Kamala Harris’ Positions Are Flip-Flops

Kamala Harris’ most constant political trait could also be an absence of consistency. Over the course of her lengthy profession, first in California after which in Washington, D.C., the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee has been stricken by believable allegations that she’s arduous to pin down and lacks a secure ideological core. She’s a flip-flopper—or, if you wish to be charitable, she evolves shortly.

Over the summer time, Harris’ evolutions stored on coming, along with her marketing campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of a lot of her earlier positions. As a result of she ran her failed 2020 presidential main bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, a lot of her new positions are noticeably extra oriented towards the mainstream—and freedom.

Harris and her working mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have even embraced “freedom” as a central theme of their 2024 marketing campaign. The phrase is emblazoned throughout their rally websites. Lyrics about freedom pulsed time and again between speeches on the Democratic Nationwide Conference (DNC). However what do Democrats imply by “freedom”? At greatest, it is an inconsistent imaginative and prescient. At worst, it is an try at radically redefining what American freedom means.

Flip-Flop Season

Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and first threw her hat into the presidential ring in 2019. In each roles, she positioned herself to the left of your common Democrat. As an illustration, she was certainly one of simply over a dozen co-sponsors of a Senate decision in help of the “Inexperienced New Deal,” whose planks included “offering larger schooling, high-quality well being care, and inexpensive, secure, and ample housing to all.” Harris additionally co-sponsored and promoted the Faculty for All Act, a plan from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) for government-funded faculty tuition, and twice signed on (in 2017 and 2019) to Sanders’ Medicare for All plans, which might have basically ended personal insurance coverage in favor of socialized medication.

Harris’ positions on some issues, particularly well being care coverage, moved round loads. Requested on the Democrats’ presidential debate stage in June 2019 who would get rid of personal insurance coverage, Harris raised her hand. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe the subsequent day, she mentioned she wouldn’t do this. The plan she finally launched was one thing of an everything-to-everyone scheme, permitting personal insurance coverage to coexist alongside a Medicare-for-anyone-who-wants-it choice of questionable feasibility.

Then-Atlantic author Edward-Isaac Dovere known as her marketing campaign technique in 2019 “do not decide a lane.” However authoritarianism in service of left-leaning objectives was form of Harris’ factor, even when she typically shifted on the particulars.

But in recent times, and particularly since selecting up the nomination for president, Harris has been flip-flopping towards freedom—a minimum of on some points. Since 2018, she has embraced marijuana legalization. Extra lately, Harris has modified her tune on fracking, single-payer well being care, Supreme Courtroom enlargement, a compulsory gun buyback, and a federal jobs assure.

With every new flip-flop, Harris has been embracing extra reasonable and mainstream positions—and normally, this has led her in a much less authoritarian path. In 2019, Harris known as it “a good suggestion” to pressure house owners of semiautomatic rifles to promote them to the federal government. In August, a Harris spokesperson mentioned she wouldn’t push a compulsory buyback program as president.

Whereas working for president final time, Harris mentioned there was “no query” that she was in “in favor of banning fracking,” an oil and fuel extraction technique that has helped decrease pure fuel costs and lowered reliance on coal however troubled environmentalists over considerations about potential sick results. In July, Harris’ marketing campaign advised The Hill {that a} President Harris wouldn’t search a ban on fracking.

As a part of the Inexperienced New Deal Harris supported, the federal authorities would have “assure[d] a job with a family-sustaining wage, ample household and medical go away, paid holidays, and retirement safety to all individuals of the US.” The Harris ’24 marketing campaign has since mentioned she doesn’t help a federal job assure.

Throughout her earlier presidential bid, Harris mentioned she was open to increasing the Supreme Courtroom. In July, her marketing campaign advised The Hill she doesn’t help this proposal.

The Harris marketing campaign additionally lately reiterated her rejection of Medicare for All.

Whereas Harris has not spoken out in opposition to President Joe Biden’s tariffs, she has criticized a extra excessive tariff proposal from former President Donald Trump, calling it a “nationwide gross sales tax on on a regular basis merchandise and fundamental requirements that we import from different nations.” In the meantime, she’s embraced Trump’s plan to not tax tipped wages.

Whether or not these latest positions could be trusted to final is way from clear. If she flipped this simply towards freedom, she’s simply as prone to flop again as soon as she holds energy—presidents hardly ever grow to be extra libertarian as soon as they’re in workplace.

However insofar as Harris is attempting now to outline herself for a brand new period on the nationwide stage, a minimum of a few of what she says ought to have sticking energy. And on this new period, we’re seeing a greater Harris than we noticed in some previous iterations.

A Regulation-and-Order Progressive?

In these previous iterations, Harris usually talked huge about being a progressive prosecutor whereas strolling in a unique path—going to bat for officers accused of misconduct, as an illustration, or opposing marijuana legalization schemes.

Throughout this era, her flip-flops have been usually away from significant prison justice reform or accountability.

As district lawyer (D.A.) in San Francisco, she opposed the dying penalty. As lawyer normal of California, she favored the dying penalty by combating in opposition to a state courtroom ruling it unconstitutional.

When she turned D.A., she mentioned she would solely use California’s three strikes coverage “when the third strike is a critical or violent felony.” In workplace, she pushed for it to be utilized to somebody whose third offense was merely being a felon in possession of a handgun.

Being powerful on weapons and alleged intercourse crimes are two areas the place Harris has been constant all through her profession—typically main her to constitutionally doubtful locations. As an illustration, she fought to maintain in place a legislation banning sure types of handgun promoting and twice introduced pimping fees (twice thrown out in courtroom) in opposition to executives of categorised promoting platform Backpage as a result of it allowed intercourse work adverts.

On this yr’s election, Harris has definitely emphasised her previous as a prosecutor, however primarily in broad strokes. On this model, she put away rapists, home abusers, and different violent offenders, however we do not hear about her cracking down on misdemeanor offenses or threatening to jail the mother and father of truant youngsters. Nor can we hear about issues like ending money bail, abolishing the dying penalty, or ending necessary minimal sentences—positions she staked in 2019, when the Democratic Celebration was within the midst of a prison justice reckoning. Harris has, nonetheless, backed down on one place from again then: decriminalizing border crossings. “I’d not make [illegal border crossing] punishable by jail,” Harris mentioned in summer time 2019, calling it “a civil enforcement difficulty, however not a prison enforcement difficulty.” Her 2024 marketing campaign advised Axios that “unauthorized border crossings are unlawful” and that Harris’ place was the identical as that of the Biden administration.

The Freedom Candidate?

Nonetheless, Harris has gone all in on attempting to place herself because the pro-freedom candidate on this election. This message has permeated her adverts, her speeches, even her marketing campaign imagery.

Harris says the phrases freedom and future “greater than 4 instances as usually as Biden did,” in response to a Washington Submit evaluation printed August 8. In her first official marketing campaign video, launched in late July, photographs of Trump and his working mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), flash throughout the display screen whereas a Harris voice-over says, “There are some individuals who assume we needs to be a rustic of chaos, of worry, of hate. However us? We select one thing totally different. We select freedom.” The advert options the Beyoncé tune “Freedom,” which Harris has additionally been utilizing at marketing campaign occasions.

At a marketing campaign occasion in Michigan in August, Harris mentioned individuals ought to be capable to make private selections with out “their authorities telling them what to do.” Walz echoed this theme at an occasion in Arizona, saying, “I do not want you telling me what books to learn. I do not want you telling me about what faith we worship. And I positive the heck do not want you to inform me about my household.”

At a significant Milwaukee rally in August, Harris and Walz took the stage backdropped by the phrase freedom repeated again and again in huge, blue, all-caps block letters.

And DNC messaging was positively saturated with the phrase. On the ultimate evening, Harris spoke of letting Individuals “make their very own selections about their very own lives,” pledging to guard reproductive freedom, the liberty to vote, and the liberty to “love who you like brazenly, with pleasure.”

From a freedom perspective, Democrats have traditionally been significantly better than Republicans on points surrounding romance, sexuality, and copy, so leaning into these points now’s partly a continuum of longstanding commitments and methods. However it hits particularly arduous in an election the place abortion is a central difficulty on voters’ minds, cultural backlash to LGBTQ acceptance is sizzling, and the GOP’s vice presidential candidate is getting dogged for trashing individuals with out youngsters.

Democrats’ message has been clear: Republicans are “bizarre” creeps who wish to pry into all Individuals’ private selections, whereas Democrats wish to allow you to be who you might be, love who you like, and resolve for your self whether or not and when to have children. They need you to be free to vote in elections that will not find yourself in rioting and years of lies and tantrums. It is an interesting thought, and it does strike at (a number of the remaining few) elementary variations between the 2 main events.

It is “an aggressive new effort to problem Republican claims to the language and symbolism of liberty,” famous New York Instances author Katie Glueck. “Utilizing historically right-leaning phrases and phrasing, they’re portraying themselves because the true champions of common American values, and their conservative rivals as proponents of deeply intrusive insurance policies that threaten elementary freedoms.”

The Republican Celebration has lengthy been selective on what freedoms it embraces, however recently it appears to be turning even additional away from something resembling liberty. Vance rejects fundamental ideas of free speech and free markets whereas embracing financial insurance policies historically reserved for the left. Conservative-led states have been bullish on censoring on-line speech, controlling what can seem in native libraries, and dictating what could be taught at any instructional establishment. Many within the get together have gone from saying abortion needs to be a state difficulty to calling for a nationwide ban, whereas additionally threatening different American freedoms (like the correct to journey out of state) in makes an attempt to thwart individuals getting round state abortion bans. And below Trump, the get together has turned broadly hostile towards immigration and suspicious of the electoral course of.

Republicans are, certainly, “proponents of deeply intrusive insurance policies that threaten elementary freedoms,” as Glueck put it. However so are Democrats. And one solely must tune in intently to their latest freedom rhetoric to acknowledge this.

Freedom Is Simply One other Phrase

On the DNC, Hillary Clinton spoke of “the liberty to make our personal selections about our well being” and the liberty “to worship as we select or not,” together with “the liberty to work with dignity and prosper” and to dwell free from “worry and intimidation, from violence and injustice, from chaos and corruption.” Walz spoke of defending “your children’ freedom to go to high school with out worrying about being shot.” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear spoke concerning the freedom to resolve whether or not to pursue in vitro fertilization or whether or not to have youngsters in any respect.

Herein lies the paradox of Democrats’ freedom rhetoric. A few of it embraces detrimental liberty, a freedom from different individuals—particularly the state—utilizing pressure to compel or stop individuals from taking some motion. However a lot of it facilities on good issues that individuals allegedly havea proper to get pleasure from or entry, or dangerous issues that they allegedly have a proper to keep away from.

In Harris’ first marketing campaign advert, she speaks of “the liberty not simply to get by, however get forward,” “freedom to be secure from gun violence,” and “freedom to make selections about your individual physique.” Solely certainly one of these three issues—the bodily autonomy plank—is plausibly a name to get the federal government out of “telling [people] what to do.”

For Harris, freedom from gun violence does not merely discuss with a world through which capturing somebody is illegitimate. It is shorthand for an entire host of Harris-endorsed gun management insurance policies—together with a ban on promoting semiautomatic rifles, regulation of 3D-printed weapons, and extra guidelines round who can (and may’t) purchase weapons and the way they’ll achieve this. The “freedom to be secure from gun violence” takes the person proper assured by the Second Modification and turns it on its face, utilizing “freedom” to justify an entire vary of laws.

“The fitting to be secure is a civil proper,” Harris mentioned in June. However the federal authorities can’t assure everybody’s particular person security any greater than it may possibly assure particular person happiness, or marital satisfaction, or ponies. Authorities could make fundamental guidelines to assist defend life and property, however these exist already and any additional insistence on guaranteeing “security” is mostly a coded name for insurance policies that infringe on privateness and freedom. (Suppose warrantless spying on digital communications, stop-and-frisk insurance policies, COVID-19 curfews, or militarized police, to call only a few examples.) When you make it the federal government’s mission to make sure all types of security, there’s mainly no restrict on what the federal government can do.

There is a related boundlessness to a “proper not simply to get by, however get forward.” From a detrimental liberty viewpoint, we have already got this proper. There isn’t a legislation mandating all of us merely “get by,” and no legislation making it unlawful to “get forward.”

There are authorities insurance policies that make getting forward harder—issues like excessive taxes, occupational licensing, and infinite layers of paperwork. And there are insurance policies that make even getting by troublesome—comparable to laws that preserve housing costs excessive and extreme spending that drives inflation larger. A marketing campaign to unshackle individuals from such burdens can be a real freedom marketing campaign. However Harris hasn’t adopted her right-to-get-ahead rhetoric with considerations of this type. Quite, she has emphasised “a future the place each employee has the liberty to hitch a union” and “the place each particular person has inexpensive well being care, inexpensive little one care, and paid household go away.”

As soon as once more, we see issues framed not as freedom from pressure or coercion however as freedom to have or do sure issues. Freedom is a set of optimistic rights, to be offered by the federal government.

The issue with optimistic liberty is that securing it tends to infringe on liberty in different areas. Securing “free” contraception protection, as an illustration, means foisting this price onto medical health insurance plans and employers who sponsor them. “Free” little one care means both actually conscripting little one care employees into slave labor or—clearly extra probably—forcing different individuals handy over cash (within the type of paying taxes) to cowl the prices of kid take care of others. And so forth.

This form of “freedom” additionally comes with a hefty price ticket. The Committee for a Accountable Federal Price range has estimated that the Harris-Walz “Agenda to Decrease Prices for American Households”—a small portion of their financial agenda—would improve the U.S. deficit by $1.7 trillion over a decade.

The DNC was stuffed with freedom “phrased as delineations of public authority,” as Matt Taibbi put it in an August e-newsletter. “A whole lot of these freedoms are both new assertions of authority or efforts to overturn a longstanding emphasis on pure rights.”

Irreconcilable Attitudes

Isaiah Berlin explored the liberty from/freedom to distinction in his well-known 1958 essay “Two Ideas of Liberty.” Berlin instructed that “those that imagine in liberty within the ‘optimistic’ —self-directive—sense” don’t “wish to curb authority as such” however “need it positioned in their very own fingers.”

The ideas of optimistic and detrimental liberty “should not two totally different interpretations of a single idea, however two profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life,” Berlin wrote.

In the long run, the Harris-Walz conception of freedom is not broadly suitable with freedom from extreme authorities interference in our lives, our faculties, our companies, our buying carts, or the rest. You will discover additional proof by what insurance policies the Harris marketing campaign has been pushing.

Essentially the most worrying is what may very well be learn as a name to institute federal value controls on groceries. In an August assertion, the marketing campaign pledged to assist cross “the first-ever federal ban on value gouging on meals and groceries—setting clear guidelines of the highway to clarify that huge companies cannot unfairly exploit customers to run up extreme company earnings on meals and groceries.” Imprecise phrases are doing quite a lot of work right here. Who decides what’s an “extreme” revenue? How does one decide if a value improve is an affordable response to market circumstances or a option to “unfairly exploit customers”? It is potential the plan can be basically toothless. However it’s additionally potential that Harris needs to start out letting the federal authorities resolve what grocers can cost, which is a recipe for creating shortages, lessening competitors, and usually making costs worse in the long term.

The worth-gouging plan continues a Biden-era theme of pretending that any financial sick could be blamed on grasping wealthy individuals. Biden has spent his presidency railing in opposition to “company greed,” “junk charges,” and “an absence of ample competitors” within the tech, well being care, and telecommunications sectors whereas siccing the Federal Commerce Fee on companies that Democrats have determined are too huge or too highly effective.

As populist messaging goes, it’d work. However as an precise financial technique, it hovers someplace between dumb, disingenuous, and harmful. Alas, Harris and Walz appear intent on following the Biden blueprint.

Within the Harris-Walz Agenda to Decrease Prices for American Households, launched the week earlier than the conference in August, the pair pinned rising meals, medication, and housing prices on companies participating in intentionally anticompetitive practices.

A whole lot of financial guarantees popping out of the marketing campaign have—as with Biden’s earlier than them—revolved round stopping enterprise habits that reaches the edge of illegality. If huge corporations are violating current antitrust legal guidelines, we’ll go after them. If they’re doing unlawful collusion, we’ll go after them. Harris and Walz have additionally pledged to push new laws to make a wider swath of conduct unlawful, together with a legislation stopping company landlords from utilizing huge knowledge to collude to “jack up rents” and the aforementioned ban on “value gouging on meals and groceries.” The underlying precept in all of this: In the event that they’re appearing in dastardly methods, we’ll cease them, after which costs will fall.

The issue is that the mustache-twirling company villain concept of pricing is essentially a fiction. Grocery costs rose due to issues like pandemic-induced provide chain disruptions, rising wages for grocery retailer employees, and large quantities of pandemic-era authorities spending; they have been falling lately not as a result of companies magically acquired much less “grasping” however as a result of the fallout from pandemic-related issues has began to subside. Rents are rising as a result of we do not have sufficient housing inventory. And so forth.

There are absolutely some dangerous actors on the market who could be taken to job. However the concept the federal government can minimize costs throughout the board just by imposing (new or current) antitrust legal guidelines is a ruse—a sleight of hand that sounds powerful however quantities to nothing to your common American as a result of it misdiagnoses the trigger of these excessive costs.

It is successfully “junk” populism, promising a radical transformation and delivering (at greatest) nothing or just a few impotent, surface-level adjustments (like how Biden’s huge warfare on “junk charges” boiled all the way down to a change in the best way cable payments are introduced).

However the different to this ineffective populist posturing is even worse, as a result of extra authorities intervention within the market threatens to drive up costs even larger, by driving up the price of enterprise, stifling innovation, stopping mergers that might result in economies of scale, interfering with common market indicators, and issues like that.

Both means, it is an agenda utterly at odds with “freedom,” of which financial freedom is each bit as important as freedom in different realms.

A Struggle of Phrases

Perhaps, at her core, Harris is only a run-of-the-mill Democrat. She has typically misinterpret the room—as in 2019, when she leaned a bit too arduous into the get together’s extra progressive concepts. However she has by no means strayed too far outdoors the bounds of no matter second the get together is in.

Proper now, meaning backing off some Sanders-style democratic socialist coverage prescriptions, whereas nonetheless flirting with what feels like authorities value controls on groceries. Defending the correct to acquire an abortion however not the correct to personal sure rifles. Opposing the worst of “bizarre” Republican overreach whereas insisting on new kinds of Democrat-approved overreach.

Harris says she is for “freedom,” and that is not fully a lie—in lots of arenas, Democrats do encourage extra private freedom than their Republican counterparts do. However she’s additionally apt to slug social welfare spending, company regulation, and mainly another Democratic coverage prescriptive into the definition of freedom—to seamlessly transfer backwards and forwards between freedom from and freedom to.

In mixing up these diametrically opposed variations of freedom, the Harris-Walz marketing campaign is not simply “reclaiming” freedom from Republicans. It is subtly attempting to redefine freedom as Individuals usually perceive it—to forged it not as an absence of presidency intrusion however as extra authorities intrusion, as long as this intrusion is finished within the service of some purpose that Harris and her fellow Democrats deem worthy.

Democrats’ new emphasis on freedom might initially appear to be a welcome growth—a return to the time when the get together was higher on civil liberties, a minimum of, and maybe even a sign that it is ready to loosen up a little bit in different realms too. However by one way or the other making freedom simply one other phrase for giant authorities, the Harris-Walz rhetoric may truly do quite a lot of harm in the long term, finishing the work Republicans have already been endeavor to muddy ideas like liberty and freedom past all recognition.