Solidarity National Committee
Posted November 11, 2024
“IT SHOULD COME as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” — Bernie Sanders
The November U.S. election has produced a sweeping victory, not just in the United States but internationally as well, for the far right. It has sent shock waves through not only the Democratic Party establishment but progressive forces and the movements for racial, Indigenous and gender justice.
To be sure, Trump’s decisive victory preempted the fears of post-election chaos and constitutional crisis — and all those concocted rightwing accusations of “massive voter fraud” evaporated like the morning dew. We can also draw a concluding line under Joe Biden’s lasting presidential legacy: enabling the Gaza genocide, clinging to his sagging reelection campaign well past its best-by date, and returning Trump to power.
The results may be every bit as calamitous as many commentators are predicting. That’s certainly true for the Palestinian people under Israel’s state-and-U.S.-supplied genocide, quite possibly for Ukraine’s struggle to defend itself from Russia’s invasion, undoubtedly for immigrant communities in the United States facing a new reign of terror, and for pro-Palestinian activist students and faculty confronting repression on campuses, as well as looming threats to anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ and transgender rights movements. It will also accelerate — we don’t know by how much — the global climate-change apocalypse.
There’s much to say about all this, and we can only touch on some of it in this initial response. But we must begin with a dilemma that the Trump/MAGA victory presents far beyond the defeat of a stagnant Biden presidency: For those of us in the socialist movement, working class struggle and activism are the critical element to winning serious and lasting gains. Yet today’s reality is that a substantial minority of workers in the United States — largely but not only among white workers — have been won over to voting for a deeply reactionary agenda. By some accounts, half the union members in Michigan supported Trump.
Workers voting for Trump don’t necessarily identify in a hard way with the vicious social policies of the far right. It’s tempting and partly valid to attribute the election result to white supremacy — but after all, that’s a constant reality in the United States, and doesn’t adequately explain the 2024 result. If this election revolved around one central issue it was inflation, in the wake of Covid’s disruption of people’s lives.
Racist anti-immigrant appeals were clearly a mobilizing force on the right, and obviously remain so, but electoral polling indicated that these were not primary — as was also true of the very real fears about the future of democracy that motivated much of the Democratic vote.
Working class desertion from the Democratic Party is not a brand-new development. It’s been emerging in elections since the 1980s, accelerated during the disastrous “neoliberal” decades, and come to the fore now. At the same time, political alienation is widespread throughout the population. In 2024 the Trump vote didn’t change much at around 72 million (compared to 74 million in 2020), while the Democrats’ presidential vote dropped by as much as 13 million to 68 million, from 81 million in 2020.
Even as we prepare to join the resistance, by all available means, to the coming onslaught on progressive movements and vulnerable populations, the socialist left needs to come to terms with the rightward political trends within much of the working class, and clearly analyze how they might be reversed.
The far right itself will do some of the work — as Trump’s tariffs, tax cuts for the rich and attacks on essential programs and services victimize millions of folks who voted for him. But that won’t automatically move working class people leftward, especially while so many react to crises in their lives as isolated individuals and families rather than as an organized class force.
Democrats’ Debacle
We don’t ignore the severe stresses on people’s lives stemming from the Covid pandemic, especially the resulting corrosive inflation (falsely blamed by the right wing, of course, on “runaway government spending”). But we think that Senator Bernie Sanders points precisely to the basic reason why much of the working class has “abandoned” the Democrats.
It’s too easy to focus on secondary issues and tactical blunders. Of course, the Democratic establishment covered up Biden’s decline for way too long. Of course, their refusal at the convention to allow a single speech by a Palestinian-American delegate was a cynical, cowardly and racist snub — which might have been fatal if the election had turned out to be much closer and the Arab-American and progressive vote had been decisive.
But we have to get to why the Kamala Harris campaign — which was designed not by Harris but by the same coterie of corporate consultants who collect their inflated fees after every losing effort — was so insipid. Harris focused on the single substantive issue of abortion rights, which of course has resonance, along with not being Donald Trump, and very little else.
Her economic platform was mostly empty phrases about “opportunity,” with campaign-rally gestures toward unions — but nothing about the PRO (Protect the Right to Organize) Act that Democrats failed to pass, raising the poverty-level minimum wage, or tackling the obscene inequalities in the country. Rather than embracing Bernie Sanders’ message attacking corporate power, she (i.e. the professional consultants who shaped the campaign) chose to tour with Liz Cheney, essentially proposing a coalition government with non-Trump Republicans.
Her pledge to “build the world’s most lethal military” had nothing to do with appealing to the progressive voter base, or to any popular constituency at all. This was the Democrats’ promise to the ruling class to serve as the leading party of U.S. imperialism. If anything, Trump’s demagogic and lying claim to “quickly end the wars” in Ukraine and the Middle East may have sounded better to some voters.
To be clear, we will never know whether a genuinely progressive (or even traditional New Deal-type) campaign would have defeated Trump and the MAGA Republicans. It could hardly have done worse than the Democratic Party, which most emphatically did not run any such campaign. Nor is there the slightest reason to think it will ever do so.
Sanders hit the nail on the head when he concluded: “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”
Coming Dystopias
The new Trump presidency will undoubtedly begin fulfilling his campaign promises to corporate, high-tech and crypto-currency interests: new tax cuts, deregulation, dismantling of environmental protections that are disastrously inadequate to begin with, etc.
The consequences of such measures — for the federal budget deficit and national debt, for the cascading climate catastrophe — will unfold over coming years. Promises like putting the anti-vaccination fanatic RFK Jr. over public health agencies, and Elon Musk in charge of a new budget-slashing commission, would also have long-lasting medical and social consequences.
What’s not clear is whether Trump will quickly move to implement measures like huge tariffs that would immediately de-stabilize the economy and international relations, and “the largest deportation program in history” that would cost tens of billions, could cause upheaval and violence, and seriously impact parts of the agricultural, service and even industrial economy.
In short, there might be competition between elements of the Trump agenda — straight corporate greed on the one hand, versus the crazier, more ideologically driven policies that could prematurely undermine the new administration’s support. (Given Trump’s own erratic impulses and some signs of decline, the White House chief of staff may play a decisive role.)
These matters are speculative, but in any case the challenges facing the left are daunting. Certainly, building resistance against anti-immigrant and mass-deportation threats must be a top-level progressive priority!
It’s a matter of regret that the hope for a modest Green Party breakthrough didn’t materialize nationally — although the potential was seen in a place like Dearborn, Michigan where the Arab-American and Muslim communities’ entirely justified rage against Genocide Joe Biden and the destruction of Gaza was manifested in 18% support for Green candidate Jill Stein.
The left’s inability to forge a credible alternative to the capitalist parties’ duopoly is part of how we’ve arrived at the present toxic political mess. At the same time, the strategy advocated by much of the left, “working within the Democratic Party to change it,” has done nothing to stop the party’s retreat to “the center,” i.e. to the right.
As has been true for over a century, the working class in the United States needs its own party, yet in this disastrous moment the prospects have rarely looked more distant. We don’t have a blueprint, but a political alternative can only emerge from the movements on the ground, including the outrage against the ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the continuing struggles for reproductive rights, and the modest rise in labor activism and strike activity — not yet an “upsurge” by historic standards, but a hopeful sign of revival. We note that reproductive rights ballot referenda passed even in some states that elected Trump, and in others voters raised the state minimum wage.
There are no shortcuts, and never have been. But immediately, the urgent task is to be part of the movements resisting the corporate and far-right attacks, the Gaza genocide, the brutal assaults on immigrant communities, and the climate-change threat to the survival of civilization.
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