Kamala Harris vowed on Tuesday that Americans were “not going back” to the “chaos” of the Donald Trump years, as she made her campaign trail debut in battleground Wisconsin with just over 100 days left before the election.
In an fiery speech a day after securing enough Democratic delegates to win the party’s nomination, the vice-president sought to frame the contest against Trump as a choice between starkly different visions for the country, casting his as regressive and backward-looking and hers as optimistic and forward-looking. “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law or a country of chaos, fear and hate?” she asked, drawing roaring applause and chants of “Kamala” – reflecting an enthusiasm that has eluded Democrats in recent months.
Yes, we know what they’re getting at. Harris is attempting to stoke the sky-screaming angst of her base, who lost their collective minds over the idea that Donald Trump could be president for four more years.
She’s also making a veiled threat to the rest of us; namely, that if Trump were to return to the White House, the angsty sky-screamers will return to the streets to offer a redux of the civil unrest they broke loose in the summer of 2020.
And not just that summer, either.
Let’s remember Kamala Harris’ record on that score. During the debate, Trump noted that she raised money for a bail fund that sprung George Floyd rioters out of the fun house. But that was only part of the disgraceful conduct for which she was responsible. Remember this?
So when Team Harris admonishes us that “we can’t go back,” they’re letting you know that if you disagree, and win the day on Nov. 5, you’ll be subjected to the same anarchy and violence she advocated when Trump was last president.
That this woman would dare to bring up Jan. 6 is a political profanity of the lowest depths imaginable. You might be tempted to write off the cognitive dissonance of her remarks to Stephen Colbert contrasted against Jan. 6 sanctimony as evidence of her low IQ, and you might not be wrong, but Kamala Harris is a composite. She isn’t a political entity with any real agency, just as Joe Biden was not.
And she didn’t come up with “we can’t go back.” It’s a terrible, offensive slogan, but someone far more intelligent and sinister than Kamala Harris gave it to her to say.
Yes, anarchy and violence, or the threat of it, lies at the heart of “we can’t go back.” Less prominent in that package is a return of some sort of viral pandemic like the one that poisoned the last year of Trump’s first term.
It has to be that. Otherwise, what could the slogan possibly mean?
Polling shows most Americans were wealthier and happier for the bulk of Trump’s term than they are now. The number of respondents who say the country is on the wrong track is staggering — the RealClearPolitics polling average shows a 60.3–29.4 blowout of “wrong track” over “right track.” Do you really think these people are trying to convince persuadable voters that continuing down the path of national and individual debt, Latin American–style inflation, forever wars, unlimited Third World migration, never-ending racial agitation, transgenderism, and climate change nuttery is a preferable status quo?
Not without the threat it isn’t.
“We can’t go back” is the aggressive admonition of a ruling elite that has lost the ability to create or even to preserve anything but its own political power. It’s an expression of entitlement, a declaration of contempt for those unworthies without connections to its favored institutions or who lack its woke pieties.
It’s an exercise in demoralization.
No, you may not have a patriotic America. You may not express yourself freely if we don’t sanction your expressions. You may not have your internal combustion vehicle, your gas stove, your AR-15, or even your ethnic heritage unless it contains a suitable modicum of approved past oppression. We can’t go back to any of that.
You will own nothing and be happy. Just read her tax plan, which she didn’t write. And no, you are not allowed to ask who did.
Here is where I’ll reiterate a frustration I expressed in one of this week’s Spectacle Podcast episodes. Because two weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump, and when he did, Trump became the candidate of all those Americans that the “we can’t go back” crowd has in its crosshairs — a constituency that encompasses a majority of the country.
More so than ever, Trump is the candidate of what Angelo Codevilla, writing here at The American Spectator, called the “country class” some 14 years ago. For whatever his faults might be, he is nevertheless the antithesis of that ruling class — wealthy without political advantage, unbeholden to state power, hostile to the elite, and now targeted by them for destruction. Trump is locked in a death struggle with the elite; either he will drain that swamp or it will drain him.
Wrapped in that struggle is the future of this nation. We will either go back to a constitutional republic or perish under the decline and depravity of “Our Democracy.”
Trump needs to address this. He hinted at it ever so softly during the debate but so far hasn’t made it the central theme of his campaign.
That’s frustrating to see.
But given the laughable, sloppy bias of ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, with their one-sided (and mostly inaccurate) fact-checking and slanted questions, the opportunity to properly posture this election has never been greater.
“We can’t go back?” Damn right we can. We must.
America will either reclaim its heritage as a free, self-governing, prosperous, and moral nation, perhaps with a few upgrades we can all agree on from past mistakes, or we will cease to exist.
And the people screeching “we can’t go back” would be the only possible beneficiaries of this spiraling status quo. They don’t mind the ruin if they can rule over it.
We have to go back, Kamala. Maybe you should go back to California.
READ MORE: