Opinion | Kamala Harris Said She Owns a Gun for a Very Strategic Reason
At the presidential debate and on the campaign trail, Kamala Harris has hardly sounded like the Marxist or the Communist that Donald Trump has accused her of being.She hasn’t even sounded particularly progressive.
At various times, she has said that she backs fracking, taunted Mr.Trump for his weakness in the face of dictators and bragged about owning a gun — going so far as to tell Oprah Winfrey, “if someone breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”What she has been doing is a ruthlessly effective example of vice signaling from the left: deviating in memorable ways from the “virtue signaling” that has come to define Democrats in the eyes of many Americans.
“Virtue” and “vice” here are not to be taken literally.Rather, they refer to the world as seen through the rigid beliefs and commitments of college-educated whites, a narrow yet influential slice of the Democratic coalition whose views of what constitutes virtue are not necessarily shared by most Americans and who police any deviations as vice.
Yet it is precisely those breaks from the fold that signal something powerful to the average voter.Vice signaling is not just a tactic, but a way to resolve a paradox that has dogged Democrats for a decade: Many Democratic policy positions are popular, but when it comes to ideology, most American voters feel closer to Republicans.President Biden pursued and enacted popular policies, yet his approval ratings have been historically low.
Asked to place themselves on an ideological scale, more Americans see Mr.Biden as too liberal than see Mr.
Trump as too conservative.Nor is this tendency isolated to Mr.
Biden: More Americans place themselves closer to Mr.Trump than to Ms.
Harris on ideology, and in 2016, voters saw Mr.Trump as more moderate than Hillary Clinton.The reason is that despite embracing many popular policies, Democrats have fallen out of step with the American people on something larger: their approach to the world.
Americans are mav...