What’s the Matter with the U.S. of A?
Photo by Dyana Wing So
As the Democrats lick their wounds after the resounding defeat of Kamala Harris, the main question remains how did this country get here? Make America Great Again captured the misogyny and racist impulse of those Americans who felt suffocated by liberal impetus for diversity–– a corporate diversity oblivious toward social justice and redistributive politics. The concomitant rise of neoliberalism in the early 1980s with multi-culturalism and the recognition of difference, what the MAGA movement dubbed wokeism, created the perception that the two are linked. The more both Democrats (particularly the Clintonians) and Republicans fostered neoliberal policies to dismantle the welfare state and to expand the corporatization of politics, media, education, healthcare, etc., the deeper the acrimony of the disenfranchised toward the entire political establishment.
Since early 1980s, the American far right has been successful in shaping the narrative of what was unfolding in the country. They worked at the grassroot levels, municipal politics, school districts, and churches, became the spaces through which they advanced their platform. They successfully established a zero-sum game narrative between the federal and activist interventions in diversity, inclusion, women’s rights, rights of the “Other” (the black, the immigrant, the queer), and the collapse of the mythical American dream, the land of opportunity and freedom.
A majority of Americans identify the political and corporate establishment in toto as the main culprit of what is wrong with American society. The grievances vary, but the white supremacist far-right has given them a common voice glazed with age-old ideologies of hate and antipathy. Trump has become the hero of the working class and the disenfranchised because they see in him the power to dismantle the establishment that has failed to protect them against the onslaught of deindustrialization. Trump and his allies have been successful in turning the grievances against the tribulations of neoliberalism, naked corporate power and bleak futures, into a xenophobic platform for emancipation from the tyranny of the state.
The far-right has been successful in turning the “regulations” into the enemy of the people, a discursive coup that binds together corporate executives and labor. They reframed environmental regulations, labor rights laws, equal opportunity clause, and all other progressive measures as policies that forced deindustrialization and flight of capital in addition to rising consumer prices and inflation. The anti-regulation coalition razed class distinctions and unified an entire population who saw themselves as victims of the existing political order.
Although the alt-right laid the groundwork to become ideologically hegemonic, it lacked the opportunity to intervene at the federal level. That changed when in 2008, John McCain chose, albeit reluctantly, Sarah Palin as his running mate in his campaign for Presidency. This was the first time that the disgruntled anti-establishment politics found a representative at the federal level. Palin ran a campaign of ignorance-as-a-virtue, the voice of common folks who are tired of intellectual, political elites deciding on how they should run their lives, what they can and what they can’t say. McCain’s discomfort with Palin’s outlandish, idiosyncratic populism marred the campaign with unwieldly strategy. Although McCain lost the election, this was a remarkable win for the alt-right. With Palin, they brought the supremacist discourse to the mainstream of American politics. They realized the possibility of entering federal politics and reshape the national discourse above and beyond municipal politics of the earlier three decades.
Obama’s election distorted the picture of race in American politics. The alt-right used the concept of “color-blind America” to launch coordinated campaigns to end preferential programs that resulted from the civil rights movement. Ironically, the alt-right reappropriated Dr. King’s dream to “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” in order to construct a new racist ideology for the liberation of the white nation from the tyranny of the minorities. They identified the federal government as the agent of that tyranny.
The Republicans were quick to realize that a battle between the establishment and anti-establishment political forces was unfolding. The Democrats believed that they could continue to hold the paradoxical position of being the agents of change and maintaining the existing state and corporate establishment. These two views came into direct conflict during the 2016 election of Trump versus Hillary Clinton. The Democrats used all their might to derail Bernie Sanders’ campaign to stop him from winning the nomination of the party. Sanders ran a campaign of anti-establishment as an outsider within. He energized millions of younger generations who otherwise remained ambivalent toward electoral politics. The party elites (the Clintons, Biden, Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, and the whole class of the old guard) resented Sanders, both for his progressive socialist agenda and his anti-establishment rhetoric. They made sure that Hillary Clinton won the nomination, thinking that the establishment had to be defended. They were wrong.
Trump situated himself as the voice of the unheard. The voice of all those whose desires for the golden days of patriarchal, Jim Crow America, were checked through civic institutions and litigation. He drew big crowds to his rallies. His followers admired their newly found leader for his blunt and offensive language, he’s not afraid to say what he thinks. A growing mass of people found that liberating. For that, they gave him the White House. The more Trump’s opposition tried to portray him as a flamboyant, offensive, criminal who does not play by the rule, the wider his support became.
Trump lost the 2020 election to COVID, not to Biden. The Democrats deployed the same strategy in the 2020 primaries to make sure they nominate someone from the center of the party establishment. Facing another anti-establishment insurgency from within the party with Bernie Sanders and the progressive women caucus in the House, Obama and the rest of Democratic party dynasty came out of woodwork to restore the old order by pushing Biden to the top of the ticket. Trump administration’s utter failure in coping with the economic and social consequences of COVID cost the Republicans the presidency. Yes, the election was stolen, but not by the Democrats, but by COVID.
The Democrats are slow learners. They failed to see that Biden was incapable of resisting another Trump onslaught. Despite pressures from the rank-and-file, the same old guard refused to have an open primary and nominate an alternative to Biden. But the first presidential debate at the end of June 2024 sealed the fate of Biden. It placed his cognitive decline in the open, humiliating him and the party.
His withdrawal from the candidacy opened a new window for a growing grassroots participation in the election. Harris, just for not being Biden, energized a new generation of the populace who were ready to take the election fight to every corner of every city and town in the country. The defense of reproductive rights and a fast-growing anti-war movement against the Israeli atrocities in Palestine were the two central issues that galvanized the new comers into the political scene. Harris’s earlier insinuations that she would part ways with Biden’s appeasement policy toward Israel encouraged the anti-war constituents to rally around her candidacy. But in August, the Party refused to allow any pro-Palestinian speaker to address the convention in Chicago.
The Convention damped the enthusiasm and deflated all that excitement about Harris’s candidacy. Harris was to become the second act of Hillary Clinton campaign. She moved with an unprecedented speed toward proving that she is the candidate of the establishment. She secured endorsements from the military generals, intelligence chiefs, noble prize-winning economists, influential Republicans, one after another lined up to assure the public that Harris represents the old guard. Did that matter to the general public that Harris had earned the endorsement of the entire political elite, the military establishment, the Israeli lobby, and other corporate interests who were wary of Trump’s unpredictability and anti-democratic posture? Did the assurances that the U.S. will continue to support Israel unconditionally, even in the midst of an ongoing genocide, or that the NATO will defend Ukraine till the end of time mobilized anyone on her behalf?
The same strategy that led them to lose to Trump, calling him a rouge anti-establishment, convicted felon, the one who disrespects the laws of the land, was combined with Harris’s rush to the right created the fate accompli of losing the presidential election. The more time they spent to court Nikki Haley constituencies the deeper the rift became between her campaign and all the potential voters whose genuine enthusiasm she crushed at the Convention. It is a mistake to think that the only effect of Harris’s militarism and complacency in the genocide of Palestinians was the loss of Arab-Muslim votes in the election. Her surrender to the Israeli lobby had a much bigger significance that showed her unwillingness to step into a new political landscape, with new actors and new horizons.
For now, Trumpism has appropriated the anti-establishment sentiments in American politics. That was not inevitable, the Democrats made it so.
Trump’s Victory and Elite Power Over the Democratic Party
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party:
“The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago.
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016.
The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again.
After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster the wisdom to compile an “autopsy” report — assessing what went wrong and what changes are needed for the future. But after Hillary Clinton lost as a corporate war-hawk candidate in 2016, the Democratic National Committee showed that it had no interest in doing any such report.
So, at RootsAction we decided to do it ourselves, with a task force of researchers and activists who wrote “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” Many of our key findings about the 2016 election apply to the latest one. For example:
+ “The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.”
+ One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, “who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of Democrats.”
+ “Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”
+ The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people.
+ “What must now take place includes honest self-reflection and confronting a hard truth: that many view the party as often in service to a rapacious oligarchy and increasingly out of touch with people in its own base.” The Democratic Party should disentangle itself — ideologically and financially — from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs.
Four weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done anything differently than President Biden, the reply from Kamala Harris was more than notable: “Not a thing comes to mind.”
Such loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with horrendous consequences. Harris’s reply — after a full year of ongoing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military aid — was a moral failure and a prelude to electoral disaster. Harris stuck with her patron in the Oval Office and his role as an accomplice to Israel while disregarding the clear wishes of the Democratic Party’s base.
Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension. Grassroots organizing should include maximum possible nonviolent pressure on officials in government and other institutions, insisting that compromise with Republican leaders is completely unacceptable.
“If you’re not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we’re all in trouble,” the author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, warned in a video. That was six years ago.
“Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of ‘fascism’ seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines,” Stanley wrote in his 2018 book. “Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of ‘extreme’ terminology continually move.”
Resisting such normalization is now imperative.
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