WHAT CAN BE, UNBURDENED BY WHAT HAS BEEN: SAY WHAT?

 Current Vice President and presidential contender Kamela Harris has become well known, either famously or infamously depending upon your perspective, for word salads.  In preparation for writing this essay I checked with the Psy Central website for an in-depth look at word salads.

A word salad, according to Psy Central, is “…the odd mix of words and phrases that people with this condition use to express themselves.” Note that the definition contains the term condition. This denotes that word salads are used by persons who appear to have thought disorders in their temporal lobes of their brains. Temporal lobes process our emotions, language, and auditory information.

Psy Central further explains that word although word salads may become more pronounced when a person with the thought disorder is under stress or has too much stimuli, word salads can also be associated with hallucinations and delusions.  I am not a medical doctor, but I gather from the information that I read that Ms. Harris does not suffer from severe thought disorder but may have more of a thought impediment much like I possess which interferes with my speech since childhood and has me become a much better writer than speaker.

That being said, I now turn to one of Ms. Harris’s most popular word salads, “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” What is one to make of this statement? There are several possible perspectives. First. Harris has a serious disorder in her thinking and as a result, she herself does not know what she is saying. I personally doubt this is the answer based upon the analysis provided by the Psy Central website.

Second, again based on the website, she could be talking in code which is associated with salads. She could be making deeper associations in the words of the phrase.  This has several possibilities in interpretation. One possible interpretation is autographical.  Harris’s father was a native of Jamaica and her mother was of Indian descent from South Asia. They divorced while she was a child, and she spent much of her early years living I in Canada before returning to the United States for college and law school. So. It may be reasonable to assume that Harris is referring to herself in that her past is not a burden to her future success. Indeed, she has succeeded far beyond the personal and familial expectations of her youth.

The second possible interpretation of the phrase being a coded statement is that she is a Marxist, and a similar phrase appears in writings by Marx and perhaps even in The Communist Manifesto. I have heard serious conservative commentators make compelling arguments for this view. After all, her faither was indeed a Marxist professor at Cal Berkeley.  Whie the phrase does possess a Marxist twang, I doubt that this is the answer unlocking her thinking.

I think that the clue to her code is the fact that Harris is a progressive socialist and as much, she desires to rid our constitutional republic of many of the features that enables our federal government to be a republic so that the installation of democratic socialism will be unburdened by the historic “limitations” of republicanism.

A case in point was the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. Not only were the revolutionaries desired to be unburdened by the possible return of monarchy that they executed the royal family, but they also instituted a new calendar and even a new religion to hasten on a new order which embraced “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The unintended consequences of this movement were a reign of terror on the French citizenry and the eventual rise of a military dictatorship under Napoleon.

I am not even suggesting that Kamela Harris has a nefarious mindset akin to the French revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the attacks by Harris and those of her ilk to limit the First and Second Amendments, completely ignore the Tenth Amendment, eliminate the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster, and attack the Supreme Court as a co-equal branch of our federal system, if successful, would enable the triumph of progressivism and the installation of democratic socialism “unburdened by what has been.”

Both Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville would be aghast by Harris’s word salad statement. Burke understood our historic institutions as guardrails against rapid and often violent change as he detailed in his long “letter” entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France. About four decades later in his Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted the genius of Americans to form voluntary associations to solve common problems and take advantage of common opportunities, and consequently not look primarily to government. Let’s remember the warning from Ronald Reagan that the most terrifying words of the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

And thus, we can also be terrified of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” not merely as a random thought disorder, moving beyond restraints of childhood, or even possessing an optimistic view of the future,  but as coded statement of intent with dire results for our nation as a constitutional republic.