Labor Day is behind us. The election is close. That means political lawn signs are rapidly spreading like a nasty quadrennial rash across the nation.
One sign that has sprung up like a weed repeats Vice President Kamala Harris ’s phrase “... unburdened by what has been.” In speeches, the Democratic presidential nominee uses variants of “what can be” before the dots. On Monday in Pittsburgh, for example , she told her fans, “We have dreams. We can see what is possible, unburdened by what has been.”
The phrase works for Harris in several ways. First, she is trying to turn a weakness into a strength. Harris wants to suggest by repeating “unburdened by what has been” that the phrase profoundly captures the free spirit of how we should live and govern ourselves. Harris and the Democrats want the public to understand that, far from being notably inarticulate, she operates at a level above her rival, delivering deep thoughts in neat axioms and aperçus that contrast the rancor and the normal superficialities of election campaigns.
This effort to turn weakness into strength is also clear in Democrats depicting Harris’s strange and unattractive laugh, which often bursts forth at inappropriate moments, as a manifestation of joy in a happy warrior — a welcome feature, not the bug of a gauche politician. Maybe this works — housetrained news media certainly suggest that’s so.
But “unburdened by what has been” has other uses crucial to Harris’s agenda. One is tactical and another is strategic.
Tactically, Harris is desperate to be unburdened by her own past. That’s why she is not doing press conferences — so she can avoid questions about it. She is throwing previously held policy positions overboard faster than a pilot dumping weights from a sinking hot air balloon.
Harris was against fossil fuel fracking before she was for it. She was against building a wall and securing the southern border before she was for it. She wanted to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement before she didn’t. She was for mandatory gun buybacks before she was against them. These flip-flops are mostly adumbrated by anonymous staff members rather than by the candidate, but they are clearly coordinated policy. And the list of items from the jettisoned past goes on and on.
Harris, notoriously, had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate when she was there, more left-wing even than socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), but she does not want to be burdened by that. She wants voters to accept her shallow pretense that she arrived on the political scene only six weeks ago when President Joe Biden was defenestrated by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former President Barack Obama.
She and her party are doing all in their power to expunge her record, to let her campaign be unburdened by what has been, and to persuade voters of the make-believe that she stepped into the breach unsullied by years of vacuous radicalism.
Harris wants to be unstained by her four years as second in command in the hapless Biden administration. This is so she can present herself fraudulently as a force for change and newness, not of the continuity and misgovernance that have inflicted appalling damage on America since January 2021. She supported Biden in everything, differing from him only in wanting to make his policies more extreme, for example by spending not just an outrageous $1.6 trillion on the Inflation Reduction Act but an absurd $4 trillion.
Finally, the grand concept of being “unburdened by what has been” is orthodox revolutionary leftism. People who want the past cast aside are those such as Robespierre and Pol Pot, whose revolutions in France and Cambodia, respectively, expunged history by the simple expedient of starting again from year zero.
Being “unburdened” repudiates the tempering moderation of conservatism that says good government involves a continuous and respectful negotiation between the past and the future. Conservatives believe, as Edmund Burke wrote more than two centuries ago, that although the past should not block progress, the desire for change should not reject the wisdom of previous generations. The past, history, custom, and “what has been” are the inheritance of today’s children and of all future generations. It is rank arrogance in those like Harris who claim the right to scrap them. The past is not theirs to destroy.
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The effort to do so is also, at bottom, anti-American. The Declaration of Independence is couched in terms that differentiate this nation’s revolution philosophically from the one still to come in France and others further in the future. It laments “usurpations” of established rights and the “abolition of the free System of English laws.” America’s revolution was not undertaken as a repudiation of the past but to maintain it, to reclaim rights that had already been won and established. The past was not seen as a burden but as a precious patrimony. It was rightly understood to be one of the pillars of future good governance.
Being American is partly about remembering — remembering rights, remembering errors and usurpations, remembering what has been. Harris and the Democrats want the nation to forget.
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