Well, Donald Trump has been reelected and even for a committed anti-alarmist like myself, there's no way to sugarcoat the pill: It's a disastrous turn, for both the U.S. and the world, and the negative effects of it are likely to continue to impact everyone alive to read these words today for the rest of their lives.
As in the aftermath of any big loss, there are an infinity of assessments of What Happened, most refracted through the lens of the biases of those offering them, far too many long on wind but short on facts. Ritchie Torres, the dimwitted Clintonite congressclown that New York's 15th district has seen fit in inflict upon the rest of us, spoke for much of the online Clintonite-right faction in trying to somehow blame progressives:
Notably absent from the presidential ballot on Tuesday, of course, was anyone from "the far left," anyone running on "defund the police" or "from the river to the sea" or "Latinx" and anyone who either listens to anyone who pitches such things or who pitches any substantial genuine progressive reform. What American got was yet another lackluster Clintonite-right candidate, guided by all the same Clintonite-right advisers, bought off by all the same donors. Again. And this ticket lost to Trump. Again. By any reasonable assessment, it would seem as if Trump has a much greater friend than "the far left."
This writer's own analysis comes through the lens of his own biases as well, but as Torres' irrational raving indicates, not all such assessments are equal. Biases can be baggage. If they put some brand of blinders on the assessor or, as with Torres, some brand of hallucinogenic pharmaceutical in him, they aren't going to allow for a very good explanation for anything. But as with anything else, the soundness of competing analyses, however they're arrived at, is still always a question of whose argument is the most sound.
Many commentators think Trump's victory signals a hard shift, by Americans, to the far-right, toward Trump's ugly fascism, but that's arguably an even worse take than Torres'.
It's a fact that Trump is the ideal candidate of his hardest-core followers, the authoritarian strongman of which they've always dreamed. It's also a fact that they, alone, aren't even close to sufficiently numerous to elect him. A dynamic that is always at work in our elections but that few seem to recognize or acknowledge is that when, in a two-party system, it comes to expressing discontent with the party in power, the other party is the default. There's no other game in town. Trump benefited from simply having a failed incumbent of the other party in the White House, one with whom Americans have been exhausted for years.
Trump also sells his campaign via a firehose-of-falsehoods approach to propaganda, spewing many different, often blatantly contradictory, views on everything. I've often used this as an example:
"A 2016 Washington Post article offers an hilarious look at Trump’s many positions on the minimum wage in that campaign. In sequence, Trump opposed raising the federal minimum wage, said wages were already 'too high,' as if he supported reducing it, said he supports raising the min. wage to $15, said wages were 'too low,' supported raising the min. wage but not to $15, supported entirely abolishing the federal min. wage and supported raising the min. wage to $10/hour. In office, Trump made no effort to do any of these things. Take your pick."The only through-line is Trump trying to get into power. Out of one side of his mouth, Trump is the "anti-war" candidate; out of the other, he persistently disdains diplomacy and international cooperation--the things that keep nations out of war--and advocates, as a solution to every international difficulty, belligerent authoritarian aggression. When it comes to expressing his absolute hatred of immigrants, no lie is black enough, no measure against them harsh enough, but then he'll say he's just opposed to illegal immigrants and that, in fact, the U.S. needs more immigrants--while, during his first term, radically restricting legal immigration, pledging more of the same in his next and promising to deport legal immigrants already in the U.S..
Trump even tries to appeal to progressive values broadly shared by most Americans while pushing darkest fascism that repudiates all of them. The Trump who, at his Madison Square Garden event on 27 Oct., was warm-and-fuzzily touting his Muslim support...
"[T]hese are people--by the way, they're great. They just want peace. They want to have peace, and it's great... [T]he Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion."...is the same Trump who falsely claimed thousands of American Muslims celebrated in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11 when the World Trade Center fell, called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., actually enacted a version of that ban and has pledged, in the just-concluded campaign, to bring it back and strengthen it. He praised his Jewish support; he has repeatedly disparaged and condescended to Jews, suggesting, for example, in September that if he lost, Jews would be responsible, for voting for "the enemy." Trump has pledged to bar from the U.S. those who "don't like our religion." By"our religion," he wasn't talking Judaism or Islam.
Again, take your pick.
Trump has seamlessly integrated straightforwardly fascist themes with traditional conservative motifs and imagery, "Morning in America" fancies of tax cuts and a return of prosperity for those who stiffen in nostalgic appreciation for such corn porn, alongside a ruinous campaign of deportations against untermenschen, to heat the hemoglobin of the blood-and-soil brethren.
All of this contradictory and nonsensical messaging goes out there, being further distorted by the massive right-wing media apparatus that plagues the U.S.. People, who tend to have a lot more going on in their lives than following public affairs, get bits and pieces of it, form their notion of Trump--and, more broadly, their notion of what's happening in the U.S.--from what they pick up. Sometimes--ofttimes--they hear what they want to hear, remember what they want to remember. It's an exaggeration to say Trump doesn't even have policies, but it's dead-on accurate to say that, other than a few typically really bad and harmful ones, he's entirely unserious about policy. That's why he can use that firehose so effectively--he doesn't really care. What people who don't closely follow public affairs tend to get from him is a vibe, and the vibe he's projecting, when one strips away most of the specifics, is the one they're currently buying: discontent. People have been let down by the political Establishment--that's just a fact--and they feel it; Trump tells them they're right, and calls out The Elites of that Establishment, excoriates them, pokes fun at them. Even if, when it comes to that, his targets are the wrong ones, his attacks ludicrous, ill-informed, false, no other politician does that. And the political Establishment hates Trump, which allows him to pose as some sort of rebel and Wear Their Scorn As A Badge Of Honor. Trump's overawing lack of polish has always made him seem, on a public stage otherwise populated by blow-dried, scripted, rehearsed-down-to-the-micronometer politicians, Genuine--another quality appreciated by people perpetually bombarded by a never-ending parade of those kinds of political robots. All of this is a style, a brand, and though any reasonable, informed analyst would dismiss Trump as something like the least ethical used car salesman they'd ever encountered, it's received by many as an indication that Trump is a strong, straight-talking, hard-assed leader, something else people appreciate.[1]
On the other side, of course, are the Democrats, and the scorn that party's corrupt Clintonite-right leadership has earned by this disaster is very difficult indeed to adequately express. It isn't inaccurate to say that Trump has never won the presidency but, rather, that Democrats have lost it.
The public doesn't like rule by the donor-driven conservative "Democrats" of the Clintonite right but a dysfunctional system has ensured the faction has held hegemony over the party apparatus and its federal elected officials for decades, even as the public has moved further left. Joe Biden was a conservative "Democrat" of a bygone era and had been showing signs of significant cognitive impairment since he'd entered the 2020 presidential race but the party Establishment backed him because after all their other potential champions fell, they needed a name-brand Clintonite to defeat progressive Bernie Sanders. During that campaign, Biden told his wealthy donors that "nothing will fundamentally change" under his rule, and in office, that usually seemed to be his guiding principle. His presidency was a miserable failure (Trump was, in fact, only able to present himself as a viable presidential candidate after J6 because of Biden's refusal to act against he and his goons in an appropriate and timely manner).[2] His approval rating went permanently underwater--more disliked than liked--in Aug. 2021, only 7 months into his regime, and it hit permanent majority disapproval only 2 months later.
Yet still, the party poobahs stuck with him. An ABC News report on the 2023 Democratic National Committee's winter meeting in Philadelphia spotlighted how out-of-touch they'd become. It was headlined "Democrats Rally Without 'Any Reservations' Around Biden's Expected 2024 Campaign." The money-quote:
"'I have heard from no one within the DNC or other power brokers within the Democratic Party any reservation about Joe Biden,' one of the DNC members said."...while that same week, the ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 58% of rank-and-file Dems "support the idea of nominating someone other than Biden... Just 31% said they would support Biden... Sixty-two percent of Americans say they would be 'dissatisfied' or 'angry' if Biden were reelected"; 62% of respondents thought Biden has accomplished little or nothing. While party officialdom was unanimously full-steam-ahead on a reelection effort by this doomed, brain-waxed incumbent, supermajorities of Democrats had, since at least July 2022 (when I first began tracking the phenomenon), been saying they didn't want Biden to run again and didn't want the party to renominate him. The rest of the public was even less warm to the idea; by the time Biden left the race in July, he'd been losing to Trump in the head-to-head polling averages for over 10 months, in an unbroken line, losing every swing state for 7 (and losing most of them since the previous Fall).
Biden's delusional insistence on running for reelection, backed by the party elite (many of whom were, for years, complicit in trying to conceal his cognitive impairment from the public), robbed Democrats of what would have been, in the absence of this, a vibrant primary that would have allowed Dem voters--whether they would have availed themselves of the opportunity or not--to pick a strong contender from a broad selection of candidates. Had Biden remained in the race, Trump would have defeated him on 5 Nov. in a major landslide that would have been accompanied by major Dem losses all over the U.S.. But as it was, Biden wasted over a year of everyone's time, then dramatically self-destructed in a prime-time debate with Trump.
Only then, when forced into it, did the party hierarchy begin to turn against him. When Biden was forced out of the race by their newfound no-confidence, he threw his weight behind Kamala Harris. Though someone not connected to the Biden administration would have had a better chance, Biden had already screwed that pooch on that; there was little time to introduce a whole new face. More importantly, no one else would have been able to access the illicit campaign money Biden had collected to date. So Harris, who wouldn't have won a competitive primary battle for the nomination, was thrown into the deep end of a campaign for President of the United States at, in effect, the very last minute. It would be an unenviable position for a gifted politician, and Harris would never be mistaken for one of that caliber.
Still, she started with some positive progressive populist messaging that put her numbers, which were rather awful, in ascent. She proposed removing medical debt from Americans' credit scores. She scorched corporate greed and pledged to back a federal ban on price-gouging on food (inflation and sustained, insanely elevated prices on everything was a huge issue, that could have--and should have--been been hit at every turn). She endorsed revoking tax incentives that rewarded private equity for buying up large numbers of homes (such investors exploiting the housing market is a major factor in making home ownership increasingly unattainable for Americans), and called for a legal crackdown on rent-setting software that allows for price-fixing by corporate landlords. She swiped Trump's proposal to end taxes on tips for service workers, putting a more sane face to a solid idea otherwise advanced by a candidate who was entirely unserious about it. It was a really small policy though, and all of these proposals are really just tinkering, not the big, structural reforms that are needed, but for a hastily-assembled campaign, they were a good start. In the one good major decision of her campaign, she picked plainspoken Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running-mate. Walz, in turn, did something so unusual these days that it seemed revolutionary: he pointed out that Republicans are the aggressors in the sorts of culture-war "issues" on which they prefer to dwell, characterized their authoritarian obsession with getting the state into everyone else's private affairs as "creepy" and "weird" and greeted it with exhortations to "Mind your own damn business." Basic, obvious and utterly effective progressive messaging that Dem politicians at that level haven't used in ages.[3]
This pulled her out of the hole in which she'd been as a consequence of her association with Biden and put her ahead in the presidential race.
Then, instead of building on it, came what many are calling The Pivot.
I'm not really fond of that characterization. It's describing, broadly, Harris' move to the right, and it's an accurate representation of how What Happened was widely received but the reality is that Harris was already a conservative opportunist. Calling it The Pivot puts her on the wrong starting-blocks and implies there was a dramatic, Suddenly It Happened sort of change, when that wasn't really the case. The mildly populist messaging that made her a contender was just that--"mildly"--and had, from the start, always been muddled with a certain degree of Clintonite muck.[4] But as big money from the donor class began to fill Harris' coffers, the populist talk quickly faded and all but disappeared, the muck consuming nearly everything. I'll stick with calling it The Pivot, but I'll leave it in caps like that and note it's a very problematic characterization.
Arguably, The Pivot can be said to have started with a series of stories in which the Harris campaign was quietly but systematically walking back support for nearly every progressive position the candidate had made a show of taking in the past. She no longer supported a ban on fracking. She--again--no longer supported Medicare For All. She wouldn't support expanding the Supreme Court. She no longer supported a federal jobs guarantee. In her 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she had advocated making border-crossing a civil infraction, rather than a criminal offense, bringing it in line with the rest of current law (where being present in the U.S. without authorization is a civil infraction); she ditched that too. Would she support student debt relief? Well...
"Her platform briefly mentions it, saying that she will continue 'working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt' but without outlining a specific plan."On the campaign trail, Harris never so much as mentioned the issue, much less any plan, not even at her debate with Trump, when Trump attacked Joe Biden on it.
This was Kamala the conservative opportunist. She'd frequently cosplayed as a progressive earlier in her political career because she thought it would benefit her, but she'd proven herself willing to jettison all of it on a dime and move right--to, for example, become Biden's running mate--whenever she thought doing so would benefit her. That sort of thing is demoralizing and, having seen the same con many times, exhausting to politically-engaged progressives, appalling to those who want and maybe desperately need progressive reforms and are being left behind by such shifts and breeds distrust, uncertainty and disapprobation across the entire political spectrum. No one--or, at least, no one who doesn't see politics as a sporting event and just mindlessly cheers on their team--likes a flip-flopper.
The Pivot continued.
Harris used her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Committee--one of her highest-profile moments of the campaign--to announce she would revive the atrocious "bipartisan" border bill that had mercifully died in congress back in February. When that bill was being hashed out, Democratic legislators had simply given up on trying to get anything positive into it, abandoning even the Dreamers, and, in the name of "bipartisanship," just gave Republicans everything they wanted--a bloated, punitive, miserable atrocity of a bill--only to see Donald Trump order it killed anyway so that he could run on the immigration "issue." Harris said she would pass it through congress and sign it into law. This included, among other things, resuming construction of Trump's border wall, a project Harris had, in 2018, denounced as "unAmerican" and that Biden had abandoned. In a campaign in which Trump's hate-filled tirades involved insisting immigrants were a pet-eating, blood-poisoning, subhuman infestation carrying out a violent crime-wave against white Americans, Harris' representation of herself as a border-hawk, even a kinder, gentler one, only bolstered Trump's narrative.
Under Biden, the U.S. had become not just the largest producer of fossil fuels in the world but in the history of the world, with all the negative consequences that entails for the present and the future; Harris, who, in another lifetime, had been a supporter of the Green New Deal, announced she would be supporting even greater domestic fossil fuel production, bragged about Biden's "accomplishments" in this area.
In the 2020 campaign, Harris had proposed taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. In his last budget proposal, Joe Biden proposed just that--taxing long-term capital gains for households with an annual income of $1 million or more at a 39.6% rate. Even this proved to be too much for candidate Harris, who again moved to the right of even her conservative boss by proposing only a 28% rate.
Biden had been bleeding support since last Fall for his unwavering, unconditional backing of the ongoing campaign of mass murder in Gaza by the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which was trying, for months, to draw the U.S. into a larger regional war while Netanyahu was all but openly backing Trump. When Harris became the nominee, it was hoped that she would go in a different direction but in August, her campaign flatly stated she wouldn't support an arm embargo, the only thing likely to put a stop to the killing. When, at a campaign event, Harris faced protesters chanting "we won't vote for genocide," she was condescending: "You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I'm speaking." At a CNN townhall event on 23 Oct., Harris was asked what she would say to those who are thinking about voting for a 3rd party candidate or sitting out the presidential election because of this issue, her answer was just ghastly: she suggested that those who care about this issue should vote for her anyway because they also care about "the price of groceries" and abortion rights.
At his debate with Harris, Trump made use of all of this, saying
"Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She's going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat. She's gone to my philosophy."...before, of course, turning on his firehose again to add that she was a "Marxist" and that, if she was elected, she'd change back.
Harris had to bear the baggage of a widely despised incumbent Clintonite-right administration of which she had been a part from the beginning and was stuck with trying to present herself as a change candidate--because absolutely no one was interested in continuing Biden's rule--while, at the same time, not being terribly critical of Biden, due to the mechanics of the Democratic party and her place in the administration. Politically, she needed to find a way to at least seem as if she was dramatically separating herself from Biden but she never did. The contradiction came to a head when, appearing on ABC's THE VIEW less than a month before the election, Harris was asked what, during the last four years, she would have done differently as president than Joe Biden. It was an obvious question, something for which any remotely skilled politician would have been prepared. Harris wasn't.
"There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of--and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact--the work that we have done."...and that's probably how she really feels but if Harris had been actively trying to commit political suicide, the only more effective way to do it would have been to advocate something like legalized pedophilia. Trump and the Republicans seized on these profoundly brainless remarks and plastered them all over her right up until the election.
That same interview also showcased what was probably the most ruinous aspect of The Pivot, Harris deciding to spend much of the latter portion of her campaign (particularly the last month or so) alienating her own party's base to focus on chasing that cherished Clintonite chimera, the "moderate Republican" (often expressed these days as the "anti-Trump Republican"), that mythical mass of conservative voters out there somewhere who, if they could be magically mobilized, would allow corrupt donor-driven "Democrats" to ignore/replace even more of their party's progressive base and be even more pro-plutocrat with impunity. It was one of Hillary Clinton's many blunders in 2016 and as if that election--and it's results--had never happened, Harris fell right into it:
The only thing Harris told THE VIEWers she would do that was "different" from Biden was "I plan on having a Republican in my cabinet." A few days later, she said that, if elected,
"Not only will I have a Republican in my Cabinet, but I'm also going to... [create] a bipartisan council of advisers who can then give feedback on policy as we go forward... We need a healthy two-party system, we have to have a healthy two-party system, we have to. It's in the best interest of all of us."How something like that could help produce "a healthy two-party system" or even if it could, why producing "a healthy two-party system" is the job of a presidential candidate of one party who is supposed to be running against the other party, rather than helping empower it, is anyone's guess.
Not so much a mystery--though Harris was entirely oblivious to it--was the harm Harris was regularly doing to herself with this sort of nonsense. In the home stretch, the earlier positive pitches of progressive reform were mostly gone.[5] There were no bold proposals. Harris, charging to the right, was down to vaguely hinting at a pro-business vision of her presidency for which no one poorer than a millionaire was interested in dropping a tab, mouthing reductionist and inadequate "Orange Man Bad" messaging re:Trump, parading around celebrity supporters and, most especially, drawing, then, with no sense of self-awareness, waving around endorsements by highly partisan Republicans, whose backing only confirmed she was conservative enough not to alienate their support. Many of those same Republicans had, in fact, already endorsed Joe Biden before he withdrew. She was running on "defending democracy," which her own party had tried to undermine for years, while refusing to practice it--refusing to offer a positive vision for a better future around which voters could rally. Even if Harris hadn't directly said, on nationwide television, that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, this just sounded--overwhelmingly and depressingly sounded--like more of the same.
On 18 Oct., the New York Times reported about how Harris
"has carefully courted business leaders, organizing a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues."That would be the representatives of the same business class that Harris, during her early moments of populist posturing, was publicly pummeling. Behind the scenes--while she was pounding Trump for being a puppet of such creatures--they were the ones shaping her policies. Soon, little pretense remained; Harris was openly touting endorsements of her candidacy by scores of "business leaders" and adopting billionaire Mark Cuban as one of her most visible campaign surrogates.
Democrats wouldn't allow a pro-Palestinian speaker to address the party convention about "the impact of Israel's military operation in Gaza," but they couldn't seem to award enough speaking slots to Republicans. Harris received and raved about endorsements by over 100 former Republican national security officials, then over 250 former staffers of the Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. administrations and the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. She drew endorsements from Alberto Gonzalez, the civil-liberties-slaying former Attorney General for George Bush Jr., and gore-spattered war-criminal Dick Cheney, Bush's Vice President. In North Carolina, Harris "used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her." Harris repeatedly campaigned with Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, former congressclown and a vile reactionary demagogue despised by progressives but that the Clintonite right had bizarrely tried to turn into a hero for her opposition to Trump. They appeared together in, among other places, Ripon, Wisconsin, because it was the birthplace of the Republican party, and the crowd cheered at the mention of Dick Cheney and Trump VP Mike Pence! The New York Times reported that in Oct., Harris stumped with Cheney "more than any other ally." Harris sent Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton's corpse to Michigan, home of the largest Arab and Muslim community in the U.S. and a state she was in danger of losing because of Israeli mass-murder in Gaza. Torres, our old pal from the beginning of this article who tried to blame "the far left" for Harris' loss, talked up Harris' support of Israel and, among other things,
"emphasized that Harris’s team had rejected calls by Michigan-based organizers of the “Uncommitted” protest movement to host a Palestinian-American speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Harris made the controversial move, Torres reportedly said, because she didn’t want to risk the chance of any speaker opposing Israel."[6]Clintoncorpse, meanwhile, asserted that Hamas "forces" the IDF to kill civilians and dismissed, as misguided, criticism of the Israelis' grotesquely disproportionate violence.[7] Harris went on to lose Michigan. Three days before the election, Harris dispatched Hillary Clinton to stump for her campaign in Florida to, in the words of one local news outlet, "energize voters in hopes of turning Florida blue." Hillary Clinton has, for most of the last 7 years, been more disliked by Americans than Donald Trump and lost Florida in 2016, after Barack Obama had won it twice.[8] Harris went on to lose Florida--a swing state--by over 13 points.
Throughout these final weeks, the song remained the same.
It didn't help matters when, only 6 days before the election, Biden, in his typically addle-brained fashion, seemed to call Trump supporters "garbage." Biden was reacting to MAGA "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe, who, at a Trump rally a few days earlier, referred to Puerto Rico as "literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean." Biden retorted, "the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters." In context, Biden was clearly referring to Hinchcliffe's words (think "supporter's"), but Trump and the Republicans pounced on it, and even if they were being somewhat dishonest, they were right to do so. Biden can't communicate; he needed to shut the fuck up and stay out of the race. His mind-melter turned what should have been a scandal that hurt Trump--one of Trump's multiple racist speakers--into one that hurt Harris--the sitting president of her party pulling a "basket of deplorables."
In the election aftermath, Rolling Stone has reported that many Democratic operatives and insiders made the case that "palling around" with the Cheneys "and making the campaign's closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris" were bad ideas, that they would alienate and dissuade Dem voters "and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states." They were told to go piss up a rope. So add that to the pile.
A fat lot of things went into Trump's win and that kind of "leadership" in the Democratic party may be the porkiest of the passel. One could just look at Joe Biden's spectacular unpopularity, say Harris just wasn't able to separate herself from him and overcome it and leave it at that--people voted for what they saw as the only alternative--but the bad decisions by the Democratic leadership that cursed us with this outcome (and as much as I've written here, I've barely scratched the surface on this) are just too many, too egregious, too self-evidently stupid and went on too long to sweep under the rug. Votes are still being counted but so far, it looks like it came down to Trump energizing his party's base while Harris' move-ever-rightward antics (among other things) demobilized hers. The Dems just failed to turn out a lot of their voters. This was a winnable election, and Trump didn't win it; Democrats lost it. Again.
As for Trump himself, he draws votes for reasons that tend to be a lot more complicated than some allow (or perhaps want to allow). It's laughable to suggest that, because they voted for him, Americans are moving sharply right or support the sort of end to liberal democracy he pushes or have embraced the fascism he represents. The issues polling to which Americans are subjected laugh that out of the room. If that isn't good enough, then consider that all across the U.S., the very same bodies of voters who backed Trump, often overwhelmingly, also supported progressive ballot initiatives (or opposed MAGA-backed ones) by lopsided margins. If, once Trump launches his 2nd presidency, he undertakes the many odious proposals he promised, he'll find precious little public support for any of it, and overwhelming opposition to most.
After screwing over all of us again, the Clintonites who run the Democratic party have, in their election post-mortems, largely retreated into their usual deflectionary bullshit. The loss, they say, is down to sexism. Or racism. Or--most especially--progressives. Somehow. They'll insist Americans have moved hard-right, so Dems should do the same (which is what they always want the Dems to do, no matter what happens). The most contemptibly elitist of them have attacked the voters. It's the fault of absolutely everything and anything, except for them--the people who actually ran the campaign, made all the decisions and failed. Again. The people who, on behalf of a parasitic donor class, feed the rise of fascism by choking off all systemic avenues for the progressive reform that would choke it off. The facts: For the 3rd time, Democrats struggled against a candidate who is still nothing more than a reality-show clown hated by most of the public and that any real opponent would have ground up for bait. For the 2nd time, they lost to him. They barely defeated him in 2020 and would have almost certainly lost to him then as well, if not for covid. But any relatively solid contender would roll right over Trump. Going with bad Clintonite-right leaders who consistently make stupid decisions and pull these razor-thin margins, instead of good ones who would send the Trumps of the world into permanent retirement, is a choice. Dems can make a different one. If there are any more elections.
--j.
---
[1] In a pretty good post-election article, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs writes that Trump "
[2] Biden--and his conservatism--was only part of a much larger systemic failure with regard to Trump. Both of Trump's impeachments should have resulted in his being removed from office. Trump violated both emoluments clauses of the constitution every day he was in office, to no consequence (except his own corrupt enrichment). The manycrimes he committed and that would have sent anyone else to prison are legion and he's never been properly held accountable for any of them. And so on. Bu it was Biden who was charged with the federal response to all of this, and it was he who dropped the ball.
[3] There's no question Walz was a major asset to the ticket, when the campaign would let him be, but he may have been a mixed blessing, as, hearing him speak, especially after he first joined the race, one couldn't help but wonder why he wasn't the presidential candidate. Someone in the Harris campaign may have recognized this; they eventually seemed to muzzle that kind of messaging.
[4] At a North Carolina rally (16 Aug.), when she wast still pitching the more populist policies, she also said things like this:
"Together, we will build what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy, an economy where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed. Everyone, regardless of who they are or where they start, has an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children. And where we remove the barriers to opportunity, so anyone who wants to start a business or advance their career can access the tools and the resources that are necessary to do so. I will focus on cutting needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape and encouraging innovative technologies while protecting consumers and creating a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road. As President, I will bring together labor with small businesses and major companies to invest in America, to create good jobs, achieve broad-based growth, and ensure that America continues to define the future and lead the world."...sentiment aimed firmly at the business class Harris hoped--correctly--would fund her campaign and that, like so much Clintonite-right messaging, could have been offered by any conservative Republican without changing a word.
[5] In one bizarre exception that may have been an effort at a Hail Mary pass, Harris randomly decided, with less than 2 weeks before the election, to endorse increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour, a signature progressive issue (thanks to Bernie Sanders). Why wasn't this wildly popular proposal a part of her pitch from the beginning? Chalk it up to another stupid decision.
[6] Facing pushback, Torres tried to justify this (and just made it worse):
"'All people of all backgrounds should be welcome at the DNC but not all messages should be given a microphone on the Democratic Party's most important stage,' Torres told JTA. 'A pro-Israel party like the Democratic Party has every right to filter out anti-Israel messaging, just like a pro-choice party has every right to filter out anti-choice messaging.' He added that he believes Harris 'falls squarely within the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that has historically governed American politics.'"It's "the far left," Ritchie!
[7] Harris had earlier given Bill Clintoncorpse a primo speaking slot at this year's Democratic convention.
[8] No wise campaign would touch the politically radioactive Hillary Clinton with a 10-foot pole; before sending her to Florida, Harris gave her a top speaking slot at this year's Democratic convention. Meanwhile, while Harris was using her as a campaign surrogate, Clinton was running around saying things like Americans should be prosecuted for circulating Russian-backed pro-Trump "propaganda" and arguing for repealing Section 230 of federal communications law, the very foundation of free speech on the internet, which Trump himself tried, for years, to repeal.
