17 SEPTEMBER—At the conclusion of an economic forum in Vladivostok earlier this month, a Russian television correspondent asked Vladimir Putin his opinion of Kamala Harris now that the elites and financiers of the Democratic Party have dropped Joe Biden like a stone and undemocratically installed Harris to replace him as their presidential candidate. The Russian president gets this kind of question often during his press conferences and usually combines discretion with a refreshing givenness to humor. So it was when he replied to Alexandra Suvorova, a senior editor at Russia–24.

“She has a very contagious laughter, which shows that everything is fine for her,” Putin said with evident amusement. “And if this is the case… Take Trump: No other President has ever imposed so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia. But if everything is so great for Ms. Harris, maybe she would refrain from acting this way.”

Putin’s audience took this for what it was, a brilliant bit of immanent critique.

Kamala Harris is by now famous for her laughter. It is one of the two things about Harris one cannot fail to notice—the other being that she has never had a thought or an idea she will not abandon if it is politically opportune to do so. Some clever student of the Harris campaign recently assembled, from various video clips, a full minute of Harris when she is laughing, and I invite readers to view it here. You may find Harris and her empty head and her laugh amusing, as the Russian president apparently does. But there is another way to look at this, the most unserious political season of my lifetime. There is laughing and there is the other thing.

Study Harris’s smile and her guffaw, the one aggressive and the other vulgar. Should a political figure proposing to lead the United States present herself in this manner amid—a long list here—a genocide and the threat of a regional conflagration in the Middle East, a proxy war with Russia, dangerous provocations at the western end of the Pacific, the crippling vassalization of Europe, and, with all of this, gross inequalities at home that are the consequence of these extravagant adventures?

If Kamala Harris stands as a political figure before those whose votes she hopes to entice, I am quite convinced her rise to prominence as a presidential candidate is at bottom a psychological phenomenon. Her presence serves as a kind of instruction. To me she comes over as an enforcer of what I have called, since returning to the U.S. some years ago after a long time abroad, the tyranny of American happiness. This is not a laughing matter in the year 2024. It is a frightening matter in the year 2024.