Kamala Harris, America’s First Dick Cheney Democrat
With less than two weeks until Election Day, the 2024 presidential race is as tight and tense as any in recent memory. America’s almost suspiciously divided voters are within the margin of error for a dead tie in many polls, including in the important swing states — although the tide is turning.
Six weeks ago, the picture was quite different. After Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, her campaign took off like a rocket. The momentum was fueled by excitement over President Joe Biden dropping out of the race and a palpable feeling that something new was on the ballot for the first time since Barack Obama in 2008. Harris selected progressive Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for Vice President, trounced Trump in their only debate, and filled arenas with an energetic campaign focused on looking forward and calling out the weirdness of the MAGA movement.
Now, all the momentum heading into November 5 is in former President Donald Trump’s favor. In most polling aggregates and betting markets, Trump is at least a slight favorite to win reelection. It begs the question: How are Democrats this close to fumbling yet another winnable election against Trump’s MAGA circus?
Harris’s hard-right pivot
Despite her campaign’s surprising early momentum, there were signs of trouble. Harris failed to win a single delegate in the one primary she ran in, in 2020, then clinched the nomination without contest at the Democratic National Convention. In other words, national voters have never chosen her. She then refused to break with the Biden Administration’s policy of unconditional and unlimited funding for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, alienating a large section of the party’s base.
At this point, Harris faced two choices: Make some concessions to the antiwar left or pivot right to win over so-called centrists and moderate Republicans. She chose the latter.
Since making that turn, Harris made several baffling decisions that dismiss, alienate, or anger her base, including:
- Bringing in 2016 election loser Hillary Clinton for advice, along with other out-of-touch D.C. insiders.
- Cozying up to ultra-right-wing neoconservatives Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney.
- Pledging to put a Republican, widely rumored to be Liz Cheney, in her cabinet if elected.
- Abandoning some of her most effective messaging about not looking back and MAGA being weird.
- Insisting on continuing to arm, fund, and sanction the genocide in Gaza without restriction or condition.
These moves allegedly appeal to Republicans who don’t like Trump, but it’s a curious play because it isn’t at all clear how many such people exist. Trump’s approval among Republicans remains very high and the MAGA faithful’s cult-like devotion to him won’t be shaken by longtime D.C. villains like the Cheneys.
Meanwhile, support for Harris among core Democratic constituencies is plummeting. In Michigan, for instance — the state with the largest Muslim population — some polls show Green Party candidate Jill Stein receiving 40% of Muslim support while only 12% back Harris. That’s a huge drop from 2020, when Biden carried as much as 85% of the Muslim vote. Even in Michigan, Muslims are a small portion of the voting bloc, but with margins so razor-thin it’s political malpractice for Harris to alienate them — and outright appalling to do it in the service of genocidal war crimes.
Birth of the Dick Cheney Democrat
All this adds to the long and disturbing trend of Democrats trying harder to win Republican support while taking the left for granted. Going back decades with the so-called Blue Dog and Reagan Democrats, Democrats often try to appear as xenophobic, hawkish, and conservative as Republicans. Now, Harris is breathing life into a terrifying new political frankenstein: the Dick Cheney Democrat.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is one of the worst people who ever lived. It would take multiple encyclopedias to account for all the damage, death, and destruction his crimes wrought in this world. His endorsement is nothing to be proud of, yet Harris’s closing argument to voters in the last weeks of her campaign appears to be, “The Cheneys like me.”
Both Dick and Liz Cheney have argued their support for Harris is about norms and preserving democracy. Recall, though, that alongside George W. Bush, Cheney himself successfully stole the 2000 election; he has no qualms about subverting democratic norms.
Nonetheless, their endorsement does demonstrate something significant: that the social, cultural, and religious fights Republicans and Democrats often wage most bitterly — such as on abortion and LGBTQ issues — are of minimal real interest to the ruling class. Liz Cheney even specifically encouraged anti-abortion conservatives to support the pro-choice Harris.
What matters most to the Cheneys is a militaristic, interventionist foreign policy that creates new markets. For all his own hyper-capitalism and litany of war crimes, Donald Trump is unpredictable. That the Cheneys feel more comfortable Harris will pursue their foreign policy agenda, even as the world teeters on the brink of World War III, is a deeply worrying sign of what lies ahead regardless of who wins the election.
So the Dick Cheney Democrat, as exemplified by Kamala Harris, is a person with little to say on issues like healthcare or the minimum wage, who is committed to war and imperialism, but who will defend some of our important personal freedoms and social progress. That is what passes for a progressive in this bleak election: a neoconservative who’s libertarian on individual life choices.
For Gaza, no hope either way
A Dick Cheney Democrat may still be a better deal than Trump, depending on one’s perspective and priorities. But the genocide in Gaza is of paramount concern to a huge number of Americans, many of whom might otherwise be predisposed to viewing Democrats as the lesser evil.
Yet Harris has been campaigning, and indeed the Democratic Party has been behaving, as if horrific scenes of the Gaza holocaust are not flooding social media every single day. Despite Democrats’ best efforts to rationalize, minimize, or ignore the genocide, those who care enough to watch closely have seen Israel deliberately starve Palestinians in Gaza; target civilians, hospitals, infrastructure, and aid workers; and herd people into prison camp “safe zones” only to bomb and burn them alive anyway.
In one of the signature moments of her campaign, Harris silenced a pro-Palestine protester by saying, “I’m speaking,” and the insistent words quickly became a slogan. But if “Don’t commit genocide” is too demanding an ask from voters, then there’s hardly even a pretense of democracy in America left to defend. And if Harris pulls off this election with her Cheney-first strategy, the Democratic Party will know they never need to listen to the antiwar or economic left again.
When confronted on her stance toward Palestine, Harris typically takes a more sympathetic tone than Biden while reiterating her unconditional support for Israel. Trump has pledged to be an even better friend to Israel than Biden and Harris, and some Democrats point to this to argue he’d be even worse for Palestinians. But since Biden and Harris have already covered up, armed, and funded the genocide, and pledge to continue to do so, it’s an unimpressive argument at best.
It’s not clear what percent of Americans view the genocide of Palestinians or the merging of the Democratic Party with Bush-era neoconservatives as dealbreakers, but it’s plausible that it’s enough to tilt the election to Trump. It’s also plausible that Harris still manages to win, propelled by backlash against the GOP’s Dark Age brutality toward women’s reproductive health and Trump’s overt odiousness.
Either way, America is left with two newly realigned factions: the super-hawk Dick Cheney Democrats on the “left” and the Christian fascist MAGA cult on the right. Two grimmer, more depressing choices are difficult to imagine, but if recent history teaches us anything, it’s that it can still get worse. In another 20 years it might be JD Vance who emerges as a bipartisan voice of reason. By then, the Republican might be a vigilante Klansman wearing a necklace of his victims’ skulls and the Democrat might be Ivanka Trump.
