Not on Our Watch

Charles C. W. Cooke， Fri, October 16, 2020

The Democrats’ case for the election of Joe Biden is that he will keep the crazies in his party in check. The Democrats’ case for the election of Kamala Harris is that she will not.

Joe Biden is 77 years old. If, as seems possible, the Biden-Harris ticket wins in November, National Review will be more vital than it has ever been in holding back the advance of progressivism and protecting the American system of government. This is why we’re counting on your support.

Biden has been careful to describe himself as a “transition candidate.” Transitioning to what, exactly? Well, to Kamala Harris, that’s to what. Which means transitioning to the abolition of the Senate filibuster, to the destruction of the Supreme Court, to the elimination of private health insurance, to a ban on fracking, to the confiscation of the most commonly owned firearms in America, to the federal pre-clearance of all abortion law, to the seizing of patents, to the Green New Deal, and, if Harris is to be the transitionee, to an unpleasant, smirking, dismissive would-be authoritarian who has openly laughed at the idea that presidents are constrained by the United States Constitution.

The play here is a fairly obvious one. Harris failed badly in her run for president, despite her main opponents’ being Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and the unknown mayor of South Bend, Ind. At the time she dropped out of the Democratic primary, she was in fifth place even in her home state of California. Speaking to the New York Times about the collapse, a senior member of Harris’s team complained that she had “never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.” Yet despite all of this, Harris has been elevated to a position from which there is a reasonable chance that she will become president. Speaking in September, Harris previewed what she called the “Harris administration, together with Joe Biden.” It does not take a genius to work out what she meant.

National Review has long recognized who Kamala Harris is. We were clear about her when she was being ludicrously described as a “moderate.” We were clear about her when she was laundering gang-rape allegations against Justice Kavanaugh, and again this week, when she ineptly smeared Judge Amy Coney Barrett. We have been clear about her intolerance toward religious liberty, her desire to rule as a monarch, and her invention of ahistorical lies. And, while many around us have lost their minds, we have been clear in reminding the world that the existence of real flaws on the right does not cancel out the threat that Harris poses.

That threat is real. Kamala Harris represents an unreconstructed progressivism of precisely the sort this magazine was founded to oppose and will continue to oppose with all of our energy. National Review contains a wide variety of opinions on a wide variety of topics. It is no small feat to be so deeply wrong on so many fundamental questions that you alarm all of us in equal measure, but Harris has managed it. With your help, we will continue to make our case in favor of this beautiful American experiment and against those who would destroy it.