MUCH of the election postmortem predictably focuses on the mistakes made by Kamala Harris, but I want to take a step back for a big-picture explanation of the Democrats’ across-the-board losses in the 2024 elections.
No doubt Joe Biden and his quick-fix successor’s missteps contributed to the wipeout, but the fundamental reason for the latest liberal setback against the ballooning hypernationalist threat is the political paralysis the declining empire confronts in its last days.
Running with discredited neocons like Liz Cheney, refusing to let a Muslim American speak during the convention, and hoping to run on vibes and joy alone were terrible concessions to the consultant-driven politics of corporate empowerment, but why did the Democratic Party prefer self-marginalisation rather than make any real effort to address economic pain and end the wars?
The scale of Donald Trump’s resurgence is confirmation that his initial 2016 victory wasn’t a fluke. Rather, the Obama era of strident identity politics plus pint-sized economic initiatives has received a definite rebuke. The 2024 election bears comparison to 1980 and 2000 for the working class’s rejection of the very policies neoliberals thought would benefit them. I wouldn’t describe it as realignment, which was mistakenly applied to 2004 and 2008 as well. This designation is thrown around by political operatives every few years, and except for 1968, in the wake of the Vietnam debacle and the South’s backlash towards civil rights legislation, is rarely applicable.
Trump will probably overreach in dismantling the administrative state as per Project 2025. The attempts to finish off the regulatory state in every sphere of life will cause unbearable pain. He will also try to impose stiff universal tariffs and implement mass deportations through administrative means and actual roundups. As these measures reignite inflation, his newly assembled coalition of working-class voters will shatter. By the next electoral cycle, they will be eager to move on, not that there will be any help forthcoming from the Democrats in alleviating their declining quality of life.
Trump 2.0 is a different beast than the first incarnation. Inchoate isolationist tendencies — really, the desire of empire to terminate itself — have lately merged with the billionaire class’s overt interest in returning to the pre-New Deal era of zero regulation, buttressed by the state’s muscular punitiveness in keeping the working class in check.
Trump arrives infinitely better prepared than the last time, with loyalists ready with detailed plans to have an immediate go at everything that makes life worth living. Even accomplishing a fraction of these aims, particularly with respect to migration and tariffs, will cause an upheaval, leading to another oscillation in political fortunes.
The scale of Trump’s resurgence confirms that his 2016 victory wasn’t a fluke.
Every election now seems to be a change election. The last time there was any substantive bipartisan legislative progress was when Bill Clinton put in place the foundations of neoliberal globalisation, followed by George W. Bush’s implementation of the surveillance state. Obamacare, a form of privatised medicine, yielded the Tea Party, and in part Trumpism. Each time there is a grassroots progressive upsurge, as with Ralph Nader in 2000 or Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, the final result seems to be a massive rightward shift. The electorate has endorsed the same move this time.
Although much of the criticism of Harris’s loss will rightly focus on her unwillingness to offer any coherent economic message to alleviate the cost of living beyond bits and pieces, neither Biden nor Harris touted the progressive milestones they did achieve. It might sound surprising to praise Biden, but he was undoubtedly far to the left of Obama, and a down payment was made on clean energy, infrastructure rebuilding, industrial policy, and anti-trust regulation. Biden’s precipitous slide in popularity began when he rightly followed through on withdrawing from Afghanistan.
The original Build Back Better plan, whose care economy components were mostly removed, seems like an impossible dream in the wake of Harris’s rightward lurch. The Biden presidency can also be interpreted as a managed letdown from the peak of progressive enthusiasm, as social safety measures to soften the pandemic were abolished, but at least there was rhetorical fidelity towards strengthening worker rights.
Immigration was rightly loosened up, to meet the enormous shortfall of workers, and the rate of growth of inflation, to which Trump’s previous tariffs and immigration restrictions contributed as much as pandemic-era supply chain shortages, were down considerably.
But why would Biden and Harris never run on the back of these initiatives? Why did Trumpian xenophobia and cultural paranoia, exemplified in the fear of transgendered people, so completely push Biden’s legislative efforts to the background? I don’t believe that the outcome of the election was inevitable, despite the ravages of inflation. Harris could have built on Biden’s rudimentary economic progressivism, and offered young people hope for a financially sustainable future and a way out of the dual wars of choice. But she didn’t, and it wasn’t coincidental.
There seems to be more soul-searching on the part of liberals than after 2004, and certainly 2016, when it was all too easy to blame Trump as an outlier and his voters as deplorables, and then spend years trying to disqualify him and his movement as criminal enterprises.
But what do you do when large numbers of working people of all races gravitate towards the party whose tariffs and migration crackdowns will cause enormous economic disruption? Is there even a language that exists to speak to such voters about the benefits of openness, after four decades of the neoliberal zero-sum game pitting individual against individual? Perhaps there is, but it wasn’t tried.
The healthiest outcome for the rest of the world would be for the MAGA movement to actually disengage from international linkages. This is the fatal blow the empire seems determined to inflict upon itself and it ultimately explains why progressive initiatives, large or small, cannot satisfy the rotten emptiness at the core. It was, finally, less a failure of strategy or tactics that doomed Harris than the downward trajectory of empire that now seems unstoppable.
The writer’s political books include Why Did Trump Win?
Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2024
