Kamala Harris and the Election of Laughter and Forgetting

 Quickly, before it passes us by, let’s reflect on our momentous summer. I’m afraid that if we don’t, the astounding events of the past six weeks will be memed, distorted, and memory-holed into oblivion. 

We began with an 81-year-old president who his advisers, his party, and most of the legacy press insisted was sharp as ever. 

That line was exposed before the nation and the world at the June 27 debate that revealed a feeble, infirm commander in chief incapable of stringing together two coherent sentences.

When pressure on Biden to drop out came from members of his own party and a suddenly observant media, he vowed to fight on, saying he’d quit only “if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that.”

Then an assassin nearly murdered Donald Trump. And here we are in August, less than 90 days from Election Day. As far as we know, the Almighty never made a visit to Biden’s home in Rehoboth Beach. 

But we now have a new Democratic nominee who, until three weeks ago, was widely acknowledged as a political lightweight, a poor manager, and the author of incomprehensible word salads like this: “Culture is. . . it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And present culture is the way we express how we are feeling about the moment.”

And while it’s still unclear if the elected president is running the country, the news cycle since the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris has been vibes-based. 

There is Brat Girl Summer, the supposed “weirdness” of Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, and then the Veepstakes, won by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who birthed the “weird” meme that mocked the Republicans, and joked that Vance may have once copulated with a sofa. 

All of this is happening as some outlets stealth edit Walz’s military record to wipe away the falsehood that the Minnesota governor served in Iraq when in fact he was deployed to Italy in 2003.

Yes, it is weird. 

But not weird in the way the Democrats suggest. It’s weird because the party now asks us to forget what they were saying only a few weeks ago. We are being asked to accept an absurdity: that the president too feeble to run for re-election is fit for the job he currently holds. And that his successor is now the second coming of Barack Obama. 

Neither of those things are true. Biden’s public appearances are more scripted than ever, and he has still yet to address whether he has the stamina and cognitive acuity to be the president 24 hours a day.

 Meanwhile, Harris is coasting through the first three weeks of her campaign without doing a legitimate interview or bothering to explain, in her own words, why she has abandoned the fringe left positions she took in 2019. 

Being unburdened by what has been demands laughter and forgetting.

The surreal mood reminds me of the novels of Milan Kundera, the Czech dissident who wrote with scathing wit about how the communist regime of his era waged war against memory and history. Kundera’s work traced how public lies beget private ones until a whole society begins to see itself in the funhouse mirror of official distortion.  

In the first section of his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the protagonist, Mirek, seeks to stamp out the memory of a distant affair with the same ruthlessness as the communists who erase photos of politicians that have fallen out of favor. 

Mirek concludes that all political parties “shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.”

That book, along with a few other works by great twentieth-century anti-totalitarian rebels, can help us make sense of this moment in history as the Democratic Party—and Kamala Harris herself—ask us to imagine what will be, unburdened by what she has been. 

Let’s stipulate, before digging into the glorification of Kamala, that America is not about to become a communist dystopia. Democrats do not run gulags. The secret police don’t knock on the doors of dissidents in the dead of night. 

But we should notice a conspicuous parallel, an echo of sorts, or perhaps a “rhyme.” Many of the intellectuals and journalists entrusted with sense-making and truth-telling, with a few notable exceptions, insisted Joe Biden was just fine. And when that falsehood was no longer credible after the debate, the people meant to convey reality to the rest of us did their best to airbrush the episode away. 

The airbrushing didn’t convince the American public who knew of Biden’s infirmity well before the debate. But it was faithfully carried out by the media nonetheless. Biden’s fitness for office was a story for July. But it’s a new race today. So never mind the lingering questions about Joe Biden as the world spins off its axis. It’s Brat Girl Summer, don’t you know. 

“There are certain things we have in common with the late Soviet Union, and that includes a public incredulity,” Niall Ferguson, a Free Press columnist and economic historian, told me. “One of the striking features of late Soviet Russia was that nobody believed anything the party said. And cynicism, indeed black humor about the propaganda, was everywhere.” 

Ferguson, who wrote a recent column exploring parallels between America in 2024 and the late Soviet Union, said that when the Democrats could no longer keep the Biden fiction alive it turned to another one, pretending “Kamala Harris was in fact the perfect candidate, who would sweep to victory on November the fifth.” 

And that is exactly what’s happened. The press, the analysts, and the academics quickly fell into line, signed up to the Democratic project, and swooned over Harris. 

The deification of Harris occurred at warp speed. Forty-eight hours after Biden’s bizarre Twitter announcement that he was not seeking a second term, Kamala had enough pledges of support from potential rivals that her ascendance was acclaimed. 

Last month a “white women for Kamala” Zoom event drew more than 160,000 participants. The event featured a TikTok influencer who goes by Mrs. Frazzled, intoning in the voice of a kindergarten teacher: “You heard BIPOC women have tapped us as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season. 

This is a really important time, and we all need to use our voices and influence for the greater good. No matter who you are, we are all influencers in some way.”

Orwell’s Memory Hole and the Disappearing Border Czar

The influence campaign is awash in memes. It has zeroed in on language, which has been twisted in the same way that Kundera and other freethinkers of the last century, most notably George Orwell, warned about. 

Some examples: Biden put Kamala Harris in charge of the border in 2021.

As a shorthand, everyone at the time called her the “border czar.” It may not have been her official title, but that’s how the press described her.

And yet, immediately after Kamala ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Axios and several other media outlets didn’t just stop calling her the “border czar.” 

They claimed that calling her the border czar was Republican misinformation. Incredibly, Axios appended an editor’s note to one of its earlier stories: “Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.” 

As my Free Press colleague Peter Savodnik wrote last month: “There was something just more than a teensy bit Bolshevik about all of this. This piece of information that was once considered a fact—as in, a week ago—has in the past 48 hours been deemed politically unhelpful and so we’re just going to make it. . . disappear.” 

Then there is fracking. “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” she said at a CNN-hosted town hall in 2019 when she was running for the Democratic nomination. 

We are now told by anonymous Harris campaign officials that her 2019 position has been reversed. 

How come? It would be good to know. Will Harris explain, in her own words, why she changed her position? Or does the whisper of this campaign aide end all discussion of the matter?

An old Soviet-era joke comes to mind. The future is always certain; it’s the past that’s always changing. And that brings me to Orwell and his novel 1984. It takes place in a future dystopian London, where the state controls all information and peers into the private homes of all citizens. 

The main character, Winston, is eventually arrested for letting slip that he dislikes the ruling party. His head is placed inside a cage of rats that will eat his face off unless he asks this torture be applied to the woman he loves. He breaks and as a result is broken himself. 

Now let me be clear: our government is not going to place our heads in rat cages. But elements of Orwell’s novel help explain how vulnerable a society’s history and memory are to the machinations of the ruling elite.

 Phrases Orwell coined are now fixtures in the English language, notably memory hole, which he used to describe the pneumatic tubes in the “Ministry of Truth” that whisked away discarded history into a furnace. 

In Orwell’s novel, the state sought to “tear apart human minds” and rewire them. This required memory-holing inconvenient texts and banning subversive literature. In the twentieth century we saw real-life versions of this. 

It was illegal in the Soviet Union, for example, to own a copy of Orwell’s Animal Farm or 1984. 

North Korea, one of the few remaining Stalinist regimes, still bans foreign magazines and books. 

In America, we don’t suffer from a scarcity of information. In fact, we have the opposite problem. We’re drowning in it. The internet offers an ocean of text and we are forced to use search engines and AI tools to sift through it all. 

But sometimes we face social pressures to memory-hole the recent past.

Consider the recent incident involving GovTrack, a supposedly neutral website that provides users with information on the voting records of politicians. 

In 2019, Harris was ranked the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. But when she became her party’s apparent nominee, the website took the 2019 page offline, claiming a single-year snapshot was not as accurate an assessment of a senator’s record as two. 

Joshua Tauberer, the founder of GovTrack, later explained: “When I saw earlier this week that attention was being directed to a part of our site that I had warned was not reliable, we took the single-calendar-year statistics off the site for the same reason. All of them, and for all legislators.” 

Make of that what you will. 

Then there is Google. Last month people began testing the autofill function for searches on Trump’s assassination attempt. The search engine would not call up the word Trump, offering instead several other attempted assassinations, including the little-known attempt on President Truman’s life in 1960. Interesting history, but it’s obvious that nearly everyone would be searching for the assassination attempt that just happened, the one on Trump. 

Google, according to reports in several media outlets, assured us that this was not a manual fix to the search engine. Rather, we were told it was a ghost in the machine, a program that sought to tamp down political violence in an election year. 

This week the chief counsel of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told the House Judiciary Committee that the software for the auto-complete function was out of date and would be fixed in the future. 

Make of that what you will. 

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