An Open Letter to Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris posters, Chicago (2024) | John Ruberry / Shutterstock.com

On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, Vice President Harris delivered what was meant to be a defining speech of her career. Accepting her party’s nomination, she did more than make the case for her presidency—she sounded the alarm.

“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity,” she declared. This was not merely another campaign, another transfer of power between administrations. It was, she insisted, something far more consequential. 

“Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives. It is one of the most important in the life of our nation.”

Donald Trump, she warned, represented an “existential threat” to democracy itself.

Did Kamala Harris really mean what she said in August 2024? 

During the campaign that followed, the term “existential threat” was so commonly used that it became almost a cliché: In serious times, it became an unserious term.

To take an “existential threat” seriously is to signify that something of utmost importance in shaping one’s life is in real danger of vanishing or being destroyed. To invoke this term is to highlight a mortal threat to a way of life—the cluster of values that define that life, including that of a nation, provide it direction, and make its goals attainable.

The disagreement between Trump and Harris was not just a debate about divergent policies: It was a struggle over the very survival of what Harris understood to be America’s democratic way of life. 

And so, Harris, at the top of the ticket of the Democratic party, called on Americans to reject Trump, framing the 2024 election as a referendum on the country’s most fundamental principles.

In the days since returning to power, Trump has signed executive orders that weaken civil rights protections, reaffirmed his belief that the Department of Justice should work for him personally, and requested a list of names of those involved in investigating him and those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He is in fact trying to destroy what Harris presented as America’s democratic way of life, one that was inclusive and tolerant, and one that had abjured the monarchical powers of an unchecked executive. 

Trump is back.

Yet Kamala Harris is silent.

Given how Harris framed her campaign, I think we need to confront an important question: Does the seriousness of the former vice president’s warning not demand her continued resistance? If the threat posed by Trump’s authoritarian ambitions was so significant before the election, then surely it remains just as urgent now that he is back in power?

There will be people who say, “Harris tried to warn us and we didn’t listen. She did her part.” Others will insist that “Vice President Harris doesn’t owe us anything.” And still others will bitterly yet plausibly argue that “it isn’t the role of yet another Black woman to save the country.”

If these formulations are correct in one sense (and they are), they seem terribly wrong in another.

Of course, Harris doesn’t “owe” us anything in a personal or transactional sense. She ran, she lost, and has every right to step back from public life if she chooses. National elections are difficult to endure, and even harder when they end in your defeat. We can’t blame Harris if she needs time to reflect—to heal.

But being sensitive to what it’s like being Kamala Harris should not obscure the deeper question of personal obligation—specifically the character of our repeatedly avowed political and moral commitments.

If Trump was an aspiring authoritarian during the campaign, he is a virtual dictator today—emboldened by a Republican Party and a tech business elite that increasingly embraces authoritarianism, rather than supports a check on it.

What does it mean to issue dire warnings about the death of democracy, only to go quiet when those warnings seem to be coming true?

There is a broader philosophical point here, with practical implications: Some issues transcend electoral politics. They are not about who wins and who loses; they are about the moral stakes of the world we inhabit. When a leader makes the case that democracy itself is at risk, they are not simply offering a campaign argument—they are making a claim about the conditions that structure our political reality. And if those conditions remain in place (or worsen), then their commitment to resistance should persist beyond the campaign.

The comparison is not exact, but walk with me a bit longer.

Imagine if Abraham Lincoln had spoken passionately against slavery during his debates with then-incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858, only to fall silent afterward because he lost. Imagine if civil rights leaders had framed segregation as a moral crisis but, after losing a legislative battle, decided their role in the struggle was finished. If the stakes were high enough to demand public resistance before, they remain high enough to require it now.

This is what makes Harris’s silence (and the silence of others who once sounded the alarm) so striking.

This is ultimately a question about the character of commitment. Some political commitments are contingent—they are pursued only insofar as they serve electoral or immediate goals. Others are literally “existential”—they demand engagement because they are bound up with the preservation of fundamental principles.

We do not take fundamental values, like those related to family, friends, or country, lightly. These are serious matters largely because of how they shape our lives. They place demands on us, compelling us to move in one direction rather than another. In their compulsion—in their demanding-ness—we uncover their significance.

By choosing not to fight for them, we cast doubt on their worth and ironically trivialize any threat we claim they were under.

Harris, of course, is not the only person who raised these alarms and has now fallen quiet. Many political figures, media personalities, and civic leaders framed Trump’s return as a historic crisis, only to treat his victory as a normal electoral outcome, rather than as the moral catastrophe they warned against. 

This normalization is precisely how authoritarianism consolidates itself—through silence, through the quiet retreat of those who once insisted the stakes were too high to ignore.

And yet, having won more than 74 million votes, one can’t help but think the former vice president ought to be leading and organizing the resistance.

Her campaign’s extraordinariness, even amid defeat, and the enormity of the stakes require us to say, “Sorry, you may not go gently into that good night.”