We Deserved This

Looking forward to the next four years…

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Since 2015, much ink has been spent trying to comprehend the appeal of Donald Trump amongst a certain segment of the population. Was it racism? Economic anxiety? Disaffection with the political system generally? Well yes, it was all of these things. But the glue that binds them together is something less often remarked upon, something that the former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges astutely observed early in Trump’s first term – that Donald Trump thinks, sounds, and acts like the average American. Accordingly, such people find Trump intuitively appealing. For those wondering how Trump pulled off another win, in an immediate sense, this is the answer. “Trump is able to communicate with tens of millions of Americans,” Hedges wrote, because they too were “raised in front of screens, because they too have been linguistically and intellectually mutated by digital images. They lack the ability to detect lies or think rationally. They are part of our post-truth culture.” More bluntly: ever hear a Fox News segment playing in the background at an airport or a bar, and think to yourself, the fuck are these people talking about? Well, millions of people were raised on that, had their opinions and worldviews molded by that, and, as George Carlin used to like to remind us, “they all vote.”

In these troubled times, I always try to help people laugh through the pain. To that end, I will invoke two of my favorite comedians, Carlin being one of them. He was making essentially the same point as Hedges, just far less politely: “This country is full of nitwits, assholes, fuckups, scumbags, jerkoffs and dipshits – and they all vote. You know those people on the Jerry Springer Show? Those are the average Americans.” Indeed, “we got some dumbass motherfuckers floating around this country,” he would go on to say. Of course, that’s not how they see it, hence our problem. Every such person sees themself as a genius. The similarity to, and thus natural affinity for, Donald Trump should be obvious.

While Carlin didn’t explicitly say dumb white people, you can kind of infer it from the rest of his spiel. Dave Chappelle, on the other hand, was not as shy about this. Of all the white people, “the poor whites are my least favorite,” Chappelle joked. “We’ve gotten a lot of trouble out of them.” Chappelle knew this, he said, because “I listened to them! I listened to them say naïve, poor white people things.” Such as, “man, Donald Trump’s gonna go to Washington, and he’s gonna fight for us!” “You dumb motherfuckers,” Chappelle replied. “You are poor. He’s fighting for me!”

Of course, not every poor or working-class white person loves Trump – that would indeed be an unfair stereotype – but plenty do. And for those that do, I have to say, even though I know you’re not supposed to beat up on them, even though the socialist in me insists that I refrain from doing so, there’s a malicious little imp on my shoulder telling me to embrace the schadenfreude of it all. These people will continue to have their health care destroyed, their schools gutted, their job prospects diminished, and their communities ravaged by neoliberal austerity measures, all thanks to the policies of a dimwit billionaire whom they equate with Jesus Christ because they never learned how to think straight. In a perverse way, sometimes I think there’s a silver lining there – at least they will take themselves down along with us.

But then I snap out of it, and remind myself not to go there. After all, like all of us, they’re the products of structures they had little to no part in creating. And it wasn’t really these people who gave us Trump in 2016, nor was it them who have delivered him to us once this time. As Malaika Jabali pointed out in her award-winning article “The Color of Economic Anxiety,” which centers on Wisconsin voters, the people who elected Trump were those who always vote for Republicans: rich people, mostly white, who want their tax cuts – which Trump proceeded to give them. Meanwhile, many people who you’d think would’ve come out to vote against Trump stayed home. As Jabali explained,

A common narrative about the November 2016 election is that a wave of white backlash thrust Donald Trump to the White House and that white Obama voters “flipped” to Trump. This may have been true on a small scale, but Obama-Trump voters did not make a significant difference. White people of all genders and classes voted for Trump at about the same rates as they voted for Romney, McCain, and George W. Bush, and both white and Republican voter turnout stayed fairly steady between 2012 and 2016. More significant was the critical mass of Democrats who defected from the party or didn’t vote at all in the battleground states the Democratic Party needed most. The rate of this decline among Democrats in key swing states was larger than the increase of Republicans who brought Trump to victory. And in some states, the drop was unprecedented.

In the aftermath, Democrats “argue[d] about whether and how to win back the vanishingly small number of white Obama-Trump voters,” while studiously ignoring “the uncomfortable fact…that black voter turnout in 2016 was down in over half the country…If Clinton won over more of the black Democrats who voted in 2012 in just three states – Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan – she would have won the election.” This means that the critical question was, “why didn’t black voters turn out for Clinton?” My reflexive answer would have been “voter suppression,” a very persistent problem in seemingly every state with more than two Republican elected officials. Yet according to Jabali, “voter suppression was among the least important factors affecting black turnout in Wisconsin.” The real reason was, to put it quite simply, that Hillary Clinton sucked.

That’s right, it wasn’t Jill Stein, nor was it the nonexistent boogeyman of “Russian interference.” Neither was it the fact that America simply “wasn’t ready” for a woman president (Republican voters sure loved Sarah Palin, after all). No, it was Clinton’s awful record, and her refusal to distance herself from it. Clinton was the candidate of “the end of welfare as we know it,” the candidate of “superpredators,” the candidate of NAFTA, the candidate of the Iraq War, the candidate of the destruction of Libyan civil society (“we came, we saw, he died!”), the candidate of Goldman Sachs, and much else. Yes, Trump was the candidate of some of these things too, but the voters Jabali profiled didn’t turn out for Trump, either.

Clinton was a poster child of the decades-long right-wing turn by the Democratic Party, a phenomenon with deep roots in American politico-economic history. This rightward trajectory is bloody obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the recent past, but it has apparently escaped the notice of your average MSNBC viewer. And it is something that elected Democrats have spent the better part of a decade trying to avoid reckoning with. During this time, they’ve tossed out a number of alternative explanations for Trump’s rise, ranging from the plausible (racism) to the outright absurd (Russia Russia Russia). But the answer has been staring them in the face the whole time.

This point is worth elaborating on, because it’s something that both liberals and conservatives seem to be deeply confused about. And it is this: that 21^st century American liberalism is a right-wing ideology. The United States is famous for having never developed a mass-based labor party that could represent the interests of working people. To the extent that anything resembling this ever existed, it was the Democratic Party from the time of the New Deal until around the 1970s. And that iteration of the Democratic Party was hardly perfect – far from it. Among other things, it had long been constrained by its Southern “Dixiecrat” wing, and like today refused to give up on a criminal overseas war despite its senselessness, its inhumanity, and the obvious fact that it would cost them the election, which it did (like Biden, Johnson dropped out, giving us Nixon).

But at the very least, the Democratic Party of yore actually had a legislative track record that it could point to when it needed to get out the vote – the New Deal (including Social Security, unemployment insurance, farm programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, etc.), Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and the like. Starting in the 1970s, however, this began to change. Perhaps the most effective primer on what happened next is Thomas Frank’s essential book Listen Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? Frank accessibly narrates the history of the American political spectrum’s drastic shift to the right, starting with Clinton and continuing under Obama. The Republicans went off the spectrum in their unhinged subservience to capital, while the Democrats slid to the right to occupy the newly available ideological real estate.

There’s an easy way to confirm just how far to the right both parties have drifted over the past half century, and that is to look at the policies of Republican administrations prior to the shift. Today, the policies of Dwight Eisenhower and even Richard Nixon look like they were cribbed from the wishlist of what American discourse would label a “radical leftist.” Eisenhower taxed the wealthy at 95 percent of their incomes – and this was in an era when the wealthy were far less wealthy than they are today. And consider, for the sake of comparison, that Bernie Sanders only ever advocated raising taxes on the very wealthiest to around 70 percent, meaning that he was less radical than Eisenhower. Eisenhower also engaged in behemoth levels of deficit spending in order to continue FDR’s New Deal via the interstate highway system, the largest infrastructure project in American history. He also improved Social Security by extending coverage to include agriculture workers, who the Southern Democrats had originally forced FDR to exclude when the program was first created because they were mostly African Americans. What about Nixon? Well, Nixon created the EPA, as well as OSHA, and passed “some of the most far-reaching environmental laws in U.S. history,” according to environmental historian Keith Makoto Woodhouse. He also used the power of the state to stop corporate price-gouging masquerading as inflation, thereby earning the ire of free-market libertarians to this day. He also tried to institute a universal basic income (UBI) system, but was foiled at the last minute by corporate opposition. If any Democrat tried to do any of these things or their equivalents today, they’d be branded far-left lunatics, for the simple reason that in our far-right political system, most sensible political programs appear that way.

Curiously, conservatives and liberals alike appear to be wholly ignorant of this history. Perhaps understandably given their strident anti-intellectualism, right-wingers are completely incapable of distinguishing the milquetoast liberalism of the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens from the politics of Che Guevara. Witness Donald Trump & co. branding Kamala Harris a “Communist” this very election cycle. Meanwhile, liberal Democrats are in complete denial that at this point they are little more than Republicans with rainbow flags. There is nothing “left” about the liberalism promoted by the DNC. It mostly ignores labor – the chief constituency of any left movement – and embraces neoliberalism, imperialism, and xenophobia (yes, the Democrats are xenophobic too. Republicans scream about immigrants; Democrats scream about Russians – while quietly deporting comparable numbers of immigrants). That so many of them were overjoyed when Harris teamed up with Liz and Dick Cheney (the latter a much greater war criminal than Vladimir Putin) tells you everything you need to know about the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the CNN crowd.

It was this legacy of running to the right on policy, while trying to mask it with a multicultural aesthetic, that cost the Democrats this election. And really, what else could it have been? It sure as hell wasn’t the tactical brilliance of their opponents. While in the past Trump has displayed a kind of genius for tapping into the electorate, those instincts were notably absent this go around. From abandoning his “right-wing populist” rhetoric (which was always fake, but a brilliant campaign ploy), to laughing with Elon Musk (who gave him $75 million) about the joys of firing workers, to catering to the whims of the Israel lobby (Miriam Adelson alone gave him $100 million), Trump was hardly a compelling alternative, unless you’re the kind of person I described at the outset of this piece. He even managed to somehow find a less likeable, creepier Vice President than his last one, a major achievement considering what Pence was like.

Despite decades of lessons from which they might have learned, the Democrats chose to embrace tactics which have proven to fail every single time they have been tried. The results should not be shocking to anyone. “A campaign that embraces conservative themes and personalities, even while throwing out progressive policies here and there, is bound to alienate voters for whom politics isn’t just a platform for endless triangulation,” as Adam Johnson put it this morning in “Democrats chose backing a genocide over defeating Trump.”

The key word there is chose. Get ready to see a lot of people blame everyone but the Democratic Party for their loss in the coming months. People who didn’t vote. People who voted third party. But the truth is, it was trivially easy for the Harris campaign to win this election. They knew exactly what their base wanted – an end to the genocide in Gaza, and the kind of progressive policies Harris pretended to support during her shitshow 2019 campaign. That the campaign and the party chose – I say again, chose – to not even consider doing either, and to instead embrace living corpses like Cheney under the absurd – and it was absurd – pretense that this would somehow win over a mythical, likely non-existent group of voters nostalgic for Bush-era conservatism, was mind boggling. Their base wasn’t asking for much. “Ending a genocide” is not a big ask. That Harris & co. made a conscious decision to reject that path says a lot about the party and its leadership.

It also says a lot about its supporters. I’m not talking about people who held their noses and voted for Harris solely to keep Trump out. I can respect the argument that Trump would have been (and now, will be) worse than Harris on Palestine and much else, and thus that anyone concerned with doing the least amount of harm should vote for her. Well, I would accept that argument in a swing state, at least, since anywhere else it didn’t matter in the slightest. (I could also appreciate the argument many made in reply – “how could it possibly get any worse than this?”) But in either event, I’m not talking about those voters. I’m talking about the legions of liberal Democrats (or, to use less charitable internet parlance, “MSNBC shitlibs”) who were actually enthusiastic about her candidacy. For people like this, politics is a television show, and nothing more. It barely impacts them; the main difference between Trump and Harris is whether or not new main character in their favorite soap opera will be the one they like or the one they despise.

And even then, that anyone could look at the Harris campaign, let alone Harris’s record, and come away from any of it with enthusiasm makes you want to eat a grenade. The main reasons people were excited for her had everything to do with her identity, and absolutely nothing to do with her policies. There are far, far too many people out there who subscribe to what the scholar Catherine Rottenberg has termed “neoliberal feminism;” the idea that, solely because someone is a woman, they will ipso facto wield power more justly than their male predecessors. As Jesse Ventura (of all people) put it in a CNN interview when asked if he would endorse the Harris-Walz campaign, “Yes, I want to see a woman president. It’s time for a woman president; we men have screwed it up enough.” That sounds great, so long as you don’t think about it for more than a couple seconds. I’ve had to look at the pictures of a lot of mutilated children coming out of Gaza over the past year, many of them reduced to masses of pulpy flesh, delivered to their parents in bags for them to grieve before fleeing the next air strike. That imagery will be burned into my brain until the day I die. The idea that it would be some kind of progressive win for a woman to oversee this instead of a man is beyond disgusting. And yet, the fact that Harris was not merely a woman, but a woman of color, made this argument even more powerful for some people.

Unfortunately, this repulsive, faux-progressive attitude is shared by hordes of Americans, not just weirdos like Ventura. It is certainly common amongst wealthy white liberals, who have in many instances decided not to care about Gaza (or anything else). This probably allowed them get excited for Harris, since she had unwaveringly pledged to continue the Gaza genocide. She had also strangely begun aping neoconservative rhetoric about the “threat” posed by Iran. At that point, why run against Trump at all, if you’re going to mirror him this much?

Ultimately, the “it’s time for a woman” mindset is the crudest kind of identity reductionism. I’m not one to trash “identity politics” unconditionally (identity is understandably important to people, and the term “identity politics” itself is practically devoid of meaning anyway). But I am one to trash the utterly absurd idea that what matters most is the identity of the person in power, not the system of power itself. That is an infantile view of the world, embraced only by illiterates who are clueless about how things like capitalism and the national security state actually work – or worse, those who do know about these things, but see no problem with them.

Before Harris took over the campaign, the Democrats and their PR operation spent the better part of four years trying to convince all of us that what we could see with our own eyes wasn’t actually real. The attempt to “pull a fast one” on the public by disguising Joe Biden’s very, very obvious mental decline will go down in history as one of the most shameful, embarrassing maneuvers in the history of American electoral politics. And yet, the same people who marvel (correctly) at Trump’s idiocy, and his supporters’ gullibility about it, were positively eager to delude themselves about the incumbent president, solely because he came with a “D” in front of his name when he appeared on their screens.¹

When this Orwellian, 2+2=5 tactic became too embarrassing and potentially costly to continue, the party forced Biden out in what amounted to a kind of soft coup (Nancy Pelosi is said to have threatened Biden that “they could do this the easy way or the hard way”). When Harris was instantaneously coronated as his successor (no vote necessary, apparently), even more liberals than had willingly fallen for the ruse about Biden convinced themselves that Harris was some kind of a genius. Once again, anyone with eyeballs could see the truth, which was that Harris was visibly stupid. I often refer people to the Daily Show’s compilation of her word salads, not just because it’s funny, but because people who’ve only seen carefully curated clips of her, or else only see her reading off a teleprompter, genuinely have no idea that when she’s asked to speak impromptu – you know, that thing every functioning person does on a daily basis – she crumbles instantly. It was absolutely hilarious watching The New York Times try to acknowledge this while still being diplomatic about it, resulting in headlines like, “Harris Has Many Strengths. Giving Interviews Isn’t One of Them.” Reader, if a politician is bad at “giving interviews,” then they probably aren’t cut out for politics.

At this point, some might be thinking, “but what about abortion?” Indeed, the one argument we were told over and over was that Harris was going to protect abortion rights, and that this made her vastly superior to the alternative. What was interesting about this argument was the kind of people who made it. Judging from online discourse (which I realize is not always representative), it came from those who couldn’t care less about anything but this issue. The same people who didn’t hesitate to berate undecided voters concerned about genocide in Gaza as “single issue voters” seemed to care about abortion rights and nothing else. As someone who’s been pretty outspoken on this issue (and who’s done a lot more than just talk about it), I have always been repulsed by those who express zero desire to expand their moral horizon to encompass anything other than it.

Moreover, the idea that Democrats would somehow have protected abortion rights under a Harris presidency was always pretty dubious. You know how I know that? Because I’ve been conscious for more than the past five minutes. I remember Barack Obama campaigning in 2008 on codifying Roe v. Wade into law via the Freedom of Choice Act, which he promised to sign on the first day of his presidency. The law would have eliminated all federal, state and local restrictions on abortion. After his election, when he had a supermajority in the House and the Senate for two years (basically an unlimited mandate to do whatever he wanted), Obama changed his tune immediately, saying the issue was “not the highest legislative priority.” It was breathtaking to behold; he dropped his promise faster than Biden dropped his support for a public option on health care. I also remember more recently, when Nancy Pelosi was campaigning for the only anti-abortion Democrat, Henry Cuellar, against his much more progressive challenger – because, for her and for the party writ large, averting any potential lurches to the left on economics was and is far more important than protecting women’s reproductive rights. And while we’re on the subject of endorsements, I also seem to remember Biden running around Michigan campaigning for Republicans as recently as 2019, an incident everyone seems to have forgotten about.

Furthermore, people seem to forget that Roe was overturned while Biden was president, not Trump. This was in large part thanks to the wildly overrated Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who didn’t like Roe anyway), who refused to retire under Obama despite people begging her to do so, lest she die during, and thus be replaced by, the Trump administration. This, of course, is exactly what happened, and the rest is history. So you’ll pardon my skepticism that Democrats would have done anything about this if they took the White House, even if they could have. And without the supermajority that Obama had, what could Harris have done, other than hope that a couple conservative Supreme Court justices keeled over during her tenure? Undecided voters actually brought up this history with the Harris campaign, and the evasions they received in reply were stunning. The abortion issue has now been thrown back to the states, and unless something major changes, that is where battles over it will have to be fought.

Other Harris backers who tried to get people excited for her could only do so through outright lies. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez exemplified this. At the Democratic National Convention (which refused to admit any Palestinian delegates as speakers), she had the nerve to tell the audience that Harris was working tirelessly for a ceasefire, a lie so audacious that even Ilhan Omar blasted her for it. AOC went on to argue that Harris was going to fight for working people, which was almost as absurd as Dave Chappelle’s poor whites thinking that Trump was going to fight for working people. Harris has unabashedly pursued the same corporate backers as Trump. And let’s not forget that all this time she has been part of the Biden presidency. Remember when Biden infamously pledged to Wall Street that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected? Well, that’s a promise he kept, and Harris was VP the entire time, and I don’t recall her ever objecting. Then when she started campaigning, she sought to “differentiate” herself from Biden by assuring the business community that she’d be even friendlier to their interests than he was. People (myself included) love to dunk on the mainstream press, but I have to say, all one had to do was read New York Times headlines to discover this.

It’s true that on a select few crucial issues like anti-trust and especially climate, Biden’s tenure was mildly better than Trump’s. But that’s saying very little, and few people who were making the case for Harris were doing so on the grounds of things like anti-trust. When it comes to climate, yes, environmental organizations were clear that another Trump term would be catastrophic. I agree, though given Harris’s commitment to fracking and drilling, I am not quite sure that things would have been all that different under her. Biden was only mildly less terrible for the climate than Trump – hardly a major accomplishment. We’re talking about differences of degree, not kind.

So where does all of this leave us? In a pretty nasty spot, to be sure. Trump’s track record is appalling on just about every issue, from racial justice to financial regulation to the environment to policing to Israel to reproductive justice to immigration to nuclear proliferation and more. There’s no way to sugar coat any of that; the best advice is simply to prepare. And I don’t just mean mentally prepare. People need to actually take action, which means getting out of the habit of voting once every four years, then going back to brunch while the latest season of the American politics show plays out on TV. The only hope is for explicitly left-oriented grassroots organizations, committed to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist politics, to hold the line against the antiworker, pro-war, anti-environment policies of yet another Republican presidency. Real progress will come from the streets, via community groups that organize in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, and the like. Whatever progress occurs will come from these groups, composed as they are of people who understand that politics is a constant struggle, not merely the act of voting every four years and vegging out the rest of the time.

If it’s any consolation to people, the oft-heard refrain that Trump’s win represents “the end of democracy” isn’t true, if only because the US has never been a democracy. From its earliest days as a settler-colonial slave “Republic,” to the era of the Robber Barons and imperial expansion, to the Cold War, to whatever we’re living through right now, “democracy” has never described the American system. As the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James wrote in his famous essay “Every Cook Can Govern,” democracy is when ordinary people (the titular cook) play meaningful roles in governing, and not just the political sphere, but the economic one as well. We obviously don’t have that, nor have we ever. But it’s worth fighting for, and in the coming years a lot of people will indeed be fighting for it, likely at great personal cost. You might even consider joining them.

Meanwhile, the liberals who in their enthusiasm for the prospect of a woman of color president, decided they didn’t care that the woman of color in question was an avowedly genocidal candidate who basically ran on Trump’s immigration policy and courted Republican supervillains at every opportunity, while practically giving the middle finger to her own base, will be able to comfortably watch that struggle play out on TV. I hear this season is supposed to be pretty gripping.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

1. It’s also crucial to remember that before he was senile, Biden was one of the worst politicians ever. So those who defended him on the grounds that he was just as lucid as he’d always been were effectively defending a known racist, warmonger, anti-worker servant of the credit card industry.