With Kamala Harris, Republicans Can Finally Do Their Worst

And oh boy, will they ever.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

For the last four years, the attacks Republicans aimed at Joe Biden had a kind of lightness to them. They were only able to muster so much venom at Biden, an elderly White man with a moderate persona who activated few of their darkest impulses. So they shared memes of him falling on the stairs, and chanted “Let’s go Brandon!” with a laugh, and half-heartedly blamed him for every problem they saw. But there was something missing: that pulsing core of hate and rage that for so long has defined them.

Now Kamala Harris is going to be the Democratic nominee for president, and all that pent-up vitriol is about to come pouring out. Take the racist bile heaped on Barack Obama, add in the misogynistic fury directed at Hillary Clinton, bake them in the cauldron of the Trump-era American right, and what comes out will likely be the ugliest campaign we’ve seen in a long, long time. 

It has already begun, with many different varieties of “How dare you presume to think you belong here?” being thrown at Harris, to claim that she has no legitimate right to hold or even seek power. She has a long political history, a steady climb from local office to state office to federal office to the vice presidency? Oh no, she must be a slut. “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics,” says Megyn Kelly. Here’s Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster with 2.9 million followers:

But the phrase we’ve heard most often in the last two days is “DEI hire.” A few years ago they would have called Harris an “affirmative action hire,” but DEI is the updated terminology, the way to define anyone not White and male, but especially a Black woman, as an interloper, rudely presuming that she belongs in anything but a subservient position. That was the judgment of Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican buffoon whose greatest legislative accomplishment to date is a bill he sponsored in the Tennessee legislature to legalize the eating of roadkill. “One hundred percent, she was a DEI hire,” Burchett said. 

Watch Republican members of Congress struggle for a moment when asked what specifically they don’t like about Harris: They can’t say what they really think, so they say she’s “unqualified,” despite her 20 years in elected office at all levels. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was a real estate con man and reality show blowhard before he ran for president for the first time in 2016, and J.D. Vance has been in public office for all of a year and a half. But she’s the unqualified one.

We’ve seen this so many times before: Because she is Black, by definition she has no right to be where she is, and by her presence has replaced a more deserving White person. “Joe Biden did not choose her based on merit,” says prominent right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. “He chose her based on the same criteria of DEI that got Trump shot, that has been destroying this country.” 

Conservatives have a brain condition that causes them to impulsively react that way to any Black person or woman in a high position, assuming immediately that they can’t possibly deserve the place to which they have come. The examples are legion: A replacement-level party bro like Brett Kavanaugh who slid through life on the greased wheels of elite privilege deserves that Supreme Court seat, while the super-high-achieving Ketanji Brown Jackson is a “lesser Black woman,” in the phrase of one prominent conservative lawyer, obviously picked only because of her skin color. Donald Trump, a man who looks directly into the solar eclipse and thinks stealth planes are literally invisible to the human eye, demanded to see Barack Obama’s grades because he believed Obama could not possibly have been smart enough to get into Columbia and Harvard Law School. “I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard,” Trump said. If Donald Trump’s friends’ kids are outcompeted by the likes of Obama, something must be very wrong.

Some of the media halfwits on the right have even revived the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory against Harris, because her parents were immigrants. You can expect variations of that theme from Trump’s running mate, who has been advocating for a blood-and-soil conception of the nation in which the only true Americans are those who can trace their lineage to specific pieces of land through multiple generations, the people Vance’s friend Tucker Carlson famously referred to as “legacy Americans.” (This does not apply to Native Americans, of course.) 

Let your freak flag fly

Appearing in Ohio, Vance homed in on the real problem with Harris. “If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it,” he said. “You should feel a sense of gratitude, and I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.” 

Ah yes, “gratitude.” When conservatives say America is a sewer of moral depravity, or has become a hellish nightmare of crime, or is a country full of losers who can’t do anything right? No one questions either their patriotism or their absolute right to make those criticisms. But when a liberal says “There are some problems we ought to fix,” conservatives answer, “Why do you hate America?”

But the argument is different when applied specifically to Black people. They are supposed to express gratitude, to be continually thankful to a country that, by clear implication, is not quite theirs but a place they are allowed to be in, by virtue of the generosity and indulgence of the Whites who are its true owners. As Jelani Cobb wrote a few years ago, “Ungrateful is the new uppity.” 

Vance knows his audience, so in the same speech where he throws that racist excrement Harris’ way, he also reminds his listeners that they are the true victims here, since the only real racism is when conservatives are accused of racism:

“Democrats say that it’s racist to believe — well, they say that it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too.” Vance knows exactly what he’s saying: Since the libs say everything is racist, that means nothing is racist. Go ahead and call Harris a “DEI hire,” or “ungrateful,” or not a real American, or anything else you want. You’re not racist, they are. They’re racist for making a Black woman their nominee, and she’s racist for thinking she has a right to be where she is. They’re the oppressors, and you, honorable true American White people, are the victims. 

To all this, Democrats should say: Bring it on. Show everyone who you really are. Call her a slut, call her a bitch, call her a foreigner, call her a DEI hire. Dump all the rancid contents of your foul little hearts right on the table for everyone to see. 

Are some voters going to respond “Yeah, I hate her too!” and vote for Trump when they weren’t going to do so already? Probably. But maybe, just maybe, there will be even more who are reminded of who this Republican Party is and what it represents, and turn away from it in disgust. We’re going to find out.