Proverbs says fools have no interest in understanding, they only want to air their own opinions. That hurt.

When my dear friend Violet entered the hospice house in her last days of life, I was determined to love her well. As a former trauma surgeon, I’d seen people pass peacefully with loved ones holding their hands, while others drew a last breath only to inhale blood. I’d seen some die alone and afraid, and others wrapped in the arms of a spouse who whispered loving words as they drifted away. I wanted Violet’s last earthly moments to be awash in love and to reflect her identity as a beloved child of God. Violet fell unconscious shortly after entering hospice, but for hours that turned into days then into a week, her pulse throbbed on. Although I’d seen the dying process dozens of times, the long hours watching a person I loved dwindle away took a toll on my heart. To watch the strong, feisty woman—who once cleared her own land with a chainsaw—fade away filled me with anguish. “Lord,” I pleaded through tears, “please, just take her home.” Dying with Dignity? What does it mean to die with dignity? Abstractly, we all long for a dignified death, during which family surround us and we suffer minimal pain and anxiety. In reality, however, the dying process is often unsettling, even when we try to prepare ourselves for its messy realities. Perhaps most importantly, however, conflating the phrase “death with dignity” and assisted dying confuses the conversation. In assisted death or medical aid in dying (MAID), terminally ill patients seek assistance in ending their lives, either through a prescription they self-administer (physician-assisted suicide, or PAS), or by lethal injection from a physician (euthanasia). Both practices equate dignity with autonomy. For example, one advocacy group for physician-assisted suicide, Compassion and Choices, offers guidance on how to “finish strong.” “Finishing strong,” they clarify, occurs “by planning for an end-of-life experience that matches the life you’ve enjoyed—defined by love, purpose, and agency.” Death with dignity, according to this view, hinges upon strength, purpose, and agency. Accordingly, when we are weak, discern no purpose in life, and can’t decide our own course, our dignity withers away. Sadly, a review of MAID data in Canada suggests participants in assisted death uphold just this view. In 2022, the most common cited source of suffering among MAID recipients was loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities (86.3 percent). Second in line was inability to perform basic activities of daily living, such as bathing and dressing oneself (81.9 percent). Concern about pain control, while still significant, was third on the list (59.2 percent). Such statistics suggest that for those seeking assisted death, dependence and inactivity devalue life. Biblical View of Dignity The Bible teaches us our value depends not on our abilities or autonomy but on the Lord. As creations in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–27), our dignity is innate and irrevocable. Our struggles to walk or feed ourselves don’t threaten it. Our weakness and pain don’t steal it away. Our inherent dignity springs not from our works but from God’s good and perfect character. According to Ewan Goligher, a critical-care physician in Canada, assisted death by its nature devalues, rather than dignifies, human life, because it denies our God-given worth. In his book How Should We Then Die? A Christian Response to Physician-Assisted Death, he writes, Assisted death purports to uphold the value of persons by empowering them to choose when and how they should die. The question, then, is whether the act of deliberately causing death truly accords with intrinsic human value. Can you say that people really matter when you cause them not to exist? . . . An endorsement of assisted death necessarily implies support for the view that people have extrinsic value but not intrinsic value. People matter, but they don’t really, absolutely matter. (37–38, 40) Scripture tells us that people do matter. A dignified death, by definition, can’t prioritize self-determination above the intrinsic value of human life. Rather, a dignified death will honor the sanctity of mortal life (Ex. 20:13) while also acknowledging our times are in God’s hands (Isa. 40:6–8). It will strive for mercy and compassion for sufferers (Matt. 22:39; Mic. 6:8) while also cleaving to our hope in Christ (John 11:25–26). We weren’t created for the express purpose of independence, accomplishment, or even autonomy but for relationship with our loving God (Gen. 1:26–28). The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.” A death with true dignity keeps our dependence on the Lord in view and seeks to glorify him even if we aren’t in control of our final earthly moments. Protecting Dignity at Life’s End Death is the last enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). Its specifics, no matter how clearly anticipated, unsettle and aggrieve us because they were never part of God’s original design. How can we aim to preserve dignity when death is so harrowing? While we never have authority to take life, we can aim to gracefully meet our days through advance care planning. Discussing advance directives with a physician and a pastor can ensure a care team upholds our values at life’s end. For those with a prognosis of months, hospice care can offer support and guidance through an otherwise frightening process. Such planning embraces the truth that God can work for good even through our dying process (Gen. 50:20; John 11:3-4). I saw this beautifully with my friend. At my lowest, when I didn’t think I could linger at Violet’s bedside any longer, a chaplain entered the room and softly touched my shoulder. “I’m always awestruck at what a privilege it is to be here during this transition,” she said, a kind smile gracing her face. “We get to be here when our loved ones enter into his glory! I get tearful just thinking about it.” Then we prayed together, and she left the room. As I sat alone again with Violet, a wave of solace washed over me. I could still uphold my friend’s dignity, even as her breathing became more and more shallow, even as she seemed a shadow of herself. I opened my hymnal to “Amazing Grace”—Violet’s favorite—and for the 30th time, in a voice choked with tears, I sang. I sang to remind Violet that God had saved her. I sang to remind her his grace would lead her home. I sang to affirm she had dignity, and worth, and love. That evening, as I finally left her room with reddened eyes, Violet’s nurse stopped me. “That song,” she said. “Why did your friend like it so much?” And in that moment, God worked through my dear, feisty Violet—even as she lay unconscious and helpless—to share the good news of his love. When you face the grief and fear of terminal illness, never lose grasp of your identity as God’s image-bearer, made new in Christ. And never underestimate God’s power to make his strength perfect in our weakness.

A growing number of people in the U.S. identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). According to Pew Research, these individuals “consider spirituality very important in their lives, but they neither think of themselves as religious nor say religion is very important in their lives.” This group, often described as “Nones,” aren’t simply out of the habit of attending church. They see little need for “organized religion” and gravitate toward autonomous, à la carte spirituality instead. In Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity, Michael Horton argues SBNR isn’t new. It recycles several ancient cultural themes. At the heart of the growing SBNR trend is the pursuit of autonomy, a hallmark of our modern age. SBNR also emphasizes the immanence of the divine, especially through pantheism—a significant theme in theological liberalism as well as in our environmentally concerned world. This first of three volumes in The Divine Self offers a deep dive into ancient cultures and will likely influence conversations about religious trends in the coming years. Same as It Ever Was Theories about the rise of a nonreligious spirituality abound and are often associated with modern secularism. Intellectual historians find the roots of the malaise of modernity in Enlightenment rationalism, the Protestant Reformation, or the nominalism of late medieval scholasticism. These narratives sometimes represent SBNR as a reaction to modernity’s disenchantment from the naked materialism of the age. Horton, a Reformed theologian and professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, upends these theories by looking further back into cultural history. He traces SBNR’s roots to the “Axial Age,” when, around 500 BC, several cultures developed a stronger concept of the individual and the potential for someone, without being in a sacred space, to connect with the divine. The shaman—a common, transcultural figure who “was the mediator between the underworld, this world, and the heavens” (23)—became the center of an alternative spiritual world that was much more pantheistic and enabled an escape from one’s place in society. At the heart of the growing ‘spiritual but not religious’ trend is the pursuit of autonomy, a hallmark of our modern age. The shaman was an integral figure in Orphism, which is the “teachings concerning the soul’s immortality, its fall into a bodily prison, and its reincarnation in various bodies” as a means of returning to the transcendent cosmic consciousness (24). This sounds very Eastern. It is, but Horton also highlights Orphism in the philosophy of Plato (with his sage, Socrates), which has sent tendrils into all of Western culture. The pantheistic tendency of modern Protestant liberalism, along with its demythologizing rationalism, isn’t a phenomenon born a few centuries ago. It’s a variation on a recurring theme in human culture, which Horton calls “natural supernaturalism.” This discussion may seem esoteric, but intellectual history often reshapes how we think about our world. Horton’s exposition can bring nuance to helpful but simplistic models of modernity, like Francis Schaeffer’s “upper/lower story” description of modern culture. We need not discard such models, but we should use them carefully. Shaman and Sage provides significant food for thought regarding common interpretations of the history of ideas. Retrieve with Caution Audacious intellectual histories are risky. It’s tempting to find a common thread and immediately draw causal connections for some contemporary trend. Supporting the genetic connection of ideas between cultures, however, is especially challenging using ancient texts that don’t footnote their sources. Horton avoids this danger by keeping his work in the realm of the descriptive rather than the prescriptive. This book highlights similarities between movements and ideas as they flow through human cultures, but he mainly draws dotted lines. He argues for recurring patterns throughout time rather than genetic connections. For example, some form of SBNR pantheism, Horton argues, “has always been the native religion of Western culture. Challenges to the public religion of Athens and of Christendom have always asserted the ‘Religion of the One’—the perennial tradition of the One as everything and everything as the One” (31). That doesn’t mean contemporary pantheists are reading ancient sources, just that there are similarities across time. Horton helps us see broad cultural themes. In this first of three volumes, which only gets to the 15th century with the Florentine Renaissance, we see why reading ancient sources—including patristic Christian authors—must be done cautiously. Many of us are unaware of certain intellectual currents and debates. Origen’s hermeneutic, for example, involved “spiritual exegesis,” a technique he borrowed from Orphic sources. That hermeneutic paved the way for confusion about the physical resurrection, which has influenced some modern theologians. Horton’s book helps us understand philosophical currents that run through Western culture and have, to varying degrees, been adopted or resisted by the church. Impressive Scholarship Shaman and Sage is an impressive book. When put alongside Horton’s substantial scholarship—his systematic theology, The Christian Faith, his focused doctrinal texts like Introducing Covenant Theology, and the two-volume work Justification—this volume is a bold effort. Horton has written solid academic and popular works to directly aid the church. Meanwhile, he’s spent half a lifetime quietly absorbing primary and secondary literature on classical sources to present original scholarship that can bridge the gap between the history of ideas and Christian theology. This project would be ambitious if it came from an aged professor in the classics department of a major university; it’s astonishing in concert with Horton’s other efforts. Horton’s book helps us understand philosophical currents that run through Western culture and have, to varying degrees, been adopted or resisted by the church. However, because of the range of his efforts and the depth of this current volume, Horton may have outkicked his coverage a bit (to use an American football metaphor). His usual readers—Reformed Christians interested in the nuances of doctrines and their application to daily life—may find this latest volume is beyond their typical field of interest. Additionally, Horton sometimes pulls secondary themes of classic writers to the front of his arguments. None of his theories is novel, but the emphasis on supernaturalism in Plato and Aristotle, for example, goes deeper than the usual “Greek philosophy was the source of rationality” reading of the classics. This text requires constant attention to follow what Horton is doing. It may be a decade or more before we see the cultural fruit of this three-volume work. Once the project is completed, it should be the source of conversations at conferences and in faculty lounges, which will spill out in other theological, philosophical, and apologetic works. Horton’s work has the potential to influence theories of modernity and doctrinal development. It serves as a reminder of how important reading old books is for understanding our time and of how simplistic explanations for current trends mislead us.

Don Carson teaches on 1 John 4:1–5:4, exploring the themes of truth and love and the importance of spiritual discernment. He encourages Christians to display God’s character and nature through loving others and obeying God’s commands, and he cautions us to distinguish between genuine spirituality and deceptive spiritual experiences. First John 4:1–3 is a crucial truth test, warning against false prophets and demonstrating the importance of acknowledging Christ’s humanity.

I do not approve

Having successfully echoed efforts to remove President Joe Biden form the 2024 presidential ballot, the Regime Media’s propaganda onslaught continues apace in furtherance of creating aura around Vice President Kamala Harris’s nascent candidacy. Some outlets go the extra mile in service of this new mission. Watch as CNN’s Erin Burnett and noted Regime shill Harry Sisson talk about all the “excitement” and “energy” surrounding the Harris campaign: ERIN BURNETT: Harry Sisson is outfront. He's a 21-year-old Tiktokker who was one of President Biden's most vocal supporters online. His videos got as many as 15 million views. He now supports Kamala Harris, but Harry, you know- you and I met you were talking about Biden. And I want to get to that because you supported him and you believed in him all the way through. But the clips from Harris's first campaign rally that was just a few hours ago are flooding Tik Tok. So what are you seeing and what are you hearing from people that’s different from what you heard before? HARRY SISSON: Yeah, you know, Erin, it just feels like this energy has been injected into the Democratic Party. There's like an excitement that I haven't really felt since 2020. And I think people are really lining up behind Kamala Harris. She's more in line with, like, younger generations. She has policy that younger generations support and people are really feeling her candidacy and like you just mentioned, the rally, the crowd, there was insane, enthusiastic, excited, and we're kind of just seeing that also in person, but also online as well. The media are all literally performing the NPC meme, as they all echo the same talking points about the “enthusiasm” and “energy” surrounding the Harris rollout. But few would go the lengths that CNN does here, by bringing on one of the most notorious online Biden shills in order to have him talk about the sadness he felt by putting the Harris chip in his head- before he goes on to further debase himself online in service of the Harris campaign. And, in fairness, Erin Burnett is no different. The difference between her and Sisson is that at least Sisson is transparent about his dopey shilling, whereas Burnett couches it in “journalism”, as she demonstrated during her awful interview of Biden, wherein she allowed all manner of lies and misrepresentations to go unchecked.  The common link between Burnett and Sisson: the devotion to the cause of Protecting the Precious. The Precious may have changed, but the mission remains the same. Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024: CNN ERIN BURNETT OUTFRONT 7/23/24 7:49 PM ERIN BURNETT: Harry Sisson is outfront. He's a 21-year-old Tiktokker who was one of President Biden's most vocal supporters online. His videos got as many as 15 million views. He now supports Kamala Harris, but Harry, you know- you and I met you were talking about Biden. And I want to get to that because you supported him and you believed in him all the way through. But the clips from Harris's first campaign rally that was just a few hours ago are flooding Tik Tok. So what are you seeing and what are you hearing from people that’s different from what you heard before? HARRY SISSON: Yeah, you know, Erin, it just feels like this energy has been injected into the Democratic Party. There's like an excitement that I haven't really felt since 2020. And I think people are really lining up behind Kamala Harris. She's more in line with, like, younger generations. She has policy that younger generations support and people are really feeling her candidacy and like you just mentioned, the rally, the crowd, there was insane, enthusiastic, excited, and we're kind of just seeing that also in person, but also online as well. BURNETT: And so your friends who were like “who are you? You're out here doing politics, that's awful. What's wrong with you?” What are they saying now? SISSON: Yeah. So I've had people I haven't spoken to in a long time. Kind of- in just, friends I also speak to are not interested in politics, reaching out to me saying “how do I get involved? How do I help Vice President Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump?” And for me, it's just shocking. I just haven't seen anything like it. BURNETT: Wow, you're interested in what I do. OK. Tik Tok or the videos with the- the- the brat. Obviously, we're hearing that. Coconut tree clip that we were talking about, but everyone’s seen now, these are moments that Republicans thought were bad for her. They were playing them to say, look at how awful she is. And yet, on social media it appears to be doing the opposite. Is that what you're saying? SISSON: Yeah. Exactly. Right. I think this shows a broader trend in politics that the Republicans are completely out of touch with young people. They take these clips of Kamala Harris, like, laughing or having fun and they're like, “look at her, she can't be president” and everybody else in Gen Z is like “she seems kind of fun. She seems like somebody I'd want to hang out with”, and you're seeing that on Tik Tok right now with all of these, like, viral videos. BURNETT: So let me just ask you about Biden, because when we spoke, you came on last time, you were talking about President Biden. You believed in him and you told me, Harry, “never once have I ever been concerned about the president's age.” Now that was before the debate. I understand that, but I just want people to understand as a 21-year-old, you believed in him and you didn't think he was too old and you saw- and you saw positives in that. Is there any part of you that feels sad or wishes he would have stayed in the race? SISSON: Yeah, I think my immediate reaction to Biden's decision was a mix of sadness and appreciation. Sadness because, you know, my colleagues and I, we love Joe Biden. Like he's a good, decent man, but also appreciation in the sense that, like, he put the country before himself. He put the country's interests before his interests and stepped down. This is not something we see in American politics. It's certainly not something we see in global politics. So I'm appreciative of the president and I’m excited for the future. BURNETT: All right. Well, Harry, thank you very much, good to see you again.  

Strange but true.

Politics The Intellectuals De-intellectualizing the American Right NatCon 4 found the movement hungry and oriented toward results. Days before the news cycle was broken with an attempted assassination, a few blocks away from the White House, on the second floor of the Capital Hilton, Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts called this year’s National Conservatism Conference (NatCon 4) “the most important gathering of conservatives in the twenty-first century.”  While that may sound overly gracious, he has a point. And after Senator J.D. Vance’s selection, a good friend of Roberts, as Donald Trump’s running mate, it sounds less gracious; it sounds like reality. The “vibes” have shifted toward this wing of conservatism—“national conservatism.” Much has and will be written about how the confab was just thrown for “young, white and clean-scrubbed” weirdos. This, of course, is obfuscation. Yes, there was a chunk of oddballs—as at any political conference, but compared to any major right-wing gathering, the crowd included folks that were quite—normal. Some of the liberal journalists there spent more time trying to doxx than trying to learn (a key to reporting well, I’ve been told). If they had taken some time to do that, however, they might have reached different conclusions—made some friends, even.  NatCon was no CPAC. The high-schoolers were absent; the boomers were rich; no one loves Sean Hannity. What you had instead were scholars, former White House staffers, senators and students of some of the most prestigious institutions in this country.  Though one would expect such a crowd to spend their three days in the capital rigorously discussing complex ideas (and they did some of that), most attendees were already intimately aware of the ideas animating the movement—a desire to lower immigration, a rethinking of the small-government-rocks consensus, a more prudent “realist” foreign policy.  In fact, maybe because many attendees were friends, the air of pompousness one would feel at the average DC event wasn’t quite there. Understanding this is key to grasp this year’s NatCon, which attracted less Twitter users and more policy wonks. The crowd might have been cerebral (with guests like historian Paul Gottfried and national security expert Elbridge Colby), yet, interestingly, most guests talked about matters of the heart.  Love, not ideas, was the leitmotif of the convention; calls for action, not reflection, characterized it. Understanding this, I believe, will be key to grasp the still-adjusting modern Republican politics, as major figures double-down on pro-labor, anti-globalist, nationalistic messaging. This burgeoning movement—while their first conference with a lonely Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), this one had seven senators—is composed of people who would rather call themselves strategists than ideologues. Mirroring Trump to some degree, they spend their time formulating a philosophy of winning, not one of merely existing.  One great example of this was Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller’s speech, which surely terrorized the reporter sitting to my right. “A movement of the heart is the big thing to understand [national conservatism],”  he said, repeating the phrase “movement of the heart” throughout his speech. “Academics, analysis, statistics these are instruments, right? These are tools, right?,” he asked to the cheers of many academics, analysts and statisticians. “You do not build a political party around a calculator…. A political party is built around feelings, hopes, dreams, aspirations, desires,” Miller added. “The human heart is the center of American politics.” Like Miller, Hawley also kept things romantic. Opening his speech with allusions to the Roman Empire, the senator talked about how for Augustine “the secret to this new [post-Rome] order is love.”  “[Love] contained the whole of his political science,” he explained. “Every person, he said, is defined by what he loves, every society is driven by what it loves. A nation is in fact nothing other than, to quote Augustine, ‘a multitude of rational creatures associated in a common agreement as to the things which they love.’” Vance, the crowd’s favorite and, in mere days, the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee, dedicated his speech to rejecting the concept of America as an idea, criticizing the notion of a “creedal nation.”  “Though we were founded on great ideas, America is a nation,” he argued. “People don’t go and die for an idea. They go and die for a home, for their family,” the senator said. It is this perspective, this nationalism, that makes Vance uniquely popular with the crowd. “Trump is going to need a successor,” Lucca Ruggieri, an economics student at Columbia University commented on Vance’s future trajectory at the time. Keeping with the theme, Saurabh Sharma, the conference’s executive director, began his speech with an anecdote about how a State Department friend of his used to tell him that “sociology always beats ideology.” In his eyes, friendship, not mere beliefs, are what should define this movement. He extended this framework to the international level, saying that conservatives must “build a nationalist international”—a project that is well under way with Ram Madhav, who served as the national general secretary of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, inviting NatCon to his country in his speech.  The list of examples goes on, with national conservatives emphasizing the “national” more than the “conservatism”—an attachment that supersedes ideology, even reason. A few “NatCons” don’t even like the label “conservative” anymore. “What is left to conserve? We must restore!” they tell themselves. But, in keeping with being practical, most still embrace the label. For those who take politics seriously, which by extension should think about this movement earnestly, national conservatism must first be assessed as a result of prioritization. In the policy sphere that means lots of things, be it prioritizing China à la Elbridge Colby or prioritizing re-industrialization like Hawley. More importantly, however: If anything became clear in the three-day conference, it is that national conservatism is mostly about reprioritizing the heart.  In making an intellectual argument for some anti-intellectualization, which may sound counterintuitive, these thinkers intend to dispense with the overtly theoretical frameworks of the last century. Mocking neoconservatives’ primacism, libertarians’ market fundamentalism, and all those who have conserved the tools that failed to conserve the nation, national conservatives stand ready to take over politics. Call it revolution, call it vengeance, but they are organizing. And this chaotic political week suggests that they are already winning. The post The Intellectuals De-intellectualizing the American Right appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Harris Coronation Risks Repeating the Biden Mistake The vice president may have stopped the Democratic death march, but weaknesses remain. Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images Having succeeded in muscling an incumbent president out of his reelection campaign, Democratic power brokers and their media allies are ready to attempt their next feat of strength: propelling Vice President Kamala Harris to victory over the former President Donald Trump. The defining issue of this election may not be the choice between Trump and Harris but elite narrative-shaping power and its limits. One of the most absurd pieces of spin since the president was put out to pasture is the contention that the media’s anti-Biden blitz proves its political neutrality. But press coverage of Biden only grew unrelentingly hostile after the June 27 debate made it impossible to deny his frailties and, even more importantly, Democrats arrived at a consensus that he could not beat Trump. Just days before that debate disaster, the New York Times endorsed the “cheap fakes” dismissal of various video clips of Biden looking old and out of it, reporting that in addition to Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the president was up against the “distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.” By July 2, when Democrats were in full-blown post-debate panic, the New York Times reported on the increased frequency of Biden’s “lapses,” acknowledging that “by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago.” Some of the examples cited included the same events described as deceptively edited video content in the previous reporting.  There were exceptions, of course. There was a much-discussed Wall Street Journal story published in early June that arguably skewed too Republican in its on-the-record sourcing but served a valuable purpose in getting Democrats on the record about the age issue as they disputed the reporting. Some of the same Democrats who pushed back against the piece when it first appeared turned against Biden in the days and weeks after the debate. In some cases, the tone of the coverage shifted after the debate because Democratic sources were more willing to talk about Biden’s decline, editors became more comfortable running stories with blind quotes about Biden slip-ups, and that some of the on-the-record quotes that once only came from Republicans were now coming from Democrats.  But even this suggests Biden was wrapped in layers of protection that Democrats and legacy media institutions decided to withdraw. Now that protective bubble is being installed around Harris. The Democrats’ rush to coronate Harris rather than have a competitive open convention is in many ways a repeat of foregoing a competitive primary process when the imperative was pushing Biden across the finish line. Democracy, its self-described defenders know, is messy. A chaotic convention, like a top-tier Biden primary opponent, might only weaken the incumbent or quasi-incumbent without producing a better nominee. A lack of competition means that any flaws of the favored candidate may not be litigated until it is too late, however. All of the people who pretended Biden was perfectly fine until the debate pierced that delusion are now singing Harris’s praises as a generational political talent on par with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The number of people who really believed the latter on July 20 isn’t much bigger than those who subscribed to the former on June 28.  Yet the media and Democratic leaders are not invincible. If that were the case, Trump would never have become president and would not be a viable candidate eight years later. Biden trailed Trump, and Democrats were beginning to lose confidence in his campaign strategy, months before the debate. A poll found that 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 already wanted to replace Biden as the nominee over two years ago.  Harris is running substantially the same campaign with the same people Biden was. She is attempting to frame the race as a referendum on Trump rather than the Biden-Harris administration. The optics of a woman who has been a prosecutor talking about abortion and Trump felonies are better for Democrats. It is also a telling retreat from the incumbents’ actual record. Harris’s first campaign ad contained zero mentions of Biden or anything she herself had done as vice president. That’s not to say Harris cannot be unburdened by what has been. Reporters who once covered her as a joke known for churning staff and frequent gaffes will now speak of her historic candidacy. Trump has for the first time in his political career experienced weeks of more favorable coverage than his Democratic opponent. (Spare me your “but her emails” false equivalency.) That’s gone, and likely not coming back even if Harris turns out to not be the Democrats’ savior. Democrats now have hope and energy where they once had none. The campaign no longer feels like a slow death march to certain defeat. Morose Democratic operatives’ predictions of Biden’s electoral failure were on the verge of becoming self-fulfilling. Harris is at least free of all that. Whether the same operatives and a compliant media can will her into the White House against a disciplined opposition determined to make use of all the material that is there, assuming that is how Trump and the GOP actually behave, is another question. The post The Harris Coronation Risks Repeating the Biden Mistake appeared first on The American Conservative.