Kamala Harris and the Rise of Progressive Nothing Politics

Last Tuesday, Kamala Harris gave A Very Important Speech at “the Ellipse,” which Wikipedia says is an elliptical lawn near the White House in Washington D.C. The German press and the American press were very happy about this speech. They told me that it was Harris’s “closing argument,” in keeping with the campaign fiction that Harris is a fierce prosecutor sticking it to the evil unbalanced orange criminal incumbent Donald Trump, who has been ruling the United States with an iron fist for the past decade. They told me that Harris’s words were enormously wise and tolerant and that they struck just the right tone and that they were sure to win over poor people and undecided centrists and right-leaning young men.

Now, as strange as it may seem to you, I actually want Harris to give an interesting speech. I need material, and as I’ve said before, the great problem with the Democratic presidential candidate is that she rarely says anything worth listening to. I’ve now watched Harris’s closing argument two times in a row, and as expected I have come away disappointed, my hopes dashed. At the Ellipse on Tuesday, Harris simply repeated all of the selfsame things that she has been saying over and over again since at least September.

This gives us no choice: We must finally address Harris’s peculiarly vacuous message. We must ask what it means that the eminently democratic, progressive, mature, well-mannered, diverse, experienced and farsighted candidate for the office of the President of the United States in this, the most important American election of our lifetime, has so little to say.

My thesis is that we are witnessing a political development that has been in the works for some years now. This is the rise of Progressive Nothing Politics. Often, when I write about the insane asylum that is the Federal Republic of Germany, my American readers respond that we in Europe are at the forefront of malign political innovation, and that our lunacies are coming for America if a Trump presidency cannot stop this terrible process. Here I am altogether more optimistic. I think the progressive left consensus that has driven the West for decades now is decaying and that this decay is nowhere more advanced than in the United States. While progressivism was still operative, Europe indeed often seemed to be at dubious the forefront of things. Now that progressivism has begun its long retreat, the United States has taken the lead. Soon, Progressive Nothing Politics will come to Europe too. Perhaps it will even make it all the way to Germany.

In what follows I will explore Progressive Nothing Politics via Harris’s empty and warmly received speech. I will try to explain where Progressive Nothingism comes from, and why I think left-leaning candidates like Harris are facing a very dismal future, whatever happens in this particular election.