The Silent but Smiling Elephant of Harris’ Identity

As Kamala Harris goes about her crucial campaign, she’s decided to downplay her unusual identity. I have no logical basis to question that decision. She is, after all, running against a racist, misogynist and bully making every effort to summon the same demons from his cult followers. Who am I to question her campaign strategy?

And yet, and yet . . . I find her identity as a woman and a descendent of Black and South Indian people immensely inspiring. It gives me great hope, both for our nation and for our species. Here’s why.

I suppose the best place to start is with England and the UK. In 1971-72, I spent nine months in Cambridge, England, on an NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship.

My impression of the UK then hasn’t changed much in the intervening half century. I knew and know that three of the best thinkers in human history—Isaac Newton, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin—were British. (A fourth, Albert Einstein, was a German Jew.) But I couldn’t and can’t escape the feeling that Britain was and is past its prime. Like its house organ The Economist, today’s England seems to believe devoutly in widely held but unprovable assumptions like “Free trade makes everybody better off.” Even back then, its largely coal-based winter heating, it seemed to me, made the whole land smell like an old woman’s body.

Nonetheless, when Rishi Sunak became the UK’s prime minister, something deep within me exulted. Yes, I knew that the Brits had discovered DNA, the chemical basis of life, which we now know is 99.9% identical from person to person. I knew that their democracy had lasted—from the first Magna Carta in 1215—going on four times as long as ours. I had had Jewish friends, and even a distant family member, who felt perfectly at home in Britain. But somehow I had never lost my suspicion that an unexpressed racial snobbery permeated the British elite until Sunak, a man of Indian descent, became PM.

When that happened, something moved inside me. I thought of Stalin’s incredulity that Britain, with a mere half-million disciplined troops, had managed to subdue and retain a whole sub-continent as a “colony,” consisting of over a billion diverse people. I had often wondered whether that “miracle” had been based on better weapons alone, or some spark of British understanding—the same spark that had ignited the Western Enlightenment that later produced our nation. As short and unproductive as it was, Sunak’s prime ministership seemed a partial answer that question.

But Sunak, of course, was of the wrong party. The Tories’ long and disastrous rule was coming to an end. The economic superstitions that grownups had accepted as gospel had let China steal the West’s spark, industry, factories and science from right under our noses. To confuse the rubes, those superstitions were called “liberal” economics in Britain and “conservative” in the US. But they had been equally based on non-scientific assumptions in the obvious self-interest of the West’s oligarchs and ruling business elite. With all his inspiring identity, Sunak hadn’t had a chance.

Something similar had happened to Colin Powell. Remember him? He may have been one of our wisest military leaders ever. He developed the “Powell Doctrine” for optional military adventures: (1) defined goals, (2) overwhelming force, and (3) a clear exit strategy. He applied it to prevail in Gulf I in a mere two months, with a five-month force buildup. Thus he produced our only unambiguous military victory since Vietnam, and our shortest war ever. Later, as Secretary of State, he averted what could have been a war or skirmish with China by the simple act of apologizing when a plane of ours came too close to a Chinese spy plane and only ours managed to land.

Around the turn of the century, the GOP was considering running Powell for president. Just think what would have happened had he run and won! No decades-long war in Iraq. No decades-long war in Afghanistan, to end with a debacle as great as ours in Vietnam. And, best of all, no more GOP as the party of racism: the GOP could hardly have continued Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy” and the senior Bush’s racist “Willie Horton” ads if it’s own candidate had been our first Black president.

But you don’t get to rewrite history. Powell acceded to his depressive wife’s wishes not to endure the kind of oppressive, pervasive racism that Barack Obama, our first actual Black president, later had to endure. And I got the chance to transform myself from an occasional blogger into a passionate one, with a whole category in my table of contents for posts about Barack and Michelle.

As I wrote later in describing the Clintons’ betrayal of Democratic principles, I didn’t think the Dems would have a clear revival until we have another candidate like Obama.

Now we do. But there’s a difference, including a difference in gender. And that’s what drives my hope and inspiration especially.

Unlike Germany’s Angela Merkel, who also inspired me, modern female leaders sometimes try to emulate Britain’s Margaret Thacher by taking charge like a man. Thacher was famous for coming into Cabinet meetings and saying, right off the bat, something like “I’m in charge here.” She reminded me of our pushy General Alexander Haig, who said exactly that, in the White House, in the chaotic aftermath of Richard Nixon’s impeachment.

But a real leader doesn’t have to “take charge.” Especially in a democracy, a real leader has to persuade, and at times impel, people to follow. A real leader who is right for the times makes leading seem almost effortless. A real leader leads by Reason, not psy-ops tricks. Obama was like that, despite his pitched opposition.

That’s where I think Harris’ largely hidden talent lies. Some may consider what follows a bit sexist and glib. But as a devout believer whose “religion” is science, I think it’s right.

Women and men have different evolutionary roles. Their physiology and their DNA are different. While men were out fighting the sabre-toothed tiger, catching the big game, and driving the aggressive neighbor tribes over the hill, women stayed home by the fire. One of their chief evolutionary roles—still extant today—was keeping rival siblings from pushing each other over the cliff or into the river or fire. In other words, our biological evolution gave women a peacemaking role, at least in the family.

Today we need leaders who can perform that evolutionary function more than ever. We have devastating, live wars in Ukraine (and now Russia!), the Middle East, and Sudan, and a China rapidly arming for a showdown with the West. The suicidal machismo of male leaders could well extinguish us—the more so by ignoring a major threat to our survival that we have created ourselves: planetary heating.

I think Harris is that leader, in part (but only in part) because of her gender. While rival factions shout each other down on campuses, she is the one calling for Reason and even-handedness in the Middle East. She has never said so precisely, but I believe that she will not give Israel’s rogue PM Bibi a blank check to use our nation’s military productivity to advance his bent personal goals. Nor will she see an Israeli government perpetually drifting into wider combat as an ally forever worthy of unquestioning support.

It’s not just that Harris has spent most of her twenty-one years in elective office putting bad people away. It’s not just that she, a relatively diminutive woman, shows little fear of bullies. It’s not just that she seems to have a deep, abiding sense of right and wrong for us as individuals and for our species. I suppose it’s in part her smile and occasional joy, which convey a woman’s and mother’s understanding that this terrible time, too, will pass.

I don’t know how to spread this sense of joy and hope. I’m not a campaign “operative,” and I certainly don’t get commissions on thirty-second video ads demonizing the other side. But I do know that I haven’t felt this way about a candidate for president since I wrote my post about Barack Obama and his chance of recovering what we had lost, as a nation, in the three terrible assassinations of the sixties.



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