Kamala Harris

Source: Bigstock

Kamala Harris’ fabulous career has of course benefited extraordinarily from her being roughly one-quarter black, but few have offered much of an opinion on her being one-half Tamil Brahmin (besides her fellow South Asians, of course), other than it reduces her despised white component.

And yet, the rise of South Asians to positions of immense power across the Anglosphere is one of the big stories of the 21st century.

But few Americans have much of an opinion on Kamala’s Indianness, because Americans don’t traditionally think much about South Asians, who have minimal history in this country.

As I may have mentioned once or twice, I’m pretty good at noticing. Yet, I never noticed until I was at UCLA MBA school in 1981 that suddenly there were a lot of smart Indians in the U.S. As a Los Angeles baby boomer, my hazy stereotype back then of Indians, going back at least to the Beatles’ visit to their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, had been that Hindus were spiritually profound in a New Age sort of way.

Today, that’s all ancient history. The limited percentage of Americans familiar with South Asians tend to admire them as worldly hustlers with a glib line of salesmanship. (Granted, that was pretty much the conclusion the Beatles came to in 1967 about their Mr. Yogi.) Still, most Americans don’t think about South Asians much. After all, Asian Indians don’t fit within traditional American racial categories, which is why the Census hesitatingly classified them as Caucasian in 1970 and Asian in 1980.

In contrast, even East Asians played a vastly larger role in American historical mythology, whether as coolies building the transcontinental railroad, as a hated but formidable enemy in World War II, or as an ambiguous friend/foe during the Korean War.

Hence, many Republicans have gleefully taken to speculating over why Walz spent an entire year in China in his mid-20s. Surely, this is proof that he’s part of a 35-year old Manchurian Candidate-style plot by the Red Chinese to infiltrate the Nebraska National Guard. (When I mentioned that movie classic on my new Substack, one reader dubbed the former schoolteacher “The Mankato Candidate.”) Why else would an American teach in China?

Yet, most of the young white guys I’ve known who have taught English in East Asia did it for the more mundane reason that they really like East Asian girls.

In contrast, although nobody constructs a conspiracy theory about it, South Asians actually do seem to be taking over the Anglosphere. Kamala might be elected president of the United States in November, and Rishi Sunak was recently prime minister of the United Kingdom.

The vociferously anti-Scottish Pakistani Humza Yousaf was First Minister of Scotland in 2023–2024, while the gay half-Indian Leo Varadkar has served two terms as top dog in Ireland. As baseball catcher Yogi Berra exclaimed when informed that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish: “Only in America!”

While most of the rest of the world is more resistant to Indian charms than the English-speaking heartland, the half-Goan António Costa was prime minister of Portugal, an ancient ally of England, from 2015 until a 2023 police raid on his home in a corruption probe.

Although Indian-Americans are intensely Democratic (an October 2020 poll found them favoring Biden over Trump by 72–22), in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race, Nikki Haley (of Sikh descent) beat Trump in two primaries (which is two more than the competent Florida governor Ron DeSantis managed), while practicing Hindu self-promoter Vivek Ramaswamy also overperformed. The GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is married to Hindu Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Similarly, while South Asians haven’t founded all that many ultra-successful start-ups compared with East Asians (e.g., Jensen Huang, founder of shooting star Nvidia, is a Taiwanese immigrant), much less whites, they’ve done well at climbing the corporate ranks to CEO of existing American corporations, such as Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google) and Satya Nadella, who has made a colossal amount of money for Microsoft shareholders. Why? My best guess is that East Asians tend to be shape-rotators, while South Asians tend to be verbally facile wordcels. So, Chinese on average make better engineers, but Indians make better executives.

Crazy as it would have sounded in the 1980s, it’s now quite possible that America will have an Indian president before it has a Jewish president…even if Kamala loses.

In fact, the Kamala campaign’s rejection of the vice presidential candidacy of Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of crucial swing state Pennsylvania, for Tim Walz, the aging Teutonic governor of blue Minnesota, raises the possibility that America will never have a Jewish president.

The failure of any Jewish-American to come close to becoming president despite all their accomplishments at becoming billionaires, Supreme Court justices, senators, top campaign donors, and the like is striking.

Take a look at Wikipedia’s short list of Jewish presidential contenders. Barry Goldwater, an ethnically half-Jewish Episcopalian, is the only major party nominee. Bernie Sanders put up a good fight for the Democratic nomination in 2016 against Hillary, but there have been few other serious Jewish candidates for a major party nomination. For example, while successful crime-fighting billionaire Michael Bloomberg might have seemed a formidable candidate on paper, his 2020 run for the Democratic nod went nowhere.

Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s 2000 running mate, is the only Jewish vice presidential nominee ever. And it has become increasingly hard to picture a staunch Zionist like Lieberman winding up on a Democratic ticket in the future.

Especially now that the Democrats have a nonwhite replacement ethnicity—South Asians—who bring many of the same skills as Jews did, such as linguistic facility, verbal logic, and mathematical ability.

Of course, one reason that Kamala’s Hindu half isn’t attracting much attention is because she does not herself embody South Asians’ stereotypical strong suits. Kamala isn’t stupid—she passed the tough California bar exam on her second try, and she has so far obeyed her advisers’ suggestions that she not dispel her admirers’ fantasies about her by opening her mouth too much—but nobody has ever accused her of displaying a head for numbers, an articulate prose style, or an incisive grasp of logic.