Joe Biden did very well to choose Kamala Harris as his VP. He can take the reins of the USA if Biden dies or becomes incapacitated as head of the White House. After all, if he wins the November elections, he would start his term at 78 years of age. He would be the oldest president who has come to govern in the country. He’s only three and a half years older than Donald Trump, but the president looks more youthful, perhaps a product of a tan.
Kamala Harris is, like Biden, a centrist Democrat. The two great American parties are ideological coalitions. In the Democratic Party, being “center” means being a fiscal conservative, as were Bill Clinton and Al Gore, although Biden-Kamala would have to negotiate with sectors of the party that call themselves “progressives.” They believe in extending Medicare to the entire population, and in fully or partially paying the bill for university studies, arguing that it is not an “expense” but an “investment” in the future of the nation. More or less like it happens in Europe.
Naturally, both centrist and progressive Democrats tend to agree on these five big issues:
• The need for churches not to influence public affairs (although 90% of Americans believe in God and 56% assume that the description of the Bible is true).
• The “reproductive rights” in the hands of women (an expression that authorizes abortion).
• Control of firearms and the real scope of the Second Amendment.
• The benefits of regulated immigration.
• The advantages of international trade.
In the United States, I have never heard anyone with real political weight defend Marxist superstitions, much less propose a dictatorship to solve the problems that inevitably exist. The strength of North American democracy lies in the fact that neither Republicans nor Democrats, where 95% of the voters are registered, have the objective of destroying the system that has allowed them to become the great power that it has been throughout the 20th and 20th centuries. XXI. Perhaps that is the great political difference with Europe. In the USA there is no “Podemos”.
That does not mean that there are not people insensitive to the pain of others, but they have never been decisive groups in American society. Showy and strident yes, like the leaders of “Black Lives Matters”, capable of greeting Fidel Castro with admiration, but much less than the “Black Panthers” of the sixties. Or like the emuli of Adolf Hitler, bent on a racist or white supremacist vision, linked to the KKK, or their adversaries of the “Antifa”, so similar to their enemies by dint of opposing them.
Of course, Republicans and Democrats evolve as major demographic or generational outlook changes occur. The Republicans were Lincoln’s party, the party for the emancipation of blacks. The Democrats, on the other hand, were the party of the KKK and of racial segregation. Yet today blacks are closer to Democrats. Until the middle of the last century, most white college students were Republicans. Today they are Democrats.
In some ways, the Democratic Party today looks more like the multicultural society of the 21st century than the Republican. Kamala is the best proof of this multiculturalism: she is the daughter of a highly educated Indian and Jamaican, and she is happily married to a Jewish lawyer, which leaves no room for suspicion of anti-Semitism. Israel, who already knew of Biden’s loyalty, can also count on that of her VP.
Why did Joe Biden choose Kamala Harris as VP? Probably because she is very intelligent and has experience in political campaigns, but also because she is a “colored” woman who has chosen to be “African American”. A bit like Barack Obama chose to be a black American, despite being a Hawaiian (an absolutely mixed archipelago that did not know slavery, but did know the colonial expansion of the United States), son of a black economist from Kenya and a white anthropologist , whose white grandparents raised him, allegedly, as a middle-class boy.
America’s ability to generate and absorb change is staggering. That includes the conception of what was previously called the “speech.” A substantial portion of society fails to thrill over the stories of Washington, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers. To blacks they were heartless slavers. For the Mexican Americans, it was the imperialists who took half their territory from them.
That “white” story has been replaced by another much more acceptable to African Americans and the flood of immigrants of all races and religious beliefs: constitutional patriotism. There is no other link more important than subordination to the Constitution of the country.
Today the United States is loved for having been a formidable refuge for immigrants of diverse origins who came in search of freedom and prosperity. It is a “homeland-summary-of-the-European-virtues”, including the fight for Human Rights. The USA is admired for its financial, military, scientific and technical strength. For the quality of its best universities and research centers, for its inventiveness, and for having been the locomotive and sustainer of the planet after World War II, during the Cold War period, while the USSR suffered a dangerous imperial spasm. which ended up ruining it and eventually liquidating it.
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