To Beat A Demagogue

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term “demagogue” is defined as “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” Without getting into the merits of this claim (I have strong opinions on the matter, but they aren’t for this piece), many Democrats are adamant that Donald J. Trump is the textbook example of a politician who utilized demagoguery to elevate himself to higher office.

Should you be of the opinion that Donald Trump is a demagogue, thus making him unfit to be President of the United States, it would seem nearly certain that you would take care not to support a demagogue from your own side in the quest to unseat Trump. That, of course, brings me to the recently announced Presidential aspirations of one Kamala Harris.

On Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday last Monday, Senator Harris announced her candidacy for the Presidency. Since then, she has hosted an exceedingly well-attended kickoff rally in Oakland (a part of her NorCal base) and conducted a televised town hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, the site of the nation’s first caucus. Her early efforts have mostly been met with acclaim from the political media, and many experts have her at or near the top of the Democratic contenders. Bottom line, it is likely that Kamala Harris will be a force in the 2020 Democratic primary for President.

In her brief two years as a Senator, however, Harris largely stayed out of the public eye, with one exception – the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. While the public largely remembers the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing involving both now Justice Kavanaugh and his sexual assault accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, earlier Kavanaugh testimony also had its share of fireworks. At these hearings, Senator Harris made her presence known, as can be seen in the clip linked below. (The entirety of this clip is worth watching, but it doesn’t take long to get the flavor of it.)

Setting aside Senator Harris’ tone (which is horrible), her entire line of questioning implies that she has been informed about a conversation regarding the Robert Mueller investigation between then Judge Kavanaugh and an attorney she refuses to name who is (apparently) employed at a Washington, D.C. law firm she identifies as Kasowitz Benson Torres.  Senator Harris effectively calls Kavanaugh a liar for failing to recollect such a conversation, and she leaves little room for doubt that this conversation spelled trouble for Kavanaugh.  Unsurprisingly, her line of questioning sent various left-wing media outlets into a tizzy about Harris “having the goods” on damaging information about Kavanaugh.  And then … you never heard about Brett Kavanaugh and Kasowitz Benson Torres again, even when (pre-Blasey Ford) Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed nearly assured and Democrats remained desperate to stop it.

Recall the definition of the term demagogue — “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.”  Here, Harris all but directly accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a liar, without providing any factual support for this assertion while or after making this accusation.

Senator Harris, of course, has not constrained her demagoguery to the high-stakes battles for Supreme Court seats.  Here she is at Netroots Nation discussing how opponents of “identity politics” desire to “shut up” its proponents, after which Senator Harris goes on to rouse the crowd about how those who support identity politics won’t be silenced by their detractors.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4743566/kamala-harris-attacks-identity-politics

Senator Harris, of course, is well aware that the practitioners of identity politics have not only not been silenced but currently possess a level of influence (arguably on both the left AND the right) heretofore unseen in the American political landscape.  However, she is more than willing to indulge in her audience’s prejudices (or more accurately, fantasies) that the efforts to elevate group identity over family and individual dynamics are being silenced, in spite of the reality that they presently generate a near non-stop cacophony of noise constantly reverberating throughout the political discourse.  Here again, Senator Harris is no stranger to the tactics of demagoguery to fire up her supporters and to paint their opponents in an unflattering light.

Bottom line, Democrats have a clear choice when it comes to the Kamala Harris 2020 campaign for President.  They can resist the demagoguery of Kamala Harris, or they can employ their own demagogue in order to beat the demagogue they detest.