It turns out it’s a bad idea to pitch a Democratic campaign to neoconservatives such as Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol. Especially while a seismic realignment has pushed workers away from centre-left parties across much of the developed world. Yet that’s just the sort of campaign Kamala Harris ran: one premised on the “defend democracy” sentiments of affluent suburbanites, instead of the promise of social and economic democracy.
The gambit didn’t pay off. As I write, Donald Trump appears poised to clinch the popular vote – a first for a Republican presidential nominee since 2004, and the second since 1988 – and to sweep the battleground states. It’s safe to say that Trumpism in American politics is an era, in the same way we think of the “Reagan era”. The long-term trend of US politics, in other words, is right-wing populism; the Joe Biden interlude was just that.
Speaking of Bidenism, Harris might have done better had she enthusiastically articulated the populist elements of her boss’s vision: the industrial policies, the rural development, the tariffs, the anti-trust crusade. Instead, she touted that her economic platform had won plaudits from Goldman Sachs, that most beloved of institutions, even as she wouldn’t commit to retaining Lina Khan, Biden’s bold anti-trust czar (whose efforts JD Vance was more apt to praise). Her surrogates bashed tariffs as a “tax on consumers”, seemingly unaware that Team Biden had retained and expanded Trump’s on Chinese goods.
History had dealt Harris a lousy hand: a politician who had never won a nationwide primary received her party’s nomination after Biden’s disastrous debate in June, in which the much diminished president vowed to “beat Medicare”. Still, it isn’t hard to pinpoint a slew of unforced errors on Harris’s part.
For starters, there was her catastrophic lack of vision. It was hard to discern a story beyond “defend democracy” and protecting women’s right to an abortion. The latter no doubt motivated some women. But given Team Trump’s shift away from the anti-abortion cause, it didn’t do much. As for democracy, voting for Trump was practising democracy for many millions of Americans. The notion that democracy itself was on the ballot had few buyers outside the editorial boards of the Atlantic and the New York Times.
In place of a cohesive narrative, Harris offered a barrage of lame micro-policies: small-business loans, homebuyer grants, handouts to the scammy crypto industry, encouraging black marijuana entrepreneurs, scrapping tax on restaurant tips (a gimmick lifted from Trump’s agenda) and so on. What happened to the sorts of things that used to make left parties attractive to ordinary people: Medicare for all? Student- and medical-loan forgiveness? Peace in the Middle East?
Speaking of the Middle East, Harris somehow managed to alienate Muslims over Gaza, going so far as to bar a Palestinian speaker from her party’s convention, without endearing herself to the pro-Israel community, either. Trump achieved the opposite: he became the toast of the Israeli public while garnering endorsements from a number of imams and Muslim mayors in Michigan, a crucial battleground. Few expect him to restrain the IDF in Gaza, but there’s a reassuring sense that, with Trump, what you see is what you get.
Then there was illegal immigration – not a mere problem for the Democrats, but a catastrophe. Having dismantled Trump’s signature border-control measures, the Biden administration oversaw the arrival of millions of low-wage, unvetted immigrants, including gang members. They fanned out beyond the border states, putting pressure on public services and criminal-justice systems in even tolerant blue states.
Footage of low-income Americans, including black and brown people, complaining of schools and children’s recreation centres converted to migrant shelters soon proliferated on social media – but national Democrats paid little heed until it was too late. Harris tried to be hard line on immigration, but her promises were vague, and she couldn’t give a reasonable account of why she changed her mind.
None of this is to deny the numerous contradictions in Trump, who has been resurrected, like the revenant of Greek myth, to greater power than he possessed before his sojourns through the Hades of defeat and lawfare. But US voters get a binary choice, and a choice they have made. Democrats, too, now face a choice: to finally grant popular rage and work toward bipartisan solutions – or to indulge another four years of fruitless #Resistance.
[See also: Trump’s GOP takeover]
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America