Two steps toward the fringe, one feigned step back toward the center — that’s the ethos of the American left.
In recent days, newly minted Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has publicly disavowed much of the platform she ran for president on back in 2020.
Abolishing private insurance? Who would ever suggest such a thing!
Fracking ban? As if!
The Green New Deal’s socialist jobs guarantee? Fuhgeddaboudit!
But Harris’ risible PR makeover was interrupted Tuesday by her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
The Democratic Party’s long march leftward will be interrupted by nothing, up to and including the specter of a second Trump administration.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was the obvious pick if Harris’ foremost priority was walking the moderate walk and winning in November.
Follow The Post’s coverage on Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz:
Not only is he enormously popular in the all-important Keystone State, he has stood up to the antisemites and iconoclasts on his own side while refusing to kowtow before the teachers unions like the rest of his party.
If Harris wanted to lend any real legitimacy to her supposed transformation, her campaign would be falling over itself to associate her name with his.
There is no room, however, on today’s left for genuine moderation.
Or, for that matter, for pro-Israel Jews: The only poor excuse for an argument mustered against Shapiro within the Democratic Party was the mindless recitation of the thinly veiled antisemitic crack “Genocide Josh.”
Subtle, huh?
And make no mistake, Walz is meant to serve as a reassuring wink at the far left.
Harris might hope that Walz’s grandfatherly look and folksy communication style will mollify swing voters, but he is, as Fox News’ Kayleigh McEnany put it Tuesday morning, “a progressive in sheep’s clothing.”
As governor, he threw his weight behind a bevy of legislation that would appall the median voter.
Walz is an outspoken champion of barbaric late-term abortions up to the moment of birth and supports similarly grotesque sex-change treatments for minors.
When his state went up in flames back in 2020, Walz was slow to respond, dawdling after the Minneapolis mayor requested backup from the National Guard.
Then when he finally did wake up at the wheel, he lamented his own decision, declaring that “the very tools that we need to use to get control” were “those very institutional tools that have led to that grief and pain.”
Just a little over a week ago, he went to bat for failed redistributionist schemes, musing that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
And while a majority of Americans want to see immigration law enforced vigorously, Walz would rather see such “neighborliness” extended to illegal immigrants.
Not only has he turned Minnesota into a sanctuary state that offers drivers’ licenses regardless of legal status, he’s provided aliens with access to low-cost health care and tuition-free college.
This isn’t a man capable of standing up to the most pernicious people and ideas in his own political coalition, much less willing to do so.
Walz and Harris, like the rest of their party, are hostage to a fringe minority that is wildly out of step with their fellow citizens.
Not even a majority of Democrats agree with much of what this cohort is pushing, yet the party’s political class is terrified of ending up on the wrong side of anti-American campus radicals, or rioters who relish in burning down their neighbors’ businesses, or Randi Weingarten’s lucrative anti-student lobbying firm.
All the intra-coalitional power lies with these self-interested arsonists, not with the center-left.
The same people who mistook — or intentionally miscast — the party’s nomination of Joe Biden four years ago as a sign of a Democratic recalibration have been touting Harris’ rebrand.
As it turned out, Biden campaigned as a unifier only to govern as a progressive puppet — and paid the political price for his deception.
Now Harris is trying to get away with the same lie, but her decision to elevate Walz has betrayed her true intentions.
How do Democrats repair their broken image and move back to the center?
The answer for the foreseeable future, with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as their standard bearers, is this: They can’t.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.