yakov_a_jerkov | Aug. 24th, 2024

Предыдущие десять дней я был в Праге, и не смотрел съезд демократов. Впрочем, я бы его в любом случае не смотрел, как никогда не смотрел партийных съездов демократов и республиканцев до того.

Но отзывы я читал. И даже решил полностью посмотреть выступление Харрис. К счастью, ее речь занимает только 38 минут. В отличие от речи Трампа... которая должна была продолжаться примерно столько же, но продолжалась полтора часа.

В общем, я всем рекомендую посмотреть выступление Харрис, видео ниже. Конечно, как я сказал, я читал отзывы людей, с которыми я обычно согласен, и, наверное, в какой-то степени на мое собственное впечатление эти отзывы повлияли. Тем не менее, на мой взгляд, это была отличная речь. И по содержанию, и по delivery. Просто очень хорошо.

Одна интересная особенность, на которую, в частности, обратил внимание Сильвер:

Harris’s speech was low-key post-woke

Finally, I noticed what wasn’t said. How many times did Harris say the word “Black”?

Zero, at least according to the New York Times’s transcript.

And not because Harris is totally “color blind”, but because she can invoke her racial identity in ways that are a lot more nimble than the nails-on-a-chalkboard tones of what I call “Social Justice Leftism” but most of you call “wokeness”. With the subtle reference to her father being a “a student from Jamaica”. With the color palette. With the call-out to “Aretha, Coltrane and Miles” — full names unnecessary, because if you know you know.

And how often did Harris say the word “woman”? Just once, in reference to her mother — “my mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall brown woman with an accent” — and in the context of a classic American story of an immigrant’s desire to assimilate into her new country. There was none of the breaking-the-glass-ceiling stuff of Clinton 2016 — because Harris didn’t need to say it.

And there was optimism, a quality that is sometimes in short supply among Democrats and completely absent in the Matrix of Intersectional Oppression. In fact, Harris turned some woke tropes 180 degrees around: it’s Republicans who are pessimists, who are weird and unpatriotic:
You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.

America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities.
And then in the closing of her speech — in contrast to Clinton, who invoked the musical Hamilton (!) and the lame motto “stronger together” — Harris reframed another word that is often associated with the Social Justice Left: “privilege”, as in “check your privilege”. Instead of privilege dividing us into identity groups, Harris said, our shared privilege as Americans is what unites us. And not only that: instead of feeling bad about ourselves because of our privilege, it gives us a duty to go out and continue kicking ass!
It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American. So let’s get out there, let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there, let’s vote for it, and together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.
This was a remarkable speech, in the sense of being both very good and unusual. It’s not the color-by-numbers approach you usually get at a convention.

Look, I don't know what (if any) bounce Harris is going to get out of it in the polls. We’ll wait and see what the model says. But here’s an optimistic framing for Democrats that I find somewhat credible. Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate. And Hillary Clinton almost beat Donald Trump, coming 80,000 votes away in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Kamala Harris is a much better politician. Surely she can get over the bar?

Unfortunately for Democrats, it’s not quite that simple, because Trump is actually quite a bit more popular than he was in 2016 so the bar is higher. But instead of Clinton’s complacency, Democrats have a candidate who knows she has a fight on her hands, and the instincts to go for the jugular.