President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, of blessed memory, proceeded under the banner “Let’s Finish the Job.” When it became clear that the job had finished Biden or at least his candidacy, the Democrats replaced him as coldly and firmly as they had cleared the way for him, at the expense of Bernie Sanders, in early 2020. It was nothing personal; just business.

With as little compunction, the party shifted its message, too. Biden had a theme that he believed in, even if few Democrats were excited by it. As he said in his speech from the Oval Office relinquishing his re-election bid, he richly deserved a second term, “[b]ut nothing—nothing—can come in the way of saving our democracy” That was the minor chord he had banged away at ever since his election, the job that he simply had to finish: to block Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans from taking power again and ending “our democracy,” by which he meant Democrats’ rule, which was the only kind of democracy he consistently believed in.

But running against Trump all the time—especially against the January 6 riots as the epitome of Trump—was a downer, and the party’s powerbrokers thought it was an electoral loser as well. So out with Biden and in with Harris, out with Independence Hall lit blood red and in with “Kamala is brat,” the lime green, Gen-Z seal of approval that the hitherto uncool Harris has adopted as her unofficial party-time anthem.

And with that, though it’s early days and she doesn’t exactly have a stump speech yet, Harris seems to have embraced a new slogan. She broached it in remarks in Milwaukee on July 23. She began by indicating she wasn’t going to allow opposition to Trump to define or exhaust her own campaign. Rather than obsess over him as democracy’s nemesis, she compared him dismissively to the common criminals she had prosecuted in her earlier career as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general—“predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.” The line elicited laughs and audience shouts of “Lock him up!”

That change of mood allowed the new Democratic nominee to turn to prophesying a bright future without costs or tradeoffs, a hackneyed revival of Barack Obama’s Hope and Change. “We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead,” she said—“a future where no child has to grow up in poverty…where every person has affordable health care…and paid family leave,” etc., etc.

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For all the undoubted advantages of her fresh face and her new “vibe” of mocking Trump and Trump world, Harris is a thoroughly conventional progressive politician, less interesting than Obama because so much less ambitious. Obama set out to save liberalism by rescuing it from its ossified formulas. Harris would be happy to revive the formulas. She holds a diploma in good standing from the Biden School of Presidential Oratory, class of 2020. Thus she lit into Trump for giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations” and for intending to “end the Affordable Care Act” and taking us back to when “insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions.” Get ready, get ready…. “America has tried these failed economic policies before,” she concluded, “but we are not going back. We are not going back. We’re not going back.”

The audience erupted into chants, “We’re not going back!”

Harris interrupted, “And I’ll tell you why we’re not going back: because ours is a fight for the future. And it is a fight for freedom.” Wild applause followed.

There it is, her exciting new slogan for an exciting new age! To be accompanied by Beyoncé’s spirited song “Freedom”—if Harris’s subsequent rallies and web commercials are any indication.

Granted, the slogan has a certain edginess when recited by the first black and South Asian woman vice president and Democratic presidential nominee. It seems to allude to, and sharpen, Biden’s ham-handed remark back in 2012 when he was campaigning for re-election as Obama’s vice president. Referring to the House GOP budget, presided over by his opponent and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, Biden warned an audience of Democrats in Danville, Virginia: “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

We are not going back, in other words—to slavery, to Jim Crow, to ignoring preexisting conditions like “systemic racism,” to pre-woke days when America was purportedly great for rich, white guys like Donald Trump. No one is proposing such a return, to be sure. But that won’t prevent Kamala Harris from running against it, and from hinting that such are the real stakes of suffering Trump’s return to the White House.