the New Way Forward

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/23/kamala-harris-historic-month-00176105

“Can Kamala Harris be not only a candidate for president but actually, and rather remarkably, the leader of a political movement?”

Yeah, well . . .

It seemed in 2008 that Obama could be leading a movement (“Hope and Change”).

Bernie did, in fact, start to lead a movement (“democratic socialism” … a revived left-wing presence). And then he stopped.

* * * *

Kamala Harris formerly would have been viewed as exotic: female-Indian-Hindu-Black-Jamaican from a recently immigrant family, with a Jewish husband. Yet much of the country, at least along the coasts, now has some kind of identity that used to be considered exotic. Kamala Harris could not have been elected two generations ago. But she could be elected now.

Meanwhile, there is talk of her New Way Forward ultimately being viewed as one of the “hinges of history.”

Yeah, well . . .

* * * *

Well, a sort of hinge of history in the sense of the emergence of a New Democratic Party.

The MAGA phenomenon has pushed traditional Republican-elite types into the Democratic Party. The latter has accommodated them. And so, now, the Democratic Party could become:
. the absolute hegemonic home of all of the US elites
. the home of just about the entire US political class and its associated deep state
. the solidification of a movement having the Clintonesque values of the coastal cosmopolitan neoliberal thriving ten percent who constitute the leaders, the influencers, the funders

They are thriving enough to be magnanimous and their liberal-tolerant policies may, indeed, smooth the rough edges of the Leviathan.

Which would leave a motley scattering of alternative inclinations at the margins … some MAGA, some green, some socialist, some libertarian.

Flies in the ointment could be:
. a long period of major economic stagnation after decades of debt build-up
. a split in the Republican Party that shatters the duopolistic system