The Harris campaign attempts to distance itself from the Biden-Harris administration she has been an uncritical part of for 4 years, activeky working for its imperialist and anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.
Seems a bit late to attempt that performative pivot. And who is the audience for it?
Not really. As vice president her role is to follow the administration and donbidens plans, but not unquestioningly. As a candidate, she should have her own vision.
Shes more responsible than someone outside the administration but shes not the administration on her own. So even if there were minor tweaks that were inconsequential to you or any major issues, it wouldn’t be performative but perfectly normal.
I would expect her platform to also not undermine her current role, or shed have to leave. If she plans major changes, she should announce them before election but that doesn’t mean she needs to announce things that aren’t election issues, unless she chooses to This is perfectly normal whether you agree with her or Biden or neither or both. To paint it as unusual is performative on your part, not hers.
Not really. As vice president her role is to follow the administration and donbidens plans
As Vice President she can do basically whatever she wants re: taking political positions, breaking ties in the Senate, going on diplomatic missions. The VP slot used to go to the runner-up of the election, they weren’t even of the same party.
She actively chose to be a “team” player for xenophobia and genocide. And that, of course, is part of why she was selected as VP in the first place.
but not unquestioningly.
Okay well she did it without public questioning and did actual bad things.
As a candidate, she should have her own vision.
As a candidate she should be a lot of things, beginning with not forwarding genocide and being elected. Harris has received no personal electoral wins since 2016. She could not even win her home state during the 2020 primaries. Her campaign is virtually devoid of major policies.
So far, her campaign, in effect, is about how openly liberals will embrace genocide. The answer is: quite a lot, but perhaps not enough for her to win the election.
Shes more responsible than someone outside the administration but shes not the administration on her own. […]
Anyone supporting genocide or xenophobic policies is complicit in them. As a person in office, she has the capacity to work against those things. But she is in her position because she would never do so, she is an empty suit.
I would expect her platform to also not undermine her current role, or shed have to leave.
Why? She can’t be fired. She could be impeached but that is rare.
If she plans major changes, she should announce them before election but that doesn’t mean she needs to announce things that aren’t election issues, unless she chooses to
Harris has the entire DNC behind her, was previously a Senator and is now VP. If she prioritized independent policy in any way, even just as a cynical piece of election propaganda, she would have had an agenda ready to go on day 1 of being coronated by the party leadership.
This is perfectly normal whether you agree with her or Biden or neither or both.
Please refrain from normalizing genocide.
To paint it as unusual is performative on your part, not hers.
Liberals are usually not so openly genocidal and previously claimed to be against Trump’s harsh immigration policies. These are both salient positions contradicted by the Biden-Harris afmin and Harris is complicit in them. I have made zero claims about whether a VP being a good lapdog is abnormal, but these are serious violences that she has had a material impact on and for which she bears responsibility.
I’m not nornalisong genocide. I also recognize that there are two bad options and she is the least bad option.
Actively seeking to undermine her without an alternative is advocating for more genocide, not less.
I’m not nornalisong genocide.
One of the things I said she did was lockstep promote genocide as part of the Biden-Harris regime. You seemed to be saying that it this is normal because VPs should be lockstep. But… it’s genocide. Genocide is not something to normalize by saying things like, “well she has to because she is veep [no further explanation given].” Maybe you don’t think of yourself as normalizing genocide, but in reality that is the meaning if what you are saying. To downolay the social violence she supported as part of this administration, to say it is her role, it is normal. I listed genocide and anti-immigrant policy.
I also recognize that there are two bad options and she is the least bad option.
Appealing the lesser evil canard when the topic is genocide is also an attempt to normalize genocide. You should fight and oppose genocide not try to justify why you support 99% Hitler over 100% Hitler (in your mind).
Actively seeking to undermine her without an alternative is advocating for more genocide, not less.
No, exactly the opposite. I work to make empathetic people realize that they do not, in fact, have to support genocide, and can build political power against this evil.
We could talk about how your lesser evilism is poor political calculus, but frankly it should be enough for you to simply say, “I will never vote for a genocide candidate”. You should be able to say that. Let me know if you do.
anti-immigrant policies
Annual net migration inflow into the US has tripled since pre covid era. What are you basing this statement on?
Creating much higher bars for seeking asylum. Ramping up mass deportations. Building and populating more facilities that Dems called “kids in cages” when Trump did it (naturally liberals stopped caring about immigrants once a Democrat was in office). Encouraging or tolerating making the border itself more dangerous to cross. Doing an anti-immigrant PR push to shift the burden (“do not come”). Maintaining the detention centers and their horrible overall treatment, including just dumping people on the street when they are released, with no money or support, even if they don’t know the language, often thousands of miles from where they entered. Doing a hard push from the right on border policies in Congress, held back only by a contrarian GOP, then incorporating what they could into executive orders, declaring a crisis, deporting asylum seekers that cross the border. Negatively restricting immigrant protections for people from designated imperialist target countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, using families as a maximalist foreign policy push. Continuing ICE-related anti-immigrant policies and even dialing up “enforcement” (cops and prosecutors) in several instances.
This has also barely touched on their overall continuation of Trump’s policies that now fall under their right shift to being “tough” on the border and “illegal” immigrants.
Correct these policies are political party agnostic, immigration will continue because the owner class needs cheap labour and US is undergoing a demographic shift that esp since COVID put upward pressure on the wages. Can’t have that.
With that being said migration is the triple rate of 2000-20 period, so clearly the regime is not “anti-immigrant” but they treat migrant about as well as they treated indigenous slave force. Do you expect the regime to treat migrants better than the indigenous slaves?
I am really confused how this specifically Kamala issue or immigrant issue. This is just how America be.
these policies are political party agnostic
bipartisan = political party agnostic
You’ve got a way with words; you should go into politics.
The criminalized immigrant labor underclass is part of and subjected to key contradictions (in the dialectical sense) of American and therefore international capital. You’re 100% right that there is a substantial economic (capiralist) force that benefits from the systemic underpayment of this labor force, so they push for policies that ensure it is present and that the owner class never pays too big of a price for “enforcement” of anti-immigrant laws. At the same time, being able to underpay undocumented immigrants requires that they stay precarious and delineated into that underclass. They must be kept unable to demand better working conditions and pay through fear of ICE and deportation. So the capitalist class also pushes for precarity and criminalization so that the immigrant labor underclass is regularly disciplined.
Compounding this, they also need to deflect from their practices, for why the higher-paid jobs disappear, and rather than accept blame for trying to pay horrendously low wages, they employ the oldest of American owner class dupes: they spread a racist, xemophobic false consciousness that transfers blame to to desperate people, trying to make them both undeserving and villains for having to take shot pay under bad conditiobs., which the owner class frames as “stealing jobs”. Thus in deflecting blame they create a force against their policy of a disciplined but present undocumented labor underclass, creating a huge number of absolute racists that would restrict that labor force (through cruelty and violence) below what the owners actually materially want. And at some point, psychology and ideology begin to have a substantial impact - that point is when the direct material impacts become somewhat detached from the policy, e.g. when employers get unlimited bailouts and profits are more from finance than production.
Re: COVID, I think their primary weapon there is to drive up unemployment overall and to make workers poorer and less able to withstand longer periods of unemployment, which does include the undocumented immigrant labor underclass but also every other worker.
Re: Being anti-immigrant, the regime depends on terrorizing the underclass and also must contend with an increase in attempted crossings, so that population can increase even as anti-immigrant policies go into effect.
Re: Kamala, parent asked how this regime had anti-immigrant policies. I listed examples. I also referred to anti-immigrant policies originally because these policies are social violence of which Kamala was an active part of selling. She was and is an import piece of adopting the rightward anti-immigrant push of the Democratic political class as a whole, in contrast to any attempt to distance Harris from the Biden-Harris administration.
We should spell this out for people more often. Liberals generally fail to crack the “paradox” of right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric and those same right-wing petite bourgeoisie & corporations illegally/semi-legally putting them to work.
I think it would be useful to compile talking points resources at different levels of complexity and thoroughness, kind of like Wikipedia vs. Simplified Wikipedia. The stuff I’m saying is a well-established analysis, of course, and something we could all curate for use in discussions. Obviously there is ProleWiki, but I think a denser web with different levels of complexity / scope would be pretty useful.
In this case, a short overview of the contradictions in the maintenance of a precarious immigrant labor force would be useful. And I didn’t even mention immigrants that are documented but still precarious (like H1-B holders) and how they still serve the same type of role and face similar contradictions, just usually at a higher level of pay. Etc etc I could go on but should’t, ha.
And yeah liberals have a tendency to be racist at the same time as they are trying to position themselves as anti-racist (not talking about parent, but your comment on the paradox). It is kind of fascinating.
On the fact that he’s a tankie and therefore considers himself morally obligated to tell whatever lies he thinks will serve the global worker’s uprising, the ends justify the means and all that. It’s a full-on cult complete with promised land and day of reckoning, don’t bother trying to reason with him.
He responded below with some valid points but they don’t really prove “anti-immigrant” thesis, merely that the owner class hates labour and will do anything to devalue the wage they have to pay us.
Please do your best to act in good faith and not inventively insult.
I mean, voters, since Biden’s approval is rightfully in the gutter, but she needed to come out of the GATE being like “We’re changing everything” and even then, as you point out, she’s been complicit with this for years. But at this point, they’re just realizing they’re toast waaaay too late and throwing shit at the wall out of desperation. I think the DNC brain trust thought they can just swap voter bases with the GOP by adopting the platform of a generic pre-Trump republican and getting the Cheney/W endorsements, and gain the same electoral advantage the GOP has. But the indie run in Nebraska shows democratic candidates pay a 20 point asshole tax in every state they don’t unilaterally rule, so the smaller set of voters they traded the GOP for almost certainly cannot win 270 electoral votes. Nate Silver’s blog had a piece about this recently.
It does appear to be an incoherent act of desperation. The obvious move if you wanted to coopt people that oppose Biden, as in genocide Joe, would have been to make purely performative gestures to triangulate despite her obvious complicity in the administration’s policies. Easy wins.
I think their campaign decided to treat this as a typical “court the right, do what we wanted to anyways, and vote shame the left” strategy and have found out that none of those things are working very well, for various reasons. For one, the candidate having no charisma or sellable policies, being a career empty suit. Or the fact that their genocide is not just a “loony left” issue but also an ethnic and familial and basic decency one.
I have actually never met a single person that can name a major Harris 2024 policy promise off the top of their heads, lol. That is how little they think of anyone that is actually concerned about material outcomes. It’s like the saw Hillary 2016 and were like, “we can do that but better because we have manic JOY”.
I think their initial idea was to run the Carter '76 campaign, which was “The GOP isn’t electable this cycle, all I have to do is propose nothing, so as not to anger swing voters and I will win” which I don’t think CAN work post-Clinton and Obama, because at this point the DNC pays a 20 point asshole tax in every state they need to win. Additionally, even if you DO win it’s a shit plan, because as Carter discovered, when you run on nothing, you have no mandate to do anything, and in four years the voters go “What would you say you actually DO here?” Every move this campaign has made has not only been terrible strategy, but betrays people who want to be in power for purely no other purpose than being in power in and of itself, which I suppose is better than the Obama/Trump motivation of wanting to be on TV and make money off the celebrity, but not by much…
There is really no better situation for a party that serves the status quo faction of the bourgeoisie to promise nothing and depend entirely on claiming, “but the other guy is worse”. It isn’t that different from promising policies you know you won’t fight for and for which you can manufacture scapegoats (Congress, half-assing court cases, etc), not in terms of actual policy changes. But it does suppress consciousness that a better world is possible, for people to become disillusioned from the planned “failure”. This is all consistent with Democratic political strategists doubling down on trying to cow and disregard its left flank, to prevent another Bernie. A revanchist position that is trying to create a base that fully serves the party regardless of what it does. They certainly envy the GOP.
The selection of Harris is of course a result of this. There was no last-minute primary, no opportunity for political struggle. No acknowledgement that Biden stepped down for a reason that should invoke the 25th amendment. Just accept this genocidal neoliberal ghoul we chose for you, swine. Embrace JOY. Are you not satisfied!?
It is your personal responsibility to vote for us no matter what we do - The DNC
Harris team and White House discussed plans for her to verbally distance herself from Biden
Then maybe she should actually say what she plans to do if she becomes president, because at this point her platform is quite literally “I suppose genocide” and “I’m not Trump”.
