Conservatives should vote for Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris is the conservative choice. Trump is much more radical. I know this sounds crazy. Trump began calling Harris “Comrade Kamala,” and she did have a liberal voting record in the Senate. Trump, on the other hand, is a mainstay of right-wing TV networks and loves to talk about returning America to an earlier era; he likes to talk about President William McKinley and recently mentioned the Alien Enemies Act passed by Congress in 1798.

However, when making an important decision, it is best to go back to first principles. What does conservative actually mean? Conservatives believe that slow social change is better than massive and rapid social change (the name itself comes from the verb “to preserve”). Conservatives believe that free markets lead to the greatest economic growth and that decisions are best made through billions of everyday interactions. between individuals, not between leaders at the top. Conservatives believe that the main function of government is to maintain law and order. Conservatives believe in the character and sanctity of the family.

These principles – not the fleeting arguments about who said who was trash, or who went on what podcast, or who said who had mommy issues, or any of the other pointless crap that is currently trending on X – are timeless . These principles define conservatism. And on every count, Harris is the more conservative option.

Before we begin the comparison, it is important to note that conservatives are mostly right about these principles. Massive government-imposed changes rarely produce good results, as victims of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Holodomor, or the French Revolution can attest. The freer market American economy has for decades outperformed the more government-controlled European economy. In general, children raised in two-parent families have much better life outcomes.

This is why it is so important to choose a more conservative option. And Trump simply does not pass any test of true conservatism. He promises sweeping and rapid changes in American society. He wants to replace our entire income tax system with tariffs. He wants to end birthright citizenship. He wants to deport up to 11 million people at once.

And, in a move that should make the hearts of conservatives and libertarians alike flutter, he wants to significantly expand the power of the executive branch.

No society or economy can absorb so much change so quickly. Even if a conservative agrees with the goals he is trying to achieve (and I find it hard to believe that there are true conservatives who want more executive power), the speed and scale of what he wants to do would tear American society apart and create economic chaos . Even his supporters, such as Elon Musk, admit this.

This brings us to Trump’s next conservative failure: He believes in command-and-control economics rather than free-market economics. In his first administration, he openly favored companies, as was the case with large incentives in the ill-fated Foxconn deal. He has also taken aim at companies, as when he took on Nordstrom, the NFL, Amazon and many others to mention. Moreover, his obsession with tariffs, including tariffs as high as 2000%, constitutes massive government intervention in the free market. They will distort incentives on a scale not seen since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs (which also failed).

Conservatives believe in law and order, of course, but Harris is a much better choice here, no matter how much Trump protests. While Trump has talked a lot about crime, it is difficult to point to what he has actually done to reduce it during his administration. He continued existing programs to provide police departments with surplus military equipment, but other than moral encouragement there was little else.

The same cannot be said about the Biden-Harris administration or Harris herself. Crime is lower than it has ever been under the Trump administration, and while the strong economy is undoubtedly the main driver of this drop, the Biden administration has given local police departments enormous resources to both hire more police officers and employ more police officers. training in modern, proven policing techniques such as de-escalation.

If anything, Harris’s own record is even more aggressive, especially as a prosecutor and attorney general. During my time as District Attorney, the number of cases prosecuted, the number of convictions obtained, and the conviction rate increased dramatically. It’s telling that the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called her time as prosecutor “slightly less terrible.”

Finally, Trump fails to meet all conservative standards when it comes to loyalty to family and character. Trump has boasted about his many affairs. He is twice divorced, and each of his divorces ended in accusations of infidelity. He is a distant father and may go months without speaking to his daughter Tiffany. Trump’s character flaws are too numerous to mention, but over the last nine years we have seen his impulsive anger, his ridicule of the disabled and the less fortunate, his pathological lying, his complaining and his inability to take responsibility for any failures. at all. He is the furthest thing from the conservative Gary Cooper archetype.

So Harris is almost the more conservative choice by default. I’m not going to suggest that Harris is William F. Buckley or even Ronald Reagan. She believes government has a role in the economy. She believes in universal health care (though not single-payer health care), she believes taxes should be higher on the rich, and yes, she even believes in subsidies. But the idea that she is a communist is laughable. It’s telling, for example, that her plan to build more housing is largely about cutting red tape and getting things built. She prefers a highly competitive healthcare system. She calls herself a capitalist. It has nothing to do with the “seizure of the means of production” of the Marxist type. If anything, calling her a communist devalues ​​the phrase and insults the actual victims of communism (such as those who participated in the aforementioned Great Leap Forward).

What about character and family? She was married only once. She is an attentive stepmother. There were no allegations of treason. The accusation that she somehow woke up on her way to the top has not a shred of evidence behind it; her relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown ended long before her entry into politics. The attacks smack of desperation to add something salacious to the story of a man whose personal life is, shall we say, not very interesting.

When it comes to politics, there is an entire ecosystem of loud and passionate opponents that makes us forget our fundamental principles. MSNBC, Fox, and the “influencers” on X and TikTok make money and get satisfaction from talking about topics they know nothing about (somehow now everyone is a constitutional scholar, border patrol agent, economist, etc.). But big decisions, like who should be our next president, shouldn’t be left to the small stuff. They should be defined by the boulders of core beliefs, not the pebbles of the last thing we read that made us angry or sad.

When it comes to these boulders, those principles that truly make a conservative, then there is no comparison. Harris is more suited to the true conservative voter. Vote accordingly.

About the author:

Neil Urwitz is a public affairs executive in Washington, DC.