Busing is such an antique notion that pollsters don’t even bother to ask about it anymore. A 1973 Gallup poll showed only 5 percent of Americans agreeing that busing was the best way to integrate schools. A 1999 Gallup poll found 82 percent opposition to busing. Black Americans saw some pluses and some minuses; a small plurality opposed it in 1999. Among white Americans, the hostility was virtually unanimous. Unfortunately for the Democratic party, electoral success in 2020 depends heavily on not scaring white suburban voters such as those who backed it in 2018. Harris has now twice been caught live on national television telling voters she wanted to abolish their private health insurance, each time insisting afterward that she got her words wrong or misheard the question. Now, to busing, she is delivering paeans that can’t be explained away as the product of confusion under the hot TV lights.

Democrats do best when they stick to promising voters free stuff and keep quiet about the social engineering. Yet the social engineering is the more important goal. The free stuff is just the means to the end of remaking society along progressive lines, about healing our poor diseased souls. This is why Rahm Emanuel let slip that we should never let a crisis go to waste. It’s what Barack Obama meant when he said his imminent election was about “fundamentally transforming” the United States.