When Kamala Harris speaks, she sure sounds like a progressive. In a speech on Tuesday, the US presidential candidate said: “We need our leaders to speak truths. We have an economy where the cost of health care, housing, and education are going up, but paychecks aren’t growing fast enough to keep up.” It’s not just the economy that’s broken in her view: Harris hits progressive notes on everything from the criminal justice system to climate change. These are the “truths” she consistently promises to tell.

This rhetoric is matched by her emerging policy platform. Since 2016, Harris has adopted a number of leftwing positions first popularized by Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign. But, despite the fact that she has embraced these policies as her own, the timing of her leftward shift, combined with her failure to tie it to a consistent ideology, has left some progressives skeptical.

During her appearance at a CNN town hall last month, Harris reaffirmed her commitment to Sanders’ most defining policy goal: “I feel very strongly about this, we need to have Medicare for All.” But in the days after, she rolled back her commitment to “eliminate all” private insurance, saying instead that she was open to a number of more incremental efforts, though single payer was the goal.

There’s a persistent tension between the firmness with which Harris commits herself to her catchphrases and the shallowness of her political commitments (and her record). At times, Harris’s progressivism can feel as poll-tested as her campaign slogans. She likes to say that if something is “worth fighting for, it’s a fight worth having”, by which she means (I think) that if an issue is important, leaders should commit to it regardless of the surety of victory or the political expediency of the cause. “Let me be clear” she often starts her sentences. “I feel very strongly about this” she preambles. But as any writer knows, telling isn’t as good as showing. And Harris’s record is a poor showing.

In 2016, Harris didn’t feel “strongly” enough about Medicare for All to support the only candidate on the Democratic ticket who backed it, Bernie Sanders. Moreover, her policy adviser and sister, Maya Harris, also advised Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the former Senator and first lady famously insisted that single payer would “never, ever come to pass”.

It feels like Harris's politics are driven by the wind of popular opinion

Certainly people can and should evolve. Social mores shift. New information comes to light. Politicians such as Sanders expand the limits of political possibility. But without a more substantive articulation of why and how Harris and her team came to a new ideology, it feels like Harris’s politics are driven less by a normative vision of the world than by the wind of popular opinion.

The gap between her professed ideals and her actions is most apparent when the focus is trained on Harris’s career as a prosecutor, about which there’s been significant reporting and criticism. Somewhat hubristically, she’s still chosen to pluck her campaign slogan from the prosecutor’s oath: “For The People”.

In light of her record, which includes failing to prosecute “foreclosure King” turned Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, while supporting an anti-truancy initiative that criminalized noncompliant parents and threatened them with jail time, the slogan raises the question: for which people?

When challenged about her office’s defense of the death penalty, opposition to the release of non-violent prisoners, and violation of the constitutional rights of various drug defendants, she demurs by pointing to victims of violent crime who are the “most vulnerable among us.” She stresses the threats posed by murderers, rapists, and child molestors – ignoring the scores of non-violent drug offences and misdemeanor violations which comprise the bulk of her office’s prosecutions, and the fact that thousands are jailed merely because they’re too poor to pay.

Most disappointing, perhaps, is that Harris should know better than to adopt such a pat understanding of victimhood. She often evokes her progressive parents, going so far as to say that nobody had to teach her “about the disparities in the criminal justice system because” she was “born knowing what they are”. But even they questioned her choice to become a prosecutor, calling it “a curious decision”. “Why would you go and be a part of an institution that is not always fair and does not always pursue justice?” her family asked her, according to Harris.

That question looms unanswered.

When asked directly “how do you reconcile your contradictory past with what you claim to support today” at the recent town hall, she sidestepped the issue, replying summarily: “I‘ve been consistent my whole career.” But that’s the problem.

During her 2003 race to become District Attorney of San Fransisco, Harris circulated flyers featuring the torso of a tattooed, presumably Latino, man throwing up a gang sign, with the caption “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” On another flyer, featuring a crime scene chalk outline, she criticized her opponent, progressive prosecutor Terrence Hallinan, for his low conviction rates. “It’s not progressive to be soft on crime,” she said during race.

In 2010, she bragged about using her power to prosecute parents as a “huge stick” to ensure school attendance. “I sent a letter out on my letterhead to every parent in the school district,” she said. “A friend of mine actually called me and he said, ‘Kamala my wife got the letter, she freaked out, she brought all the kids into the living room, held up the letter, said: if you don’t go to school Kamala is going to put you and me in jail!’” Harris smiled as the audience laughed. “Yes,” she said. “We achieved the intended effect.”

In 2013, Harris scoffed at the idea that we should “build more schools, less jails.” “There’s a fundamental problem with that approach,” she said. “I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason why I have three padlocks on my door.”

A genuinely progressive policy agenda addresses those reasons directly. It targets underlying causes – not the people struggling to survive in a broken system. It imagines the world as it should be, and innovates policies that can get us there.

A progressive policy agenda imagines the world as it should be, and innovates policies that can get us there

Progressives see prison as a stop-gap measure: a bandage that merely contains, but does not relieve an issue, one that perpetuates further cruelties in the process. “I think it’s a false choice,” Harris has said, “to suggest that communities don’t want law enforcement. Most communities do.” But the false choice is presenting law enforcement as the only path to personal security.

As my colleague Nathan Robinson aptly put it, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And “when all you have is the ability to bring criminal charges, everything looks like a crime.” Yes, everyone wants to be safe. But the idea that incarceration is the way to achieve that end is at best naive.

To a progressive, the solutions are more fundamental than prison: a jobs guarantee, universal health care, including mental health care. Free college. A progressive doesn’t divide the world into victims and criminals and wage war on the latter. Instead, she wages war on the system that creates them.

It’s not clear that Harris sees our economic and political system as flawed. Take for example Harris’ response last week, when asked whether it’s morally defensible to have multi-billionaires in a country where 1 in 5 children live in poverty. Yes, she affirmed, “we have had policies in this country ... that have disproportionately benefited the top 1% to the exclusion of working families”. She added: “We have babies in America today that are on the verge of starving. We have families who cannot pay their bills.” Harris is adept at speaking these truths. But blame the system that got us here? She wouldn’t go so far as doing that. This betrays a lack of political imagination that extends far beyond Harris’s approach to crime.

Compare Harris’s response to the answer given by New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Martin Luther King Jr Day. When asked by author Ta-Nehesi Coates if it was a “moral outcome” to live in a world that allows for billionaires, Ocasio-Cortez replied without hesitation. “No, it’s not.” It’s not that all billionaires are immoral, she explained, but a “system” that allows such extreme poverty when Americans’ basic health needs aren’t even being met is wrong. “What kind of society do we want to live in?” she asked. “Where do we draw the line in excesses?” Ocasio-Cortez clearly is driven by a positive vision of the future. But what drives Harris?

Harris increasingly speaks in class terms. She seems to have taken the advice of a Demos study from early last year, which confirmed that the most effective messaging with “persuadable” voters stresses the shared class interests of “working people” of all races as distinct from the “wealthy few”, and to evoke racism as a tool elites used to keep working people divided. She now routinely hits populist themes, referencing the fact that 40% of Americans are $500 away from an economic emergency, and arguing “they’re trying to divide us. They’re trying to have us point fingers at each other”.

In these moments, Harris is at her best. But she hasn’t yet internalized the bigger truth behind the messaging – that a concentration of obscene wealth in the hands of a few has undermined our democracy.

In her Oakland speech, Harris noted that “America’s story has always been written by people who can see what can be unburdened by what has been”. It’s hard to see Harris as that person. Speaking truth is an important first step. But it’s not a substitute for having the courage and vision to do something about it.