We are past the peak of woke politics in the United States, and the Harris campaign for president is the leading indicator.

Of all the things Kamala Harris wants you to know about herself — that she grew up in a middle-class family, that she’s no Joe Biden, that she has a “to-do list” for the American people — perhaps the most important among them. is that he didn’t wake up.

She doesn’t have a line to say so, but reaching for distance from the trendy left-wing politics that defined the Trump years and their immediate aftermath motivates much of what she says and does.

That Harris now feels compelled to expose so many of the ideas she once espoused is powerful evidence of their political toxicity.

An idea is won or lost in American politics when both sides are in favor or against it, or simply don’t want to fight for it anymore. Ronald Regan’s economics really prevailed when the Democratic Party, through Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, accepted his basic approach. Gay marriage won politically when Republicans decided to stop talking about the issue.

By this standard, woke attitudes and policies are in significant decline, and Harris is Exhibit A. Except for her abortion radicalism, she has turned her back on much of what she once claimed to believe in or sympathize with. Are you defunding the police? Absolutely not. Abolish ICE? In no case. WHY? I haven’t heard of him. Medicare for all? That was a long time ago. Green New Deal? Let’s not get carried away.

She has walked back her flamboyant stances on the trans issue and the border. Now he insists that instead of pushing the envelope on either of them, he simply wants to follow the law. You could be forgiven for thinking that the only pronouns she knows are she/her and he/him. Harris does not bring up identity politics at all. Not only does she not talk about the once ubiquitous concepts of white privilege or “fairness,” she doesn’t even talk about breaking the glass ceiling or the historic nature of her candidacy.

Listening to her campaign, you’d have no idea that the twin “isms” — racism and sexism — have been consuming the left’s obsessions for years. There is also no trace of the hostility to law enforcement that characterized progressivism with the rise of Black Lives Matter. No, Harris is a tough-as-nails Glockwielding prosecutor who, you may have heard, is the only person in the race to have prosecuted transnational gangs.

This is as complete a change as we have seen in recent American politics. In terms of the French Revolution, Harris was once a fellow traveler with Robespierre, the famous radical, but is now happy to accept the Thermidorian Reaction that overthrew him. It’s as if William Jennings Bryan decided, after criticizing them so famously, that the gold standard and Eastern financial interests weren’t so bad after all.

What happened is that many Democratic politicians believed that the backlash against Trump and the revulsion over the killing of George Floyd had fundamentally reoriented American politics, and the hothouse leftism of the college campus could be exported to the country at large. In reality, most people have never been on board. Joe Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency in 2020 if he woke up, and Harris wouldn’t be locked in a tight race now if she was still fighting for her old causes.

In no way does this suggest that awakened priorities are on the way out. They are still dominant in academia and other elite institutions, and if she wins, Harris could follow them further. Her sincerity is neither here nor there. That a politician who marinated in progressive California for decades and who once embraced or appeared favorable to every woke priority realizes that he can’t do that and appeal to the majority of Americans speaks volumes. Harris doesn’t have much political instinct, but even she understands that.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.