Long-time US socialists Joe Allen and Bill Mullen survey the carnage from the recent election results, offer an explanation for why Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party failed to connect with voters looking for an alternative, and plot a set of urgent priorities facing the American Left as it confronts a second Trump presidency.
Let’s face it: we live in dangerous times.
To the shock of many people in the US itself and around the globe, the convicted felon Donald J. Trump has been re-elected president. This is a man who has spoken favourably of the “good things” that Adolf Hitler achieved, who pledged to deport millions of people, to use the military to crush his enemies (who he calls “vermin”) and who attempted a presidential coup just four years ago. His election under these circumstances is a testament to the depth of a broad-ranging social crisis in the US. The results prove that tens of millions of people across American society have become so desperate—and so fed up with the status quo—that they have placed their hopes in a man who will undoubtedly make the lives of most of them far worse over the next few years.
Such a victory was only possible because the ruling Democratic Party regime and its standard bearer Vice-President Kamala Harris proved so arrogant in a delusional belief in their “historic” achievements, and so oblivious the pain of a broad range of the population, that many of their own working class supporters chose to stay home on election day, or voted for Republicans. While Trump is personally unpopular with many of the people that voted for him—he managed to receive three million less votes than he received in 2020, after all—the Harris campaign managed to haemorrhage ten million Democratic votes over just four years.
Trump’s 2024 campaign built upon trends seen in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and managed to cut deep into Democratic support among Latinos and African Americans. Despite his boasting about his Supreme Court appointments’ role in overturning the historic Roe vs. Wade abortion rights ruling, and despite his conviction for sexual assault, Trump won 45% of the women’s vote. The Republicans demonstrated surprising strength in previous Democratic strongholds, and now many of them boast that it is the party ‘of the working class’. Trump will take office with the Republicans controlling the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, whose rulings this past year clear the way for an increasingly authoritarian presidency for Trump’s second term.
Many of the groups who mobilised in opposition to Trump from within the trade unions (excluding the Teamsters—whose leader spoke at the Republican convention), civil rights organisations and the women’s movement—and from the ranks of the broad U.S. liberal-left that invested heavily in Harris’ campaign, face an uncertain future. There were important glimmers of hope, including referendums on abortion rights and Green Party standard bearer Jill Stein’s anti-imperialist campaign focused on the heavily Arab and Muslim city of Dearborn, Michigan. The US Left overall has been comprised, however—if not outright discredited—by its support for Biden, then Harris, whose unwavering support for Israeli genocide in Gaza has repulsed millions. A major re-think of what kind of Left should exist in the U.S. has to take place.
Over the past year the most important political development was the emergence of a powerful anti-imperialist movement led largely by Palestinian and Arab youth and Jewish anti-Zionists. The ongoing campaign for Palestinian liberation has generated a serious and probably irreversible crisis for Zionism in the US, and drawn large numbers of young people into a reckoning with the role of the American empire in the ongoing carnage in the Middle East. The mass demonstrations that rocked US campuses last spring combined with the emergence of the ‘Uncommitted’ movement during the Democratic primaries to produce a much-needed crack in the suffocating “lesser-evil” politics that has wrecked the US Left for the better part of a century. If there is a hope in the near future it lies in the possibility that the emerging anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist movement that lay the foundations needed for the revival of a broader. Principled and independent Left in the United States. Of course the Republicans will be out to shut the movement down through repression.
Trump’s victory should be seen less as a full-scale political realignment of U.S. two-party politics and more a new chapter in the forward march of authoritarian neoliberalism that has plagued the global capitalist system now for going on three decades. Trump is an amalgam of Thatcher-style bully politics (the late Neil Davidson called her “’anti-Lenin’, part of a bourgeois vanguard that was prepared to take risks before which others would have retreated”), Reagan-style nostalgia nationalism (Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is warmed over “Morning in America”) and aggressive neo-fascist racism, nativism, and misogyny.
Trump has lifted himself up as the saviour of a declining American empire. We should be clear: the decline is real and not illusory, and many Americans feel it in their bones as well as their pocketbooks. His winning over larger portions of Black and Latino voters in this election means that in the absence of any solutions to the crisis from a marginal Left compromised by its relationship with the Democrats, their immiseration and alienation is merely being expressed in the same language as angry, alienated white voters. Trump ran a devilishly clever campaign, projecting himself as a “peace-maker”. In sharp contrast, Harris and her campaign managers calculated that endorsements from Dick and Liz Cheney—who epitomise neoconservative warmongering—outweighed any gains that might be won by making even token concession to those outraged over the Israeli genocide.
Harris’s decision to run on the Biden record—as a defender of the status quo—gave the billionaire real estate mogul the space to put himself forward as a defender of struggling working-class families who will fight for lower grocery prices. The results were predictable. According to the Detroit Free Press:
In the November 2020 election, Joe Biden received 82% of the vote in the eastern part of Dearborn. In that same area, Vice President Kamala Harris received only 23%. The nearly 60-percentage point drop in four years was in an area where an estimated three-fourths of the residents are of Arab descent, mostly Muslim. Harris won the western part of the city, where residents generally have higher incomes and are more likely to be white, with 46% of the vote and Donald Trump receiving 42%. In 2020, Biden won west Dearborn with 61%, 16,057 votes.
While it is hard to predict how Trump will govern, there are clear early indications. His appointment of Elise Stefanik—a rabid pro-Zionist who has led the witch-hunts in Congress against pro-Palestine activists—as U.N. Ambassador, and of Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee as Israeli ambassador, surely means that Netanyahu and company will find in the White House a relentless cheerleader for genocide. His reappointment of former advisor and maniacal nativist Stephen Miller as White House Chief-of-Staff indicates at least a symbolic commitment to the threatened Trump program of mass deportations of “Illegals” and other immigrants. Marco Rubio has been named Trump’s Secretary of State: aside from leading attacks on “wokeness” in the state of Florida and championing right-wing regime change for Cuba, Rubio’s bonafides include hardcore anti-China rhetoric.
While on one hand these appointments are obviously ideologically worrying, their conventionality reaffirms that Trump has no intention of ‘draining the swamp’. All of these figures are solid Washington “insiders”, and whatever else they may bring, these appointments don’t yet portend the “deconstruction” of government Trump (and his allies like Steve Bannon) have threatened since 2016.
Of far more consequence at this point is how and whether the fractured, uneven, and largely demoralized revolutionary Left in the United States can regain its lost footing. Despite much hand wringing from Democrats about vote-stealing, Green Party candidate Jill Stein took about .5 percent of the total vote in this year’s election, far fewer than Trump’s margin of victory. Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) candidate Claudia de la Cruz took .1 percent. Black liberation theologist Cornel West, running as an independent, took the equivalent of 0 percent of the vote.
The electoral path to a “Left” victory remains foreclosed by all of the obstacles put in place by the two-party system itself. Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America, who proudly endorsed the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have wobbled and scraped as those candidates have cohered around the disastrous Democratic Party strategies of first Biden then Harris. Sanders’s post-game comments that the Democrats have “abandoned the working class” to practice “identity politics” reeked of opportunism and—even worse—white resentment.
Where then are the openings for the revolutionary socialist Left? First, among the 10 million voters who chose not to vote Democrat this year. They represent potentially the largest defection in modern history from “lesser of two evilism,” and we need to draw them to our political doors. Second, Trumpism will force into action some sections of the activist Left who rightly feel an existential terror at the prospect of attacks on immigrants, on LGBTQ and trans rights, on public and higher education, social welfare, ‘green’ policy, combined with ramped up support for Israel’s genocide. Third, the powerful social movements that coalesced against the U.S./Israel war on Palestine, and the BLM movement that emerged in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, are still there in some form, and need to be remobilised. The range of pressing issues that weigh so heavily on workers and the oppressed in a society in the advanced stages of decline need to be knitted into a revolutionary program capable of winning supporters across American society, and armed with the ambition to win mass support, including among those who look to Trump in despair. Fourth, the threat of fascism, domestically and internationally, will likely return some people to understanding of Marxism as a set of ideas that can both make sense of the crisis and offer a way out.
The situation in the US is urgent, and we cannot begin this process of education and memory restoration fast enough. American capitalism remains a teetering ship: the upward flow of wealth during the Biden years, the fattening of the stock markets alongside the massive degradation of actual living conditions for the US majority is obscene. Whatever his claims about standing for ordinary Americans, these trends will only be turbo-charged under the new Trump regime. Handouts for the very rich are in order, mostly in the form of further tax cuts for corporations and the shredding of the last remaining vestiges of America’s paltry social welfare provision. In the wake of Trump’s electoral win, the stakes are extremely high. The hard right forces rubbing their hands at what they might get away with under Trump have to be stopped in their tracks. The Left has serious challenges and responsibilities ahead, but also one of its best opportunities in recent memory to speak to a desperate majority whose vote—or abstention—in the recent elections express deep anger over the failures of American capitalism and an urgent desire for something better.
