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In 1978, I visited my first war zone, Beirut. There were, in fact, several wars going on. The Israelis had made an incursion in the south, but there was chaos everywhere, with various local militias squaring off in the streets. Two of them had battled each other for control of the Holiday Inn. Imagine that. Beirut, clearly, had been a civilized and sophisticated city; parts of it still were — and yet it was descending into the unthinkable. The lesson was stark: My American soul, my life experience, had assumed that civilization was a rock-solid given, especially in historic cultural and commercial centers like Beirut. But it wasn’t. It was a tenuous state of grace. It needed to be nurtured, protected.
That is why I’m voting for Kamala Harris for president. Civic order is the predicate for a diverse democracy like ours. It is the predicate for freedom. And we have been flirting, dangerously, with disorder and disunity in the Trump era.
My case for Ms. Harris is a conservative one, but it has little to do with the current nihilist havoc of the Republican Party — or its precursor, the libertarian, neoliberal reaction against government led by Ronald Reagan. It rests primarily on Ms. Harris’s respect for the traditions and institutions of our remarkable country. It also rests on two necessary adjustments she’s made to Democratic Party dogma: a move away from identity politics and a move away from the notional, indulgent pessimism of the academic left. That’s it. Three words: stability, unity, optimism.
In his first Inaugural Address, in January 1981, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” He was wrong. Government could be arrogant and clumsy; it could make foolish attempts at social engineering and overregulation. The free enterprise system, undervalued by the left, was the most clever antidote to poverty ever invented. But capitalism could overreach, too — and government was the bulwark against the destructive excesses of greed and oligarchy.
Ms. Harris, who was trained in the rule of law, understands viscerally the importance of the stability that government provides. Donald Trump doesn’t. He has attempted to destroy our faith in the institutions that keep us safe — the courts, the F.B.I., the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the military, even our electoral process and, this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Let’s focus just for a moment on the military: It is the template for the highest form of citizenship. It requires a solemn pledge to subsume your individuality to protect the greater good. According to his former chief of staff John Kelly, Mr. Trump has referred to service members as “suckers” and “losers” — though he has said that this was “a total lie.” The former president has absolutely no idea of the rigors the military requires, the notions of service and sacrifice. He is a stranger to the most basic requirements of a democracy.
I’ve written about politics for more than 50 years. Ms. Harris is the first candidate for president I haven’t met since Richard Nixon. I don’t know enough about her to be entirely confident in my assessment. Her campaign has been overmassaged by consultants, distressingly synthetic, but there are signs that she will chart a moderate course.
One of those signs came in Ms. Harris’s speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh late last month. Toward the end, she spoke about the American tradition, now lapsed, of building up quickly — it was once our international hallmark. It enabled us to win World War II, creating an overwhelming war apparatus from a standing start. Ms. Harris said: “The simple truth is, in America it takes too long, and it costs too much to build. Whether it’s a new housing development, a new factory or a new bridge, projects take too long to go from concept to reality. It happens in blue states. It happens in red states. And it’s a national problem.”
This is an implicit recognition, unusual among Democrats, that too much regulation can be stultifying. Yes, she is obviously a progressive, but her activism is more from the Daniel Patrick Moynihan wing of the Democratic Party than the Bernie Sanders wing. Ms. Harris has proposed no new bureaucracies, no mandates (though a few, like instituting a period of mandatory national service for citizens over 18, might be useful). She favors cash incentives — for new housing, for new businesses, for child care.
There are two other signs that Ms. Harris may represent a more reasonable era for the Democrats. One has to do with identity politics. In recent presidential cycles, I rarely heard a Democratic presidential candidate celebrate the most remarkable American triumph of the past 60 years: the human rights advances we have achieved for women, Black people, gay people, Latinos. The Democrats have been the party of grievance politics, complaining about glass ceilings, structural racism, homophobia. Impediments do exist, of course, and bigotry will always be part of the human condition. But the liberal failure to acknowledge the steady progress toward a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous society has been as purposefully myopic as Mr. Trump’s fever dream that white America is under siege — most recently, by legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Ms. Harris is not playing that game. Her slogan “We’re not going back” assumes that progress has been made. When asked what she would “do for” young Black men, her answer was entirely race neutral. Her proposals applied to all young men, and women, too. Her campaign has made a conscious decision to appeal to Latino voters the same way she appeals to everyone else: eschewing grievance politics, assuming that Latinos want law and order on the southern border as well.
She has refused to make a big deal, or any deal, of her own racial identity. This is smart politics. Her identity is obvious. It is a metaphor for the great choice we’re facing: whether we’re ready to follow our destiny as a wondrously creative, inclusive democracy or crash on the straitened delusions of antique white nativism, an American tendency of long standing but always a losing one in the past.
Which brings me to the final argument for Ms. Harris: her optimism. This is crucial. We have been besieged by a fashionable, irrational, cynical pessimism in recent years. Both parties have suffered from it. Democrats have been led astray by the excesses of the academic left and the Marxist residue of economic determinism. Some Democratic negativism was justified, especially with regard to our feckless failures abroad. Mr. Trump agreed with them on that, then curdled it with his recumbent support for tyrants overseas. Indeed, he has become the emperor of the irrational, pursuing a dismal vision of “American carnage” at a moment when crime is down, illegal immigration is down, inflation is down and our economy is the envy of the world.
The basic, irrefutable truth is that we are the luckiest people in the history of the world. We have created a stable democracy from disparate sources, from the world over. We are not in danger of becoming Beirut, not yet. And not ever, if we can respect and curate our traditions and institutions. Kamala Harris’s optimism is a sign not only that she thinks we can but also that she understands how corrosive and dangerous — and, well, un-American — pessimism can be.
Joe Klein is a veteran political journalist and the author of “Primary Colors” and other books. He is the publisher of the Sanity Clause newsletter on Substack.
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