HOW POWER WORKS

Kamala Harris is out.

Kamala Harris dropped her presidential campaign on Tuesday after months of failing to lift her candidacy from the bottom of the field — a premature ending for a California senator once heralded as a top-tier contender for the nomination.

Harris told aides of her intentions in an all-staff call. A person familiar with the call said she sounded distraught. While Harris had qualified for the December debate in her home state, she was running dangerously low on cash — lacking the resources to air TV ads in Iowa — and her staff was gripped by long-running internal turmoil.

I agree with this, but probably not in the way Giridharadas means it:

At @KamalaHarris's lowest moments in the polls, she has outpolled @MikeBloomberg. That she is now out and he's just getting started tells you so much about how money, power, race, and gender work in America.

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 3, 2019

The way money, power, race, and gender worked in this case was that without being forced to do so, we seem to have talked ourselves out of considering anyone other than white men -- plus Elizabeth Warren, though her candidacy is in decline now, and may never fully recover. One set of rich white men funded a Republican Party that used gerrymandering and vote suppression to dominate our politics for the past twenty years, culminating in the election of a popular-vote loser as president for the second time this century, thanks to the Electoral College. Now we don't trust our own judgment as to which candidate can beat Donald Trump. Black voters fear that the best they can do is rally around a white guy who was a decent ally for eight years. White voters fear that fellow whites won't vote for a black or Hispanic candidate, or a woman, or a progressive. This happened in large part because another set of rich people -- Democratic plutocrats, although there's considerable overlap between that group and plutocrat Republicans -- told us (by means of their elite-media spokespeople) that we really, really don't want to risk throwing in our lot with anyone other than a white male moderate. And so here we are, probably facing a Biden-Buttigieg stretch run, with Warren and Sanders lagging behind, and, if you believe certain pundits, Bloomberg buying his way into contention.

This was not an exercise in raw power. It was an exercise in manufacturing consent. And it appears to be working.