Count me out of the Kamala Harris love-in
There is no daylight between Biden and the U.S. vice president…and perhaps its follow-up president.
By Alan Story
Prepare for a week of lap doggery. Get ready for the next chapter of the mainstream media’s love-in of Kamala Harris.
The first chapter came out about a month ago when Joe Biden unexpectedly announced he was not running for re-election as US president. He anointed or appointed – take your pick --- his vice president to be the candidate for the Democratic Party against Donald Trump in the 5 November election.
Jonathan Freedland, the lead columnist for The Guardian, began chapter two of the love-in with his usual Saturday column on 17 August. It was titled “Harris has had a dream start. But it’s too early to celebrate.”
Freedland pulled off quite journalistic feat. In 1400 words, he never mentioned any of the following words: “Israel”, “war”, “Gaza”, “Palestine”, let alone “more than 40,000 deaths” in his assessment of the upcoming U.S. election in which Israel’s barbarous war on Gaza will surely figure prominently and which is an issue splitting the Dems. ( In the above cover photo, Harris is seen chatting with Israel’s president Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent trip to Washington where he addressed the US Congress to “more standing ovations than I frankly could keep track of” in the words of one journalist.)
Meanwhile, the BBC is carrying on with its own usual obsequious news coverage from the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago.
EVEN THE DAILY MAIL HAS JOINED IN
Even The Daily Mail is getting in on the act. Hardly a liberal newspaper and not at all sympathetic to Harris’s pro-choice standard on abortion, it acted on what it senses is the dominant mood in the UK. The Mail’s lead story today (20 August) is headlined: ROYAL WORLD EXCLUSIVE: QUEEN SAID TRUMP WAS “VERY RUDE.” At least four other right-wing media featured the same overnight headline to a very old news story I remember reading about when the Queen was still alive and Trump was still U.S. president.
So what is the dominant UK mood and one which the media is working full out to spread? Trump is a monster. We must all back Harris.
Count me out on this one. If Harris triumphs, some of us won’t be celebrating.
Yes, Trump is a monster. In his July speech to the Republican National Convention, he promised to “deport millions” of non-US citizens in “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” His followers responded by holding up chilling banners reading “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW!” Tommy Robinson’s supporters in the UK would have cheered as well.
But the idea that the peoples of the world --- most of whom, of course, who cannot vote on 5 November --- should “celebrate” a possible Harris victory is delusional in the extreme.
Let’s start with the war of Gaza. Yes, Harris has expressed some sadness for Israel‘s killing of more than 40,000 Palestinians and says she supports a ceasefire.
But, on all the other key issues, she marches in lock step with Joe Biden who has made the US the main weapons supplier for the Israeli campaign of genocide. Harris, for example, fully supports continued U.S. arms sales to Israel and has verbally attacked pro-Palestine solidarity activists.
NO DAYLIGHT BETWEEN BIDEN AND HARRIS
There is “no daylight between” the views of Biden and Harris on Gaza and Israel says Harris’s former national security. “Her policy, which is the policy of this White House, is not changing,” says Halie Soifer who now leads the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
On issues other than Gaza, Harris is fully on board the Biden train. Since 2020, Biden’s program “has proved completely inadequate to address the growing grievances among the working classes and oppressed, who have been hammered by inflation. It has also failed to overcome the system’s metastasizing crises, especially climate change, which is causing catastrophe after catastrophe with insufferable heat waves, floods, wildfires, and storms wreaking havoc from California to Vermont”, writes socialist activist Ashley Smith in a 16 August COUNTERPUNCH article titled “U.S. Politics Today: Chaos, Conflict and a Creeping Constitutional Crisis.” He says much more on the dangers of war, mass repression on the U.S. borders, and other issues.
Another US commentator, Natalia Tylim, reminds us that “many working class people and the oppressed are (rightly) terrified about what harm and violence a Trump presidency would do.”
But she emphasises that the Democratic Party is a thoroughly ruling class party, has no answers for the deepening economic and ideological crisis in the United States, and that Harris promises simply more of the same if elected. Yes, Harris is the lesser evil, but we can do far better than act on a lesser evilism strategy.
Neither Ashley Smith nor Natalia Tylim will be voting for Harris.
If I was an American voter, I would be taking their electoral advice and not that of Jonathan Freedland…or THE DAILY MAIL.
In coming weeks, THE LEFT LANE will return again to the question of the U.S. elections and what is the response of U.S. progressives.
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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe
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