The fox guarding the henhouse
As we know, Joe Biden was anointed in an uncontested primary, because he was the incumbent and that's how things are done. For almost a month after his cognitive decline became obvious in a debate watched by tens of millions of people, the Dems told everyone not to believe their lying eyes. Comedian Jon Stewart commented:
Honestly, "get on board or shut the f*ck up" is not a particularly compelling pro-democracy bumper sticker. ... Can't we stress test this candidacy? Can't we open up the conversation? Do you understand the opportunity here, do you have any idea how thirsty Americans are for any hint of inspiration or leadership and a release from this choice of a megalomaniac and a suffocating gerontocracy? ... All we want is for someone to keep it 100!
In fact, the Democratic candidacy never had a stress test. When Biden finally dropped out, Kamala Harris was likewise anointed without a primary. As the VP, it was Kamala's turn, and that's how things are done. (Nancy Pelosi is now among those regretting in hindsight that there wasn't enough time for an open primary, and she's right.) The last time Kamala had passed a democratic test was 2016, when she won a California senate seat.
Democratic relief burst into joy: finally a younger, competent candidate who could surely beat Trump. He's deeply unlikeable, and his 2016 win was a fluke. Kamala had campaigned from the left in 2020, and now her campaign's message was "we're not going back" and "freedom." She bucked the establishment choice for VP in Josh Shapiro and picked progressive favorite Tim Walz, who appeared to be humiliating MAGA by calling them "weird." Bon Iver even evoked the U.S. Civil War at one of her rallies, singing "Battle Cry of Freedom!" And progressive hopes for Gaza were faintly raised when Kamala skipped Netanyahu's speech in Congress, declaring "I will not be silent." Kamala massively outraised Trump, and thousands of small donors flocked to enormous identity-based conference calls like "white men for Kamala." Importantly, she surged ahead of Trump in the polls.
So much for the summer. Kamala wound up running a campaign that was conservative in both the political and strategic sense of the word. Election post-mortems have identified her campaign as out of touch with voters' pain and anger. To her credit, she did swerve away from Biden's message that voters just didn't understand how great the economy was. (Remember when the economy "recovered" from the 2008 crash? "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!") Still, after not talking to the media for weeks, on "The View" Kamala infamously was unable to say how her administration would differ from Biden's. She promised some policies that would have economically benefited the working class, but it was always "opportunity economy," never railing against billionaires. The main theme of her campaign remained joy and optimism, which seems not to have connected with many Americans experiencing darkness and crisis.
Kamala contradicted many progressive positions she'd taken in 2020, tacking hard to the right on immigration and abandoning her past support for medicare for all. She of course did nothing to diverge from Biden's policy on Gaza, but she did have campaign ads with opposite messages targeting Arab and Jewish voters. She at one point suggested that she just couldn't differ from Biden because she's the VP, and that's just not how things are done! She stumped repeatedly with Liz Cheney, and made a big deal of the fact that she prays daily and owns a glock. (The obvious pandering calls to mind Barack Obama's infamous comment about "clinging to guns and religion.")
Somewhere between the rightwards flip-flopping, patronizing voters, and associating with anti-Trump Republicans who everyone hates, Kamala became the establishment candidate. Damon Linker in the New York Times summarized why this was a fatal flaw:
Another longstanding Gallup poll tracks the level of public confidence in major U.S. institutions. It’s been falling since the debacle of the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008, and currently reveals that a mere 28 percent of Americans have such confidence. Perhaps bleakest of all is a Pew poll about trust in government, which sits at an astonishingly low 22 percent.
Some seventy million people and counting still voted for Kamala, for many reasons: some passionately supported her, others are college-educated Republicans who only wanted to stop Trump, still others on the left similarly chose the "lesser evil." Their votes count for just as much as the vaunted swing voter. But ultimately, Trump beat Harris comfortably, and for the first time will control all three branches of the federal government - with a popular mandate to ice the cake.
In the end, the Democrats didn't keep it 100. Americans saw the quality of our democracy when we were ignored and lied to about the Iraq war, we saw that billionaires are above the law during the 2008 financial crisis, we saw our leaders abandon victims of the the opioid crisis, we saw "Occupy Wall Street" come to nothing, we saw our loved ones die needlessly because they couldn't afford healthcare, we saw massive protests against racist police violence come to nothing, and now we can't afford to pay the rent or buy a home. Then we saw the Democratic candidate bear-hugging the Cheneys while Barack Obama patronized and scolded Black men, and for good measure we got a parade of A-list celebrities. We were told that democracy was at stake, but it seemed the fox was guarding the henhouse.
Trump obviously threatens what vestige of democracy still exists in the U.S. He heads a growing movement of psychotic resentment, lies and violence, and could potentially commit truly unprecedented atrocities. Nothing justifies supporting him. Nonetheless, blaming a clear majority of seventy-five million people for destroying democracy would be badly losing the plot.
What happened to the protests?
It's astonishing the degree to which "anti-establishment" has come to be synonymous with deranged MAGA hatred and conspiracy theories. Occupy Wall Street, Bernie's "political revolution," and uprisings against cop violence feel like they're from a different era. All of those insurgent movements lacked their own political party. Since Biden won the 2020 primary, Bernie and the Squad have in large part hitched their wagons to the establishment, sensibly adapting to respectable Washington politics in order to stop Trump. Now Trump runs every branch of the U.S. government.
France has a parliamentary system, and a decidedly different political culture from the U.S. Nonetheless, it was a shock to everyone when their left-wing party won the most votes in the last round of their elections. Author Richard Seymour writes:
Notably, the New Popular Front’s success in France was achieved with a programme that addresses people’s immediate needs through higher wages and price controls while attending to more collective, long-term desires. It defended migrants, for example, and opposed Islamophobia. It supported climate measures, a ceasefire in Gaza and recognition of Palestine. The programme will be hard to realise, and the Left will be resisted by those in power – but it cut through the hopeless synergy of hard-centre and far-right and showed that punitive nationalism does not enjoy anything like a monopoly on public desires.
Of course we have only two parties in the U.S., and a winner-take-all election system very unlike a parliamentary one. This fact is cited every election year by the Dems to patronize and scold the left, portraying leftists who won't back them as childish. They love to accuse us of "posturing," and say we're unaccountable to the consequences of our vote. They valorize being unprincipled, as if kowtowing to billionaires and lesser bigots is actually wise and mature. They had a very similar message when calls grew for Joe Biden to drop out: as Jon Stewart put it, "'get on board or shut the f*ck up' is not a particularly compelling pro-democracy bumper sticker." Don't believe your lying eyes, and if you don't vote for us, Trump will be worse.
So now here we are. The Democrats' message to swing voters was not unlike how it has always treated the left, and millions of people decided they either would abstain or go with Trump. A CNN piece on the election opened with this damning account:
Pick one word to describe Republicans and Donald Trump, the focus group moderator asked, and one word to describe Democrats and Kamala Harris.
“Crazy,” said the White woman in her 40s, who hadn’t gone to college. Then: “Preachy.”
... Asked to pick between the two words, the woman said she’d “probably go with ‘crazy,’” anguish clearly in her voice.
“Because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me,” she said. “‘Preachy’ does.”
This is where "lesser evilism," "three-dimensional chess" and "harm reduction" have gotten us. It turns out that stuff is bullshit. Politics are simple: you fight for what you want. In a democracy, you vote for what you want. If you can't win now, you build whatever power you can for the next round, instead of immediately folding and giving it all up to your enemies.
With no organization through which to fight for our politics, our movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter have languished and failed, and "the left" has become attached to the establishment. Many people who once supported Barack Obama ("change") and then Bernie Sanders ("revolution") are now listening to MAGA, the only remaining voice acknowledging this fundamental truth: the establishment is bullshit.
The point isn't that if the left would only form its own party, we would suddenly sweep to victory in every election. Of course nothing remotely like that will happen - putting aside the question of whether our current political freedoms will survive the next four years. The point is that we don't have any option other than to get started now.
If someone went back in time ten years and predicted the events of the past decade, no one would have taken them seriously. Yet here we are. The future may look bleak, but it's still unwritten.
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