One could be forgiven for not noticing, but Vice President Kamala Harris did make her campaign’s closing argument speech Tuesday night in Washington, D.C. To be fair, the little notice it received is not entirely her fault, for as she was making her remarks to a big crowd, President Joe Biden was making his own remarks, calling all Trump supporters “garbage,” which drew everyone’s attention away from Harris.
Harris’s speech nevertheless deserves attention. This is not because it was an exception but because it was an entirely pedestrian and unexceptional dribble of words that could have been given by any other Democrat in the last 100 years. That is a key problem with Harris’s bid for the White House.
Like many other Democrats before her, Harris promised to “seek common ground and commonsense solutions.” She claimed she was “not looking to score political points.” To that end, and this is the really weird and troubling part, she promised to end “division, chaos, and mutual distrust” by pledging “to listen to experts.”
Democrats have yearned for, promised, and attempted government by the experts since at least as far back as the Woodrow Wilson administration. From President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration to President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, Democrats have relied on experts to make more and more economic and social policy decisions. This has been done at the expense of citizens, at the expense of democracy, and for more than 100 years, the results have been disastrous.
The problem is not just that those deemed experts don’t know half as much as they claim to know. It is also that their bias has become ever more partisan and increasingly sequestered from and contemptuous of public opinion.
This was made crystal clear during the COVID-19 pandemic and government shutdowns. Despite scant knowledge of the nature of the threat, government experts adopted the precautionary principle, set unnecessarily stringent and damaging policies, and lied about them, supposedly for the public good.
Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for example, opposed mask-wearing and then flip-flopped and called for mask mandates. He kept changing the percentage of the population that needed to get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. He claimed his positions were backed by science but later admitted they were nothing more than a “gut feeling.”
Let’s not forget school closures caused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance that people stay 6 feet apart, which had no scientific basis and was pushed at the most senior levels in the White House by teachers unions. Biden, the CDC, and the teachers unions have not apologized for the damage they caused by forcing unnecessary closures on schoolchildren.
The damage done by experts during the Biden-Harris administration is not limited to COVID policies. Autoworkers across the nation, but especially in the Midwest, are losing jobs because of the administration’s misguided effort to foist unwanted electric vehicles on drivers. Not only did Biden-Harris experts fail to predict demand for electric vehicles accurately, but they also failed to build the infrastructure needed to make electric vehicles reliable. Despite spending $7.5 billion to build 5,000 charging stations, the Biden-Harris administration has constructed just seven.
No issue better encapsulates the problem of trying to get experts to solve political differences. Governing involves choices, and those are political. Devolving those choices is a dereliction of political duty, which is characteristic of Harris.
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Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has empowered “experts” to decide what books should be in libraries in Minnesota. It is not a decision for experts but for the government. Instead of parents and elected school boards determining which books should be in a school library, under the Walz regime, only “a licensed library media specialist” with “a master’s degree in library science or library and information” is allowed to decide which books stay and which books go. Few academic disciplines are more corrupted by left-wing groupthink than the library sciences. Relying on experts is a way of ensuring a left-wing outcome, sidelining the good sense and moral authority of ordinary people, and allowing political “leaders” to shirk responsibility.
That is what Harris plans for the next four years.