Eric Fretz takes a look at Kamala Harris’ record in a number of areas, arguing that she is no significant break from the politics of Biden or the rightward drift of the Democratic Party.
In a world beset by major interlocking crises, America, still the world’s largest economic and military power, is going through a most shaky and unsettled election season. After Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and the shambolic yet violent failed Capitol insurrection of January 6, many thought the right-wing ignorant narcissist had retired to Mar-a-Lago a pariah. Since then, he was convicted on 34 felony counts in one criminal case, and indicted on three others, still pending. Now Trump is back, having moved further to the right, less constrained by conservatives, with his policies and style dominating the Republican platform.
Joe Biden’s presidency was hit by rising cost of living, a range of unfilled promises of change, and his support of Israeli genocide in Gaza, losing support on the right and the left. Then his disastrous performance at the only Biden/Trump debate revealed to the nation the extent of his cognitive decline. This (and the dramatically photogenic near-assassination of Trump) led to predictions of a landslide for Trump in November with the Congress turning Republican on his coattails. After refusing to step down, the Democratic Party bigwigs finally forced Biden to resign from the race, and Vice President Kamala Harris became his anointed successor — all without a contested vote or debate in the Democratic National Convention.
I had never heard so many people, from such a wide range, complaining of the inadequate choices we are given in elections as I did in the last months before Biden dropped out. But now, after the “don’t vote Genocide Joe,” chants have faded, not only has the argument for lesser evil voting been dusted off, but many are now expressing an enthusiasm for Harris’s campaign, dubbed “Kamalamania.”
Many in the United States have long been feeling an unease, that things are wrong, and they are facing a frightening future. For some that resentment manifests (with prodding from the right) as anger towards the more vulnerable. For many on the left fears (of climate change, growing inequality, and the far-right) are personified in the figure of Donald Trump. For them, Kamalamania is the product of sudden relief that there might be a chance to beat Trump in the elections.
As VP, Harris has never distinguished herself from Biden’s politics, and was largely ignored. It looked like the Democrats had made their usual tactical mistake: pick a centrist figure associated with the status quo when people wanted change. But despite being a corporate Democrat, Harris is younger, capable, and articulate compared to Biden. She is also a Black woman of mixed ethnicity who will mention the word “abortion.” For many voters, this helped make her feel different from the disappointing Biden years. While activists in the Palestinian movement and other leftists continue to criticize the Biden/Harris history, many others are desperately grasping at any alternative to a Trump return. Younger people and Black people are now more likely to vote. And Harris quickly reduced Trump’s lead, with national polls showing her ahead. However, it is still possible that once again a Democrat may win the popular vote by a slight margin, only to lose the presidency because of the disproportionate weight given to rural, conservative states in the electoral college.
This article, written in the midst of the campaign, will look briefly at the politics of Kamala Harris and what differences we may expect from the Biden administration. Later articles will look at the Trump phenomena and its far-right links; and a third on the state of the left needed to resist Trumpism and go beyond the two parties of capitalism.
Top Cop
Harris started her career as California Prosecutor, and then Attorney General, and describes herself as a former “top cop.” Although she also called herself a reformer who was “smart on crime” she successfully ran against San Francisco’s reformist DA Terence Hallinan from the right. Critics saw her approach as a relic of the tough on crime era. “In her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away,” wrote Lara Bazelon, a law professor and former director of an Innocence Project in Los Angeles.
Harris’ road to higher office was filled with contradictions. In liberal San Francisco she rightly stood against the death penalty, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings, and defended cops accused of misconduct. In her 2009 book she wrote that liberals need to move beyond “biases against law enforcement,” and at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests she expressed sympathy but publicly rejected calls to defund police. The same pressures would be put on anyone whose strategy was, as she put it, working “at the table where the decisions are made,” alongside police departments. But some could have put up more of a fight along the way.
In an age of mass incarceration, when the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons was so bad that it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment, Harris’s office still fought repeatedly against the mandate to release a few thousand non-violent offenders. Her office even argued against the release of an inmate who had been proven innocent, but it lost in court. Her office still blocked payouts for the wrongfully convicted, and even argued for keeping non-violent prisoners in jail because the state needed their labor. And as attorney general she sent a brief seeking to deny gender affirmation surgery for trans inmates, fighting a court order and dismissing the importance of the procedure.
Settling with the Banks
Those trying to claim Harris for the progressive side often bring up her joining a suit against unscrupulous California banks after the 2008 mortgage crisis. “She’s the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion,” states an early Harris campaign ad. She did participate in the national mortgage settlement, a massive deal made with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank which covered trillions of dollars in securitized mortgages, excusing the massive “foreclosuregate” fraud that could have brought down major banks.
The complicated story is described by David Dayen (see The Intercept and The American Prospect), who called it a “catastrophe” and “second bank bailout, protecting legally exposed mortgage fraudsters while doing little to prevent evictions.” Almost $14 billion of the $18 billion offered to consumers went to pay unpayable loans, allowing the banks to reimburse themselves with settlement money. A minority of affected California families got any mortgage debt forgiven, and underwater homeowners received pennies on their dollars of debt. And, naturally, the “smart on crime” AG put no bankers in jail.
A few years later, Harris chose not to go after OneWest Bank despite clear evidence of “widespread misconduct” in foreclosure operations. She then accepted a donation from Steven Mnuchin, who had been CEO of OneWest, and later US Secretary of the Treasury under Trump.
Vice President
For a short time, Harris was running in the 2020 Democratic Primary, against both Joe Biden on her right and Bernie Sanders on her left. At the time she supported a form of “Medicare for All” public health insurance, and put a ban on fracking in her platform. She quietly dropped these ideas as Biden’s 2020 VP pick and now as Presidential candidate has officially renounced them.
The Biden/Harris administration outlawed a national strike from overworked rail workers, and oversaw continued deportation of migrants, record levels of fossil fuel extraction, absence of any fight for healthcare reform, escalated inter-imperialist conflict with China, and increased support of Israel during the murderous attack on Gaza. As vice-president, Harris objected to none of this, and raised no policies separate from Biden’s.
Immigration
In June of 2021, after Biden had expelled over 170,000 people, thrown over 19,000 children into a network of camps, empowered ICE officers, and pressured Mexico to bar migrants on its southern border, Harris went to Guatemala as part of the effort to stop migration Northward. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border,” she insisted, and mirrored Trump’s tone in telling impoverished potential migrants in a country that has felt the brunt of US imperialism, “Do not come. Do not come.”
This July, Harris campaign officials told the New York Times she still backs the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement. The Trump campaign has still chosen to attack her as soft on immigration, falsely claiming she was a “border Czar” under Biden. Trump’s whipping up racist fear of immigration is a major part of his campaign, from “rapists and murderers” coming across the border to migrants taking jobs and “poisoning the blood of our country.” Rather than use the attention focused on her as an opportunity to cut through Trump’s lies, Harris is trying to beat Trump at his own game, telling a July rally in Georgia “Donald Trump has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.” She emphasized her record as attorney general of a border state, saying “I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally.” This may or may not win some votes, but it helps inflame an already dangerous situation.
Abortion
When Harris speaks for reproductive rights, she is not afraid to use the word “abortion,” which Biden avoided. This alone helps generate the “Kamalamania” cheers at rallies. It is also a vote-winning stance; in a 2024 poll, about 70% of adults think abortion should be legal in all or most cases (including a strong majority of political independents), a proportion which has risen since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade (the 1973 ruling providing a limited national right to abortion).
Roe v Wade was overturned during the Biden/Harris administration, and they failed to pass a nationwide law protecting it—a pledge in their 2020 election campaign. Harris has again pledged to restore Roe v Wade, but will still face a recalcitrant Congress and conservative Supreme Court. And advocates are disappointed she did not pledge a broader guarantee, as even under Roe states were able to pass a range of restrictions on the procedure. Even against opposition, abortion could best be defended by the mass movements that won Roe v Wade under the Nixon administration, when huge demonstrations for reproductive rights coming on top of the Vietnam War protests worried the courts that the country was becoming ungovernable. There is, however, no chance of Harris using her pulpit to call for such a movement. Without it, her only strategy is to passively wait years for a change in Congress, or decades for enough conservative judges to die off and be replaced by a pro-choice administration.
Harris and Israel
As a US Senator in 2017, the first resolution Harris co-sponsored was one defending Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank and accusing the UN of “a long-standing biased approach towards Israel.” The same year she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and spoke at the conservative AIPAC conference in the US. “I support the United States’ commitment to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance over the next decade,” she told AIPAC. “I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable, and we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us. … As long as I’m a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.”
She repeated those talking points campaigning in 2020, and as Biden’s VP, leading Jewish Currents magazine to summarize: “Harris’s positions on Israel/Palestine exemplify the same transactional, values-neutral style of politics perfected by Biden. Even as her party’s base has moved left, Harris has been careful to toe the AIPAC line on Israel, reciting the Israel-advocacy lobby’s approved script.”
Those looking for a cigarette paper’s difference between Harris and Biden on Israel point to her calling for a (temporary and negotiated) ceasefire before Biden did, and skipping (along with half the Democratic delegation) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. But the empty call went nowhere, and she later met with Netanyahu privately in what she called a “frank and productive meeting.” “I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians,” she reported afterwards, with an eye on the unpopularity of the war. But she again pledged to ensure Israel has the “ability to defend itself.”
Whatever sympathy she may have had for murdered Palestinians, her ire was aimed not at Israel but at pro-Palestine demonstrators. While Netanyahu spoke, some 5,000 protested outside the capitol, many facing chemical irritants sprayed by police. Harris’ written statement condemned “despicable acts” and “dangerous hate-fueled rhetoric” by a separate smaller group of protesters who had burned an American flag. Her words mirrored those of Netanyahu inside condemning anti-genocide demonstrations as “pro-Hamas.”
Harris continued her unequivocal support for Israel in August when activists from the Uncommitted movement disrupted a campaign rally in Michigan. Harris hit back: “you know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” She softened at a subsequent Arizona rally saying that she “respected” the anti-genocide protesters voices, not necessarily showing that she can be moved on the issue in substance, but that she understands dismissing the movement outright is politically unwise if she wants to keep the Arab and youth vote in November.
She has to be careful of losing the vote of people enraged by the ongoing massacre. This was partly behind her pick for Vice President, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. An earlier frontrunner for VP, Josh Shapiro, Governor of the swing state of Pennsylvania, had been widely criticized for his Zionist stance, including backing a law against BDS and calling for the clearing of Gaza encampments at University of Pennsylvania. While Shapiro had been vicious in his verbal attacks on the encampments, Walz is quoted as saying the tens of thousands in Minnesota voting “uncommitted” over Palestine were “civically engaged” and “asking to be heard.”
Progressive Democrats tried to make the choice of Walz over Shapiro a sign Harris is better on Israel, and in general (Walz and not Shapiro was backed by UAW president Shawn Fain). But Walz had also repeated slurs about the encampments making Jewish students uncomfortable, had spoken at AIPAC, and voted for US military aid to Israel and for the same resolution supporting West Bank settlements that Harris had co-sponsored. Recently, Minnesota activists have criticized Walz for canceling a scheduled meeting with Palestinian families who have lost relatives in Gaza after learning they wanted to talk about state divestment from Israel.
Either VP would have had to carry Harris’ line. On August 8 Harris’s national security advisor announced a firm policy position that Harris “does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”
The choice of Walz was a concession to the strength of the Palestine movement, but is also one of style over substance. For the tens of thousands who voted “uncommitted” as a primary protest against “Genocide Joe” Biden, there is nothing in a Harris/Walz ticket that should make it easier to vote for. Part of Harris’ stubborn support for Israel may have been political expediency, and continued protest could move her to express more sympathy for Palestinians, call louder for a temporary ceasefire, or oppose Netanyahu in favor of a less openly genocidal Zionist. But as President she would be just as wedded to American imperialism, its links to the Zionist entity, and the resulting Palestinian oppression.
The Liberal Tim Walz
On many issues, Walz was seen as the leftmost of the group of white male mainstream choices for VP all vetted by corporate-friendly Eric Holder. It shows Harris has to be concerned with keeping the left on board.
His candidacy was supported in Jacobin, and the pick was cheered by union heads. But what do workers in his state think? Look at the Minnesota Nurses statement when Walz accepted excluding Mayo patients and nurses from a better care and working conditions law: “One year ago, Governor Walz stood with nurses on the strike line and promised no piece of anti-labor law would ever make it past his desk. By siding with the profits and power of corporate executives over the rights and needs of patients and workers, Governor Walz has made clear he will only side with labor when corporate interests concede.”
Walz is cheered for enacting a transition to renewables act in Minnesota. At one point, he stood with environmentalists and moved to suspend the Line 3 pipeline. But under pressure from Enbridge Energy, he approved it, potentially locking in decades of carbon emissions. Democracy Now quotes Tara Houska, an Indigenous lawyer and activist who remembered Walz oversaw the 2021 police response to the Stop Line 3 protest, where she was “shot by police with rubber bullets, mace, pepper balls paid for by Enbridge.” A Minnesota judge later dismissed the charges against Line 3 pipeline protesters saying, “To criminalize their behavior would be the crime.”
Republicans are attacking Walz for not responding immediately to the request for state National Guard in Minneapolis during the Black Lives Matter protests, but the point is he did soon call them in, with predictable results. In that period, Walz banned certain holds by police in schools, but then reversed the ban under pressure from police departments, and ended putting money into police departments and police recruitment.
Walz is to the left of the current Democratic Party, but those are very narrow limits. If you look at any “progressive” politician trying to run things in a capitalist state, you will find these contradictions and accommodations. But it would undercut our struggles if environmental activists, racial justice protesters, organizers for Palestine or union militants were to make these accommodations as well. As VP Walz will be following Harris’ politics, one consistently friendly to big business.
Harris and Big Business
In the 24 hours after Biden announced he was stepping down, the Harris team brought in over $81 million in new donations. Future Forward, the largest Democratic super PAC, also announced it had secured $150 million in commitments from donors who were “previously stalled, uncertain or uncommitted.”
Wall Street Democrats, who found former President Donald Trump’s presidency unpredictable but objected to antitrust enforcement under Biden, see a chance to regain influence now that Harris is the party’s nominee. Some considered switching to Trump’s side, but “are now reconsidering their electoral strategies,” being scared of Vance’s populism, and reassured by Harris’ record. Jeff Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor who is close to business leaders and hostile to the current antitrust enforcement approach, said CEOs “are exhilarated over this choice.”
Big business in the US is still split. To some extent this follows more globally oriented firms leaning Democratic, with manufacturing supporting protectionism, nationalism, and the Republicans. The smaller businesses and self-employed contractors squeezed by big corporations are the core of Trump’s support. Fossil Fuel is more Republican, and Hollywood Democratic. But all sectors and sizes are riven by ideological divisions, as seen in the tech and crypto world pouring money into the 2024 race. “Support for Trump in Silicon Valley and Wall Street is up,” it was reported in June, “with the candidate getting about 50% more in donations from securities and finance than Biden, a stark reversal from 2016.” J.D. Vance held a Silicon Valley fundraiser in August.
However, Box CEO Aaron Levie told Business Insider that Harris’ entrance into the race has shifted momentum in the tech industry. Harris has now been enthusiastically backed by prominent Silicon Valley millionaires.
When she was based in California, her office worked closely with Facebook, Google, and Instagram, describing them as partners. While big tech was being criticized for cornering markets, Harris noted they were a “significant source of California’s economy” and argued “we have to allow these businesses to develop and grow because that’s where the models will be created.” As Attorney General she took no action against these big tech firms, and failed to back privacy legislation.
Today these same tech firms are looking forward to a Harris administration as more friendly to them than Biden’s. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and member of “Venture Capitalists for Harris,” co-wrote a book called “Blitzscaling” that endorses the monopolistic business strategy of raising a lot of money from investors to corner a market. He has also given $10 million to a PAC supporting Harris.
Hoffman and billionaire Democratic donor Barry Diller have been loudly complaining about FTC chair Lina Kahn for being too aggressive in antitrust legislation, and publicly called for her to be sacked. Both are linked to companies under scrutiny from the FTC.
“There is a major opportunity for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the House and Senate to set our country on a different course” Hoffman wrote in a New York Times opinion piece, where he also complained of Trump’s “meddling in the business affairs of iconic American companies” along with Biden’s FTC constraining the development of AI through antitrust.
Other business heads and lobbyists agree behind the scenes, but think the publicity is counter-productive. “I’ve always felt once you make these things public, it makes it harder for politicians to do” said consultant Stuart Stevens. Google executives made many visits to the Obama White House while it was first being investigated for antitrust, but kept their asks quiet. One anonymous strategist told the New York Times Harris should “reject executives publicly, and then tell donors privately, “Sorry, I had to do that.” Hillary Clinton made similar statements in private speeches to bankers.
We probably won’t see Harris move on these asks unless and until she is safely ensconced in the White House. She wants the Wall Street donors, but also needs votes from swing states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania where antitrust policies and tariffs have more support. These are manufacturing states where the local bosses tend towards the nationalist rather than globalist side. Trump and Vance are trying to exploit that feeling.
Will Harris Continue Bidenomics?
Despite the commonalities of governing a profit system, there was a significant shift in the neoliberal consensus of Clinton, Bush, and Obama seen under the Biden administration, a shift that started with the stimulus launched against the Covid-induced crash of the economy under Trump. It is an open question of how much Harris will or can continue what’s been called “Bidenomics.”
As described elsewhere by Joseph Choonara, Biden’s substantial stimulus and infrastructure plans, while not amounting to near what was originally envisioned, still went way beyond any previous peacetime spending, marking a change from a long period of neoliberalism that reflected a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and private capital. On the surface, the largest programs were enacted as emergency responses to the sudden collapse of the economy during the pandemic. But Choonara places these in the context of a) a crisis in profitability now over half a century long, and b) the post-Cold War challenges to American power and inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and state-directed capitalist China. Both entailed new roles for the state and a politicalization of the economy that went beyond crisis management to address longer-term structural problems in the US.
In Congress, there is now no appetite or perceived need for another big stimulus or infrastructure bill, and no sense of fighting for one in the White House. The social half of Biden’s plans were abandoned or removed as compromises to the right, and even renewal of the temporary “family friendly” Child Tax Credit was voted down in August. Families in the US have used up savings created while receiving stimulus and Covid unemployment checks, and starting to spend less. In that sense, Harris can no more copy the first half of Bidenomics than Biden could. But the politicalization of the economy is harder to undo. Ideologically, on the left, the example opens space for larger demands of the state. On the right, it also underpins both the Trumpist initiation of tariffs and its current attacks on supposedly “woke” corporations.
Biden was keeping an eye on US capitalism as a whole when he continued the Trump-initiated suit against Google and let his administration pursue several others. This was a less expensive continuation of Bidenomics. Some of the hyper growth and investment in new tech companies (and especially Crypto) threatened to form a bubble which could bring down a broader circle of debt-loaded corporations if they burst. Biden was aware of the importance of high tech in national security and modern warfare, wanted the innovations kept securely in the country, and used the state to stimulate things like chip production in the US.
China is going through the same calibration. 2021 saw a tightening of regulations around its tech giants, but this was more of a reset than a crackdown, and the plan now encourages startup innovation and supports a stable growth of platform economies “to enhance global competitiveness.”
For his own reasons, Hoffman appeals to this international rivalry, arguing “AI, robotics,… blockchain.. [etc.] will be playing an even greater role in creating economic prosperity and ensuring global competitiveness.” Hoffman praised Biden’s investment acts for providing state funds for chip factories etc. while opposing antitrust and regulation as opposed to innovation. But in China this growth was still in line with “the country’s development plan.” It is such state direction that Biden had to respond to, and so will Harris.
Harris has not put forth any detailed policy statements, and said nothing on economic plans. In rallies she has mentioned opposing bank junk fees and rising food prices, without any details. Despite all larger pressures from the tech industry, she has not taken a position on digital asset policy, much less larger spending plans.
Hoffman is an example of others in industry who will use the change of President as an opportunity to influence personal and policy change, if more subtly. But there are material reasons why those limits are fairly narrow. It is possible Harris will ease up a bit on this regulation, but quietly and not until she is ensconced in the White House. But she will not allow the free-for-all some in the industry are asking for. While Trump is headlining promices of hugely disruptive new tariffs, there is no sign of Harris depating from the more limited, but equally China-targetting, second part of Bidenomics: the $52 billion CHIPS act providing government money for private chip production in the US, the order limiting American investment in China, and the general A.I. Nationalism. There have even been calls for a CHIPS Act Two.
Alan Beattie wrote in the Financial Times, “Bidenomics Will Survive Biden’s Departure.” That seems true under Harris, the immence expantion of tarrifs and rules against trade with China proposed by Trump would be much more unpredictable. Harris does not have a worked-out policy, Beattie sais, but “won’t have much room to shift from industrial intervention and import tariffs.”
Harris will attempt to continue Biden’s strategy of relying on and building US-led geopolitical blocs. This is quite unlike Trump’s isolationist America First approach, although both are alternative strategies of imperialism and balancing state power to support a capitalist system.
The world is changing, and there will be tweaks in policy, but Harris’ fundamental politics are no different than Biden’s; she is committed to the same program of assisting US capitalism on the world stage. This means any program will be done in a business-friendly manner (i.e. encouraging profitable electric cars, but not limiting fossil fuel extraction). Like Biden, policies will all be with an eye on competition with China. And the commitment to US imperialism goes hand in hand with her “unwavering commitment” to Israel, even as the US state wants to tamp down on region-wide configuration.
“At heart, she’s a capitalist with liberal views,” Harris’ Senate Policy advisor summed her up to the New York Times. While those views have been malleable, she is at her core a mainstream corporate Democrat.
An Obama Moment?
Between now and November, Harris has a difficult game trying to keep up the enthusiasm of the liberal side of the party, win potential Trump voters, and signal her continued devotion to big business while under a national spotlight.
We can expect her to appeal to crowds talking about abortion, saving democracy, and attacking Trump’s most extreme positions. But her campaign is focused on the middle ground between her and Trump in the swing states. Their strategy is to keep her in the center right, and highlight the “prosecutor vs. felon” approach. Frighteningly, her advisors are pushing the idea that the “strength, intelligence and toughness” of a prosecutor can also be applied to being a commander in chief.
Despite all this, the Harris campaign has the makings of the Obama moment, when ordinary people put their hopes in an attractive promise of “change,” only to be left behind as the state focused on nursing capitalism. If, as seems more and more likely, Harris wins there will be relief it was not Trump, and pride that America could elect a Black woman president. We will need to ensure the sense of relief does not turn into a honeymoon period, where the broader left waits to see what she does. Not only because the Biden/Harris project is not the economic or political answer for the working class, but because her policies will also not be a program that undercuts Trumpism, which shows no signs of going away.
Eric Fretz
Marx21 US 