The Family Values of Kamala Harris
In her DNC speech, she told the story of her origin and of the values her parents instilled, which are largely uncontroversial and mainstream in 2024. But can they move voters to action?
Left: Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention (Photo screen from Youtube) Right: Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (Photo screen from Youtube)
In 1992 the Republican National Convention took place in Houston, Texas, to nominate President George H.W. Bush for reelection against Democratic nominee Bill Clinton. But it was Bush’s party rival, Pat Buchanan, who stole the show. Buchanan, a former Nixon aid and White House Communications Director under Reagan who ran a failed primary campaign against the incumbent Bush, delivered a fire and brimstone speech about the fate of the country and warned of a war over its basic values.
“Friends,” Buchanan said, “there is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” For Buchanan, that war’s battling sides were exemplified by the opposing presidential candidates:
George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and a champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded.
Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda.
At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.
Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
It was a speech thought at the time to have “backfired,” alienating centrists and religious voters not aligned with the New Right and its particular brand of family values. Bush went on to lose to Clinton.
But Buchanan’s speech has undeniably set the terms of party polarization on domestic issues for the decades to follow. Ask someone what they think when they hear the phrase “traditional family values.” You’re likely to hear much of what appeared in Buchanan’s speech—pro-marriage, strict and distinctive gender roles, respect for the authority of one’s elders, anti-abortion, anti-gay. There’s a reason Republicans tack back to these issues when they need to get out the vote or fire up their base.
Last month, Kamala Harris delivered her own presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. It was in many ways the antithesis of Buchanan’s historic speech—one which emphasized unity, and commonsense values that reach across party lines, with a much narrower enemy in mind than Buchanan’s: Donald Trump and the radical Project 2025 agenda. While the speech focused on justice and economic opportunity issues, much different issues than what Buchanan called “the cultural war”—Harris also presented an idea of family values to guide her priorities.
As Harris told her “origin story,” about her parents and the family that raised her and the events that made her the person she is today—a common refrain in this genre of political speech—she also painted a picture of her own family values. Tellingly, she started with one she named outright, “self-determination.” She started her own story with her mother’s:
[M]y mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer.
When she finished school, she was supposed to return home to a traditional arranged marriage. But as fate would have it, she met my father, Donald Harris, a student from Jamaica. They fell in love and got married, and that act of self-determination made my sister, Maya, and me.
This emphasis on self-determination, the right to choose who one marries for themselves contrasted with entering an arranged marriage, resonates more broadly in a political moment when same-sex marriage rights are under attack. The convention as a whole emphasized the radical plans of Project 2025 and the Trump campaign. But is that what this portion of the speech amounted to? A call to let families do their thing and more or less maintain the status quo?
For Democrats, this race has been about banking on voters’ fatigue with the extreme or “weird” vexations of Republicans under Trump, from small to large, from Hunter Biden to attacks on abortion rights, bans on gender affirming care, and attacks on public education. It’s been about promising voters a return to a kind of moderate normality, including less focus on policing the choices individuals are families are making for themselves. In contrast, Democrats have sought to appear, well, normal.
While progressives seem happy with the efficacy of this anti-weird approach, especially given how dire things seemed earlier this summer, the question remains whether it’s a strategy that can get them their real wish list—not just non-interference in family’s lives but public policy that offers assistance and stability.
You can read her whole speech here. I’ve linked to just the origin story portion of the speech here. So here are the values I heard referenced either directly or indirectly in the speech, in order of appearance in that introduction (please let me know if I missed anything that stood out as important to you):
Self-determination
Joy
Fearlessness / Ambition
Hard work
Family is chosen
Love
Community
Faith
The Golden Rule
Kindness
Respect
Compassion
Toughness
Courage
Taking care of a neighbor in need
I think these are decent middle-ground values few people in America would balk at in 2024. I certainly have nothing negative to say about working hard and being kind, and plan to teach my son the value of each as he grows up.
While progressives seem happy with the efficacy of this anti-weird approach, especially given how dire things seemed earlier this summer, the question remains whether it’s a strategy that can get them their real wish list—not just non-interference in family’s lives but public policy that offers assistance and stability.
But Harris could’ve listed other values—say, acceptance, diversity, championing public support for families—or connected them directly to policy positions she herself has supported, like abortion rights, affordable child care and paid family and medical leave. You might say you can read those issues between the lines or see a connection between these values and the rest of the agenda laid out in the speech. I’m open to that argument.
The question is whether these particular family values are powerful enough to move people to action, to armor them against the fear-driven rhetoric of the Right, and then to ask for more. Is the line between these values and rhetoric about protecting the traditional institutions of the American family (let’s start with marriage and heterosexuality) clear enough to voters, to undecideds? Is it clear to the average voter why Harris’s idea of family and supporting public policies like those our peer nations have had in place for decades go hand in hand? Or, could these particular values be folded into more conservative policy positions just as easily?
We won’t know the answer until November, and maybe the four years that follow as the candidates seek to enact their agendas. Maybe the speech was what Harris needed to beat Trump, and the next test of Harris family values rhetoric will come later.
For now I’m left pondering the overlap between family values that simply don’t offend and family values that fire people up enough to ask the government to build infrastructure, rather than simply to leave families alone to decide what to do for themselves, to support self-determination on the one hand and public infrastructure on the other.
How did you perceive Harris’s approach to family and family values in the DNC and in her campaign more broadly so far? Is there anything else you’d like to hear from the candidates?