On
Tuesday, Joe Biden announced his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his
vice-presidential nominee. It was a remarkably formulaic decision: he had said
a while ago that he was going to pick a woman; after the George Floyd Riots, everyone
started chattering about how he should pick a black woman; Kamala Harris, the
Junior Senator from California, was the highest-ranking politician who fit the
bill.
People on
the right have spent the last few days talking about how Harris will be bad for
social conservatives. People on the left have been talking about how she will
be good for diversity. Cynics have been talking about how easily she forgot
about the groping allegations against Biden which, just one year ago, she was
insisting we should all take seriously.
(Perhaps
you remember all the headlines about “Handsy Joe” from last spring? Well, they
went away pretty quickly once the media realized that, love him or hate him,
Biden was going to be the Democratic nominee).
Right
now, a lot of of people are talking about how if the Biden-Harris ticket wins, then
Harris has a pretty good chance of finishing out Biden’s term because Biden is
so old. If he wins, Biden will be 78 when he takes office; Trump will only be
74. Either candidate would break Reagan’s record for oldest president, the
difference is that, while Trump would do it in the final year of his term, Biden
would do it on inauguration day.
The
ironic thing is that Biden began his career in Washington as the sixth youngest
Senator ever (he reached the legal age, 30, in between election day and
inauguration day). Back when he was still a young man cheating his way through
law school, Biden had made up his mind that he was going to become a Senator at
30 and then become President as soon after that as he possibly could. Say what
you like about the guy, he’s certainly got patience.
But back
to the matter of whether Biden, if he wins, will die in office. A quick glance
at the US actuarial table reveals that, on average, a 78-year-old man has a 79
percent chance of still being alive four years later. And I don’t think it
really matters that Biden’s mind is nearly gone; old people often keep
breathing long past their mental prime.
Now
there’s a chance that the “first woman president” buzz will be appealing enough
that Biden will resign in favor of Harris in the event that his condition
worsens, but I wouldn’t bet on it; if Biden actually thought that lucidity was
necessary for the president’s job, he wouldn’t be running in the first place.
His ego is just too big to admit what everybody else already knows.
But
enough about Biden and his age. I promised you a post about Kamala Harris;
well, here it is.
Apart
from her friendliness toward corporations, Harris is as far to the left as they
get. (And if you’re one of those dowdy old folks who define leftism in terms of
principled opposition to the money power, then you have to admit that America
doesn’t really have an organized “Left” at all).
To begin
with, Harris made a big deal in the primary out of attacking Biden for his
(purely ceremonial) opposition to forced bussing in the 1970s. This line of
attack was appealing because a big part of being a good Democrat these days consists of straining the facts to paint everyone and everything around you as racist.
Bussing children
out of their own neighborhoods for the sake of racial imbalance was very
unpopular back when it was a live issue; according to Gallup polls from the
1970s, only 4 percent of whites and 9 percent of blacks approved of it.
The
reason that even most blacks, whom the policy was ostensibly helping, disliked
it was that, in a lot of the places that ended up having bussing, the courts
had already tried to end “de facto segregation” by allowing blacks to
send their children to a neighboring district’s mostly-white school if they
thought that the white school was better. Most black parents chose not
to do this; they deemed it better for a black kid to go to a mostly-black
school in his own town than to a mostly-white school further away from home.
So the
federal courts ended up deciding that the only way to have true equality was to
say that, whether you were black, white, yellow, brown, or whatever, your own
opinion about where your children should go to school didn’t matter, hence the “forced”
in “forced bussing”. Naturally, a lot of people didn’t take well to this
philosophy of government, but the opposition to bussing was a complete failure,
because the “silent majority” was largely unable to engage in the same kinds of effective civil disobedience that liberals had recently deployed against
segregation and the draft.
Harris,
if she becomes President, will probably support an aggressive foreign policy
just like what we had under Obama-Biden. She has promised to “stand up to”
Russia. Granted, there isn’t much substance behind the “stand up to Russia”
shtick; it’s just something that Democrats have to say now that they’ve blamed
Vladimir Putin for their loss in the 2016 election. Nevertheless, I expect that
Harris will handle the Middle East even less cautiously than Trump has.
Here is
another interesting thing about Kamala Harris: she has no children. This is
kind of a big deal: in the last eighty years, everybody who has been nominated to
run for either President or Vice-President has had at least one child. (That
includes all three women: Geraldine Ferraro had three, Sarah Palin has five,
and Hillary Clinton has one). And this isn’t just a matter of bad luck on Harris’
part; Harris did not marry until age 49, when she wed the millionaire lawyer
Douglas Emhoff. She was a career woman, and only a career woman.
I happen
to believe that, until recently, this would have counted against a potential vice-presidential
nominee. And even though it isn’t polite to say so anymore, there is a good
reason for this. People don’t exist as isolated individuals, and a community
can only sustain itself if its members, on average, contribute at least two
children to that community. Being a devoted member of your tribe, city, nation,
church, or whatever means trying your best to do your share of the work.
Now,
obviously not everyone is going to contribute equally. And I don’t judge people who don’t have children
because they can’t, or because they never find the right person to settle down
with. I even have a degree of respect for those who choose religious celibacy,
though at the same time I am glad that my own religion’s concept of
holiness does not involve refusing to perform an act which is necessary to the
continuation of the species.
But I
digress. As for Biden picking a childless running mate, while it certainly has
something to do with the new leftist attitude toward families and procreation,
it’s a reflection of changes that are done and over with, not a harbinger of
things to come.
The
general rule with politicians is that they keep paying lip service to a principle
long after they stop believing in it. Perhaps you remember all the kerfuffle
about Bernie Sanders being the first candidate to get close to the Democratic
nomination while running as a socialist? Well, it isn’t because the Democrats
are just now turning against economic freedom, it’s because they stopped caring
about economic freedom several decades ago, and are just now flaunting that
fact.
So it is
with the glorification of the childless career woman. When Biden announced his
choice of Harris, Rod Dreher ran an article entitled “Kamala: Woke Capitalism’s
Dream Pick.” He never mentions the childlessness, but he talks about all the
other traits that make it obvious that Harris is going to cozy up with leftist plutocrats
and crack down on social conservatives.
This is hardly
surprising. Leftist plutocrats have a lot of power in this country, but social
conservatives are a spent force. Mainstream American society has long since
abandoned its original ideas about religion, family, sexuality, marriage,
divorce, childbearing, etc. Insightful people saw same-sex marriage coming
decades away because it was an inevitable consequence of what is, by now, a longstanding
consensus that sex and marriage exist mainly to satisfy the emotional appetites
of adults.
The
opposition to abortion has similarly been a failure, owing largely to the antics
of the pro-life movement itself. To begin with, not a single Republican
politician has been held accountable by his base for going soft on that issue.
Also,
it is a cornerstone of western political thought that governments derive their
legitimacy from the act of protecting the life and other inalienable rights of their
subjects, and become fit targets for a revolution when they refuse to protect
these rights. Thus, it is hard for a fair-minded observer to take the Right
seriously when it claims to believe in an unborn baby’s right to life, even
though Roe v. Wade and Congress’ ambivalence toward that decision for
the last 47 years haven’t inspired independence movements in the parts of the
country with ostensibly pro-life majorities, and even though the March
for Life quietly disperses itself each year without the need for John Roberts or
whoever to send in the tear gas and the dogs.
Kamala
Harris becoming Vice President, or even ascending to the White House itself,
won’t actually have much impact on the mop-up phase of America’s so-called culture
wars. Putting her in office is the sort of thing that the Left does when it has
already won.
As for
me, I will be voting for Donald Trump and Mike Pence this November. I am not
expecting them to usher in some grand turnaround, but I do see value in keeping
America out of more wars. (While Trump has had a few brushes with Iran, I think
he is less warmongery than Biden or Harris would be). And I would like to see
Trump appoint more judges who will defend freedom of speech, the press, and
religion. Those aren’t causes which I think Kamala Harris holds in high regard.
The big question that conservatives must answer is: which of the great changes of the last half-century are genuinely episodes of civilizational decay, and which are not -- either advances in civilization, or 'neutral' steps to the side. And the problem is, they may be both. If educated women stop having babies at replacemenet rate or better this is not a good thing. But if the barriers -- formal or informal -- to education for women have dropped, this is a good thing. I personally think repeal of the laws which could put homosexuals in jail was a good thing. The same for laws allowing a couple who do not wish to remain married, to divorce. But a stable society requires a lot of traditional male-female families. Other examples could be brought forth.
ReplyDeleteOur real problem is that there is no theory to predict society's evolution. Clearly -- to me at least -- economic development and technology has a lot to do with it: societies which are rural, and where the average person has no access to an automobile or to radio/TV will produce a different sort of human being to ones where the population is concentratedin urban/suburban centers, can drive, and has access to radio and TV (and now, the internet). Social change will will be a function of economic/technical change. But just what this function will yield - where we're going -- is, to me anyway, a mystery.