14.11.2024

A strangely familiar failure

How could the Democrats lose to that man - again? The inquest begins, but do not expect any bold thinking from the decadent consultant class, writes Paul Demarty

After a political disaster as stunning as that of the Kamala Harris campaign’s defeat to Donald Trump, there is inevitably a search for blame.

The simpler the picture, the better - ideally, like a tyrannical boss, we are on the hunt for ‘one throat to choke’. Yet elections are complicated things. Especially when a country of 300 million is faced with a choice between two real candidates for one position of supreme authority; more especially still when that choice is mediated by the kind of baffling, baroque procedures mandated by the US constitution. Contrary to the popular aphorism, failure too has many fathers.

Indeed, it is arguable - and people have argued - that this is not quite so bad a failure as it looks. By historic standards, this is in fact a close election in terms of the popular vote. Trump’s clean sweep of the swing states has a dramatic look to it, but in many of them the margins were again very fine, as they had been in 2020, when he was defeated by Joe Biden. There are the global trends to mention too. The post-pandemic era has been exceptionally unkind to incumbent governments all over the world. Taking into account the bizarre circumstances of Harris’s emergence as the candidate, her defeat might merely be thought a respectable effort in the face of invincible headwinds.

Yet it cannot be so, because her defeat was to him - that man, with the vulgar tan, the Joycean digressions, the cartoonish collection of vices. A man who next January will be inaugurated for president the second time, four years and two weeks after he made a two-bit coup attempt. For Democrats, the failure to exclude such a person from meaningful contention for the presidency is a blot on the American copybook - never mind the failure to defeat him on two occasions out of three. (On this point, if no other, we have to say that we agree.)

Glamour

How can this have happened? There is the first option, that nothing could have been done. This was put very starkly - and in a way so idiotic that it is somewhat telling - by Joy-Ann Reid, an anchor at the uber-liberal MSNBC network: “This really was a flawlessly run campaign,” she told her distraught and dwindling audience. “[Rapper] Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her. She had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the [Taylor] Swifties, she had the Bey-hive [Beyonce Knowles fans]. You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time.”

Here we really do feel that history is repeating itself exactly. The celebrity glitz failed to rub off on Hillary Clinton eight years ago, and she had real stars stumping for her - not some washed-up 90s comedian like Latifah and pro forma statements of support from Swift and Charli XCX. Even in this, the most utterly diversionary aspect of American politics, Harris underperformed, but no matter: however stupid American voters may be, they are not so stupid as to take their voting orders from Taylor Swift. The failure of red-carpet endorsements to swing elections is now so longstanding that it deserves its own Eras Tour.

Reid’s talk about how such a flawless campaign failed brings us to our second set of explanations - the identitarian ones. “Anyone who has experienced or been in the United States for any period of time,” she said, “cannot have believed it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of colour.“ (In fairness, she was speaking in the midst of election night, and did not have the benefit of the following statistics.) Here, things are more of a mixed bag. There really is a gender gap in American politics, which has notably widened since 2012. More men lean Republican, compared to women. Pre-election polling suggested that it might be on the verge of dramatically widening again, though that did not happen in the event, if exit poll analysis is to be believed. In any case, it is an interesting phenomenon, deserving of further study.

On the race question, things are far more complicated for the identitarians. A significant uptick in the black vote for Trump does not seem to have occurred, though it did increase a little. Far more interesting is the Latino vote, which was more or less split down the middle this time. If Trump’s racism is directed anywhere, it is against the people of Central and South America - “they’re sending rapists” and all that. Yet this is exactly the ethnic-minority demographic where he did best (except perhaps Native Americans, who may have swung to him dramatically). The ‘white rage’ account of Trumpism cannot be easily discarded: after all, it is a certainty that he took close to all of the votes of conscious white racists. Yet it is clearly no longer the whole picture, if indeed it ever was.

Indeed, the identitarians are directly opposed by anti-identitarian explanations. The problem, for these people - largely on the right of the Democrats - is that the party has become beholden to various ultra-woke constituencies. As a result, they claim, it is associated with unpopular policies like open borders and defunding the police, and can only communicate to voters in the form of impenetrable intersectional jargon. If you want Latinos to vote for Trump, the argument goes, just insist on calling them ‘Latinx’.

As a criticism, this might have had some purchase four years ago - the year of Nancy Pelosi taking the knee in her Covid mask and kente cloth (a year, remember, when a Democrat won the presidential election in any case). As a description of the Harris campaign, however, it is highly questionable. With a few trivial exceptions, Harris steered clear of the whole territory. She declined to make much of her ethnic background or gender, or to distance herself from Biden’s adoption of Trump’s border policy. Far from proposing defunding the police, she ran as a cop, against the felon Trump, playing on her origins as a prosecutor. Next!

We come to, at last, the explanation largely favoured by the left, or at least its less identitarian sections: as the headline to Michael Roberts had it in this paper last week, it ‘Was the economy, stupid’. Here, at least, we meet what voters actually reported as being their overriding concern. As Roberts noted, headline economic figures may have looked good, but ordinary Americans did not feel the benefit. Real wages have at best stagnated over Biden’s term. Inflation is now under control, but prices remain high.

This is, in principle, a survivable obstacle. Many have mentioned Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign - having endured a torrid time towards the end of his first term, he nevertheless went after opponent Mitt Romney with bared teeth, painting him as a parasitic downsizer with personal responsibility for deindustrialisation wherever he got the chance. The picture stuck, not least because it was accurate. As Bhaskar Sunkara wrote in his Guardian post-mortem last week, “more than policy, Americans craved a villain”. If Trump could not serve, why not Elon Musk, or any of the other kleptocrats who now felt emboldened to back him? Harris might have run on such economic populism, but she dramatically retreated from it early in her campaign, and settled into a Clintonesque role as the candidate of real businessmen, not a faker like Trump.

She did not endorse some of the stupider punditry that accused Americans of being foolish for not believing headline GDP figures rather than their lying checking-account balances. But she did not have anything like the simplicity of Trump’s ‘solution’ to the problem: tariffs, mass deportations, running the government with good “business acumen”. And so she lost.

Weakness

We meet the limits of this outlook - which you could call social-Democratic, with a capital D - when we ask why she did not endorse such punditry. Harris has no beliefs, after all; so these beliefs are as good as any other. She is not above adopting radical rhetoric, like Nancy Pelosi draping a kente cloth over her neck; she showed that in her 2020 primary campaign. Some blame her brother in law, Tony West, whom she placed in charge of economic policy, and who is a bigwig at Uber. Again though - why him?

It seems that here we have to rehearse the sequence of events that landed her in the hot seat. Back in 2020, when Bernie Sanders was again riding high (and Harris herself was being humiliated) in the primary contest, there came a moment when the Democratic establishment - led by Obama - decided to close ranks. They did so, despite Obama’s own misgivings, around Biden, who was visibly declining even then. Since it was the year of George Floyd’s murder and the mass protests that occasioned, the choice of the whitest man in American politics was tough for many to take. Harris was chosen as VP partly because she was black and a woman, and partly because her disastrous primary outing made her unthreatening to the prickly, paranoid Biden. Biden, for his part, had made it known that he would be a one-term president if he won in 2020.

He did win; and he began to believe his own bullshit, especially after the 2022 midterms turned out better than expected. Once he decided to run again, the Democratic machine ensured there would be no serious primary, which meant a rude awakening when it turned out that Biden was simply incapable of campaigning early in the summer. Biden hung on, but Pelosi - who, whatever her faults, has something of the ruthlessness of the machine politics of former times in her - finally managed to offload him, when it became clear that a true landslide Trump victory was all but inevitable. She now claims that she expected a truncated open selection to follow, but failed to get one, and blames Biden for immediately endorsing Harris.

When Harris emerged as the candidate, she was actually in a very weak position. The honeymoon period never took her meaningfully into the lead. She was known to be a lightweight, essentially a figure of fun, and more or less invisible during her whole tenure as vice-president. She had no real base of support at the grassroots - even the entirely Twitter-based ‘K-Hive’ of obnoxious superfans had largely dissolved. So she had to borrow others. The only thing she had in her locker was effectively infinite money (Harris-Walz out-raised Trump-Vance by a factor of two). So she ran the money campaign, which means you don’t scare the money, and you do what the money wants. She could not have done anything else (except perhaps not wasting quite so much of it on pointless celebrity cameos).

This is not a matter of individual choice per se. The real story here is the malfunctioning of the Democratic Party as an instrument of the American state. Its hyper-professionalisation has stunted the growth of regional party elites, and therefore poisoned the talent pool of potential leaders, leaving them reliant entirely on an aloof and increasingly decadent consultant class in the DC area. A Democratic revival is surely possible in the coming years - even likely, given how obviously fake Trump’s populism is. (The US president is, after all, the ultimate ‘one throat to choke’.) For it to last, however, it would require a Trump-level event; and, given the overall drift of US policy towards great-power conflict, the result would probably be a more radical version of military Keynesianism than either Biden or Trump were capable of.

The left cannot address this situation by way of riding the populist tiger. Sunkara’s suggestion in The Guardian that one simply needs a villain to make it work suggests he is, alas, engaging in the same kind of toytown Gramscianism that inconsequential leftists have always employed to give themselves the illusion of power.

For us the job is the same as it was before - supplanting the Democrats with an independent working class party.