The Demonization of Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris is going to be the enduring lightning rod of the American far right for the next four years.
The animating emotion of what today has become the Trumpian populist right is culturally based — as opposed to economically based — resentment. Among worldwide illiberal movements, the object of this resentment is often called ‘cultural Marxism’; here in America more often, ‘political correctness.’ From the right populist point of view, liberal elites are know-it-alls, willing to go to any lengths to impose their way of life (wearing masks!) and their ideology.
The gathering populist narrative is that Biden is a cipher and, in a Manchurian Candidate-like fashion, Harris — that monster, that communist, in Donald Trump’s words — will be running the show.
In the USA, resentment of political correctness stands on two pillars: loathing for multiculturalism and for feminism. This makes Kamala Harris the twofer incarnation of fears that have hardened into identities, where being white and/or being male is perceived as being society’s new and most egregious victims. These are angry, ferocious fears, the acid anger at feeling that something, yours, a privileged patrimony, is being wrested away.
This will make Harris a focus of imagined conspiracies and made-up facts — an industry that is already well underway in rejecting the Biden-Harris election. The gathering populist narrative is that Biden is a cipher and, in a Manchurian Candidate-like fashion, Harris — that monster, that communist, in Donald Trump’s words — will be running the show.
The liberal world’s celebration of Kamala Harris’s multiple breakthroughs will be mirrored on the right by a widespread — 70 million Trump votes! — and relentless narrative of her as the point person for stealing away that America that instead was supposed to be on its way to being ‘great again.’
Lawrence Rosenthal is chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies and the author or Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism (The New Press).
