It has come to the most dangerous part of the campaign season, when it seems like better things are possible. But if hope can kill you, you might want to figure out how dead you want to be. Unfortunately, the full dimensions of the Kamala Harris platform have remained provocatively vague under a torrent of legacy media scrutiny like, “Why don’t you let us sit with you at lunch, or on a special vehicle for straight talk?” and “Do you know who my great-great grandfather Adolph Ochs was?”
A President Harris will break new ground just by being who she is — first woman, first Asian-American and second Black president — but there is no accurate gauge of her desire to create substantial changes in policy. Anxious Democrats reading this (are there any other kind?) might wince at talk of a future administration like baseball players reacting to someone returning to the dugout with, “Hey, guys! We’ve got a no-hitter going,” and that’s understandable. But it’s never too early to start compiling a wish list of ways your president can break your heart. If you’re going to hope, aim for where it hopes and hurts most.
Think, for example, about criminal justice reform.
I know. Expecting criminal justice reform from a Harris administration sounds like a very stupid ambition, but almost all reform starts and feels that way until suddenly it doesn’t. The Obama administration had no great ambitions for supporting full marriage equality until Vice President Biden blurted out that they did. The difference between “Richard Nixon becoming pals with Chinese communists is the dumbest hippie shit I’ve ever heard” and “only Nixon could go to China” is roughly 24 hours. Something axiomatic can be replaced by its antipode with a switch; meet the new saw, opposite of the old saw, each instantly absorbed as political folk wisdom.
Expecting criminal justice reform from a Harris administration sounds like a very stupid ambition, but almost all reform starts and feels that way until suddenly it doesn’t.
Harris the candidate as currently constituted does not seem like a probable tribune of such reform — not the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general who wanted to jail truants to send a message, hunted down Backpage, and supported SESTA and FOSTA. At the same time, however, a Harris administration will struggle to realize essentially any significant reforms without an attack on an increasingly lawless and absurdly captured conservative judiciary.
The easiest way Harris can make the case for judicial reform is as an anti-corruption, anti-madness candidate. Reform doesn’t scan as much as a kind of politicized choice when you can accurately point to Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas as two of the most corrupt jurists in American history, or when you can highlight a single judge in the Northern District of East Jesus, Texas (population: 4) putting a restraining order on the entire rest of the nation because he owns stock in whatever company Elon Musk just bought to construct the Vergeltungswaffe 3. Hating rich people who cheat, plunder and smash up the commons is a remarkably bipartisan pastime.
But powerful people cheating suffuses the entire criminal justice-punishment system. Police who violate citizens’ civil rights to obtain an arrest corrupt the polity twice: by robbing one group of people of their rights, then robbing the rest of legitimate convictions in court. Worse, the tendency to replace any defunded public services with police intervention robs citizens of their ability to regulate their own communities, maintain a non-punitive control of public health and to interact with the state on a basic services level without confronting someone given the power to legally use force against them.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Department is on year four of a sickout designed to punish a reform district attorney who hasn’t been in office for two. Law enforcement in Portland, Oregon, seem to think they are the crowd-control auxiliary of the Proud Boys. The New York Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s response to widespread corruption isn’t to stomp it out but to hire enough public relations professionals to fill out three NFL 52-man rosters and try to paper over it with cuddly “cop rescues dog instead of shooting it” memes. The FBI stopped sharing domestic terror data with local law enforcement in the Obama administration because the latter has become too infiltrated by right-wing domestic terrorists. U.S. Customs and Border Protection seem to have reconceived of their job as a projection of Donald Trump’s eliminationist id. Speaking of Trump and Portland: He had his own Justice Department kidnap protestors in unmarked vans. Not one of the above conditions can exist without a corruption of policing and justice.
To be fair, both court and policing reform will be easy to pillory as court packing and defunding the police, but thankfully Harris the candidate has shown a refreshing unwillingness to believe that, just because your enemies call something a name, you have to use it too. Better still, the friskiness of her very online comms suggests a willingness to respond to an accusation like “why are you defunding the police?” by ignoring it and instead asking, “Why do conservatives want to fund corruption?”
This is, of course, more wish-casting than prognostication, but that’s the point of a candidacy.
This is, of course, more wish-casting than prognostication, but that’s the point of a candidacy: You’re tying your hopes to the universes of possibility that attend any person before they get locked into an observable state as an official, encumbered now by checks and the promises that can’t be escaped. For now, though, it’s all promise. Your heart only feels heavy after you let it be light for a while.
Even cynicism eats itself this far out from the bounds reality and inertia assert. After all, it’s possible that Kamala Harris has had some terrible positions as a state’s #1 law enforcement official because those are the things you have to believe to become one, and maybe it’s better to stay that way. On the other hand, if it’s all just a put-on in the first place, there’s no reason, at the peak of American power, not to take it off. And if you aren’t willing to let yourself believe that, I have a print of Nixon eating kung pao in Beijing to sell you.
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