Kamala Harris’s legacy as a ‘well-behaved woman’ who couldn’t make history

Well-behaved women seldom make history.  

The phrase was originally coined by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her work about Puritan funerary practices. But it quickly escaped its original context, wandering into intermittent virality on t-shirt shop racks alongside monochrome prints of Che Guevara. 

It also became something of a clarion call of the feminist movement in the United States. ‘Seldom’ was replaced with ‘rarely’, to be easier on the American vocabulary, and a rage of politicians – from Hillary Clinton and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, to most recently, Kamala Harris herself – found themselves on merchandise meant to rouse the teeming masses. 

Sadly, Kamala failed to do exactly what her t-shirt campaign promised. She missed the memo on bad behaviour. 

In a battleground state speech a day before the election, Barack Obama, arguably one of the best-behaved presidents in his public appearances, called out bad behaviour. He reminded the crowd that Americans had an inherent sense of “the goodness and the neighbourliness, the shared values and the integrity” that bound them together. The man who had made an artform out of the rousing speech stuck to the feel-good message, almost perfectly in line with Kamala’s approach, through the entire campaign season, of reminding anyone who listened that they were good and kind people – whichever side they were on. There was only one bad person, and that was the debauched leader who undermined them all. 

Outside of her jibes against him, Harris’s speeches had the jarring charm of calibrated exactness that, in a transcript, could only be a politician, or ChatGPT trying to be one. 

And this was not the America of the late George W Bush era, in which one demonised leader alone was good enough to turn a party’s suggestions to dust. Even when Trump lost in 2020, there were a range of mitigating factors, most significantly Covid, that left independents desperate for the stability offered by a boring leader. The vote for Biden in 2020 came at a moment of existential panic for a country in freefall, with nobody clear on what the future held, in which the president had himself lost many allies. But even then, his faithful did not waver. And for all the things Trump has been called, scripted has never been one. 

Trump offers many important lessons for the modern populist. He reminds us that the focus of attack should never be on the leader on the other side, but on what that side is comprised of. The leader can only be an object of derision (crooked Hillary, sleepy Joe, Kummala) but the real object of disdain is a shadowy abstract that constitutes the core support base of the other side. Trump’s villains were always ‘they’ – the radical left, the socialists, the sick people, the enemy from within, the very dangerous people. What Trump understood, and the Democrats still haven’t, is that the façade of decency does not sell. Populism feels much more honest. 

The populist leader circumvents the party system and goes straight to the people and appeals for their loyalty. For the populist, the goal is to flatten a traditional identity group that associates with a static party structure, to instead being part of a ‘legitimate’ group whose leader simply holds fort against the interlopers. In effect, Trump is not in the business of appealing to people who are thought of as Republicans because of some imagined identity: Christians, small business owners, rural whites, suburban seniors. Instead, he invites people from those identities, and others like them, to think of themselves as the legitimate Americans. He asks for their vote not because he is Republican, but because he is the holder of truth. Whatever he is, he reminds us that he embodies the American essence.

Ergo, not standing with him is not only being a bad Republican, but being un-American. 

Clarity vs wishy-washy

The Republican party has already had its complete cleanup in the image of Trump himself. The core values of what it meant to be Republican in the pre-Trump era are irrelevant. Old-school Republicans are now referred to as RINOs, Republicans in name only, and in little over a decade, the clans of Romney, Bush and Cheney garner nothing but boos in any Republican event.

Harris made the terrible mistake of trying to capitalise on it and woo over to her side any leftover establishment Republicans under a call for national unity, when she reached out to them at the DNC. The move brought little other than derision for the leaders who moved over to her side from their erstwhile followers. Worse, it alienated her core base of Democrats who long fought the old establishment Republicans over fundamental values like their investment in wars, their opposition to reproductive choice, and their disdain for equity for the marginalised. 

Here was a party that refused to allow stage space at the DNC to its own progressive corners, yet willing to cynically feast on the losers of Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. 

The schisms in the Democrat home base that this triggered is part of a larger undoing waiting to happen. Republicans have near complete oneness on a range of political issues – foreign wars, government downsizing, reduced taxes, degraded environmental laws – while Democrats spent their time coming up with the most convoluted framings that offended nobody and, in turn, enthused nobody. 

Kamala Harris was haemorrhaging young voters by playing a tiptoeing game on Israel that pleased donors and by openly standing with fracking with the aim of winning voters in the swing state of Pennsylvania. But the Zionist vote was gone anyway, because Donald Trump was open about giving Israel a full free hand to do what it wanted. And the odds that anyone employed in the traditional energy economy would believe that a progressive Democrat was in their corner was about as believable as Trump suddenly claiming he would protect a woman’s right to choose. What Kamala instead did was make sure young voters were lukewarm about her candidacy at best. 

Voters want clarity. They have shown, time and again, that the same voters would go from Bernie Sanders straight to Trump rather than go with someone who seems wishy-washy. And coming with the place of pride of being the global bully almost requires bad behaviour. So what can be worse than an effete leader in the face of global challenges? 

During the campaign, some industry leaders and public figures who bankrolled Trump expressed fear about retribution from the Harris team, should it win. But in the run-up to the election, there were instances of industry leaders making backdoor appeals to Trump to make sure they wouldn’t be in his bad books if he won. In a liberal democracy, that should immediately raise red flags, but Trump pretty much flouted it as a star on his shoulder. Here was a leader who would not concede if he lost, whose followers would hit the streets with machine guns should someone stand in his way. And on the other side was someone who would meekly stand down since that was the decent thing to do. 

In a country where you can buy broccoli and bullets in the same supermarket, the thought of an angry man outside your children’s school can be a lot more sobering than the pain of living under a president you’d rather not have.

The Trump strategy 

The most foundational value that defines how most Americans still see themselves is through the prism of a frontier spirit. If I made it, I made it on my own. Successful immigrants, including (and often especially) Indian Americans like to think of their entire success story as migrants from standing in line and coming the legal way. It’s similar to how during one’s first American visa interview, the correct answer to tell the consular officer is that they plan to return to their home country. 

The power of the American narrative is in that the same immigrants now turn around and see the new waves of immigrants – refugees fleeing death or economic immigrants like themselves – as somehow far more prone to criminality, though the data clearly show this is untrue. Or they see new immigrants as unfairly seeking a piece of the pie they once sought against some of the same discrimination aimed towards them by earlier citizens.

But for the same American spirit, if one hasn’t made it, then it’s because the government did them wrong. It’s therefore telling that the two strongest appeals in this election have been those of economic easing and sectarianism. Trump’s reputation as a business leader still remains one of his strongest appeals. It ends up being totally irrelevant that Biden has arguably done a fairly remarkable job of keeping the economy from complete freefall in the post-Covid days. People believe Trump can do it, irrespective of the evidence. 

And even if they believe Trump can do no better than Biden, the economy is where the faultline of American misogyny most strongly erupts. Voters certainly won’t believe a woman can outperform a man on the money.

More important is Trump’s creation of the ‘other’ population that is coming for America’s resources. The inflated and massively mischaracterised reports of illegal immigrants have found purchase among the one population that is most clearly alienated from the Democrats – working-class Americans.

What Trump has done is truly remarkable. He has raised his vote share among Black American men, who are among the most consistently undermined by the tenor of his speech and actions. Even more shockingly, he has got a massive spike in Hispanic male voters, who are most commonly attacked as the face of immigrant disdain in the US. 

This is also where Trump’s media strategy paid off. On mainstream media, you can get challenged by a professional journalist when you make false claims about immigrants. But when you do most – or all – of your outreach on social media and podcasts, you get to control the narrative. And what better foothold on social media than getting Elon Musk himself to be your number one champion?

Trump’s victory is no accident. It was a real landslide – popular vote, presidency, Senate, probably the House of Representatives as well in the hours since this piece was published. 

There is one critical difference between the Trump campaign of 2016 and that of 2024. In 2016, he was an outsider and a weirdo. Besides the fact that people weren’t sure of his chances, it wasn’t really clear what he stood for or what he would do.  It was embarrassing to be associated with Trump, not just because he was seen as racist, but because his bag of advisors was a crew of random outsiders and nobodies that a lot of the big names quite simply did not want to be associated with. 

But by the middle of the Biden era, two new coalitions that brought legitimacy of their own had found value in Trump. First, the AIPAC went from being much more heavily invested in Democrats to realising that Trump may end up making quantum changes to Israel, and significantly upped their backing for him. 

Second, a big component of the tech industry leadership (not at all its rank and file) realised that Trump would be good for deregulation of a rapidly consolidating technology industry, the libertarian ethic that drove it, and a piece of financial technology that could benefit incredibly from a Trump presidency – cryptocurrency. The selection of JD Vance as the running mate was not just proof that Trump no longer needed the legitimation that a textbook Republican like Mike Pence gave, but rather that this new group offered both a massive amount of money, and the public purchase of a wunderkind narrative. 

Surely, the man who has the faith of these young men who have made their millions before they made their first bald spots that technology cannot cure, must stand for something. And that should be another strike against good behaviour.

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