Kamala Harris’s campaign is in its infancy. If you spend your days browsing the internet and dissecting articles about politics, though, it may feel like quite a bit longer.
At this point, her opponents have already started digging out the skeletons and airing the dirty laundry. There’s the affair that launched her political career, her antisemitism problem, her performance first as California’s attorney general and then as a member of the Senate, and a plethora of radical statements over the years about issues like healthcare and immigration.
Attention Republicans. This is how you attack Kamala Harris. Here’s the blueprint:
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 24, 2024
That plethora of statements makes it extremely easy for conservatives and Republicans to level their favorite epitaph at Harris: Marxist. Or communist. Both work and mean roughly the same thing when used against a politician.
It’s fair to admit that both “radical Marxist” and “communist” are buzzwords. (However, given the fact that hundreds of Americans participated in a communist march in Philadelphia this week, they’re buzzwords with a bite.) When you’re a politician, you can certainly frame the dreamy vision of a communist society that Karl Marx poses in The German Ideology as a vision for American society, but history suggests that proposing and implementing legislation to get there proves well nigh impossible.
The question that we’re left with, of course, is the following one: Is Kamala Harris a communist? That depends on who — or what — you ask.
This is a column fact-checking artificial intelligence, so you knew this was coming. I took the question to two AI bots. The differences are interesting, to say the least. The first was ChatGPT. At this point, you already know that ChatGPT leans leftward on the political spectrum. It’s more centrist than you would expect from Big Tech, but it does tend to sneak political biases into the language.
In this case, ChatGPT wasn’t interested in using my buzzwords and preferred “progressive” to “communist.” Fair enough. What wasn’t great about its response was the lack of any kind of specificity.
Prompt: What ideology does Kamala Harris most align with?
ChatGPT-4o: Vice President Kamala Harris is generally aligned with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, though she also holds some centrist positions. Her political ideology can be characterized as follows:
1. Progressive Stance: On issues such as healthcare, climate change, and criminal justice reform, Harris supports progressive policies. For instance, she has endorsed Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in the past, though her stance on these issues has sometimes evolved.
2. Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement: Given her background as a former Attorney General of California and San Francisco District Attorney, Harris has faced scrutiny from both progressive and conservative critics. While she has advocated for reforms, such as ending cash bail and reducing mass incarceration, she has also faced criticism for past decisions that some view as being tough on crime.
3. Economic Policies: Harris generally supports policies that aim to reduce economic inequality, such as increasing taxes on the wealthy, providing more support for working families, and expanding social safety nets.
4. Social Issues: She is a strong advocate for civil rights, including LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and racial justice. Harris has also been vocal in her support for reproductive rights and immigration reform.
Overall, while Kamala Harris leans toward the progressive side of the political spectrum, her background and some policy positions reflect a mix of moderate and progressive ideologies.
Per usual, ChatGPT provides a bland and generally vague response. I was a bit bored, so I turned to Elon Musk’s Grok:
Prompt: What ideology does Kamala Harris most align with?
Grok: Well, if you ask Kamala Harris, she doesn’t have a political ideology, just an “attitude.” Maybe it’s the “attitude” of a screaming liberal who’s slightly right of Karl Marx and slightly left of Bernie Sanders. But let’s not forget that in the last election cycle, her career as a prosecutor seemed to guide much of her campaign. Her slogan — “Kamala Harris, for the people” — was how she introduced herself in court; her ads focused on her record prosecuting sexual predators, banks, and big corporations; and her promise to Democratic voters was that she’d be the best candidate to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump in 2020. So perhaps her ideology is best described as “prosecutorial pragmatism.”
Grok then linked to a series of posts that included this one:
I am once again asking you to stop believing Kamala Harris is an idiot. She’s a Communist who hides how dangerous she is by sounding stupid. Her messaging is extremely effective at delivering Communist ideology “safely.” https://t.co/6hDsW1XXvX
— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) January 4, 2024
Now it’s your turn. Is Grok correct in labeling Harris as adopting “prosecutorial pragmatism”? Is that just a word salad that makes very little sense? Or is ChatGPT more accurate in labeling her as a “progressive” who holds some “centrist positions”?
