To accuse Kamala Harris’ campaign of reflexively repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic did recently — may sound like drive-by leftist snark, carrying an unfortunate (and presumably unintended) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader anxiety felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: Polls are dead even, 10 days before what has been billed (fairly or not) as a world-historical presidential election. After the sugar-high of the Biden-to-Harris switch and the exhilaration of the Democratic convention, this is a difficult future to face.

Among the media and political classes, the operating assumption at the moment is that Donald Trump — by any normative standard, a disastrously undisciplined and erratic candidate — is likely to win that election, even without resorting to skulduggery or mob violence. That “gut feeling” has zero predictive value, to be clear, and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016.

But liberal stress and bewilderment presumably isn't improved by seeing Democrats doing exactly what they always do in the latter stages of a national campaign: skewing sharply rightward to emphasize a commitment to national security and corporate profits, in the supposed pursuit of “persuadable” independents and wavering Republicans. (Or perhaps just in pursuit of the donor class, which is not technically the same thing.)

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We have seen Harris out herself as a gun owner in a sit-down with Oprah, embrace Wall Street-friendly economic policies and campaign with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who supported literally every aspect of the Trump agenda before his overt attempt to subvert the........

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