Twirling Towards Freedom
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Have no fear, dear listener: while Jonah is still radio silent as he swan-dives in slow-mo off of waterfalls (or something), The Remnant hasn’t forgotten you. David French returns to guest host this episode with return favorite Ramesh Ponnuru from National Review and AEI. There’s the requisite Kamala Harris talk, but also deeper questions about ideology and the “Burn It Down” debates.
Show Notes:
-Henry Olsen: Kamala changes nothing
-Kevin Williamson summarizes the “Burn It Down” debates
-The inside baseball of Trump’s teleprompter troubles
-Ramesh on why the Republicans need to keep working-class voters
-“Always twirling towards freedom”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I thought the second part was an interesting dive again into the Republican Party and some of its struggles and how people view the platform and Trump. Any chance we can have someone on The Remnant in the future that can do a dive in the Democratic Party and what the average person not paying attention thinks about its parties future right now and post election?
Thanks for the podcast David. Also, if you continue to host The Remnant, you will need a cat or dog to post pictures on your twitter feed. The dogs name can be Aquaman/woman and the cats name can be Cerberus (because why should a 3 headed dog guard the river Styx’s?).
Loved the podcast as David and Ramesh are two of my favorite pundits not named Jonah Goldberg. But (yes, yes, I know, nothing matters before the but)... I've been trying to put my finger on why I'm so bothered by the refrain that Kamala Harris is a mainstream Democrat and the obvious pick for Biden. I was a Senate staffer until last year, so I've watched Harris's record since she came to the Senate in 2017, and, well, let's just say there's a reason for those surveys that pegged her as the fourth most liberal senator. From the very start, she distinguished herself as one of the fringiest votes against many of Trump's most mainstream nominees: one of 12 votes against Dan Coats for DNI, one of 6 votes against Rod Rosenstein(!) for Deputy AG, one of 13 against Jerome Powell at the Fed. In 2018, she was one of just 3 Democratic senators to join most of the Republicans in voting down a bipartisan immigration bill that would have given the DREAMers a pathway to citizenship -- it had too much border security for her taste. (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren voted "yes" on that one.) Later that year, she was one of 6 votes against a Coast Guard bill. Lest anyone assume this was purely about positioning for the presidential campaign, the trend continued into 2020 after she dropped out of the race: she was one of 10 votes against the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (Warren voted yes) and one of 14 (10 Democrats) against the annual defense bill. It's also been widely reported that she was the ringleader of Senate Democrats' decision to block Tim Scott's police reform bill -- and less widely reported that Chuck Schumer and many other Senate Democrats initially wanted to move the bill forward and try to amend it.
I get that there are plenty of reasons to think Harris is less of an ideologically committed leftist than Sanders, Warren, etc. (Although I'd submit that her "law-and-order" background is not necessarily one of them; Communist regimes have not historically been known for defunding the police.) But her record in the Senate -- combined with her enthusiasm on the campaign trail for governing by executive order, abolishing the filibuster, court-packing, etc -- paints a pretty clear picture to me: whatever her ideological moorings or lack thereof, Kamala Harris is far outside the mainstream in terms of her utter disdain for any kind of bipartisanship, consensus-building, or compromise. In that respect, she is the mirror image of Trump, and very different from Biden, whose most appealing quality is his instinct to turn down the temperature on partisan polarization and try to cut legislative deals with Republicans. I fear Harris will follow in Trump's footsteps in fanning the flames of division and polarization for political advantage, of course with the huge difference that elite media and cultural influencers will be eager to cheerlead for her and paint any opposition as motivated by racism and sexism. And I think that makes her elevation very dangerous for the future of the country.
I, for one, would feel a whole lot less anxiety if the VP pick had been someone like Karen Bass, who is certainly very far to the left but is more interested in getting things done and building coalitions to get things done than in "owning the cons."