Kamala Harris Should Steal Donald Trump's Best Quality

In defense of audaciousness.

(Photo by Handout/Biden Inaugural Committee via Getty Images )

Kamala Harris will deliver a heavily publicized speech in Washington, DC, next week, before a crowd on the ellipse, just south of the White House, where four years ago Donald Trump assembled an insurrectionary mob that would go on to attack the Capitol.

The symbolism is intentional, and I imagine Harris’s remarks won’t let the symbolism speak for itself.

We’ve spent most of this penultimate week of the election in a news environment that strongly benefits Harris, and at an ideal time. The outpouring of alarm from Trump’s top advisers, their plaintive acknowledgment that their old boss is a fascist and a danger to the republic, dovetails perfectly with a closing message that doesn’t relegate democracy to subtext.

But I also don’t imagine that’ll be the only thing she talks about. And so while the spotlight is still on her, I want to throw out an idea that runs at a bit of an angle to her campaign’s approach thus far.

Harris has taken pains to juxtapose Trump’s derangement and incompetence with her normalcy. The main flanks of her policy agenda are designed to appeal to most people without putting off the rest. At her CNN town hall event Wednesday night, she contrasted Trump’s “enemies list” with her “to do list.”

It’s a good version of what remains very conventional approach for Democrats in the Trump era.

Instead of placing so much faith in the persuasive power of the policy laundry lists, though, she and all leading Democrats going forward could drink Trump’s milkshake by borrowing something obvious from his playbook: audacity.

THE GREAT, BEYOND

Trump’s campaign promises are nearly all vaporware, or cloaked in his signature bigotries, or both. The Wall™ is the canonical example—a project that conveys ambition and grandeur, but only to a certain kind of person.

I don’t think Harris should bullshit people, and I don’t think she should promote ideas designed to pit people against one another. But I do think Democrats could benefit from setting big, exciting goals, and letting the underlying projects stand as implicit totems to American ingenuity.

Homing in on one or two big ideas like this would work on three levels: First, it would allow Harris to cloak herself in the awesome and benevolent aspects of U.S. power; second, it would allow her to challenge Republicans to abandon their decades-long politics of sabotage, wherein shared national goals must be subverted if they reflect well on Democrats; third, it denies Trump a cornered market on fanciful but galvanizing objectives for the nation, sidelining the greedy hangers on that seek to profit from his profligacy.

My favorite ideas in this realm are ones that neutralize whatever appeal Trump surrogates have with independent voters: She could promise to put a human on Mars by year X, delivering significant ego injury to Elon Musk. She could take whatever kernels of commonsense still occupy RFK, Jr.’s wormholed brain and promote the physical health of all Americans. She can and should promise to complete Joe Biden’s moonshot-for-a-cure cancer-fighting initiative.

MAGA is for the most part backward looking, and when Trump makes big promises, they are typically empty promises to whoever happens to be in his vicinity. But there’s a level on which this kind of demagoguery has real merit. Liberals tend to bristle at the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and I get why: Trump appropriated it from bygone 20th century Nazi sympathizers; it implies that America is not already great, and was only ever great in the past when it was more bigoted. All of these are fine objections. But they scan as nitpicking when set against the raw text—the idea that Americans can team up to “make” “great” things.

Joe Biden’s political rhetoric reflects this intuition. Throughout his candidacy and presidency, he has ended his speeches with the same flourish: “This is the United States of America, there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together.”

Mostly true, I think, but also vague. Democrats would benefit from giving Biden’s idealism more shape, along with a place of prominence in the party platform. And Harris could do it in a way that makes a simple case for still-undecided voters: accomplishing big things as a country means defeating the Trump-era GOP’s zero-sum politics. We can’t pursue big ideas only when they’ve been coopted by Republicans. John F. Kennedy didn’t abandon the goal of putting a man on the moon for fear that the moon landing would occur under a Republican president. But today’s Republicans think exclusively in those terms. Any ideas associated with Democrats are unacceptable to them. They need to rediscover real patriotism, not the patriotism of Republican supremacy, and step one in that direction is putting an end to the Trump era.

MARS, NOT CANDY BARS

Elon Musk's theory, if we're more generous to him than he deserves, is that getting to Mars requires empowering him personally. More likely he sees the allure of human ambition as a useful ruse for husbanding his own wealth and power, or mainstreaming rank bigotry.

But in either case, his vision of space-travel is doomed. It simply can not come together in a way that benefits and appeals to all of humanity if he spearheads the initiative as an oligarch, working under a president who is vengeful, incompetent, and partisan to the marrow.

If Musk were sincere about his interplanetary ambitions, or if RFK Jr. truly wanted to Make America Healthy Again, they would use their newfound influence over Republicans to convince them to chill out. To end the GOP’s strategic approach, pioneered by Newt Gingrich, of pursuing power through humiliation and abuse. To propose big ideas because they're in the interests of the country and its image, and then to really commit to them—even if it means no one party gets credit, and accomplishing it requires working across administrations.

If he weren’t malicious, Musk would try to convince Republicans that climate change and ecological degradation and basic solar physics are threats to humanity, and that revolutionizing space travel would be both a form of insurance and a branding coup for the United States. RFK, Jr. would try to convince them that libertarianism creates a downward health spiral, because greedy corporations make people unhealthy, and unhealthy people can't get medical care in an unregulated market. Making food healthier can help slow this spiral well outside the GOP no-go zone of federal taxation.

Everything from the design of the American health-insurance system, to the reach of its regulatory agencies, and the country’s big social priorities will still be shaped by partisan contestation, but objectives of principally symbolic value don’t have to be.

MEDISCARED STIFF

Democrats should know how to do this. FDR and JFK were both Democrats. But these days they have a tendency to shoehorn national objective-setting into existing interest group frameworks (green jobs of the future) and poser pandering (crypto), or else they hope that good-but-incremental advancements (over-the-counter hearing aids; local road and bridge repair) will be as galvanizing as national-greatness initiatives.

There’s a famous progressive internet meme that juxtaposes some billionaire flight-of-fancy—a hotel in low-Earth orbit—with the unmet needs of existing normal people. “We seriously just want health care.”

It’s arch commentary, and in a world of less abundance, where we had to choose, I’d obviously support building out the last miles of the safety net over some ego-driven goal like luxury space travel. But in this world, ambitious Democrats can have it both ways. We live in an incredibly wealthy society. We can feed the hungry, treat the sick, and insure the continued existence of mankind—all in an environment of historic prosperity. And we can do these things without turning over our liberty to dictators and oligarchs.

One of Harris’s most ambitious initiative is her plan to fold home-care coverage for seniors into Medicare. The current system is horrible, and will only get worse as Baby Boomers age. Medicaid currently covers long-term home care, but only for households that can prove they’ve burned through their savings.

It’s a great, important policy idea. I hope she wins and manages to enact it. But Democrats should understand why ideas like this—policy reforms, in general—are distinct from goal-based promise like curing cancer: Even if Harris wins a governing trifecta, passing new Medicare benefit legislation will be a terrible slog, and the difficulty will have nothing to do with Donald Trump or MAGA. If we’re lucky enough to return to some semblance of normal politics, Republicans will still vehemently oppose the safety net as is, to say nothing of the idea that we should make it bigger and more robust. Even the best-polling, best-intentioned Democratic campaign promises will eventually degenerate into an enervating legislative slog.

Republicans will probably resist Democratic-led national-greatness initiatives, too. But they won’t be able to fold their opposition into boiler-plate right-wing antipathy to the welfare state. Who are the makers vs. takers in conquering the final frontier? Whose votes are Democrats buying by trying to cure cancer? Is that really something Republicans want to make a big show of opposing? Most likely yes! But if they do, they’ll more plainly expose themselves as saboteurs—sectarians who want the country to fail unless it becomes a right-wing autocracy, and they control all the levers of power.