PROF. JENKINS: Kamala Harris, stone-cold Marxist
Harris's conception of 'equitable treatment' is indistinguishable from communism—no doubt because our modern notion of 'equity' is itself simply a rebranding of Marxism.
Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University - Perimeter College. In a career spanning more than three decades at five different institutions, he has served as a head men’s basketball coach, an athletic director, a department chair, and an academic dean, as well as a faculty member. Jenkins’ opinions are his own and do not represent those of his employer.
The latest media narrative surrounding Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ newly-anointed presidential nominee, is that she’s a “moderate.” She was never for open borders, defunding the police, or free healthcare for illegal aliens.
Of course, since the internet is forever, we know that’s just gaslighting. She supported all those far-left policies and more. That’s because she’s not a moderate—she’s a stone-cold Marxist.
I’m not suggesting Harris is some sort of deep-thinking, doctrinaire disciple of Das Kapital. I don’t believe she’s a deep thinker at all. She’s more like one of von Mises’s “useful idiots,” who helped the communists take over their country—to its ultimate ruin as well as their own.
In short, she is a classic mid-wit, mindlessly spouting left-wing platitudes and Marxist slogans. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t believe them. She absolutely does. And that makes her a danger to freedom and our democratic republic.
Because Marxism, as we know from history, is utterly antithetical to both. For all the revolutionaries’ talk about “freedom,” what actually happens following a Marxist takeover is that most people essentially become serfs. Just ask the Russian peasants in 1918. Or today’s Venezuelans.
Such a system can be maintained only by a brutal dictatorship.
How do we know Harris is a Marxist? Well, for starters, her father, Donald J. Harris (yes, Donald J.) was a well-known Marxist economist. Of course, that in itself doesn’t necessarily prove anything. By all accounts, Harris lived mostly with her mother after her parents’ divorce.
Still, it seems the coconut didn’t fall far from the tree.
As Campus Reform and other outlets have reported, Harris has endorsed a plethora of “progressive” policies, including free college, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), and abortion up to birth. She also famously said that pro-Hamas protestors are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be.”
But perhaps even more telling is her routine rhetoric, which has been consistently Marxist to its core.
For example, here she is explaining the difference between “equality” and “equity”: “Equality suggests ‘everyone should get the same amount’….Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.
There are two problems with that statement. First, even though she’s supposedly defining “equality,” she clearly doesn’t understand it herself.
When Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” he meant equal before God and before the law. The idea that “everyone should get the same amount”—especially the implication that we “get” this “amount” from the public coffers—would have been anathema to the Founders.
Second, her conception of “equitable treatment” is indistinguishable from communism—no doubt because our modern notion of “equity” is itself simply a rebranding of Marxism. The only way everyone “ends up in the same place” is through forced redistribution.
Another example of Harris’s casually Marxist rhetoric is her signature platitude, which she seemingly wastes no opportunity to inflict upon the world: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” That sounds like meaningless fluff, verging—like so many of her pronouncements—on gobbledygook.
Unfortunately, as scholar James Lindsay points out, it’s worse than that: It’s a far-left dog-whistle, “an esoteric incantation of societal and human rebirth…that has manifested in such human paroxysms as the French Revolution [and] all communist revolutions.”
Every such revolution, he argues, “is a revolt against what has been in the hopes of achieving a utopia only the [enlightened] can ‘see.’…The Bolsheviks, Pol Pot, Mao, and the rest were all leading people to see ‘what can be, unburdened by what has been.’ The death and rebirth of…society is precisely the goal.”
In other words, what appears to be little more than a mindless trope is really a reformulation of Marx’s infamous dictum: “The ruthless criticism of all that exists.”
Whether or not Harris actually understands what she’s saying—and I suspect she does—the mantra-like repetition suggests that she is fully invested and, given the chance, will make “unburdening” a central feature of her administration.
That is, she will happily unburden us from what we have been—the freest, most prosperous nation in history—so that we might see what we can become: a repressive, impoverished, communist hellhole.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
