Connor O’Keeffe
Connor O’Keeffe (@ConnorMOKeeffe) produces media and content at the Mises Institute. He has a master’s in economics and a bachelor’s in geology.
President Joe Biden announced over the weekend that he is withdrawing from the 2024 presidential election. The announcement follows almost a month of pressure on Biden to drop out after his abysmal debate performance in late June made it impossible to keep hiding the fact that the president is cognitively impaired.
The soon-to-be former president and most major players in Democratic politics quickly threw their support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In the days since, Harris’ biggest potential challengers have either fallen in line and endorsed her too or began maneuvering to become Harris’ running mate. By Monday night, Harris “had the support of well more than the 1,976 delegates she’ll need to win” the nomination, according to an Associated Press survey. So, it appears all but guaranteed that Kamala Harris will be the 2024 Democratic nominee.
Because of her professional background, failed 2020 campaign, and tenure as Biden’s vice president, we can already be certain that a Kamala Harris presidency would be awful.
Harris represents not merely a continuation of the Obama-Clinton-Biden doctrine of progressive interventionism at home and abroad but an acceleration.
As vice president, she remained closely aligned with Biden on all of the worst things he’s done. She had a hand in his repressive response to the pandemic, championed his effort to expand the federal government’s industrial policy, and pushed him to attempt his illegal, regressive student loan forgiveness plan.
Early in Biden’s term, he put Harris in charge of the southern border, which anyone – regardless of where they fall on the topic of mass immigration – has to admit descended into utter chaos.
Harris’ foreign policy ambitions are nearly indistinguishable from Biden’s when it comes to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the US’s provocative militarization in the Pacific, which puts us at risk of war with China and North Korea.
And when Harris differs from Biden, she’s always on the worse side.
In the 2020 campaign and early in her term as vice president, Harris did not support the bipartisan effort to end the war in Afghanistan. While Biden and his team handled the actual withdrawal terribly, leaving was the right move. The fact that Harris wanted to continue pouring our money into that failed state-building project speaks volumes about her.
In his term, Biden has helped pass and implement some terrible, costly, downright anti-human environmental policies. Harris has wanted to go much further and pass a colossal $10 trillion climate plan that, in the style of the Green New Deal bill she cosponsored in the Senate, seeks to restructure the entire economy to try and usher in a green utopia before 2050.
Harris is also worse than Biden when it comes to trade and the push for federally funded college.
As Ryan McMaken pointed out back in 2020, when Biden announced Harris as his running mate, many of her detractors go wrong by calling her a radical or a tool of the far left. In McMaken’s words, “The reality is actually far more alarming. Radicals have a tendency to lose political battles, because they often stand on principle. Harris is unlikely to have that problem.”
Not only does Harris not hold any concrete principles, her craziest policy ambitions fall well within the mainstream establishment consensus. That’s what makes Harris so dangerous as a potential president.
We live in a world where the federal government constantly intervenes in the economy, our lives, and regions around the world to redistribute money from poor and middle-class Americans into the pockets of the politically connected rich. Harris poses no threat to this scheme. And so, like Biden, her policy objectives are likely to face little institutional resistance from the media, wealthy corporate elites, and the bureaucratic administrative apparatus that makes up the bulk of the federal government.
And where Harris differs from Biden, it’s only because she’s pushing for policies that will garner even more power for the federal bureaucracy and more money for wealthy plutocrats than he was ever willing to try for.
In his one term as president, Joe Biden has done much to compound all the most pressing problems facing the American people. At best, a Kamala Harris presidency will continue where Biden left off. More likely, she will go even further.
This article was originally published by the Mises Institute.
