Kamala Harris deserved to lose the U.S. presidential election

Donald Trump made history by becoming the second president in U.S. history to win a non-consecutive term. 

His victory comes at the expense of Vice President Kamala Harris who, Democratic partisans and sympathizing outlets will tout in their postmortems, put up a valiant effort after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. 

The truth is that Harris deserved to lose. I do not say this out of support for Trump, but out of recognition that the U.S. needs its own version of the Canadian slogan “Liberal, Tory, same old story.”

The truth is that the Democrats are a borderline ineffective opposition party and ineffective at governing. In 2021, as Biden’s vice president, Harris told Guatemalan migrants “Do not come .… If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” 

While campaigning for president, she doubled-down by promising to revive a bipartisan border security bill that would hike the number of border patrol personnel and make claiming asylum harder. Recall that the first Trump presidency — which separated families and banned Muslim migration — was no friend to immigrants. 

Roe v. Wade was a perfect piece of ballot box bait, which is why, despite the decision being made in 1973, no Democratic-controlled White House or Congress made any serious or recent attempt to legislate it into law. 

Under Biden, the amount of federal protections for transgender people was outweighed by the anti-trans legislation which proliferated during his term. The Harris campaign refused to break the trend.

From wanting to draft a Republican into her cabinet to endorsements from war on terror cheerleaders and architects, the Harris campaign embodied another persistent problem in the modern Democratic Party — prostration to the cult of bipartisanism, an idealized belief that reaching across the aisle will pay dividends. 

The problem is that they have reached so far across the aisle and so often that they have basically crossed the floor themselves. This is exceptionally concerning given how far right the Republicans have drifted. 

Combine that with its penance for playing the perpetual underdog and you get a party that intentionally kneecaps itself and bemoans its own “lack of power” — domestically that is — when in office. This is all while insisting the answer lies in the newly molded conservative status quo that the last Republican government left behind, which becomes fertile ground for an even further right successor — like a ratchet that only lets a cog spin rightwards, blocking any attempts to turn leftwards.

The Democrats abandoned the working-class long ago and have sacrificed immigrants and Arab-Americans to the bipartisan altar of preserving global hegemony. Now, it seems that trans people are the next concession. 

With how frustratingly devoted their partisans are to “voting blue,” “harm reduction,” and “lesser evil-ism” — whether it’s excusing the genocide in Gaza or ostracizing rightfully angry Arab-Americans — you cannot help but come to the conclusion that the U.S. entirely deserves another Trump presidency because he represents the country’s collective unconscious desire to subjugate the world. 

Hunter S. Thompson once said, “It is [Richard] Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise .… He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close.”

Trump is the 21st century embodiment of that sentiment as Nixon was to the 20th. A Harris administration would still have turned U.S. imperialism inwards, but with “a kinder, gentler machine gun hand.”