Yes, Conservatives and Centrists Can Back Harris–Walz Without Pain
One can candidly criticize aspects of the candidates’ past and present record—and still see them as a positive choice.
EVER SINCE VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee, there has been a steady drumbeat of commentary arguing that, for “Never Trump” conservatives or centrists, supporting Harris involves particularly painful and torturous compromises with conscience and principle. As Andrew Sullivan put it in one of the first examples of the genre:
Hillary [Clinton] and [Joe] Biden were one thing: two centrist Democrats with quite moderate, pragmatic pasts. Kamala Harris is another thing entirely: a politician who has fervently embraced identity politics as central to her understanding of the world, and is the most left-wing candidate to be nominated for president by a major political party in American history. . . .
The Never Trumper is thereby confronted with an inevitable tension. Not voting for Trump is an easy call, of course. But actually voting for the most left-wing candidate in US history—and one in the vanguard of the new left’s woke cultural revolution—forces us into a new, and awkward place: abandoning almost all our previous principles for the sake of preventing one man’s return to office.
Harris’s choice of populist-progressive Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, rather than the more centrist Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, has reinforced this line of argument. While Sullivan speaks of “Never Trumpers” as “we” and chronicles his own hand-wringing, others are openly gleeful about the Never Trumpers’ supposed humiliations as they pathetically strive to explain away the repeated slaps to their faces.
Does the Harris–Walz Democratic ticket really pose a particularly painful or even impossible choice for conservatives, libertarians, and centrists determined to keep Donald Trump out of the White House? Let’s set aside the schadenfreude, partisan gotchas, and Trumpian spin and take the question seriously.
PERHAPS THE SIMPLEST ASPECT of the case against Harris–Walz to answer is the one formulated by maverick pundit Richard Hanania in a recent post: In essence, vote for Trump to save capitalism. Hanania, over the past year or so, has made an unlikely transition from the authoritarian-friendly right (with past alt-right controversies) to pro-Ukraine, pro-liberal democracy, pro-diversity, pro-abortion rights centrism. The new Hanania is often scathingly critical of the Trumpified Republican party. Nonetheless, in his post he advocates voting for Trump—while fully acknowledging that Trump poses a threat to democracy and promotes misogyny and racism. The reason, according to Hanania, is that Harris poses a threat to capitalism, and that’s ultimately more dangerous—especially since, in his view, Trump’s authoritarian bluster is very unlikely to be matched by his actions.
But Hanania’s argument doesn’t wash. If Trump can get the benefit of the doubt on the assumption that stated intentions do not equal results, then so can Harris, whose economic plans will be subject to congressional approval and, in some cases, judicial scrutiny. She’s already walking back her most controversial “anti-capitalist” idea, a vague anti-price-gouging plan, after a backlash. Another progressive proposal, a tax on unrealized capital gains, would have very limited reach if enacted, applying only to individuals with at least $100 million in wealth paying less than 25 percent of their income in taxes—and even then, only to certain categories of gains. It is, incidentally, an unenacted Biden administration proposal—and it’s extremely unlikely to become law under a Harris administration.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of indications that one of the defining features of a second Trump administration would be a concerted effort to break down guardrails on executive power (above all, via a cadre of hardcore loyalists). Trump might not be able to accomplish his oft-stated goal of deporting 11 million or more illegal immigrants, which would be ruinous not only to human lives and civil liberties (mass deportations would inevitably require sweeping police powers and operations that would also affect citizens and legal residents, especially minorities profiled as likely migrants) but to the economy as well. However, it is highly probable that he would at least try, causing untold damage in the process.
Finally, “pro-capitalism” vs. “anti-capitalism”—at least if “anti-capitalism” is broadly defined to include “socialistic” elements in a mixed economy—is a much less binary proposition than “democracy” vs. “anti-democracy.” Levels of taxation, regulation, and social welfare have long been the subject of negotiation and debate in liberal democracies. Another one of Harris’s “Marxist” proposals is to raise the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent from the current 21 percent. During the first term of that well-known commie, Ronald Reagan, that rate was 30 percent for income over $50,000, 40 percent past the $75,000 mark, and 46 percent past $100,000. From 1993 until 2017, the corporate tax rate for revenue above $75,000 was 35 percent. Yet capitalism remains alive and well. It will also survive Harris just fine.
The corrosive and corrupting effects on democracy of a new Trump presidency—vendettas against political enemies, pardons for insurrectionists, and manipulation of institutions (the kind we are already seeing in Georgia) to enable election sabotage—would be much less remediable. Add to this the damage to political culture from having a president who led the effort to overturn the election, instigating a violent attack on Capitol Hill in the process; who traffics in fringe conspiracy theories; who has repeatedly flaunted his contempt for liberal institutions and his admiration for autocrats—and even the worst-case effect a Harris–Walz administration could have on capitalism pales into insignificance next to the Trump threat to liberal democracy.
WHAT ABOUT THE CLAIM that a Harris administration would be poised to usher in a reign of radical “woke” cultural progressivism? Aspects of both Harris’s and Walz’s records have been legitimately criticized, not only from conservatives but from moderates and liberal centrists, for excessive entanglement with the cultural left.
Take Harris’s stance toward the unrest following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 is a case in point. Attempts to portray her as a cheerleader for rioters and looters are dishonest. Harris was referring to protests, not riots, when she said in a television appearance in mid-June 2020 that “they’re not going to stop.” The bail fund she promoted for protesters in Minnesota appears to have helped only two people accused of protest-related violent acts, one of whom went on to be acquitted on grounds of self-defense.1 But her total silence about the rioting until a fairly tepid condemnation in late August 2020 can be faulted as a failure of leadership: When you speak out in support of a protest movement that has been linked to visible, destructive, and deadly violence, surely the responsible thing to do is to stress the distinction between peaceful protest and violent mayhem that devastates the very communities the protesters claim to champion. (Yes, 93 percent of the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 were peaceful, but with nearly 8,000 protests nationwide this still means hundreds of violent events—with property damage totaling at least $1 billion.) Joe Biden managed to strike that balance well, repeatedly condemning the violence, arson, looting, and destruction early on and stressing the “need to distinguish between legitimate peaceful protest and opportunistic violent destruction.”
The likeliest explanation for the difference between Harris and Biden isn’t that Harris—previously known as a tough-but-liberal prosecutor—sympathized with rioters, arsonists, or looters. Rather, it’s that she remade herself as a social justice progressive for her short-lived 2019 presidential campaign, during a cultural upheaval in which “Kamala is a cop” became a slam in Democratic politics. Most of her rhetoric actually wasn’t all that radical for a moment when even George W. Bush was speaking out about “systemic racism” in America. But it did lead her to some regrettable places, such as praising the “defund the police” movement and suggesting that putting more cops on the streets in less advantaged communities was not a way to be safer. (Those communities strongly disagree.)
It didn’t help when, a few days before the 2020 election, Harris posted a video about “equity vs. equality” that seemed to endorse equality of outcomes over equality of opportunity. Critics, including then-Rep. Liz Cheney, said it sounded “just like Karl Marx.” And Harris returned to the equality/equity theme several times during her vice presidency.
That infamous 2020 video does end on a Marxist-sounding note—with Harris saying that “equitable treatment means that we all end up at the same place”—although in truth the whole thing is a confused, self-contradicting mess. Clearly, Harris’s rush to embrace the trendy but poorly thought out “equity” slogan was emblematic of her 2019–20 “social justice” persona. She seems now to have left it far behind: In her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination last month, Harris called for an “opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed,” rhetoric that could have come from any Reaganite Republican or neoliberal Democrat.
Reasonable people can reach different assessments about what Harris’s genuine beliefs are and whether they’ve been stable over time (more on that later), but she certainly wears the today’s centrist liberal persona much more comfortably than she wore that of the radical “woke” ideologue five years ago.
WALZ’S RECORD IN MINNESOTA points to other progressive pitfalls. While the governor did not, as JD Vance claimed, encourage “the rioters who burned down Minneapolis,” even sympathetic accounts suggest that Walz’s initial, hesitant response was due partly to his conviction that police-abolition activists were a legitimate voice of the community rather than a cranky fringe.
Two other controversies from Walz’s tenure in Minnesota are even more indicative of why principled conservatives and centrists might have a problem with his brand of social-justice progressivism.
One is the Walz administration’s use of race in 2022 as a factor in rationing scarce monoclonal antibody infusions to treat COVID-19. The racial element of the Minnesota Department of Health’s scoring system, which automatically gave two points for being a racial minority, may not have affected many people, since it was quickly dropped after a legal challenge. But it could have led to a situation in which a younger, healthier, nonwhite patient was prioritized over an older, sicker, white one. (The race-neutral scoring system still tended to prioritize black patients in practice, since it gave points for other health problems they are more likely to have; but that was entirely appropriate, since black COVID-19 patients were, in fact, at significantly higher risk of severe illness and death.)
The other controversy has to do with the new Minnesota social studies standards for K-12, which were approved last January and came under fire from conservative critics even before Walz was picked as Harris’s running mate. Conservative critiques of curricular “wokeness” often reflect either bad faith or right-wing snowflakery. But in this case, the concerns seem to be at least partly well-founded—especially with regard to the “ethnic studies” component set to be integrated into history and other disciplines starting in 2026. While the implementation of the guidelines will depend on local school boards and teachers, the standards, written with major input from progressive activists, are heavily infused with an ideology that sees all society and culture through the lens of “systems of oppression.”
One benchmark expects kindergarten students to “retell a story,” personal or from reading material, “about an unfair experience that conveys a power imbalance.” Ninth-graders are expected to “analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity and gender” and “apply these understandings to [their] own social identities,” specifically by examining “racialized hierarchies based on colorism and dominant European beauty standards and values.” Cultural standards related to beauty (and their racial aspects) are certainly a legitimate subject of study, but the Minnesota standards seem designed to inculcate a particular, reductionist viewpoint. And while asking students to examine female, black, and Native American perspectives on the American Revolution along with more traditional narratives should be part of a modern history education, surely this examination should take place in the context of a well-rounded study of the Revolution itself—including the ideas that fueled it, which are left out of the new standards.
Other examples of bias abound. Particularly egregious: A unit on responses to “foreign and domestic terrorism in the United States” in ninth-grade history standards asks students to “evaluate how those responses have been influenced by xenophobic and Islamophobic perspectives” but makes no mention of terrorist ideologies. All in all, the charge from conservative critics that that the standards seek to foist progressive activism on students has at least some foundation. Indeed, one benchmark got nixed by a judge because, as initially written, it seemed to literally require students to “eliminate historical and contemporary injustices.”
IT SHOULD BE NOTED that Walz himself did not craft every detail of these various policies, but as governor, they were ultimately his responsibility. It should also be noted that while Walz may be somewhat to the left of, say, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, there is little reason to think that he is anything like an outlier in the Democratic party on matters of “social justice” progressivism.
But right now, the “woke” moment—identitarian ideas came to dominate the Democratic party’s left wing and gained a certain level of acceptance among moderates, who have tended to conflate it with the old-fashioned racial and gender liberalism—seems to be passing. Businesses and even some academic institutions are backing away from the racially polarizing, identity-fixated version of “diversity and inclusion,” and the prophets of “anti-racist” racialism such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are increasingly discredited. The aftermath of the October 7th attack in Israel has exposed the ugly and hateful underside of much left-wing rhetoric about “decolonization” and “oppressor/oppressed” hierarchies. Discussion of the challenges facing men and boys—not as supposed recovering oppressors and abusers but as human beings—is newly welcome. Questions about underage gender transition and the need to balance transgender access with the protection of single-sex facilities and programs for women are being raised in LGBT-friendly media.
On some of those issues, including the complicated debate on transgender rights, the Democratic establishment has lagged behind the culture. But overall, the 2024 Democratic campaign reflects the pivot toward moderation. Both Harris and Walz have spoken out strongly in defense of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. One of Harris’s first acts following Joe Biden’s exit from the race was to issue a scathing condemnation of the pro-Hamas protesters who burned the American flag and vandalized Union Station in Washington, D.C. Walz spoke of solidarity with Israel and “moral clarity” three days after the October 7th attack. The Democratic National Convention featured unabashed celebrations of American military power and patriotism. And while Andrew Sullivan saw the “White Dudes for Harris” and “White Women for Harris” Zoom fundraisers as signs of identity-mad balkanization, the campaign has since largely avoided identity politics and stressed American unity.
Is this a strategic self-reinvention on the part of Harris and her staff? To some extent, of course it is—pivoting from her earlier strategic self-reinvention in 2019. But there is also plenty of evidence that the 2024 version of Harris is much closer to her real self. It should be noted that even in her “social justice progressive” phase, Harris sometimes downplayed identity: Her preferred version of reparations for slavery, for instance, was in the form of tax credits for low-income Americans of any racial background. Even some of the controversies from earlier in her career reflect essentially conservative instincts of norm enforcement—such as using the threat of jail against parents of chronically truant children despite the fact that minority families were disproportionately affected.
BUT WE CANNOT TALK ABOUT the Harris–Walz ticket in a vacuum. The concerns about the potential polarizing and illiberal effects of social justice progressivism are dwarfed by the menace of the Trumpified GOP. For the sake of argument, let’s leave aside the sociopathic con man at the top of the Republican ticket; let’s even leave aside the democracy subversion and the potential damage to the liberal international order and America’s role in it. For now, let’s focus solely on the culture wars. The “Never Harris” hand-wringers who think the progressivism of Harris–Walz is unacceptable don’t seem to notice the massive harms of the toxic anti-wokeness.
We now have, after all, the official Trump campaign account posting overtly and grossly racist memes that show Kamala Harris’s America overrun by hordes of black and brown migrants.
We have Trump himself trafficking in crude race-baiting and sex-baiting toward Harris.
We have the daily updates in misogyny from JD Vance, from resurfaced interviews in which he bashes childless women and attacks liberal men as “soy boys” to the use of a cringey Miss Teen USA clip to mock Harris.
Meanwhile, MAGA pundit and Trump inner circle member Tucker Carlson, who had a prominent speaking slot at the Republican convention in July, has progressed (or devolved) from racist migrant-bashing to “just asking questions” about whether Adolf Hitler was actually the bad guy of World War II.
While such rhetoric helps normalize bigotry and misogyny on the right, its effect on the rest of society is generally to make “wokeness”—or “political correctness,” or whatever else you may want to call it—more attractive. It lends some credence to progressive claims that white supremacy and patriarchy still have a strong presence in American culture. It lends a lot more credence to progressive claims that “woke” or “politically correct” are simply codewords for common decency and that people who complain about “wokeness,” “PC,” or “cancel culture” really just want free rein to bash blacks, immigrants, women, gays, transgender people, etc. without social stigma. In other words: When “anti-woke” sounds like Trump, Vance, or Carlson, no one except the haters (or infantile contrarians) wants to be anti-woke.
Back in 2016, there was an argument going around in conservative and libertarian circles that a vote for Trump would somehow defeat political correctness. In fact, it was foreseeable even then that, on the contrary, a Trump presidency was likely to exacerbate the excesses of “social justice.” A Trump victory in 2024 would likely reverse the current mainstream backlash against the excesses of social justice zealotry. Ordinary Americans don’t like crazy wokeness, but they don’t want to be on the side of bigots and bullies.
You think Harris–Walz and the Democratic party are too far to the left on some economic or cultural issues? Enter the big tent that Harris has made it clear she wants her campaign to be. Moderate, centrist, and even conservative Harris supporters can build up enough political capital to make themselves heard in Harris’s America on the issues that matter to them. You can make the case—to take just one example—that if Democrats are serious about being the patriotic party, they should teach history in a way that acknowledges America’s failings but also celebrates American greatness.
Trumpism needs to be stopped from taking power. (Its influence on public life also needs to be curbed as much as possible, but that’s likely to be a difficult and long-term task.) Then, we can have all the other debates: about tax rates and regulations, about the meaning of equity, about diversity without polarization, about a balance on transgender rights, about a patriotic and inclusive way to teach U.S. history. A vote for Harris is a vote to give normal a chance.
It’s worth noting that the fund also didn’t do much for nonviolent protesters, who were usually released without bail if arrested; most of the money it raised was used to help indigent criminal defendants with no connection to protests.