Kamala Harris is destined to be the Democratic nominee in 2028 because the American left is now conservative. Democratic politics is now based on two suppositions: The existence of a “silent majority” and the reflexive defense of even the most unlovely institutions.
The conservative left glorifies the intelligence agencies and praises generals as the defenders of the republic, while insisting that most Americans despise MAGA and its revolutionary aims. It’s why Joe Biden’s attorney general described the FBI as “patriotic public servants” and the Democrats ran Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative, in Virginia. And it’s why the Atlantic ran a 2023 cover piece calling Mike Milley “the Patriot” who “protected the Constitution from Donald Trump.”
The conservative left believed the country, the silent majority of Americans, was with them. In the 2022 midterms, the Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan said that he represented the “exhausted majority, Democrats, Republicans and independents, against the extremists.” The slogans of the mid-2020s American left all speak to this new spirit of ornery conservatism: “Having a normal one?”, “Touch grass,” “Log off,” “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
With a clique of Trumpist radicals ensconced in the White House, the left now bases its plans on a supposed reserve army of normal people who will, someday, rise up to put an end to these radical schemers. There was a prefiguration of this thinking in the plan to get Taylor Swift to endorse Harris and so end the 2024 election at a stroke.
The response to the ICE arrests shows what’s changed. There are few Democrats who defend things like open borders or diversity anymore. Instead, they speak about mass deportations disrupting a certain domestic idyll. We can see this in the use of the term “neighborliness” during the Minneapolis saga. Jacob Frey, the city’s mayor, speaks in a tone of Norman Rockwell conservatism: “Stand up for America… This is not a partisan issue. This is an American tradition.” Tradition. The American left will no longer really defend egalitarian ideas; yet it considers any alternative to these ideas unconscionable.
A defense of the military and spy bureaucracies and notions of a moral majority: we have a term for this and that term is conservatism. In the second Trump era this tendency has only become more pronounced. If the American left is now a narrow defense of existing institutions, then the movement will naturally fall to Kamala Harris, who has always styled herself as “Momala,” a matriarch and apparatchik.
Kamala now only needs a popular constituency, and she will find it among black Democrats. Harris enjoys “a 29-point lead over Newsom, with 39 percent to 10 percent (no one else breaks 5 percent),” according to the pollster James Johnson. Black Democrats make up a third of voters in the presidential primaries.
Black Democrats have also been empowered by this left-conservative turn. The American left, whatever its divisions, still treats African Americans as something like the moral invigilators of society. Both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California governor Gavin Newsom see the black churches, organized into political machines at a local level, as the superego of their party. To them, they are a reminder of historical wrongs to be righted, but also a voice of no-nonsense pragmatism and good sense. Yes to reparations, no to antics like Otherkin.
In the South Carolina primary of 2020, the black electors of that state – led by the machine Democrat Jim Clyburn – put the kybosh on Bernie Sanders. The new American left is a defense of normie-dom, and African Americans are seen as the normiest of normies. Given the Democrats’ are leaking Hispanic support, given their ongoing froideur with big tech, this type of conservatism will only grow stronger, to Harris’s benefit.
The 2028 primary is set to open in either North or South Carolina, and so the likely course events becomes clear. As Gavin Newsom and AOC argue over the merits of socialism and Palestine, Kamala will abruptly win one of these states by a decisive margin; she will then be accepted by the party’s leadership as the candidate of unity. By “Super Tuesday” it all will be over. It will be a repeat of 2020, when, so the narrative goes, the church ladies of South Carolina called time on both the radicalism of Sanders and the hubris of Mike Bloomberg. It doesn’t matter that Kamala is an object of derision and strangely mute nationally.
The Democratic party increasingly prizes ordinariness and by 2028 neither of Harris’s rivals will seem ordinary – to the voters there will be too much of a whiff of sulphur to Gavin Newsom, and there will be no energy for a hard transformative AOC project like universal healthcare. This leaves only Harris. Whether the country at large will be interested in “having a normal one” is a different question.
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