The UK-based Economist magazine has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential race, asserting that a vote for her is a vote for “stability.”
The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, an active force in the magazine’s ongoing trend to the left, took over the direction of the Economist in 2015, after which it endorsed only Democrats: Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and now Kamala Harris in 2024.
In explaining her choice for Harris, Beddoes insists that those who believe that Donald Trump did more good than bad in his first term as president are guilty of a “recklessly complacent” analysis.
Beddoes goes on to argue that Harris, who defended Biden’s sound mental state and did not win the Democrats’ primary, “stands for stability,” which could be true in the sense that the same behind-the-scenes shadow government that has been running the Biden show would likely continue in charge if she were elected.
Beddoes also makes the fascinating claim that Harris has abandoned the Democrats’ most left-wing ideas and is “campaigning near the centre.”
In early September, the Harris-Walz campaign brought on Camila Thorndike, a far-left environmental activist, as its “climate engagement director,” an indication of the sort of characters likely to wind up on her presidential staff.
Thorndike, who had worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders as a legislative aide drafting climate-related policies, Thorndike has described the fossil fuel industry as a “death cult” run by a “toxic patriarchy” marked by “white supremacy.”
This decision fits well with the new “centrism” of the Economist, which advocates the idea of a carbon tax and pushes environmental protectionism.
Other key facets of Harris’s “centrism” are her full-bore support for Bidenomics, which produced record inflation levels, her open-border policy as immigration czar, her support for the monopoly of teachers’ unions, her attacks on religious freedom, and her agitation for abortion-on-demand during all nine months of pregnancy.
It is hard to imagine Kamala Harris being a “stellar president,” Beddoes acknowledges, but “you cannot imagine her bringing about a catastrophe.”
Either Beddoes possesses a very stunted imagination, or she thinks that economic failure, social implosion, and global conflict do not constitute “catastrophes.”
Decades ago, the Economist was known as a centrist economic publication, advocating free markets, low taxation, and favorable business environments. As such, it sensibly backed Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Now, it seems to have devolved into just one more mouthpiece for the international left, following the course marked by the Guardian and the once-prestigious Lancet medical journal.