A Kamala Harris presidency is on the horizon. We should begin to prepare

Progressives openly worrying about Harris becoming president need to remember why they're progressive in the first place

Joe Biden is old — remarkably old. At nearly 80, he is one of the oldest men ever to run for president. He is older, even, that the current president, Donald Trump, and, in 2019, he signaled to aides that in intended to serve a one-term presidency, paving the way for his successor. A two-term presidency was never likely for an 80-year-old man, meaning that Biden always knew his vice-presidential choice would be part of his legacy. His decision to choose Kamala Harris for the ticket is a decision to pass the baton; to get her into the Oval Office, come hell or high water.

Perhaps we give Biden too little credit and too little largesse in moving the ball forward. We have focused on his record — on what the past looked like — instead of what he can do to change the future, and the one choice he has made has been monumentally important. We already know that in America, breaking down barriers depends not only on a rising up of the oppressed, but also on the willingness of those who wield power to use it to help shatter oppression.

What we know is that, if Joe Biden becomes president, so will Kamala Harris. But what her presidency will look like has been a matter of some debate. Some have spent time perseverating over Harris’ past, too, which includes actions in the criminal justice arena that make some progressives deeply uncomfortable. Many of those same people fear that a future under Senator Harris will be a conservative future.

But the hard-lining past that haunts Harris in some circles was a condition of the time. I wonder how a Black prosecutor rises to prominence in the early 2000s — the era of law and order, even among Democrats — without embracing the notion of civil obedience. I wonder what those who see through the lens of white privilege can understand about knowing that every decision is the wrong one. At the time, the opposite choices would have been viewed as “soft on crime,” a concession to the weakest impulses in society. Here were the options: prosecute, or fall back down the ladder.

The thing about progressivism is that it allows — in the best of cases — for dynamism in political thought. Senator Harris has acknowledged mistakes in her approach to criminal justice, and we should take her at her word when she says that, looking forward, she intends to lead differently than she has led in the past. A president is not a prosecutor. Her role will not be to seek justice, but to lead the country, and so to equate her role now with a role she held then, in a time when values were summarily different, is to fail to see the whole picture.

The reason, too, that so many women— and, specifically, Black and Indian women — have been clamoring for representation in the Oval Office is that we know, wholly, that identity does actually matter when it comes to ideology. It is a political point. Are all women progressive? No, of course not. But does being a woman inform a different life experience that predisposes us to more progressive political beliefs? Yes: anecdotally and statistically. To that end, a Kamala Harris presidency will not be farther to the right than Joe Biden’s. It will not tread backwards, or uproot the progress made by presidents who have attempted to reform the criminal justice system before her.

For the progressives who feared that Joe Biden was too white-bread, and did too little to move the needle to the left, Kamala Harris is progress in all the best kinds of ways. The best news of all is that her mere arrival on the ticket is an agreement between her and her running mate: She is here for the long haul. Her yet-unmined presidency, full of possibility and probability, awaits.