Time Loves a Hero

It’s so easy to quote from Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, The True Believer it feels like cheating. Shouldn’t we be citing a French deconstructionist to explain why we’re so fucked up that even the latest iteration of the “Hopey Changey” thing feels oddly hollow.

Written by a longshoreman who had done time on L.A.’s Skid Row, and quoted by no less than Dwight D. Eisenhower, The True Believer is still getting it right. The book is a blueprint for how fanaticism takes hold. Just as comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell traced the commonalities of myth, Hoffer’s ideas play out over and over again.

The simplistic thinking of the true believer is a societal disease and it is not confined to the deplorables - sorry, folks. This week, the New York Times ran an oped ed by Rich Lowry, editor in chief of the National Review with the provocative headline: Trump Can Win on Character. Well-educated, well-meaning liberals, whether civilians or from the ranks of the punditocracy, went nuts. They weren’t arguing with Lowry, but castigating the Times for running his piece. We need to win this thing, the thinking goes, so don't rock the boat. Besides, how dare the Times give Lowry a platform?

In reality, Lowry’s piece contained great political advice - for the Democrats. His focus was not Trump’s character, which even he must realize is, well, what it is. By providing a blueprint for attacking Kamala Harris, ostensibly for Trump, who isn't disciplined enough to take advice even from folks he's paying for it, Lowry gave the Democrats their defensive playbook. Harris’s vulnerability is that she's weak on policy. This isn’t news. To make it worse, she’s committed the dreaded political flip flop, from 2019, when she was full-throated on key progressive issues - Medicare for all and a fracking ban - to 2024, when, like every presidential candidate before her, including the mendacious Trump, she is running to the middle.

All of this is on the record. In Harris' case, the changes raise questions about how far she is willing to go to gain power. Starting with cultivating support from the wealthy San Francisco establishment and running against her boss, the rambunctious but respected progressive Terrence Hallinan for district attorney, to taking a cheap shot on busing against Joe Biden, Harris has had the reputation, merited or not, for putting ambition above all else.

Here’s what Lowry wrote, paraphrasing what he thought Trump should say:

“She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.”

Good advice, if you’re Donald Trump; certainly better than talking about blow jobs. Rather than lambasting the Times, or Lowry, who may be infuriating but is hardly stupid, Democrats would be well-advised to note these vulnerabilities. Like it or not, they are real and the campaign must be prepared to counter them.

After the rather mild-mannered Dana Bash interviewed Harris and Walz on CNN, there were similar cries of outrage. A new “friend” on Facebook, a black man, defriended me for noting that Harris has never been particularly comfortable being interviewed. Yet it’s well-known that Harris’ background as a prosecutor makes her more comfortable being the one asking the questions. (As a reporter, I feel her on this.)

In 2021, when Lester Holt interviewed Harris about the U.S.-Mexico border, she got flip and defensive. It wasn’t a good look, and this was noted. She was better with Bash on Thursday, but things got awkward when Bash asked her about changing her position on a fracking ban and the Green New Deal.

BASH: I want to get some clarity on where you stand on some key policy issues. Energy is a big one. In — when you were in Congress, you supported the Green New Deal. And in 2019 you said, quote, “There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania.

HARRIS: Sure.

BASH: Do you still want to ban fracking?

HARRIS: No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.

BASH: In 2019, I believe in a town hall you said — you were asked, “Would you commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on your first day in office?” and you said, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. So yes.” So it changed in — in that campaign?

HARRIS: In 2020 I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024, and I have not changed that position, nor will I going forward. I kept my word, and I will keep my word.

BASH: What made you change that position at the time?

HARRIS: Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far.

The Inflation Reduction Act, what we have done to invest by my calculation over t— probably a trillion dollars over the next ten years investing in a clean energy economy. What we’ve already done creating over 300,000 new clean energy jobs. That tells me from my experience as vice president we can do it without banning fracking. In fact, Dana — Dana, excuse me — I cast the tie-breaking vote that actually increased leases for fracking as vice president. So I’m very clear about where I stand.

BASH: And was there some policy or scientific data that you saw that you said, “Oh, okay. I get it now”?

HARRIS: What I have seen is that we can — we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.

It’s perfectly fine to believe Harris when she tells Bash that although her position on fracking has changed - hello Pennsylvania! - her values haven’t. But she could have answered the question less awkwardly and defensively by acknowledging that she’d grown in the office of vice president, saying something like: ”The goal remains the same: beating the climate crisis. We can do it in a way that provides not only jobs, but good-paying jobs.” She got close to this at the end of this back and forth but the road was long and painful.

Her handlers couldn’t anticipate this question? Asking Harris about her 180-degree turn is not reciting a "Republican talking point." It is journalism.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, like Lowry, a conservative pundit liberals love to hate (and truly, he is insufferable) also criticized Harris for the fits and starts of this answer when assessing her overall performance. “On the positive side, she came across as warm, relatable and — to recall Barack Obama’s famous 2008 exchange with Hillary Clinton — more than “likable enough," wrote Stephens, cattily. “Less positive: She was vague to the point of vacuous. She struggled to give straight answers to her shifting positions on fracking and border security other than to say, ‘My values have not changed.’”

I never thought I’d agree with Stephens, since I am firmly in the “he’s insufferable” camp. But, again, let's acknowledge why the campaign took so long to set up an interview. Failing to point out areas where Harris - and Walz - need to up their game does a disservice to the candidates. While memes may be enough for the vast majority of Americans, the election remains extremely close. Do you really want to throw away any chance of persuading the thin slice of independents and swing voters who could make the difference and keep Trump out of the Oval Office?

Here's the counter-argument. It's not clear how much traditional sit-down interviews matter, particularly in this election, since high-information voters have already made up their minds and the undecideds are unlikely to tune in. The less anyone knows about Harris' platform, the better, frankly: there's less to disagree with, and Americans have become a contentious lot. Many voters know what they need to know: she’s a Democrat, she’s been called up at the last minute so her platform is pretty much Biden 2.0, she has a million-dollar smile, just the right amount of swagger, and the kids might actually come out and vote. Bottom line: She's not a dictator. As far as winning, maybe memes matter more than policy. If that weren’t true, Joe Biden would still be the candidate. And he'd win a second term.

In terms of history, the different thing about this presidential election is not that a Black, female candidate appears poised to win. It's that we’ve gone beyond The Selling of the President to…Tik Tok. Philadelphia Inquirer national columnist Will Bunch, a smart guy with interesting books to his credit, noted not only that traditional media can’t figure out how to compete for young eyeballs against sites like TikTok, public faith in mass media has plunged from 72% in 1976 to 32%. Bunch noticed what I’ve seen coming up in my social media feeds lately: “…while traditionally deep distrust of the mainstream press has been the domain of right-wing Republicans, now it’s liberals who once cheered for the media to do better who seem to be giving up on them." Memes rule.

And Bunch wrote: “You know who gets the new landscape better than anyone else? Kamala Harris.”

More power to her. But there is a downside: accountability. The true believers bashing Bash for asking even the mildest of reportorial questions should read the Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic. Here are two of the questions Friedersdorf sent to the Harris campaign:

1. When you were attorney general of California, the ACLU faulted you for failing to protect the privacy of the state’s residents. “On your watch as California’s top cop, law enforcement agencies up and down the state have been secretly using social media surveillance software that has been marketed to monitor protests and activists of color,” they wrote. “Highly invasive facial recognition that may have a disproportionate impact on Californians of color is also being quietly used in several of our largest cities and counties. As the Attorney General, your leadership is urgently needed to address the lack of transparency, accountability, and oversight of law enforcement surveillance technology in order to fulfill your duty to safeguard the privacy, free speech, and civil rights of Californians.”
   
   What, if anything, did you do in response to that letter? And how does that response reflect your position on how transparent the government should be about the surveillance technologies that it uses?
2. As attorney general of California, you were criticized for taking a hands-off approach to credible abuse allegations against local prosecutors and police. “Harris sent an unmistakable signal,” the investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley wrote in a scathing 2019 OC Weekly article. “Under her watch, police-agency employees in California were free to commit perjury—even in death-penalty cases, as they did in Orange County.”
   
   After multiple Oakland police officers were accused of having sex with an underage girl, “civil rights lawyers and California residents had been pleading for then-Attorney General Kamala Harris to open an independent investigation into the situation, since it spanned several police departments and involved allegations of coverups,” Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in Reason magazine. “But she never responded to the petitions and pleas asking her to look into systemic sexual exploitation by state agents in Oakland.”
   
   David Campos, a former San Francisco supervisor and police commissioner and a vice chair of the California Democratic Party, toldThe New York Times, “We never thought we had an ally in the district attorney … When she had the opportunity to do something about police accountability, she was either not visible, or when she was, she was on the wrong side.”
   
   How would you answer critics who say that you did too little to police the police, and if elected president, what approach would you take to federal oversight of law enforcement?

The campaign has yet to answer Friedersdorf. I'm sorry to be a buzzkill, but when George W. Bush was running for office, I was covering a presidential election for a national magazine. Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, the pointed, hilarious book on Bush's record in Texas by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose was my bible. What I learned was that a candidate's record is the best guide to what they'll do as president. Again, the tradeoff may be a short-term deal worth it to keep Trump out of the White House. But what does the public's eagerness to vote for a meme say about future elections? The future of the country?

Linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter talked about politics by meme in the context of race this week, recoiling from the word “joy” attached to the Harris campaign, which he called “a euphemism for a word nobody wants to say out loud.” Laying it on the line, McWhorter wrote: “…a good deal of the joy people keep talking about is a result of one fact: that Harris is Black.

“Yes, she’s got a big laugh and a casual affect, and she seems to be having a good time. But this isn’t anything close to the whole story,” McWhorter wrote. “I’m hopeful about what she will show us, but let’s face it: Nothing about Harris just now justifies her being treated as some kind of once-in-a-generation phenom or savior.

"This is about not substance but optics. Harris is being received on the basis of a category she fits into rather than who she is as an individual. The thing sweeping so many people up is the idea that her being Black — and a Black woman at that — would in some resonant way shape her presidency. That it would be somehow significant that the president ‘looks like America.’ That Harris’s Blackness would be a meaningful part of ‘not going back.’”

McWhorter tells us that he’s heard it before, when he hoped that the election of Barack Obama would “normalize Black success.” Nothing much changed, McWhorter says. He’s only being realistic: America cannot slip the bonds of its past simply be elevating an individual. As he writes, we do better to judge Kamala Harris by the content of her character.

Harris said as much herself when Dana Bash asked the question that riffed, in that instance, per critics, not on a Republican talking point per se but on an offensive Trump remark.

BASH: Speaking of Republicans, I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. I was a little bit surprised, people might be surprised to hear that you have never interacted with him, met him face to face. That’s gonna change soon, but what I want to ask you about is what he said last month. He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.

HARRIS: Yeah.

BASH: Any—

HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH)

BASH: That’s it?

HARRIS: That’s it.

BASH: OK. Let’s talk about some foreign policy issues….

This constituted one of Harris’ best moments yet Politico seized on it with what Esquire’s Charles Pierce called arguably the worst headline of the campaign so far: Harris Evades Questions About Identity. Pierce wrote: “And that’s why we call it Tiger Beat on the Potomac.”

Where is David Cassidy when we need him? This is the kind of thing that makes it understandable that Harris would avoid interviews. But once you get into the Politico article the reporting suggests that Harris’s answer wasn’t merely justified annoyance; it also was strategy:

“The people who those things matter to have made up their mind. But the people who aren’t motivated by the historic nature haven’t made up their mind. We are in the phase of convincing that second group,” said a Harris aide granted anonymity to discuss the campaign’s thinking. What does it take to motivate those people?

Only 66 days remain until the election, but that is long enough to suggest that the Harris campaign won’t be able to rely on memes alone. No matter how desperate we are to keep Trump out of office, how irritating traditional journalism outlets prove themselves to be, the norms of an American political campaign won’t entirely be abandoned. Journalism, despite its decline, still plays a crucial role in the electoral process.

Are we willing to suspend all critical thinking? Are we that desperate? Maybe we are, but that won’t stop the questions. True believers can complain all they want, but I suspect these are some of things people will want to know: What are Kamala Harris’s deeply held beliefs? What are her political passions? What is her red line, the one she will not cross no matter how many campaign donations come her way?

There is no reason Harris and Walz can’t come up with answers that will inspire voters, even if they finesse their way out of certain specifics. Harris’s main talking point, so far, is an echo of Biden’s pledge to rebuild the middle class. At the very least, the campaign should come up with a vision grander than recycled Bidenisms.

If you believe, as I do, that Harris is going to win, it’s all the more important to pay attention to fundamental character issues. Is she a shape-shifting opportunist? She wouldn’t be the first politician to merit that charge. One could argue that all politicians have to be shape-shifting opportunists, or they don’t make it past the city council. But some of us have been around too long to get excited about another Obama, who put Goldman, Sachs guys in charge of saving the economy, handing the nation's housing stock to Blackstone's Steven Schwartzman and Trump buddy Tom Barrack, and, in retrospect, just as disastrously, choosing Hillary over Joe in 2016, and arguably giving birth to the Trump presidency. But, hey, that suit he wore at the convention? Gawgeous.

With all the hoopla last week, it was easy to overlook the most important article about Harris and her campaign. The New York Times story came out Thursday, so it was quickly drowned out by interview post-mortems. The headline? “Donors Quietly Push Harris to Drop Tax on the Ultrawealthy.” The article mentioned “growing optimism among lobbyists and donors that Ms. Harris is adopting a friendlier approach to business concerns than Mr. Biden.”

Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.

Jan. 28, 1979 William F. Buckley writing about Eric Hoffer in the New York Times.

Eric Hoffer became famous many years ago because of the incongruity of the whole ridiculous business. Here was somebody, already advanced in age, who made his living as a longshoreman, was blind when very young; who devoted a decade during his 20's to such hedonism as one finds on skid row, who looked for gold in depleted streams for a while, and then set out for a long career of manual labor. Suddenly he writes a deeply provocative philosophical book, “The True Believer.” Its success caused him to be made a professor at the University of California.

Hoffer, some of his critics in the intellectual community will be interested to learn, believes that the loss of “hope” — the quotation marks are indispensable because one is not certain exactly what he means — is the distinctive lesion of the 20th century, and that the intellectuals are primarily responsible for that terrible fatality, although he is comprehensive enough in his indictment of the general social intelligence to remark that World War I — the End of Hope — was something of a common enterprise. Everybody, in every social class, marched gladly on to war.

The stupidity (his word) of that war led to the barbarism with which we continue ineffectually to cope.

“The mystery of our time,” Hoffer writes, “is the inability of decent people to get angry. At present, anger and daring have become the monopoly of a band of mindless juvenile terrorists.”

“The fundamental difference between the thinker and the artist is that the thinker looks for a universal truth that will help explain unique events while the artist endows the unique with an intimation of the universal. What they have in common is that to both the visible is mysterious.” What they also have in common is that they are both Eric Hoffer. ■

Lucinda Williams ::: Joy