By Max Parry / October 17th, 2020
Maupin's ambitious essay surpasses the redundant analysis of the vice-presidential nominee by placing her political success in a broader historical context while forewarning the unique danger of a budding Harris administration waiting in the wings. The majority of the critical examinations of Harris during the campaign have critiqued her rebranding as an outwardly "progressive" figure in stark contrast with the reality of her career as a ruthless criminal prosecutor turned establishment politician. While that is true, Maupin's analysis takes an important step further by formulating the rise of Harris, who is the first Jamaican and South Asian-American nominee on a major party ticket, as the culmination of the U.S. left's failures in the last several decades resulting in its present deteriorated state preoccupied with liberal identity politics. More specifically, a result of the defeats suffered by the so-called New Left of the 1960s and 70s which had long-term consequences for progressive politics in America today.
Although not a biography, Maupin does link Harris's psychological profile, personality traits and upbringing with her political career which he parallels with the life stories of previous presidents and other political figures. Born in 1964, Harris was raised in a hub of the organized left in the Bay Area by immigrant parents who were politically active during her early childhood in Northern California. While not a communist, her estranged Jamaican-American father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University professor and Marxian economist whose work influenced the progressive domestic reforms in his native island country during the administration of Prime Minister Michael Manley, a democratic socialist who introduced land redistribution, socialized medicine and free education until Jamaica's neocolonization by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) decimated the Carribean nation with enormous debt, as explored in the documentary Life and Debt (2001). Young Kamala grew up attending civil rights protests in Berkeley with her parents until their bitter divorce which resulted in her Indian-American mother gaining sole custody. Maupin dares to ask — is her chosen career path as a criminal prosecutor and top legal officer disproportionately locking up black men unconsciously motivated by a vendetta against her father? Could it even explain her thinly-veiled contempt for the progressive politics she now pretends to uphold as a politician?
Maupin also argues that Harris was likely groomed for her present role as Biden's running mate by the Clintonite wing of Democratic Party once it became apparent Hillary was not in a position to run again in 2020, citing a 2017 closed door meeting in the Hamptons with elite party donors and apparatchiks. Despite her own early exit from the primaries after a knockout blow in the debates delivered by Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii who sharply criticized her record as a prosecutor, Harris was already vetted by the party leadership to be Biden's heir apparent. For the Democratic establishment, she is the perfect choice to derail the emerging progressive faction of the party led by Bernie Sanders which champions a similar brand of the social democratic politics championed by her father. This could also hold disastrous geopolitical implications, as the world is still reeling from the four years spent ravaged by the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton's State Department which oversaw the wholesale destruction of several nations in the global south. We can only expect the same regime change policies from Harris if she is cut from the same cloth.
Maupin then uses Harris and her Berkeley upbringing to explore the history of leftism in the United States, tracing the New Left's ceding of leadership roles to students and marginal groups while discarding labor rights and the class struggle back to the influence of the Frankfurt School of Social Theory. The philosophical movement of intellectuals and academics associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, otherwise known as 'critical theory', put forward that both capitalist societies and Marxist-Leninist states like the Soviet Union were equally rigid "totalitarian" systems. The interdisciplinary sociological school viewed Marx's prediction of revolutionary emancipation in the 20th century as an evident failure and rejected the historical materialism of orthodox Marxism, arguing that forces of economic change were undermined by the dominant ideology of the ruling class represented in mass media which produced false consciousness in the working class. Theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse attempted to reformulate Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis and other disciplines while critiquing mass consumer culture and modern technology.
Please go to Dissident Voice to read the entire essay on Harris.
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