Commentary
Joe Biden’s selection this week of Sen. Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate clarifies the stakes at the ballot box this November. It accentuates the fault lines in the nation’s cold civil war between the Americanists, defenders and preservers of the American regime and way of life, and the civilizational arsonists, those who fan the insurrectionist flames now engulfing America’s urban corridors and hope to abet national decline.
Many would have us believe that Biden and Harris are both positioned squarely within the ever-shrinking faction of Democratic moderates. Perhaps this is true when one compares their political positions with those of the party’s out-and-out socialist flank, led by the likes of Soviet Union-honeymooning curmudgeon Sen. Bernie Sanders and economically illiterate “it girl” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But within the intellectual confines of reasonable, pro-Western, pro-America politics, the Biden-Harris ticket evinces the radicalization of a major political party.
Suffice it to say this is not the Democratic Party of tax-cutting cold warrior John F. Kennedy—or even Bill “Abortion Ought To Be Safe, Legal and Rare” Clinton. In his opportunism, Biden has abandoned, over the course of his presidential bid, many of his long-held stances. He has forsaken his erstwhile support for the Hyde Amendment, which has long barred the federal use of taxpayer funds to subsidize elective abortions. He has publicly flirted with endorsing the elimination of the Senate filibuster, which he adamantly supported over the entirety of his nearly four-decade senatorial career.
He supports reinstituting the expired, feckless national ban on the cosmetically amorphous and technically undefinable subclass of popular semiautomatic weapons that leftists refer to as “assault weapons.” He supports a new capitulatory nuclear accord with the Iranian mullacracy that is the world’s number one state sponsor of jihad, and he supports a mass amnesty for essentially every illegal alien. His proposed climate plan is estimated to cost a jaw-dropping $2 trillion.
Clearly, the Biden-Sanders unity task force, which helped craft the Democratic Party’s official platform this year, is paying dividends.
As for Harris? Harris’s presidential bid panned out early because even the Democratic electorate was able to see through her deep cynicism, constant shapeshifting and comical desire to perpetually shift her stance and rhetoric to appease the wokest of the woke blue-checkmark Twitterati. In the course of doing so, Harris flirted with a gun-grabbing executive order, directed at least toward so-called assault weapons but possibly encompassing all semiautomatic weapons—so self-aggrandizing and reckless as to make King George III blush from the grave.
She briefly espoused support for outright banning private health insurance—something not even Britain or Canada, oftentimes the left’s idyllic models for health reform in America, have ever seriously considered. She has openly stated a belief that illegal aliens are not, or at least should not be considered, criminals—a stance amounting to full-on support for terminating borders and, by extension, the concept of the nation-state as it has existed in the West since at least the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.
Her nakedly opportunistic flip-flop on the credibility of Biden’s myriad sexual accusers is a proverbial knife in the backs of actual sexual-assault survivors, whose cause will be set back by her tunnel-visioned, Machiavellian lust for political power at all costs.
A Biden-Harris administration would operate in thrall to the Black Lives Matter and Antifa radicals currently melting down the streets of America’s leading cities. It would sell out America to its archfoes such as China, Russia, and Iran, and it would accelerate the Balkanization and cultural malaise now afflicting every level of our beleaguered social fabric.
A vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in short, is a vote to hasten American decline. For Americanists who still believe in the moral primacy of the Founding Fathers-era vision, the supremacy of the rule of law, and the integrity of the nation-state, there is only one logical vote this November. And Biden-Harris it is not.
Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training, is an opinion editor for Newsweek, a podcast contributor with BlazeTV, of counsel at First Liberty Institute, and a syndicated columnist.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
