29.08.2024

End of the beginning

With the Democratic national convention safely wound up, Paul Demarty assesses the presidential race and peers into an uncertain future

It is strange to think that the national conventions of American political parties used to be decision-making bodies.

They were never terribly democratic, of course. Instead, their delegates emerged from the various local party machines and, having emerged, they spent endless hours horse-trading over who would get the nomination. The Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln did so on the third ballot, while his thousands of supporters cheered on and made the best attempt possible to intimidate the electors by hooting and whistling. A contemporary observer compared the noise to “all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death-squeals together”.

164 years later, it is a different picture, though it is at least equally possible to imagine fans of the Republican nominee making the most bizarre noises. Donald Trump, in theory, went through a contested primary (primaries are a relatively recent innovation). No competitor laid a glove on him, and indeed he did not so much as bother to turn up to the debates. The idea that anyone else could be selected was preposterous from the beginning. Those staffing the Republican hierarchy plainly feel it more fitting to impose their agenda on him than try to impose another candidate on the electorate.

The closest anyone came to keeping him off the ballot was Thomas Crooks, the alienated youth who attempted to off him with a gun from a Pennsylvania rooftop, but only nicked his ear. Kamala Harris’s journey to the top of the ticket did not involve any votes at all, of course, which drama we will rehearse in a moment.

Theatre

And so both the Republican and Democrat conventions were essentially theatrical performances, in which speakers lined up to effuse over the virtues of the pre-ordained nominee, and denounce the perfidy of the ‘other guy/girl’. The Republican convention took place immediately after the assassination attempt, and was notable principally for the Trumpite hysteria among attendees, many of whom wore bandages over their ears in honour of the great helmsman. Trump formally nominated JD Vance - the Ohio senator and Peter Thiel creature, who once considered him a new Hitler, but has since become a spectacularly obsequious toady, and merged into the general online far-right scene.

There was a certain amount of triumphalism involved at that time, since a mortally wounded Joe Biden was still at the top of the Democratic ticket; but that was short-lived, when various Democratic bigwigs - notably former House leader Nancy Pelosi (a woman so Machiavellian and stupendously corrupt that she really does recall the glory days of Tammany Hall) - succeeded in bullying Biden into giving way. There was some talk of a contested convention (largely regarded with horror by the party elite), before everyone involved was brought around to back Harris. She selected for her running mate Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and folksy former high-school football coach, on the theory that a black woman candidate needed the whitest imaginable man as co-pilot to achieve victory.

The Democratic convention, so far as it had any specifically political purpose, was an opportunity to divide the left and bring some big hitters on side. Those included representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (AOC, the supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America, elected as a Congress Democrat) who gushed about Harris’s “tireless” work for a ceasefire in Gaza (having previously set herself up absurdly as a ‘Biden or bust’ character earlier in the whole drama). Needless to say, this is believed only by those who want to believe - those with real moral objections to Israel’s genocide, who nonetheless fear a new Trump presidency more than death itself. To them, she - and Bernie Sanders, and others - offered an off-ramp.

It is welcome that protestors made themselves a nuisance, that the ‘uncommitted’ movement, which ostentatiously refused to back Biden in the laughable primary process that nominated him, made a great hue and cry about being cut out of the show. Hopes - and worries - that the Chicago convention would produce scenes like that of 1968 were nevertheless dashed. And that is not surprising: the mere fact of replacing the semi-conscious Biden with someone fully in command of her faculties has reinvigorated Democrat activists. They feel they have something to fight for, and can thus bring themselves to tune out dissenting voices.

Battleground

So the rival forces are arrayed. How do their chances look? Before Biden’s decision to accept the inevitable, it seemed inevitable that Trump would walk it. No especially complicated calculus is necessary to see why. His opponent was in acute cognitive decline; Trump was simply Trump. Polls suggested a real beating.

With the Harris coup, it is a very different picture: she leads in national polls. The swing in her direction is astonishing and unprecedented, but then so were the circumstances that led her to become the candidate. Republican attacks on her have the reek of desperation. Can anyone believe that she is secretly a ‘communist’, when she has been in government for three and a half years? Beyond that, there is merely the stale racist trope that she is a ‘diversity hire’ - but that is for voters to decide, surely, and is frankly unfair, given the ruthless manner in which she has conducted her own career. Perhaps she could have made a great Nancy Pelosi.

Yet this is not a straight national election. The electoral college system means that it will be fought out primarily in a handful of battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona. In these states, things look a lot tighter, with few polls finding either candidate with a lead greater than the 3% margin of error usually taken into account for these things. There are real worries here: after all, Michigan, for example, has a large Arab-American population deeply alienated from current policy on Israel, and over 100,000 people voted ‘Uncommitted’ in the primary. That is not far off Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020. All this leaves aside domestic issues like inflation - going down, but purchasing power is still badly hit compared to 2022 - and the perception of ‘chaos at the border’, to which we can expect Trump to advert endless times between now and November. He does not need that many votes.

Trump received one fillip recently with the decision of Robert F Kennedy Jr - the son of the one-time attorney general and contestant for the 1968 Democratic nomination who was assassinated that year (and, of course, the nephew of Jack Kennedy himself) - to pull out of his independent run at the presidency and endorse the Republican ticket. The younger RFK was best known as an eco-warrior until relatively recently, but like many Green types he has fallen in with anti-vaxxers, and attempted to contest the Democratic nomination on the basis of conspiratorial anti-militarism (though he remained a fanatical Zionist).

Along the way, he burnished his reputation as one of modern America’s great eccentrics, most recently when he confessed to leaving the carcass of a bear in the middle of Manhattan’s Central Park. It is hard to tell, but he was probably taking more votes from Trump than Harris (and was running at a not-insignificant 3% in polls), and so his withdrawal principally benefits the Republicans.

Outcomes

With the result so uncertain, we need to consider both possible outcomes. Trump has promised an immediate mass deportation of illegal immigrants. It is not clear that he can achieve such a thing, but he could cause a lot of trouble trying. He promises to wrap up the Ukraine war in short order - again, easier said than done, but some recent events in that theatre suggest that the antagonists are trying to secure the best possible position before the US decides that enough is enough and pushes for a cessation of hostilities. As far as the Middle East is concerned, he backs Israel to “finish the job”, and has denounced the present US government’s hypocritical handwringing for peace and the lesser-spotted two-state solution.

There is a great deal of worry over what a Trump victory will mean for American democracy, such as it is, and it would be wrong to merely dismiss this as hysteria. Trump did, after all, set his addled followers off on a riot to overturn the results of the 2020 election, to say nothing of the less dramatic methods of lawfare and heavy manners he used to the same end. His followers gleefully await military tribunals of his enemies. He proposes a political purge of the permanent state apparatus. His position is complicated, however, by the fact that important parts of that state apparatus, crucially the military, are obviously not onside. A Trumpist victory on January 6 2020 would most likely have resulted in a military counter-coup.

For all the soft-left wish-casting to the contrary, we expect a Harris presidency to entail more of the same: more entanglements abroad, more halting, half-cocked attempts at industrial policy, more ‘neoconisation’ of the Democratic Party. Needless to say, neither have anything to offer people shaken to political consciousness by the horrors of Gaza.

What is perhaps worth stressing is the commonalities. For all the weepiness over “kids in cages” in 2020, the Biden administration has strained every sinew to act tough on immigration. Biden’s policy was merely Trump’s policy on a four-year time delay (leaving aside that great white elephant - the big, beautiful border wall). More significantly, both are committed to the new strategic orientation towards encirclement of China and military brinksmanship in its near-abroad - indeed, so was Barack Obama - and consequently on attempting to use industrial policy to reshore critical military industries like semiconductors.

There are practical disagreements on whether this entails the break-up of Russia or backing a greater Israel in the Middle East as a local strongman there (the current, ‘lesser’ Israel is a strong enough man for the Democrats). Yet the underlying dynamic is clear. Major strategic shifts can only be achieved across different administrations. US imperialism is declining - everyone knows it, and indeed Democratic and Republican-leaning think-tankers alike recognise this as a problem. Both parties will have, as their first order of business, doing whatever they can to reverse that decline, even at the risk of great-power war.

It is in this light that we should interpret soft-left backing for Harris (and, indeed, the doomed attempts of AOC and Bernie Sanders to keep Biden on the ticket). For such people, the substantial stimulus packages offered by the Biden administration - the Inflation Reduction Act and friends - reflected their relation with Biden, as did faltering attempts to revive anti-trust enforcement, and thus a reason to get inside the tent and do ‘real politics’.

Leaving aside the moral vacuity of such a stance - what is a stimulus package compared to a genocide?! - it is simply misconceived. These are long-running policies of the American state, which have proven difficult to achieve, thanks to the dysfunctional political machine that has to implement them. They cannot even, really, be weighed up with US foreign policy crimes at all; they are means by which US imperialism proposes to get away with more crimes.

The American left needs an independent policy - which need not imply universally refusing (extremely) critical support to this or that leftwing Democrat, but certainly does imply extreme opposition to the bipartisan political apparatus, the military state machine, and in the end the pseudo-democratic structure of the US constitution itself.