The Kamalamania facade

In a society that worships the self, identity politics is a very powerful force. We see this now in Kamalamania — the dizzying speed with which the vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee has been turned, through mass acclamation, from national embarrassment to Democratic savior. 

Will Kamalamania last until the election is over?

The fact that Harris’s transfiguration doesn’t make much sense is sort of the point — the more improbable it seems the better. We are memetic creatures, especially in the digital age, and the meme of the moment is that Harris has magically invigorated the Democratic base and turned the 2024 US presidential election around in their party’s favor. It’s quasi-religious in that you don’t have to believe you just have to repeat the message until you accept. 

Nobody who has seen Harris speak believes that she is the next coming of Barack Obama, but many millions of people will now express faith in the sudden excitement around her campaign because they want to believe in the idea of Harris, a mixed-race woman, delivering them from what they see as the horror of Donald Trump. For many, Harris’s past failings, her incoherent record as a politician, can all be forgotten in an instant. A select few, meanwhile, can claim to have had faith in her all along. 

Cornell Belcher, the Democratic pollster, put his finger on the key point for Harris earlier this year. In describing her appeal to young black women, he said: “Younger girls kind of see her in a way that younger African Americans saw Barack Obama:” This too can happen, there too can I be.

“It’s beyond politics, it’s beyond cultural, it’s a spiritual thing… from a political standpoint, that shit is gold.” In other words, logic is irrelevant. How Harris looks, her skin color and her sex, trumps all. It’s the identity, stupid. 

Will Kamalamania last until the election is over? It might. The identity tribes of modern America are now coalescing around her in impressive numbers: on the Sunday Joe Biden dropped out, 40,000 black women joined an organizing call for her campaign. The next night, 20,000 black men did the same. On Thursday, not to be out done, 40,000 “White women for Kamala” joined at such speed that the Zoom livestream crashed. The New York Times called it “a paroxysm of solidarity and angst.” And yesterday, more than 60,000 “White dudes for Harris” joined in. It’s one nation anti-Trump, if you don’t count the many millions of other Americans who believe in the Donald. 

Last night, we also saw what Joe Biden’s purpose in this election is to be, as he delivered another humiliatingly bad speech to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The crowd laughed generously as he went through his tiresome stories about campaigning for the Senate in the 1970s. At one point, he seemed to refer to himself as “a former president” — a telling slip. 

Republicans and others now complain that, if Biden is unfit to run, he is unfit to serve as leader of the free world. But in the Democratic worldview that’s beside the point. Biden is the distracter-in-chief now. His clear and present dysfunction will serve as a reminder to Americans of why they are better off with Harris, who can at least use a Teleprompter without reading off the “end quote” instructions. 

In this way, Biden and Harris have switched roles. For the last four years, Harris, with her “word salads” and her disastrous interviews, has fulfilled the primary duty of a vice president — to make the big guy look better. All that time, one of the main arguments for keeping Biden was that Harris’s performances showed she would be worse than he is. That’s all changed now. Biden is now the decrepit yang to the Harris campaign’s energetic yin. She doesn’t have to govern, she just has to run. 

Until Election Day, she will now be stage-managed as tightly as Biden has been throughout his term. Her off-the-cuff remarks will be kept to a minimum, her public interactions limited. Because if “this too can happen, there too can I be.”

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This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.