Father Knows Worst: Kamala Harris’ Marxist Dad

13.09.2024 06:15

Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump’s father of creating through private enterprise enormous wealth that he turned over to his son. Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris’ father of advocating the taking of enormous wealth through state confiscation.

One learns about the competing philosophies governing both parties by what they regard as the sins of the father.

“I wasn’t given $400 million,” Trump insisted Tuesday in response to Harris’ charge of a huge parental gift. “I wish I was. My father was a Brooklyn builder — Brooklyn, Queens — and a great father, and I learned a lot from him. But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars.”

When Trump issued a more direct claim about the vice president’s father, Harris sat her chin upon her fist and offered squinty-eyed glares. She, perhaps wisely, did not respond. The Democratic Party presidential nominee talks a great deal about her mother, and her sister, and her high school best friend. Donald Harris remains the family’s invisible man. His unfashionable beliefs help explain his becoming a sort of living ghost despite residing in the capital just like his daughter.

“I was going to send her a MAGA hat,” Trump explained of his opponent’s flip-flops. “She’s gone to my philosophy. But if she ever got elected, she’d change it, and it will be the end of our country. She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father is a Marxist professor in economics and he taught her well.”

USA Today writers deflected the charge by calling Donald Harris “a post-Keynesian economist” who merely wrote about Marxist theory. “Is it true that Donald Harris was (and, one supposes, still is) a Marxist?” Charles Mudede asks at the Stranger. “The answer can only be a resounding ‘no.’”

Long before the political adversary of Donald Harris’ daughter called him a Marxist, his colleagues, students, friends, and peers did so. One struggles to find a single instance in which the Jamaican immigrant objected to the use of this label, in the context of academia, not as a Trumpian taunt but as an accurate classification. Indeed, his writings are so extreme that they at times read almost like a caricature of Marxism.

The 1972 Journal of Political Economy article “On Marx’s Scheme of Reproduction and Accumulation,” for instance, critiques capitalism through Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value, i.e., profit amounts to theft from workers. Within this scholarly article, Harris strangely cites Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg as authorities. One would search for a long time before finding any scholarly article anywhere that held up those two communist revolutionaries as experts upon which to base an academic argument.

Scholars reviewing his books regarded him as a devotee of Karl Marx. “The author presents his own basic model, a Marxian formulation,” two economists teaching at Michigan State write, for instance, of Harris in a 1979 review of his book Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution.

At Stanford, Harris became the subject of an unusual movement by campus radicals to permanentize his temporary position under the explicit rationale that he represented Marxism in an economics department rejecting it. In 1974, an article in the Stanford Daily described him as “one of two Marxian economists currently in the department” and a “radical prof.” Harris, set to leave an expiring appointment at Stanford in the midst of a petition by left-wing students to offer more courses based in Marxism, said he harbored no desire to stay because the university lacked any serious commitment to the issues that interested him. The chairman of the department characterized Harris’ complaint as Stanford lacking “a positive faculty commitment to Marxist economics.”

An anthropology professor objecting to his expected departure, albeit more on racial diversity grounds, acknowledged his “radicalism” in a letter to the editor. Another article on the pressure campaign to add more radicals in economics again described Harris as a Marxist. The item in the student newspaper noted a public meeting on the subject of the paucity of economics courses offering “Marxian radical analysis.” It noted the letter of protest regarding Harris signed by 208 undergraduates demanding the economics department “fulfill this responsibility” to present “instruction in all schools of economic thought.” The item closed: “The situation was brought to a head with the planned departure of visiting Prof. Donald Harris and the scheduled leave of Prof. John Gurley, the department’s only Marxian professors.”

The vice president’s father ultimately received his position at Stanford through a politicized pressure campaign that explicitly cited his Marxism as the alpha and omega of why the economics department must hire him. About two years after the controversy subsided, students used the example of Professor Harris, whom they described in the Stanford Daily as “a Marxist scholar,” gaining his position to buttress a similar campaign to grant tenure to one of the professors who organized the campaign to keep the vice president’s father at Stanford.

In the mid-1980s, when Harris spoke on campus about Ronald Reagan’s orchestrating the overthrow of the Marxist rulers of Grenada, he signed a petition questioning the Hoover Institution’s relationship to Stanford in light of its connections to the 40th president (full disclosure: the author serves as a Hoover Institution visiting fellow). His scholarly articles continued to read as though written by a communist.

Ultimately, voters rightly do not judge candidates by the unsettling actions or weird beliefs of their fathers. Ronald Reagan’s dad was the town drunk. Woodrow Wilson’s father owned slaves. William Jefferson Blythe Jr. bigamously married Bill Clinton’s mother, his fifth wife in eight years, before dying three months prior to the future president’s birth.

The Bible, of course, instructs us not to judge the children based on the sins of their fathers. Still, one cannot notice that even in the case of Bill Clinton, who never met his father, children take after their parents. Democrats do not want anyone to think this in the case of Kamala and Donald Harris.

Alas, President Trump’s enemies, through articles long in numbers but short in evidence, turned Fred Trump, and what his beliefs and actions said about his son, into a cottage industry for the last eight years. Now Donald Trump counters all that by saying something true about Donald Harris. Rather than solicit comment from the very much alive academic, these journalists instead deny his Marxism or muddy the waters or color the invocation of the man’s beliefs as somehow indecent.

“My father is stronger than your father” neither works on playgrounds or in politics. So, the legs of criticizing Fred Trump or Donald Harris seem negligible in terms of generating votes. One cannot condemn Harris for the cultish, anti-intellectual beliefs he adopted. But one can notice that in certain ways both the Republican and the Democrat resemble their fathers.

Fred Trump made millions. Donald Harris wanted the government to expropriate billions. Invoking the former patriarch while running away from the latter seems a tacit acknowledgment that American voters retain a higher regard for wealth creation than wealth confiscation.

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