Harris Candidacy, Double-plus Good?

One of the most memorable sequences from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is in Chapter IX, when the protagonist Winston Smith stumbles on a rally in a central London plaza. By way of parades, war films, campaign banners and war songs, government had been stoking the populace’s animosity towards Eurasia, a minimally defined superstate with which Winston’s country Oceania was at war. After six days straight of concerted propaganda, and in the middle of a fervent rally in which the crowd is on the brink of lynching two thousand supposed war criminals captured from Eurasia, government unobtrusively delivers a message that Oceania is actually at war with the superstate of Eastasia, not Eurasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Even an official on stage haranguing the crowd into bloodlust then substitutes the new enemy into his diatribe mid-sentence, and continues in stride, simply switching around the references in his address as members of the audience instinctively know to remove the anti-Eurasia posters and banners to trample them underfoot.

Little over thirty days ago U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris was thrust into the spotlight as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, to oppose the Republican Party’s candidate of former president Donald Trump. This is the same Vice-President whom the Establishment only months earlier had openly mused to switch out for being ineffectual and unpopular (Washington Post, March 15^th, 2024; New York Magazine, Intelligencer, September 13^th, 2023). The same candidate who was tacked onto 2020’s presidential ticket despite polling nationally at only 3.4% when she discontinued her primary bid (RealClearPolitics average, NBC News, December 3^rd, 2019). Against the incumbent President Biden publicly vowing to follow through with his re-election campaign as late as July 11^th of this year, in the puff of a smoke-filled room Kamala Harris emerged as the heir anointed… recent Democratic primary results be damned.

Like clockwork, the Establishment raced to re-invent the obscure Vice-President as the next messiah. Suddenly a figure largely absent from the national stage for years was gracing the cover of Time magazine, twice in one month. Regime iconographers leapt into action, generating treasurers like that attached to this article. All the usual celebruminati in cinema and music (Billboard, Politics, H. Dailey, Aug. 27^th) praised Harris as if she were the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt, forgetting their public professions of unwavering confidence in Joe Biden scarcely two months earlier (AP Politics, W. Weissert, June 13^th).

Admittedly the analogy to the sequence in Nineteen Eighty-Four is inapt in some respects. Presidential candidates are mere vehicles for the ideologies which support them. Trump is the conservatives’ vehicle to reach the White House (ads promoting Trump have even featured an inexorable “Trump train”), and Biden, I mean, Harris is the progressives’ vehicle to do the same, so it is quite unlike Oceania mid-sentence swapping enemies, and therefore, objectives. Nevertheless, in what amounts to a societal gaslighting, the regime and its NPC underlings give the impression that Harris was the only candidate who ever was and could have been in this campaign, and even that Harris is the best candidate the Democrats can offer (despite personages like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Senator Bernie Sanders having higher national profiles and better fundraising records, for example). Insofar as these influences in politics and media demand that the public overlook all recent and contrary data, they march this country in lockstep towards a bottomless and gaping memory hole.