Democrats should pass on a Kamala Harris candidacy

We need a mirror match to balance forces and blunt momentum

We must understand what we’re fighting against. Our nemesis this cycle is fascism.

What drives fascism — what gives it its power — is a sense of inevitability. Where one encounters it, one must allow oneself to succumb and become a part, or risk being bulldozed. This is its draw: you’re either with us or against us.

We know also that fascism is embodied in images, namely the image of the strongman.

In yielding to the inevitable strength of the movement and its leader, the follower finds protection in the leader’s shadow — as finding relief in a tree’s shade. The strongman appears to wear a cloak, a cape, a crown . . . but these are images only, projections from the crowd imposed upon the leader to make him seem invincible.

Masculinity motifs are crucial to the image of the strongman. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who specializes in the understanding of classic fascism, tells us that masculinity is an underlying engine of fascism. Noting these recurrent themes, she states that authoritarians “use machismo for political legitimacy.”

This, as it happens, overlaps with theorist Wilhelm Reich’s analysis of the mass psychology of fascism. Reich’s interpretation of fascism rests on the patriarchal structure of family.

“Within the family the father holds the same position that his boss holds toward him in the production process. And he reproduces his subservient attitude toward authority in his children, particularly in his sons. Lower middle-class man’s passive and servile attitude toward the führer-figure issues from these conditions. [...]

“What this position of the father actually necessitates is the strictest sexual suppression of the women and the children.”¹

In this structure, sexuality — especially female sexuality — is suppressed and, through this suppression, excess energy manifests in the individual. This energy is then applied in a religious or spiritual context, mystifying that person’s vitality, making it able to be channeled in a collective sense toward projects exalted by religious leaders and other pinnacle authorities.

“[T]he sexual inhibitions and debilitations that constitute the most important prerequisites for the existence of the authoritarian family and are the most essential groundwork of the structural formation of the lower middle class man are compassed with the help of religious fears, which are infused with sexual guilt-feelings and deeply embedded in the emotions. Thus we arrive at the problem of the relation of religion to the negation of sexual desire. ... The compulsion to control one’s sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honor and duty, bravery and self-control.”²

Theorist Herbert Marcuse touches upon this as well, noting that authority in the Western sense is derived from this patriarchal structure. This authority is nested, like an expanding coil, where the nuclear family as headed by the male is a node and each level of society is a concentric ring.³

The suppression of female sexuality is key to fascism (an extreme form of authoritarianism), which explains why there is such anti-female hate at the core of the movement.

This being the case, I am dumbfounded as to why Democrats are determined to place a female at the head of the Democratic ticket, just as that ticket is being made a clean slate.

I understand the sentiment, but this plan to insist upon Vice President Kamala Harris as being President Biden’s heir apparent — “It’s her turn in line” — will doom the party, because it is completely at odds with the energies at play this election cycle. We’re fighting fascism. We must beat it at its own game.

The fascism on American soil

Now, fascism is protean, meaning it adapts itself to the conditions of each nation in which it’s adopted. American fascism is laden with anti-black racism.

As the American South is now considered, retrospectively, as a place of proto-fascism,⁴ today’s racism is American fascism in full bloom. The Southern strategy of the 1960s has met the Slave Power of the 1860s and today births a new movement completely outside of time.

Fascism often seems timeless, because it draws from strands of culture that have long stood as individual elements, and from latent streams of thought; and it weaves these together, along with current tendrils of the time, to create a tapestry that feels familiar yet seems altogether new.

“Make it new!” — Ezra Pound, fascist

So we have on the one hand anti-black racism as distinctly the American contribution to this movement, and anti-female sentiment — misogyny — as endemic to fascism’s raison d’etre and molten core.

In this light, it is worse than folly to send up against the icon of the American fascist movement an opponent who is either Black or female. But it is especially foolhardy to send one who embodies both.

Vice-President Kamala Harris. Image source: Reuters / BBC

I take no joy in bringing this news. I happen to live at the intersection of those two traits, blackness and female biology. The last thing I want to do, as a liberal Black woman in 21st-century America, is exclaim that a Black woman can’t win in this election cycle.

But it is that embodiment that provides me with the ability to judge the moment in its fullness. Misogynoir — hatred of female Blackness — is A Thing, and it’s one that must be acknowledged on its own terms.

A hybrid hatred

Misogynoir, a term coined by Moya Bailey, refers to “the unique form of anti-black misogyny faced by Black women, especially in visual and digital culture.”⁵ That misogynoir embeds itself in visual culture is especially relevant to the discussion of fascism, which elevates image above all.

Misogynoir, in American fascism, can be seen as elementary — a basic conceptual building block of the worldview shared among those immersed in the movement.

Many female Black stereotypes proliferate American culture, but most pertinent to our discussion here is that of the Jezebel stereotype. In contrast to the Mammy — a ubiquitous figure in American culture, depicting a homey, heavyset Black matron in a subservient position — the Jezebel is the female Black virago, hypersexed. 

“The portrayal of black women as lascivious by nature is an enduring stereotype. The descriptive words associated with this stereotype are singular in their focus: seductive, alluring, worldly, beguiling, tempting, and lewd. Historically, white women, as a category, were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty — even sexual purity, but black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory. This depiction of black women is signified by the name Jezebel.”⁶

Stereotypic images that endure: Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire. Image source: Al Jazeera

Another pervasive Black female stereotype is that of the Sapphire, a caricature that depicts Black women as overbearing, acerbic and domineering. This is the image of the emasculating woman. In haranguing men and sassing them, she robs them of their essence, in effect siphoning it off and, in turn, becoming more masculine herself. Because of this “theft,” she earns men’s resentment.

This is the attack — combining these two enduring misogynoir tropes — that fascists in Donald Trump’s party will deploy against Kamala Harris.

The attack⁷ will be unrelenting, it will be withering, and it will reignite a latent stereotype that has, for most Americans, lain fallow all of this time, only to be resurrected in all of its grotesquery.

Let me be as clear as possible: Donald Trump wants to go scorched-earth. He does not care what damage he does to the body politic. He will happily rain N-bomb after N-bomb on the campaign trail if it paves his way back to Pennsylvania Avenue. He will go after Kamala Harris with viciousness and vitriol, in defense of what fascist America holds sacred as negating values: not-black and not-female. 

He will stitch together these dead metaphors and fashion a Frankenstein. From racism, from sexism, he will derive his power, activating stereotypes considered long-buried.

Movie poster for The Bride of Frankenstein. Artwork by Martin Ansin, 2010.

It’s important to know that, while Kamala Harris is fierce and an extraordinary fighter, she will not be the only one bearing the brunt of these attacks. All Black women in America will be forced to endure these attacks, to hear not just Harris but Black women as a concept — as an idea — being rent apart and torn asunder. Our skin will be cloth in a tiger’s teeth. Our sex will be an opened centerfold.

It would be a tall ask of African-American women to endure such caustic fury as would be unleashed by these stereotypes, were there a decent chance that Harris could ascend to the highest office. But she cannot. Not in this environment.⁸

Thus, the ask is futile; but, more than that, it requests that African-American women come in for and withstand gratuitous abuse. Accept this sadism, perform this masochism, for our fantasy of an equitable America, one where a Black woman can claim this crowning achievement. It is folly — and Black women are the ones who will bear the lash.

Instead, we need to play the game right back at the fascists, to mirror them without imitation.

Two can play at this game

Donald Trump thinks very highly of his physicality. In his heyday, he believed himself to be the most attractive male in his vicinity. He’s vain. But this goes not necessarily toward his narcissism in this regard but rather to his idea of beauty, aesthetics.

Trump holds a standard of beauty that he takes to be classic. This is evident in how highly he held his own athleticism in his youth. He wants to be known as graceful, limber, full of motion and strength, a locomotive, a dynamo. This longing is the locus of fascism.

In this sense, we need to nominate someone who can mirror this standard back at Trump. But we need someone so much younger than he, and more handsome than he, that he will be embittered just by glimpsing his opponent. This bitterness may yet ensnare and entangle him and cause him to repel his more lukewarm supporters, even possibly his ardent boosters.

He must be made to yearn. But that jealousy that Trump would display needs to be organically evoked. The opponent would need to be of the mold of a quarterback or swim champion, someone with classic features and symmetry, just what aging Trump desires but can no longer possess.

A pale reflection. Image credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

This type of strategy — playing to superficiality — is anathema to Democrats. Heirs to Enlightenment values, we believe that we should hew to reason, that voters are eminently rational and will base their decisions on enlightened self-interest.

The belief is idealistic and, in this current environment, wrong. Fascism is a movement of emotion, of desire, of regression.

Fascism is a returning to an age before the age of reason, regaining a preverbal sense of wish fulfillment. Fascism is a retreat into the ancient, nonthinking mind — a journey back to a plane of pure sensation. Pain and pleasure are the devil and angel on the voter’s shoulders.

Fascism’s voters are not interested in party platforms. They want sights, sounds, spectacle.

In fact, it is this facet of fascism that gives Democrats a fighting chance at overtaking Trump’s apparent sense of inevitability. Fascism-friendly voters are not basing their choice on rationality. They can be distracted by counter-spectacle, by their own stereotypes of strength and beauty.

Skin-deep similarities

It’s important to note that these voters are focused entirely on the superficial. This means that they will give more credence to surface-level — that is, arbitrary but immutable — traits such as skin color and biological sex.

More than that, they want their yardstick for greatness reflected back to them. When fascists see people like themselves elevated, it assuages their self-esteem and allows them a vicarious life through their leaders.

We Democrats can give them that and distract them with their own standards.⁹

Yet, underneath that surface, we can articulate our own vision for the future, retaining our own philosophy and platform. (Liberalism spoken from such a mouth might seem to these voters like reverse ventriloquism. It may cause the fascists a slight sense of cognitive dissonance when they hear such a message emanate from such a paragon of beauty or rugged individual, but their reliance on superficiality will be their own undoing, as they likely will give the candidate’s overture a hearing in spite of themselves.)

More to the point, those who have yet to pick a side will be affected in a similar way, but even more profoundly. I’m speaking of the undecideds, the independents, the swing voters, and especially what we call the “low information” voters. This cadre of voters notoriously wait until the last minute to make a decision, to break this way or that; and it is precisely these voters who are up for grabs in the last four months of a presidential race.

In a cycle where so many have expressed frustration at being made to pick from the same tired choices as last time, with our new candidate we will be just who they’ve been waiting for.

Our candidate, selected to go up against the image of the fascist by mirroring the fascist’s exterior, will neutralize that image. The low-information voter, those most likely to make decisions on the basis of the most superficial details, will be given an equally compelling image and will not be swayed on that basis alone.

If we give them a “looker,” they will gaze at both candidates. This negates fascism’s advantage.

If we give them a candidate that trips a wire on their latently held (or newly activated) stereotypes, they will turn away without a second thought.

Annulling anti-intellectualism

Also, it is the Democrats’ tendency to exalt science and intellect, products of the Enlightenment, our deepest values. But Trump and his fascists are telling their followers explicitly to disdain intellectuals.¹⁰ Again, they do this to champion themes of power, beauty, dynamism.

So we must play to that level and match them pace for pace. We can select someone who possesses those traits but also is sharp, quick-witted, and silver-tongued. Smartness is attractive, and we can package that in a way that draws those marginal voters.

But where the fascists will be pushing a vision of doom and destruction, the Democrats must project a message of inspiration. James Carville, longtime Democratic strategist, said that he’s been in the party for many decades, and every winning Democratic coalition has put forth a message of hope.

Such a message will be ever more stark of a contrast when both candidates are superficially, aesthetically similar. But the same message coming from a non-majority person — a female, a racial minority, or someone embodying both — will not even get a hearing.

America: shape-shifter

We’re beyond the regular state of play — the background radiation, if you will — of American racism. We are in new territory.

Some people will say it’s a bunch of foolishness to say that Kamala Harris cannot win this year. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and left office in 2016, not too long ago. That proves that a person of color can rise to the highest office in the land.

However, the people making that argument conveniently overlook the very fact that Donald Trump landed in the White House due to backlash stirred during Obama’s presidency. The electorate itself has changed immeasurably since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, which has gone on to morph into MAGA, QAnon and other iterations, all of which are streaked with racism.

Above and beyond that, however, is the fact that this movement of American racism — a recasting of Nixon’s Southern Strategy — did not merely make it permissible to wear one’s racism publicly, though it has certainly done that. It also has made new converts to racism. There are brand new racists walking around. 

This is true of sexism as well, especially with the rise of opposition to LGBTQ+ cultural gains. Such backlash fuels a hyper-heteronormativity (that is, traditional gender roles), which then lends itself to the reinstatement of “traditional” femininity, leading back to the nucleus of the patriarchal family with suppression of female sexuality. That’s precisely what we’re seeing with not only the drive to curtail abortion access but also burgeoning battles over access to birth control (even male contraception in the form of condoms).

So we are not anywhere like where we were when Americans elected Barack Obama. Polarization began nearly 15 years ago, and Donald Trump himself deepened it. He has turbo-charged racism and misogyny. Now, according to the New York Times, he has ascended to “mythical” status,¹¹ accepting the Republican nomination following the attempt on his life. The messianism surrounding Trump’s candidacy likely will intensify the bigotry against women and minorities, as Trump’s followers endeavor to emulate him even more.

So Kamala Harris is not the selection that will save the country from fascism. In fact, she presenting herself as an option to those inclined to vote for Trump will evoke a venomous reaction. This venom then will have a chance to spread through word of mouth.

Harris does not deserve hate speech, but she will get it, and it will proliferate. If this were a normal election cycle, such hazards may have been possible to overcome, through exposure and familiarity over time. 

This is not a normal cycle. Fascism is on the ballot.

In an environment where fascism is already in the air, emotional thought processes have taken hold of part of the electorate. Many are not reachable at all. Others will be making decisions based on automatic behaviors and stereotypes. We need a candidate that will circumvent this, or at least not trigger it. That means selecting a more optimal candidate.¹²

The goal this time around isn’t to elect a Black female president, as fine an aspiration as that is. The goal is to defeat fascism.

1. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946 / 1970), Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael, eds., p. 53. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

2. Reich, ibid., pp. 54-55.

3. “The idea of the inheritance of property is one of the most effective factors through which the family is tied to the order of state and society which protects it, and the individual is tied to the family; however, this is not the only reason why the family becomes a matter of life and death to the state. Authoritarian traditionalism knows very well that it is precisely in the family that the ‘dogmas and prejudices’ which it proposes as the basis of society are originally handed down[.]” Herbert Marcuse, A Study on Authority (1972 / 2008), p. 76. Verso Books: New York.

4. “Southern ideology heralded the fascism of the next century.” Stefan Roel Reyes, “Antebellum Palingenetic Ultranationalism: The Case for including the United States in Comparative Fascist Studies,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascism Studies (2019), Vol. 8, p. 321.

5. Wikipedia, “Misogynoir.”

6. David Pilgrim, “The Jezebel Stereotype.” The Jim Crow Museum, July 2002.

7. This attack will reprise the same themes as Harris has faced before: her success as a hard-nosed prosecutor — wherein her ability will be used against her — and her romantic relationship with Willie Brown when he was Speaker of the California Assembly, in which it’s charged that Harris “slept her way to the top.” (Note that Brown is not maligned in such a smear; instead, Harris as a woman is reduced to her body, portrayed as someone willing to trade sexual favors to satisfy ambition. This is a very anti-female form of undercutting.)

8. Don’t just take my word for it. Listen to some 2020 Biden voters, now undecideds, surveyed by the Bulwark as part of a focus group. (This is from two weeks ago.)

Asked specifically about Harris’s prospects, one said, “So, she has unfortunately, and I hate to say this, but she already has two strikes against her. She’s not going to get a lot of people to support her, and she won’t get the necessary votes.”

Another: “We would hope that we were in better race relations at this point in our society, and our country, but it’s like we’ve regressed. As far as racial attitudes, I was born in 1962, so I saw all the civil rights [struggles] when I was a little child. It, to me, feels like we’ve gone back to that era, and it’s sad to see that. So I just don’t think she would get the support, not only because of the lack of her abilities, but also because of who she is. She’s an African-American lady, and, you know, we have to be realistic.”

From “Derangement vs. Impairment (with Tim Miller) | The Focus Group Podcast,” The Bulwark, YouTube, July 3, 2024, at ~ 38:40.

9. What does that mean? Presenting them with a candidate from the cultural majority. Some might see this as pandering, but even in other forms of persuasive communication consideration of the spokesperson’s external traits is taken as part of the inventory. Advertisements regularly feature conventionally attractive people so as to obtain that the audience’s fickle attention. Am I advocating this as a general rule? No. But we are in a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation, and we must work with the audience’s limitations in order to gain a hearing.

10. Anti-intellectualism is a throughline of the paranoid style of politics, specifically of what’s described as ‘pseudoconservatism’. See Richard Hofstadter’s classic analysis which deals with the exemplar of the time, that of Barry Goldwater’s political philosophy. (Hofstadter also penned an article on the same subject for Harpers in 1964, touching upon McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.)

11. The Daily. “At the Republican Convention, Trump Achieves Mythical Status.” New York Times, July 19, 2024.

12. I do think there is still room for Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket, just not at the top. Not this cycle. (I may expand on this in a separate essay.) I wholeheartedly believe that she would be ideal to stay on as vice-president, so as to present a sense of continuation. In fact, she could be the unifying element on a new ticket. But a fresh standard bearer is needed to beat fascism, and its politics of imagery, at its own game.