I recently listened to a recording and read the text of Kamala Harris’s August 22 acceptance speech in Chicago. In my view, most of it was politically anemic, relatively harmless boilerplate—because it was so cliched and vapid as not to be taken seriously by anyone with a basic sense of logic who does not suffer from amnesia about recent history and from ignorance of the basic features of the long-term history of U.S. wars since the administration of Thomas Jefferson.
But the following three excerpts from her speech are not harmless boilerplate. They demonstrate a religiously rigid fealty to the pernicious myths and catechisms of an imperialist nation historically addicted to inflicting lethal violence—our own and that of our client states—on other peoples in the world.
- “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
- “I will make sure that … America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.”
- “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7…”
These excerpts from her speech reek of the murderous hubris that has been a prominent feature of U.S. foreign policy since the birth of our republic. If we cannot rapidly learn to exercise global leadership by outgrowing that hubris, nuclear war is an inevitability which will destroy human civilization before the effects of climate change do so.
And yet, I think if anyone else had been in Vice President Harris’ shoes on August 22, they would probably have said nearly the same things that she did (I hope without believing them), because anyone who has a realistic possibility of being elected president of the United States has to say them, on pain of death or rapid descent into political oblivion.
I learned this unpleasant truth from a vivid dream that I had in 1997 (the year before President Bill Clinton was impeached over his sexual relationship with a White House intern).
I dreamt that I had run as a third-party protest candidate for the presidency and was shocked to wake on the morning after Election Day to learn that I had won.
When reporters flocked to ask me questions, I realized at least four things, which came to mind almost instantly during the dream:
- I would need to promptly appoint a press secretary.
- I would need to nominate a secretary of state.
- I wanted to nominate for secretary of state someone with the outlook of a politically astute Quaker or Unitarian—like President Kennedy’s gifted speech writer and pacifist advisor Ted Sorensen—who would oppose the reflexive use of military violence and economic sanctions, which were already routinely killing tens of thousands of children in Iraq during President Clinton’s second term.
- I realized immediately that I could not nominate for secretary of state a person of Ted Sorensen’s political persuasion because, as president of the United States, I would not be able to make that choice according to my own values related to making war. I realized the unpleasant political truth that, as president of all the people, I would need to choose a secretary of state who would accurately represent to the rest of the world a people that was—in our international behavior—rapaciously greedy and violent. That political reality would force me to appoint someone very much like Madeleine Albright (President Clinton’s secretary of state after serving as his ambassador to the United Nations), who, by the night of my dream in 1997, had already done an exemplary job of implementing brutal sanctions against Iraq that had already killed at least 300,000 Iraqi children.*
The unpleasant epiphany the dream gave me helped me develop a tad more empathy than I had previously felt for President Clinton in his difficult job of making foreign policy decisions. But that insight did not excuse for me the cruelty of his actions, nor those of his successors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as commanders in chief of our lethal military and coercive economic powers.
If Kamala Harris is elected on November 5, and if she holds to the three pledges quoted above, she will likely eventually find herself echoing Lady Macbeth:
… Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty
And she is likely to risk Lady Macbeth’s fate of descending into madness.
My recommendation to Ms. Harris, if elected, would be to govern in a visionary style that would allow her to renounce war and brutal economic coercion, and to echo Palestinian American Professor Hala Ayan’s conclusion to her August 28 New York Times essay: “the most visceral show of hope I can offer this country [is] to ask it to do better, to ask it to bridge its talk with the underbelly of its actions. Because here’s the thing about a worthy future: You don’t stumble into one. You build it.”
My fear is that if Ms. Harris found a way to do that, she would be assassinated as President Kennedy was in 1963. And my intellectual assessment of the realpolitik governing the U.S. presidency is that the political process that vets who is electable to that office selects only those in whom, whatever their gender, the process has already unsexed (or internally assassinated) what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”—a lesson consistent with the harsh epiphany of my 1997 dream.
