The excitement is in the air. Kamala Harris is about to head to Chicago where, before a watching world, she will be crowned queen of the left, or as they still quaintly put it, receive the Democrat party’s nomination for president of the United States. In accord with her new stature, Harris is adopting a suitably statesmanlike posture. At a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, she even produced a mangled, pseudo-profound utterance that will have the establishment media ululating in adoration over her gravitas, her intelligence, her wisdom, and above all, her joy! Joy! Joy!

Here is the latest wisdom from the left’s newest hero: "…And that’s what our election is about. Our election is about understanding the importance of this beautiful country of ours in terms of what we stand for around the globe as a democracy. As a democracy, we know there's a duality to the nature of democracy. On the one hand, incredible strength when it is intact. What it does for its people to protect and defend their rights. Incredibly strong. And incredibly fragile."

Kamala word salads are so back: "Our election is about understanding the importance of this beautiful country of ours in terms of what we stand for around the globe as a democracy. As a democracy, we know there's a duality to the nature of democracy. On the one hand, incredible… pic.twitter.com/GeMmgVESFk

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 18, 2024

Harris delivered this pronouncement while her Lady-In-Waiting Tim Walz stood behind her, looking pensive or miserable, depending on your point of view. Did the flicker of a thought cross his mind about how Harris was taking a great many words to say very little, and that some of her sentences actually made very little sense, if they made any at all? It’s more likely that Tim Walz, a longtime party apparatchik, years ago forbid himself from thinking such thoughts, and was focusing simply on looking as if the boss was saying something deep, because it seemed like maybe she was, and he knows enough not to break character.

But what was it that Harris actually said? Her sentences were overextended and needlessly complicated, but what she was actually saying was clear enough. Our election, she said, is about understanding the importance of America in terms of our global significance as the world’s foremost democracy. So far so good, at least from the leftist perspective. The line from this authoritarian and undemocratic regime, which has framed its principal opponent for numerous bogus crimes and collaborated with the social media giants to limit the speech of its critics, is that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Elect these Marxist authoritarians, goes the line, or democracy in America will come to an end. 

Never mind that there is no democracy in America in the first place, and that what we have is not a democracy, but a representative republic. Harris’ word salad is so far fairly clear: Vote for us to save democracy both in the U.S. and around the world. At that point, however, her word become harder to parse. “As a democracy,” she says, “we know there's a duality to the nature of democracy.” This sounds as if it must mean something, but ultimately what it comes down to is that Harris wants to say simultaneously that democracy is the strongest, best, most powerful system of government in the world, and that it can be destroyed in a matter of days by one man, the Orange Bad one.

And so Harris offers her contradiction as if it were a thought-provoking paradox: Democracy has “incredible strength,” but it is at the same time “incredibly fragile.” It can free societies, liberate women, and enforce justice, but all it takes is one vote for the wrong presidential candidate to do it in.

     Related: Media Response to Harris’ Appropriation of a Trump Proposal Revealed More Than Just Bias 

Harris’s statement thus boils down to saying that democracy is important and wonderful, and don’t ruin it all by voting for the wrong person. The democracy that Harris reveres is the democracy that was practiced in the old Soviet Union, and is practiced today in places such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the Soviet Union’s 1950 legislative election, for example, there was a full slate of candidates, but every candidate was nominated by the Communist party. All candidates had to accept the rule of the Communist party over the country. But there were lots of people to vote for! That’s what democracy “does for its people to protect and defend their rights.”

It's the same in Iran. The Islamic Republic, in fact, might have even more democracy than the Soviet Union did. In the recent presidential election, “reformist” Masoud Pezeshkian won the presidency with 54.76% of the vote. The only catch was that both Pezeshkian and his rival, Saeed Jalili, had to have the approval of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, or they wouldn’t have been able to run. So it’s clear: Iran is a democracy, but only within the limits of Islamic rule.

Kamala Harris wants to see the U.S. as a democracy, but only within the limits of the rule of the far left. That’s the ominous edge on her latest word salad. It may take awhile to figure out what she’s saying, and when you do, you wish you hadn’t.