Weird Democrats and How They Hide It
The Harris-Walz Party’s Institutionalist-Activist Two-Step
On June 27, 2024, the same day as the debate which led President Biden to leave the Democratic ticket, The New Yorker, whose artistic reputation hides its liberal advocacy, led with a story about the Democratic youth group Voters of Tomorrow (V.O.T.) The article read like an H.R. promotion for one of America’s corporate consultancies—Bain, McKinsey or Deloitte. It pictured the teens in professional dress holding iced Starbucks walking to meetings in Northwest Washington, D.C. It described them fixated on business cards and lobbying meetings— “the best moment of my life,” said one. It featured them cheering for Nancy Pelosi: “If the[y] . . . had any misgivings about our gerontocracy, they were hiding it well.” It called them “pragmatists . . . trying to fireproof the political system” against “officials whose . . . purpose seem[s] to be the destruction of officialdom.”
A little more than three weeks later, the Democratic nomination landed on Kamala Harris. By most descriptions, she is a middle-aged version of V.O.T. leaders: a careerist whose stepdaughter jokes that “whenever we bring our friends over . . . if you don’t have your 10-year plan, like, fully ready and outlined in a spreadsheet . . . you’re not going to survive . . . .” On X, supporters toasted her nomination with $150 bottles of red wine and boasted about their boarding school educations, equating their career successes with hers. Columnists praised her shutting down of progressive protestors, making her into a take-charge administrator. Sympathetic media outlets emphasized her prosecutorial record and called her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, “coach:” the ultimate adult in the room.
(Read more: The Real Story of Chicago)
From V.O.T. to their presidential nominee, Democrats have come so far from the Hamas imitators and dancing activists of this spring’s college encampments that the Party’s main line of attack is that Republicans are “weird.” At their convention this week, Democrats have made a show of distancing themselves from the pro-Palestinian protestors chanting Marxist slogans outside while emphasizing their “law and order” bona fides.
But this bottom-to-top shift is deceptive. Looking more closely at V.O.T. and its extreme alliances, and the way they map onto Harris’s, helps explain why.
Washington Agitators, Union Activists, and their Socialist/Antifascist Allies
Case in point: V.O.T.’s main ally, Gen Z for Change, the most powerful youth group in Washington, D.C,. V.O.T. has liaised with the Biden-Harris White House on climate policy and the Ukraine War. Its executive director, Elise Joshi, had no problem “bump[ing] into Joe Manchin” and bragging that she made him “run around in circles like a scared-y cat.” In Joshi’s view, speaking to Politico, “any progressive change, by any means, is our goal.” Jack Petocz, another board member, was expelled from Vanderbilt for helping lead its pro-Palestinian encampment, and former board member Olivia Julianna staged a phone attack on a Texas pro-life hotline which effectively shut it down. Gen Z for Change may be close to institutions, but its tactics are bare-knuckle street.
So are the tactics of people connected to one very prominent member of the four-person board of directors of V.O.T.: American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. AFT has been one of Harris’s most prominent backers. Like Harris, Weingarten has sophisticated connections, but her organization consorts with people in places more ragged than Northwest Washington, D.C or the Upper West Side of New York.
Five years ago, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), riding high off half a decade of growth, sent out a letter to its subsidiaries urging them to become more involved in teachers unions. Today, this directive has paid dividends. This year, the United Teachers of Dade, the third-largest AFT affiliate in the country, has appeared in approving reports by the communist Cuban regime’s state-run newspaper, GRANMA. The newspaper praised union members’ appearances at rallies against “De Santis’s book bans” and the “Cuban blockade” alongside Democratic Socialists, Maoists, and Marxists.
(Read more: Cuba’s Long Communist Play in America)
Antifascists also joined the union project. In 2021, a period of aggressive union-backed masking and school shutdowns and rising local activism against these policies via public meetings and protest, the anonymous group Miami Against Fascism entered the picture. It formed in late summer of that year and began doxxing community members who pushed back against masking and closures, costing some of them their jobs. It also backed one loose cannon operative who attended meetings, took down names, and was later arrested for vandalizing a family clinic. Not only did Miami Against Fascism’s actions help silence dissent against union policies; but the group appears to have been connected to associates of United Teachers of Dade.
The Harris/Walz Shell Game
Kamala Harris’s record in her last administrative posts, San Francisco District Attorney and Attorney General of California, matches this two-step. In these positions, she jumped on the federally funded war on crime, sending black men to prison, and aggressively stonewalled against charges of prosecutorial misconduct. At the same time, she emphasized high-publicity activist issues like abolishing the death penalty and not enforcing federal laws against illegal immigrants.
Her staffing choices in 2024 mirror this two-step. Her communications director, Brian Fallon, went on record in the summer of 2020 with the rallying cry “defund the police.” Walz, her vice presidential pick, is a former member of the AFT. As a U.S. representative, he adopted conservative positions because his district leaned that way, with high rankings from the N.R.A. When he became Minnesota governor, heading a progressive party, he supported scaling down gun rights and held off calling the National Guard during the 2020 riots in Minneapolis, creating backlash from the city’s Democratic mayor.
Most likely, Harris will continue this strategy. She will present herself as an institutional law-and-order candidate for as long as it’s politically convenient. But, when aggressive activism is needed—whether over a contested election in November or, if she wins, over a push to pass a new Voting Rights Act or sweeping climate legislation—it will resurface.
The Bigger Shell Game at Play
The alliance goes back to the 1960s, when elite universities became pipelines for operators in nonprofits, corporations, law and lobbying firms, and government. Some of these operators were institutional players: a striking collection of corporatists, academics, and defense contractors. Others were activists: idealists minted in protests against Vietnam. For decades, the Democratic Party developed these two wings into political forces. From the 1970s to the 2000s, these mixtures included Barack Obama and former Weather Underground member-turned-academic Bill Ayers meeting on the top floor of a skyscraper in Chicago; or Hillary Clinton having as her political “guru” a former Sixties activist, Michael Lerner. Beginning in the 2010s, though, they accelerated, at the hands of institutionalists like the Center for American Progress and activists like Democratic Socialists of America with unions joining the two.
From the Women’s Marches to Black Lives Matter, from the Kavanaugh hearings to the Green New Deal and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this mix of elite pressure and activist outcry has defined the party. This trend has reach the point where, today, the People’s Forum, the Marxist organization on West 38th Street, is described in The New York Times as an "event space" and associated with players on Wall Street and the New York Mayor’s office as well as one of the city’s largest nonprofits.
All this has come at a cost. Just a few weeks ago, the editor of American Prospect, one of the few outlets to try to hold to an older Democratic reality, wrote that “Democratic mass-membership organizations have been neutered and diminished to the point of irrelevancy, so the remaining voice of the Democratic polity is ‘top donors.’” The way these donors appeal to voters is emotions and causes not practicalities. Just like one description of Harris’s first election ad: “1. Pride flags waving. 2. Hardly any white men. 3. Trump mugshot featured. 4. Abortion, abortion, abortion.”
The Republican Opportunity
This turn among Democrats made the Republicans into the party of populists: representing people not tied to the agencies, conglomerates, and universities that since 1945 try to run America. Its coalition begins with Christians and rural and white Americans, and men. It may continue with young lower-middle and middle income Americans of all races and genders alienated from distant structures. It can move beyond them to voters claimed by Democrats: Latinos used as tools of intelligence agencies, blacks hurt by a war on crime, immigrants, and even, logically, Native Americans whose children get taken away by the same state agencies targeting white Christians. Luckily for Republicans, institutional operators don’t stop with one group: from wars on families to wars on terror and crime, their policies always impact another group.
Beginning in the 1970s, Republicans began attracting some of these voters. But the Party has accelerated that movement after Donald Trump remade it. It began with his rallying cries against the Deep State, and evolved into policies to dismantle it. If Republicans follow the logic of Trump’s moves to broaden their constituency, theirs will be a party suited to purpose: standing for an American majority Democrats have left behind. This means a people’s party in the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, Lincoln and then Reagan: a standard bearer for the common person and a scourge of the institutionalist-activist insiders of Kamala Harris’s political apparatus.
(Read more: Promoters of Cuba and Communism are Infiltrating America’s Institutions)
