Identify the Policy
2024 DNC bulletin
No matter how much we might complain, apparently they’re just determined to stage the 2024 American presidential election, so let’s take another look at what’s happening in the latest episode of today’s most-watched reality-show. This week, the drama changed scenes to Chicago for the still ongoing 2024 Democratic National Convention and the public coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee, following President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race due to health and cognitive concerns. While Biden endorsed Harris, some commentators suggested then that his withdrawal and endorsement may have been forced—as the current president has since (more or less) confirmed—and speculated about Harris being positioned by the Democratic establishment.
Of course, despite her prior unpopularity and lack of primary victories during her 2020 campaign (with such a poor showing that she quit in 2019), the Democratic Party went on to hold a “virtual roll-call” that named her the nominee on 6 August, so the convention is little more than a formality.
Some might say that Harris treats her policies the same way: little more than a week ago, the 2020 presidential candidate and current Vice President was “cautiously” rolling out her policy platform, attempting to navigate the legacy of her past positions while addressing vulnerabilities from her 2020 campaign. Eventually adopting some ideas from her rival, Donald Trump, such as ending federal taxation on tipped earnings, Harris reportedly began shifting away from her more liberal stances, focusing on pragmatic, centrist policies aimed at building consensus.
Harris went on to articulate more of her policies last Friday in North Carolina, with proposals including measures to combat grocery price gouging, to increase housing affordability, and to lower prescription drug costs. Alongside plans to provide significant down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, to expand tax credits for families and low-income workers, and to maintain tax cuts for households earning under $400,000, Harris emphasized her commitment to promoting economic opportunity while maintaining the Federal Reserve’s independence (“Boo!”), and indicated plans to reveal more policies soon—a reflection of her campaign’s “strategic vagueness” designed to attract broader support while avoiding criticism of the details.
Of course, it’s fair to question whether she genuinely believes in anything or if she is merely an opportunist without core principles, calling for her to clarify her current stance on key issues. Obviously, Harris’ policies (or those of any candidate) ought to stand front and center, but some see her campaign as staging her identity as a substitute. On that subject, Niko House (whose analysis we featured when Biden first withdrew from the campaign) offered useful insights on identity politics last Tuesday when responding to a listener’s write-in question: “Just as with Obama in 2008, there’s pressure to vote for the first Democratic black woman for president. What’s the best argument against voting for her based solely on identity?”
In his response, House argues against voting solely on identity, stating that a candidate’s policies and qualifications should be the primary consideration. He criticizes Obama for betraying the Black American community and contributing to the resurgence of slavery in Africa through his actions in Libya. Similarly, House critiques Harris for her lack of a clear platform and accuses her of betraying the Black community by increasing funding for police despite concerns over police brutality. These betrayals provide evidence for House’s argument (at ~1:18) that identity should not be considered a qualification for a job or position: instead, a candidate’s policies, experience, and understanding of issues should be the primary factors in evaluating their merit. He also suggests (at ~2:48) that minority candidates who gain prominence in American politics often do so by appeasing elite interests and being willing to “sell the community down the river”—and cites Harris’ willingness to work with Joe Biden, a former segregationist (whom she lambasted as such during the 2020 Democratic primary debates) as evidence.
Of course, House notes (at ~4:42) the importance of not dismissing candidates solely due to their identity, and advocates for giving everyone a fair opportunity and consideration regardless of their identity. He seems to leave unsaid, however, the potential danger of a candidate’s identity overshadowing criticism of their time in various offices and of their previously stated policies. But he might only do so because Briahna Joy Gray (featured last June in our mid-year dispatch) pointed it out so capably when writing about Harris in 2017 while discussing how identity politics have been weaponized in progressive circles to suppress valid criticisms.
While Gray acknowledges that identity politics can help highlight systemic inequalities, she also points out that it can reduce individuals to their demographic characteristics, silencing dissenting voices within those groups, before specifically noting how criticisms of Harris’ political record—particularly her actions as California’s Attorney General—have often been dismissed as racially or gender-motivated rather than engaging with the substance of the critiques. Gray then compared that treatment to the 2016 election, where critiques of Hillary Clinton were often dismissed as sexist, ignoring legitimate concerns about her policies. Gray contends that this misuse of identity politics not only stifles healthy debate but also erases the voices of progressive people of color who do not align with centrist views. Instead, she stresses that identity should not shield politicians from scrutiny and that legitimate critiques should be evaluated based on their substance, not dismissed based on the critic’s identity or the identity of the candidate in question.
But criticisms of Harris’ political campaigns aren’t limited to how much the candidate leans on identity politics. Soon after his time in Venezuela observing Maduro’s re-election, Ajamu Baraka turned his focus back to the U.S. political system to criticize Harris’ replacement of Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee—which Baraka characterizes here as a “coup” orchestrated by the capitalist oligarchy controlling the party. Accordingly, he argues that this move reveals the lack of real democracy in the Democratic Party, dominated by neoliberal forces aligned with Silicon Valley, before also highlighting how Biden’s political career has embodied the neoliberal turn in U.S. politics, which has abandoned the reformist liberalism of the past in favor of policies that serve corporate interests and perpetuate wars abroad.
That, Baraka suggests, should give us pause while considering his replacement, whom he doubts would represent any meaningful departure from Biden’s policies, predicting a continuation of neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism. Instead, he proposes that the oppressed of the country must recognize the existential threat posed by the U.S./EU/NATO axis and continue to struggle for genuine societal transformation through revolutionary means. Accordingly, Baraka calls for the rejection of America’s two-party system and for the building of alternative popular power structures.
These analyses from House, Gray, and Baraka will surely come as no surprise to longtime readers of Radio Free Pizza, who may recall our dispatch from July of last year arguing that “wokeness” and identity politics are being used by powerful elites—both in politics and business—to distract from and suppress movements that seek wealth redistribution and empowerment of the working class. This socially-engineered zeitgeist protects the interests of the wealthy and powerful by redirecting public energy away from class issues and toward social or cultural issues. This, in turn, prevents challenges to the economic and political systems that favor the elite.
The next month we discussed the consequent development among progressive American liberals of what we called “the professional-managerial dialect” as both a product of and a tool for maintaining the status quo. This linguistic phenomenon, influenced by financial interests and technocratic forces, not only deepens ideological rifts but also threatens to make communication across those divides increasingly difficult—to the point that language becomes a barrier to public discourse rather than a bridge.
Of course, the engineers of American society can’t just let the professional-managerial dialect go without an antithesis. For that reason we next unpacked what we called “the traditionalist-reactionary dialect,” which collapses complex, opposing ideologies (like communism and fascist corporatism) into a single, negative category, simplifying and misrepresenting these ideologies to reinforce a reactionary stance against perceived threats to traditional economic structures. While the professional-managerial dialect often expands the meaning of terms to include a broader range of identities and experiences, the traditionalist-reactionary dialect reduces complex concepts to a single negative idea that fuels a reactionary political agenda, leading to a distorted understanding of political and economic issues.
Accordingly, the pseudo-conservative wing of the U.S. political establishment (which caters to the “traditionalist-reactionary sphere” of the American public) started calling Harris a communist—or, as The New York Post would put it, a “Kamunist.” The tabloid reported that Harris’ $1.7 trillion economic plan attracted immediate criticism from economists and Trump supporters, who labeled the plan fiscally reckless and warned that such government spending could exacerbate inflation and increase the national debt.
Meanwhile, Trump himself apparently saw no reason for The New York Post to coin a neologism, posting the image below the day after Harris’ speech:
Obviously, that’s a huge stretch from the traditionalist-reactionary sphere. If price controls are communist, then (as Newsweek reminds us) so was Nixon, whose Executive Order 11615 mandated a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to counter inflation—the first time the U.S. government imposed wage and price controls since World War II. In addition, Harris’ aforementioned commitment to maintaining the independence of the Federal Reserve is one of the least communist policies that anyone could propose.
Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine that Harris’ economic advisors would design a communist platform, now that we know she has chosen Brian Deese and Mike Pyle, both formerly of BlackRock, as Sabrina “Sabby Sabs” Salvati of Revolutionary Blackout Network reported last week.
Salvati naturally expresses her concerns that this connection to BlackRock may influence Harris’ policies to favor corporate interests over the needs of the working class and marginalized communities. Knowing that the Democratic Party has for decades neglected the working poor, Salvati suggests (at ~8:43) that Harris’ policies may continue this trend, while criticizing the party more broadly for prioritizing the interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. After touching (at ~13:45) on Black celebrities and media personalities insulting the intelligence of Black men who do not want to vote for Harris—trying to shame Black men for thinking for themselves and forming their own opinions rather than blindly supporting her based on her identity—Salvati goes on to feature (at ~19:26) Dr. Umar Johnson, who questions Harris’ commitment to uplifting the Black community economically and argues that political candidates often engage in superficial gestures, such as hosting cookouts or featuring entertainers, rather than addressing the substantive economic issues facing Black communities.
So, yes, it’s hard to imagine that former BlackRock executives would supply Harris with any communist economic policies. But what do communists think about Harris? (Since they surely wouldn’t acknowledge Nixon as one of their own.) For insight on that, we can turn once again to Caleb Maupin, who appeared earlier this month on George Galloway’s Mother of All Talk Shows to discuss his book Kamala Harris & the Future of America (2020), and the controversy surrounding its removal and subsequent reinstatement on Amazon.
Maupin and Galloway’s discussion begins by connecting the book’s removal to a broader pattern of censorship and manipulation by tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Twitter. As their conversation continues, Maupin delves (at ~6:32) into Harris’ background—later mentioning (at ~11:19) her Marxist father, who denounced her 2020 campaign—along with her niece’s involvement with George Soros’ NGOs in India, and her ties to the U.S.’s “color revolution apparatus” for foreign regime change, alleging her to have been groomed by the same forces responsible for internationally destabilizing actions undertaken during the Obama administration’s first term. He also discusses (at ~9:43) Harris’ prosecutorial record, accusing her of mass incarceration, covering up scandals, and prioritizing cheap prison labor over justice: all quite contrary, of course, to her latter-day support for organizations like the Minnesota Freedom Fund, after doing so had become politically convenient.
(Speaking of Minnesota, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that at the start of this month Harris selected Governor Tim Walz as her running-mate, who presided over the destruction of my hometown in 2020. Maybe now he’ll preside over a nationwide collapse, probably in the name of [private] equity.)
Opening up further insights into how the professional-managerial sphere represents a co-opting of progressive liberals’ instincts, Galloway raises the claim (at ~12:23) by Dr. Phyllis Bennis that Harris would be tougher on Netanyahu and more sympathetic to Palestinians than Biden or Trump. Of course, Maupin dismisses this, pointing out that Harris has consistently sided with Israel and ignored Palestinian activists, and suggests that the Democrats are trying to appeal to Muslim voters by portraying Harris as more sympathetic to their causes, but he believes this is a façade—much (it seems to me) like her supposed defense of 2020’s anti-racist protesters.
Overall, Maupin argues that a Harris presidency would be dangerous for the world due to her ties the aforementioned regime change apparatus of the American deep state. Given Harris’ chameleon tendencies—that is to say, given her career-long failure to genuinely represent the interests of minority communities as a prosecutor before pivoting to identity politics during her 2020 campaign—alongside attempts from the liberal wing of mainstream legacy media to drum up support for her through identity politics (for whom criticism of Harris represents “misogynoir”: misogyny against Black women in particular), a Harris presidency would likely be dangerous domestically too, generating further civil unrest between the professional-managerial and traditionalist-reactionary spheres of American public discourse.
In the ongoing spectacle of American politics, the 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be yet another chapter in the nation's complex dance between identity politics, economic policy, and the ever-persistent influence of elite interests. The discourse surrounding Harris’ candidacy underscores the deepening divides in American society, where identity and policy are frequently wielded as tools of manipulation by both the political establishment and its critics.
Meanwhile, commentators like House, Gray, Baraka, Salvati, and others remind us of the dangers of allowing identity to overshadow substance. As Harris’ campaign unfolds, it will be crucial for voters to critically assess not what she represents symbolically, but rather the concrete actions she proposes and the broader implications of her leadership for both the U.S. and the world.
As we move closer to the 2024 election, we here at Radio Free Pizza predict that the discourse surrounding the Harris campaign will reveal a great deal about the current state and future direction of American democracy. Accordingly, keep tuning in to stay abreast of its trajectory and to remain ahead of the curve.
Hilarious those messianic depictions of the Queen of Zergs...