12 Apr Kamala Harris and Identitario-Gnosticism
If Joe Biden wins reelection this November – an outcome that the online betting markets are currently predicting – then there is an excellent chance that Kamala Harris will, at some point, become the 47th President of the United States. Not to be morbid, but based on what we know about him – his age, his physical infirmities, his mental infirmities, etc. – it is highly unlikely that Biden will survive in any functional capacity until January 20, 2029. That’s not a prediction, mind you. It’s a statement of actuarial fact.
We’re not exactly what you’d call fans of Joe Biden. We could probably spend the rest of today and most of tomorrow listing all the problems we have with the current president and still not get even halfway through the tally. He is, you might say, less than great.
That said, he is infinitely better than Kamala Harris would be. Heck, we’d have a tough time trying to think of someone who would be worse than Harris. And when we say that, it’s not for the usual reasons that people say similar things about politicians. It’s not that we think she’s more sinister than other politicians, or more ideological, or more dedicated to what we see as the negative aspects of her party’s platform. Rather, we say that because of her personality, because she is, in ways that other politicians aren’t, thoroughly unfit to serve in a position of any real power.
To be honest, we’ve never much liked the Vice President. She is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, after all. Moreover, she has a difficult time not laughing hysterically and disturbingly at her own “jokes” – and we use those scare-quotes advisedly. She is intellectually and ideologically incoherent. If Dan Quayle had said half the dopey, incomprehensible things she has, George H.W. Bush would have dropped him from the ticket in 1992, so as to save himself, Quayle, and the rest of us the embarrassment.
We’ve been thinking more about a potential Harris presidency these past couple of weeks. In part, we’ve had to come to grips, slowly but surely, with the possibility that our firmest prediction of this election cycle – that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic presidential nominee – just might not prove accurate. And, as we say above, where Joe goes, so goes Kamala.
In bigger part, however, we’ve been ruminating on the following interaction between Harris and a local reporter in North Carolina just over a week ago. We quote her words below, but you really should watch the video. It is…soooo much more telling than the text:
Do you know, a bit of a history lesson, do you know that women were not, the women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022? Think about that. And what, talk about progress, ya know, better late than never, but progress, and what that has done because, of course, when, you know, I had a bracket, it’s not broken completely, but I won’t talk about my bracket. But, you know what, just that how we love, we love March Madness and even just now allowing the women to have brackets and what that does to encourage people to talk more about the women’s teams, to watch them, now they are being covered, you know, and this is the reality.
All of this is gibberish. You know it. We know it. Every sports-talk radio show in the country that covered this and laughed at Harris knows it. There’s no point in dwelling on it. As we said, she’s not exactly sharp.
It’s not the stupidity that bothers us, though. (Or, at least, not just the stupidity.) What bothers us most is the way she frames her point (whatever that was). She has the facts wrong. She knows she has the facts wrong. She doesn’t care that she has the facts wrong. She still insists that what she is saying is both true and comprehensible. More importantly, she delivers the incomprehensible unfactual factoid in the form of lecture. She gives “a little history lesson” that is completely and utterly unhistorical. Even though she doesn’t have the foggiest idea what she is talking about and KNOWS that she doesn’t have the foggiest idea what she’s talking about, she still believes that it is her place, her responsibility, her right to give the reporter and his audience “a little history lesson.”
Over the years, we have written a great deal about the Gnosticism that characterizes the contemporary Left, the belief on the part of its practitioners that they and they alone possess the secret knowledge that is necessary to achieve salvation (in this case, temporal salvation). What Harris is demonstrating here is something related but nevertheless radically different. Harris demands that we listen to her, that we put our faith in her, not because she possesses secret knowledge but simply because of who she is. Indeed, she demands our respect and faith, even though she clearly does NOT possess the requisite gnosis. She wants us all to enter her Dream World based exclusively on the fact that she is Kamala Harris. She is, for lack of a better term, an Identitario-Gnostic, someone who believes that his or her personage is enough to guarantee access to salvation.
Now, one might be tempted, given the time of the year especially, to think that Kamala Harris suffers from what the mental health professionals might call a Messiah Complex. But as we are not medical health professionals and, even if we were, have never examined Mrs. Harris, we will refrain from offering such a bold diagnosis. At the same time, we do see how one might confuse an Identitario-Gnostic with a false Messiah. Take up your bracket and follow me, she says!
The point here, we suppose, is that the quasi-religiosity of the contemporary Left’s approach to politics continues to grow more and more undeniable. Since its inception, the Left has been Millenarian in its approach to the human condition. Hillaire Belloc called the Left “the Modern Phase,” and accurately labeled it the last and most pernicious of the great Christian heresies. Still, the conspicuousness of the religious undertones of the Left’s endeavors are less and less hidden today than they likely have ever been before. As much as they enjoy prattling on about their love of science and their aversion to superstition, today’s leftists are more overtly religious than most Christians. Their faith is rivaled in intensity and fervor only by the radical Islamists’.
And God help us, Kamala Harris is their leader, whether she knows it or not.
