The phrase most associated with Vice President, now Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is “what can be, unburdened by what has been”. It expresses a simple utopianism: Shedding the past will open the way to a bright, shining future.
Other names for “what has been” are “experience” and “history”. To be “unburdened” by those is to be indifferent to, or ignorant of, how “what is” came about and what constraints have in practice limited “what can be”.
The French Revolution was the first great instantiation of Kamala’s maxim.
In 1789, the Ancien Régime autocracy was in crisis, not only because the government couldn’t pay its bills (French kings had been bankrupt before without lasting damage to the principle of absolutism) but because the ideas and institutions inherited from the reign of Louis XIV were no longer convincing or effective. The need for reform was hard to dispute, but what kind of reform. On one side was the program of figures like Jean-Joseph Mounier, Antoine Barnave and the Marquis de Lafayette:
to substitute citizenship for the prerogatives of birth and to establish a constitution consecrating the liberties of citizens and guaranteeing the powers of the nation as well as the monarch – a constitution that would not rebuild atop old ruins but rather marry the progress of civilization to the legacy of the past.1
Ranged against the “monarchiens”, as they were called, were the advocates of rejection of the past root-and-branch, who wished to reconstruct the French state on purely rational principles. Those principles were ungrounded in experience, and the effort to put them into practice led to the Reign of Terror. When the party of anti-historical Reason triumphed, the measures that they served up – persecution of the Church, expropriation of property, debasem*nt of the currency, imposition of price controls, etc. – sparked revolt by both faithful Catholics in the Vendée and enlightened entrepreneurs in the “federalist” cities opposed to the radicalism of Paris. To suppress dissent, the revolutionary regime resorted to state-sponsored terror. The men who sang the praises of “liberté, fraternité, égalité” in 1789 were by 1793 rounding up “traitors” and sending them to Madame Guillotine after perfunctory trials. The transformation was not marked by any overt change of principles.2 It is best seen as a working out of what was inherent in the revolutionary mentalité. For Maximilien Robespierre, the supreme, unrelenting exponent of Terror, Virtue was the product of Reason, Reason entailed the rejection of “what has been”, those who clung to “what has been” were not reasonable and therefore could not be virtuous. If they resisted Reason’s decrees, were rightly put to death.
We see much of that spirit today in the Left’s “distributed totalitarianism”. There are differences, one of which might seem crucial but in fact means practically nothing: Robespierre idolized Reason; our contemporary woke ideologues despise it. Yet what they have in common – contempt for mankind’s experience – drives them in the same direction.
One must not be alarmist. It’s possible, of course, that the word salad emanating from Kamala’s lips is just a salad. “Unburdened by what has been” may have no more meaning than her enthusiasm for Venn diagrams or her emblematic paragraph bizarrely intruding into a speech lauding abortion:
So I think it’s very important – as you have heard from so many incredible leaders – for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future.
It’s also possible that to be both Robespierre and a salad maker. Maximilien, too, had his silly side. Dan McLaughlin has an informative exposition of the two Kamalas on NRO (languishing, however, behind the paywall [links omitted, because they lead to other walled-off content]):
On the one hand, there’s the Harris we saw as California attorney general, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That Harris was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith, or reputations of anyone in her way.
On the other hand, there’s the Harris we have seen as vice president: bluntly, an idiot. That Harris is a figure of fun and hardly seems in danger of accomplishing anything. She’s been endlessly compared to the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character on Veep, with her speeches full of empty cliches and time-filling blather. She has hemorrhaged staff. The Biden White House never assigns her anything but hopelessly lost causes and impossible tasks while endlessly leaking about the low regard in which she is held.
These two pictures are not necessarily inconsistent. Power hunger is not limited to the smart, the competent, or the eloquent. Incompetence is not limited to the meek. Disregard for America’s Constitution, laws, and basic civics can proceed as much from ignorance as from malice. Harris, raised in the progressive hothouse of the San Francisco Bay Area, is reflexive rather than considered because she has never really had to engage with opposing ideas, win the support of people who disagree with her, or pay a political price for disregarding their rights.
All in all, a Candidate Zero for Year Zero.
1
Ran Halévi, “Monarchiens”, in François Furet & Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, p. 371 (1989)
2
For an account of the process of transformation, albeit without any clear explanation of why it occurred, see Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (2015).
