In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page made what seemed like <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B">a bold claim</a>: “If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened”. In 2024, that became clearer as billionaires flaunted their influence in the US electoral circus.
It wasn’t just that one corrupt and noxious billionaire, Donald Trump, won the presidential election or that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, used his social media platform and wealth to land a spot as a “virtual” co-president. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/democrat-donors-harris-biden.html">Billionaire Democratic donors</a> for months propped up President Joe Biden, before driving him from the presidential race, having been assured that his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, <a href="https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/tony-west-negative-influence-on-harris-campaign/">would run a business-friendly, centre-right campaign</a>.
In 2024, the American oligarchy <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/12/06/trump-billionaires-cabinet-elon-musk">emerged from behind the curtain</a>. More accurately, 2024 marked the year when oligarchic tendencies that had been gathering force for decades came into full bloom. Months before Trump narrowly won the election, the Supreme Court, whose unpopularity rivalled Biden’s, granted Trump and future US presidents <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-courts-presidential-immunity-ruling-undermines-democracy">expansive impunity</a> even to commit crimes while in office.
The liberals—the leaders of the Democratic Party and its associated non-governmental organisations, intellectuals, media and fundraisers—said the 2024 election was a <a href="https://dailyjournal.net/2024/10/22/harris-says-democrats-are-ready-if-trump-tries-to-prematurely-declare-victory/">referendum on US democracy</a>, maybe even the last-ditch effort to stop “fascism” riding in on Trump’s coattails. Yet despite the heated rhetoric, they ran an uninspired campaign in defence of a status quo that most Americans had already rejected. They showed themselves (once again) to be a party more interested in touting support from “never-Trump” Republicans than in campaigning for real change for working people.
In the process, they showed their contempt for the main source of activist energy in 2024, the movement opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their support for Israel wasn’t a surprise. But the degree to which the liberal establishment—from university presidents to the president of the US—<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/criminalization-of-first-amendment-protected-pro-palestinian-speech-is-spreading/">reached to criminalise</a> supposedly First Amendment-protected political activism reminded us of earlier periods of liberal capitulation, such as the <a href="https://accuracy.org/release/how-liberals-collaborated-with-mccarthyism-then-and-now/">anti-communist witch hunts</a> of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 2025, when the Trump administration is trying to outlaw pro-Palestinian activism, or is implementing mass deportations, we will need to remember that the liberals paved the way. When the Democratic Party hierarchy believed that supporting the most restrictive immigration bill in a generation <a href="https://www.ctinsider.com/politics/article/ct-chris-murphy-dnc-speech-19715629.php">was a clever piece of political jujitsu</a> against Trump, we should tell the inconvenient truth. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/09/27/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-campaign-event-douglas-az/">If you’re competing to show how “tough on the border” you are,</a> you’ve already ceded the ground to the right. And when the voters are presented with the original (Trump) or the copy (the Democrats), <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/11/24/far-right-voters-generally-prefer-the-original-to-the-copy_6285464_23.html">they almost always choose the original</a>.
For all their attempts to disqualify Trump and to make their stand “in the most important election of our lifetimes”, it’s revealing to see the liberals and Democrat leaders revert to “business as usual”. The hosts of the liberal MSNBC’s Morning Joe <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2024-11-18/kissing-the-ring-msnbc-morning-joe-hosts-say-they-met-with-trump-to-reopen-lines-of-communication">visited Mar-a-Lago</a>, Trump’s Florida estate, to “kiss the ring”. Biden, who, earlier in 2024, cast his presidency as no less than a Second World War fight against totalitarianism, welcomed Trump—whose own vice president <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trump-hitler-now-they-are-running-mates-2024-07-15/">once called him “America’s Hitler”</a>—for a cordial White House photo op. Even the <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/11/24/resistance-trump-protests-womens-march">2017-era liberal “resistance” is deflated</a>.
So, what is the alternative? One path that 2024 should have closed is <a href="https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture">the electoral road to change</a> that supporters of Bernie Sanders/AOC (New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) reformist politics represent. Since Sanders’ failed 2016 Democratic primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, we’ve heard many social democrats say that <a href="https://jacobin.com/2020/04/third-party-bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism-elections">reforming the Democratic Party</a> is the only meaningful way for the left to impact US politics. 
And yet, in 2024, with Sanders and AOC being “all in” for Joe Biden and then “all in” for Harris, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">that strategy has run aground</a>. And Sanders’ post-election chastising of the Democrats for “abandoning” the working class is much less credible after he and AOC touted Biden as the most pro-working-class president in our lifetimes.
The next few years under the Trump administration will be exceedingly difficult, with many defeats to come. But there will also be unanticipated and heroic struggles that push back what is, despite the election results, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/a-trump-mandate/">an unpopular agenda of social regression</a>. It’s in those struggles, not in the multibillion-dollar electoral circus we just witnessed, that working-class people can win the change we deserve.

Lance Selfa

US liberalism offers nothing for workers or the left

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality. Now that the dust has begun to settle on the presidential election results, he looks at some of the conclusions that should and should not be drawn.
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Flush with election night news that he had won the presidential election fair-and-square, Donald Trump took to the stage at his victory rally to assert: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”. The next day, Republican congressional Representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump lickspittle, declared: “We the people made our voices heard by re-electing President Trump in a historic landslide”. Trump rewarded Stefanik’s fealty with an appointment as US ambassador to the United Nations.
On the Democratic Party side of the political spectrum, <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/liberal-arrogance-and-hatred-display-after-trump-victory">despair mixed with lashing out at</a> millions of “stupid” and “selfish” Americans who supported Trump. As always, social media brought out the worst, of which this was just one small example:
“I hope every woman who voted for Trump and lives in a no abortion state gets what they wanted. To bleed out in a parking lot due to a miscarriage and no doctor will help you because THAT’S what you voted for. Y’all deserve it.”
Even <a href="https://x.com/HowKeen/status/1859194744938594495">Rachel Bitecofer,</a> a political scientist turned Democratic Party consultant, condemned Uncommitted movement adviser Waleed Shahid with the indefensible statement: “I probably won’t be able to stop the Schadenfreude when Shahid gets deported”.
Did Americans vote for authoritarianism, misogyny and racism? Is that who Americans “are”? Millions certainly are avid supporters of Trump and, at the very least, don’t consider his racism and misogyny disqualifying. But it’s harder to extend those observations to all Americans—or even to the 64 percent of eligible voters who cast a ballot.
As more votes are sorted, it becomes much clearer that Trump’s victory, far from being a landslide, was quite narrow. When the count is finalised nationwide, more voters will have chosen someone other than the bigoted billionaire. At the time of writing, the president-elect had corralled 49.8 percent of all ballots, meaning that more than 50 percent of voters chose either Harris or a third-party candidate. In fact, Trump’s victory is the seventh narrowest (about 1.6 percentage points in vote share higher than Harris) in 51 presidential elections going back to the 1820s.
When compared to the 2020 election, we see a mirror image. In each election, the incumbent president was turfed out, and the winning candidate’s party lost ground but prevailed as the majority in the House of Representatives and narrowly won the Senate. Trump and the Republicans certainly won, but the margin of their victories doesn’t suggest a fundamental reordering of US mainstream politics.
That doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t try to act on its most reactionary, authoritarian and venal impulses. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/11/americans-elected-trump-they-might-not-like-what-comes-next/">But those actions won’t embody “the will of the people”—even of those who voted.</a>
To take a couple of examples: exit polls showed that support for abortion rights exceeds support for either major party candidate. And clearly, millions of people who support abortion rights also voted for Trump. If the Trump administration pushes through a national abortion ban, it won’t be because it was acting on an anti-abortion “mandate”.
Second, exit polls showed that while most voters support “mass deportation” of the undocumented, more significant majorities support providing the undocumented with a path to US citizenship. When people are asked if undocumented residents who have lived and worked in the US for decades should be deported, support for “mass deportation” evaporates.
Despite what the pundit “hot takes” and “instant analyses” say, the simplest explanation for the election result is that millions of people were dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s economic management, and enough of them decided either to vote for Trump or to not to vote for Harris (more on this later).
And that’s the judgment of the estimated 155 million people who voted—out of a voting-eligible population of just under 245 million. When the counting is completed, Trump is expected to net about 77.8 million votes and Harris about 75 million. Trump’s total will be about 4 million fewer than Biden received in 2020. Meanwhile, about 90 million people who could have voted didn’t. In other words, the “party of non-voters” is the winner again—as it has been in every election since the post-Civil War era.
Research over the years has shown that these non-voters tend to be younger, not college educated, lower income and people of colour. They don’t pay much attention to politics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have political opinions. One of the reasons they tune out of mainstream politics, <a href="https://knightfoundation.org/press/releases/new-study-sheds-light-on-the-100-million-americans-who-dont-vote-their-political-views-and-what-they-think-about-2020/">according to a large 2020 study</a>, is because they have little trust in politicians or the system to do anything that will change their lives for the better. They are more likely to consider the system “rigged” than those who cast ballots.
An <a href="https://apnews.com/projects/election-2024-our-very-complicated-democracy/election-2024-why-americans-dont-vote-episode-6.html">October Associated Press story</a> showed these sentiments were alive in 2024. It recounted an encounter between a voter registration organiser and Earl Jones, a 73-year-old Detroit resident who said he survives on Social Security and “hustling” and hasn’t voted since the 1970s. “I ain’t voting for nobody unless we see somebody go do something for us, and not just for me, for everybody—you, him and him”, Jones said, pointing to people around him. “If they do something for us, it’ll be alright. If they don’t, the hell with it.”
This sentiment reduced the turnout for Kamala Harris. While the media maps of the vote showed a “red shift” to Republicans in most of the country, Harris lost the most ground in urban Democratic Party strongholds. A <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/23/city-turnout-black-hispanic-neighborhoods-00191354">Politico analysis</a> of precinct data in “swing-state” urban areas showed major declines in Democratic turnout from 2020. In swing-state precincts with African American populations of 85 percent or more, Harris lost more than 17,000 votes compared to Biden’s total in 2020, while Trump gained about 3,500 votes in the same precincts. Politico showed a similar pattern in swing-state precincts that were more than 85 percent Latino.
And those data are from the seven swing states, where both campaigns focused the entirety of their campaigns. In those states, the popular vote split between the Democrats and Republicans shifted 2.5 to 3 percentage points to the Republicans, compared to 2020 results. In fact, Harris won more votes than Biden did in four of them (Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina). Nationally, the shift was about 5.5 to 6 percentage points compared to 2020. The decline of the <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/11/15/2024/democratic-turnout-plummeted-in-2024-but-only-in-safe-states">Democratic presidential vote in non-swing states</a> such as California, New York and Illinois, and the increase in Republican votes in Texas and Florida, accounts for the bulk of the national popular vote shift.
These figures illustrate the absurdity of the electoral college system of electing a president. A multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign that essentially ignores 43 of 50 states doesn’t have to address itself to the mass of working people clustered in the largest and most diverse cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Tampa. It’s why so much post-election commentary magnifies as significant changes what are small shifts among voters in a handful of states.
Widening the lens on the election result provides more perspective. Do most Americans really want an authoritarian theocracy that architects of the conservative <a href="https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained">Project 2025</a> promise? Did they get to vote for what they really want?
The 2020 study quoted above noted that about one in five non-voters say they would vote for a third party if they did vote. And, for about two decades, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/651278/support-third-political-party-dips.aspx">opinion polls have</a> shown majorities of Americans believe a third party is needed because the two major parties don’t “do an adequate job” of representing the people. In 2024, however, third-party support was low by historical standards, and the Democrats couldn’t blame the Green Party or the independent campaign of Cornel West for costing them the election.
The money-soaked US electoral system managed to do what it always seems to do in presidential years: present an increasingly dissatisfied electorate with two capitalist parties—one an increasingly authoritarian, theocratic party (the Republicans) and the other a centre-right party of the status quo (the Democrats). That’s the way the plutocrats and oligarchs behind both parties like it. The Elon Musks and Richard Uihleins on the Republican side and the Michael Bloombergs and Reid Hoffmans on the Democratic side aren’t about to <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/i-worked-democrats-years-billionaires-have-unfettered-influence-opinion-1961471">finance a real political challenge to their dominance of the US political economy</a>. Social commentator <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-the-democrats-want-to-win-someday">Freddie deBoer,</a> who voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in Connecticut, drew this conclusion: 
“A country with a two-party system that include[s] a far-right party and a center-right party is a country that will inevitably move in a far-right direction. And not [pundits] Jon Favreau nor Gail Collins nor Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor the New York Times editorial board nor Hillary Clinton herself nor any other of the tongue-cluckers have a response to that fact. Because they’ve assumed away any possibility of positive change; they know they’re stuck. That’s the other thing almost nobody did [on election day]: articulate any path for the country to get better. You can’t, because better can’t emerge from this rotten system.”
There’s no use in sugar-coating the election result. But it’s also important to remember that most positive social change in US history didn’t come from elections. It came from the struggles of ordinary people. This may not seem to be on the cards right now, but history hasn’t “ended”. The great peoples’ historian Howard Zinn put it well:
“The Constitution gave no rights to working people; no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance….Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”

Most people didn’t vote for Trump, or Harris

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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No matter who wins the presidential election, a central fact of US politics is that there is an unmovable conservative bloc of about 46 percent of the electorate. It’s Trump’s floor of support, and it’s the reason so many people ask themselves how, after everything Trump has revealed about himself, the race can be as close as it appears.
There are many explanations. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn reviewed many of them <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/02/upshot/democrats-trump-election.html">here</a>. Cohn argues that the “national political environment just isn’t as conducive to a Democratic victory as many might imagine”. He hangs that judgment on several factors: the unpopularity of President Biden, opinion polls showing that large majorities feel that the country is “on the wrong track”, and the pattern of backlash against ruling parties in the post-covid world of disruption and inflation.
These factors may explain why Trump has a consistent support of 46 percent in the current polling averages (46.9 in <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/538">ABC’s 538 average</a>). But they don’t explain why he received 46.8 percent of the popular vote in 2020 or 46.1 percent of the national popular vote in 2016. In other words, a solid conservative bloc in the electorate is willing to support Trump no matter what. And it has persisted for quite a long time. Even in the 2008 election—held during an historic meltdown in the economy that should have reduced the incumbent Republicans to non-existence—Republican John McCain received 45.7 percent of the vote, against Democrat Barack Obama’s “landslide” of 52.9 percent.
Despite the media’s obsessions with Trump’s alleged working-class base, it’s clear that most people who voted for him in 2016 were the same people—or at least the same types of people—who voted for stuffed-shirt capitalist Mitt Romney in 2012 or for faux cowboy George W. Bush, the scion the quintessential Republican establishment family, in 2000 and 2004.
For more than a generation, the Republicans have depended on solid support from 20 states in the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West. Various GOP (Grand Old Party) interest groups and voters have been held together by the Republican trinity of tax-cutting economic policies, a bloated Pentagon and security state, and conservative positions on social issues such as opposition to abortion.
The Republicans built a mass base for these politics using what’s been called a “dog-whistle” approach to racism—they avoided openly racist rhetoric, but the intended recipients got the message from racially tinged rhetoric on issues like “drugs” and “welfare”. Although on the losing end of the biggest presidential landslide in US history, Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign road-tested that approach. Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an infringement on private property rights.
While the electorate overwhelming rejected Goldwater, conservatives found that they excited passions not when they talked about property rights, but when they focused on so-called “cultural” issues that appealed to sections of the population—particularly to white Southerners moving away from the Democratic Party as the civil rights movement challenged the old order.
Later, Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, explained the strategy: “We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime. Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation”.
These social factors made it possible for right-wing pro-business politicians and activists to pose as “populist” opponents of “big government” and “the liberal elite”, rather than being viewed more correctly as water carriers for big business. Right-wing leaders were very conscious of this. As right-wing pugilist Pat Buchanan wrote in 1977: “If there is any political future for us, it is forfeit, so long as we let ourselves be perceived as the obedient foot soldiers of the Fortune 500”.
Today, the Christian right is viewed primarily as the vehicle by which conservatives built opposition to women’s rights and gay rights. But one of the foundational events in the formation of the Christian right in the 1970s, which was led by one-time segregationist ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was a fight with the IRS to preserve tax-exempt status for Christian schools, the majority of which were formed as “white academies” in the wake of school desegregation decisions.
The conservative political positions that the Republicans promote regularly garner support from a minority of the US electorate. The average GOP voter is a middle-aged, affluent white person, more likely to be a man than a woman, in a country that is increasingly less affluent, less white, and less religious, and in which women make up most of the population and electorate.
That’s a central reason the Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight national presidential elections while scoring big political gains during low-turnout “midterm” elections between the presidential votes every four years.
The Republicans rely on mobilising a shrinking “base”, which has led their key political operatives to turn every election into a death match against nefarious forces who are “taking away” the idealised 1950s version of the US that conservatives embrace.
This is the dirty secret about the Republican base that the 2007-08 Great Recession uncovered. Not only did economic devastation push at least a section of the conservative middle class to embrace more far-right politics, but free-market economics has delivered less and less to them. So, to keep them hitched to the GOP coalition, the Republicans amped up their “culture war” and turned it not simply against liberal policies like abortion rights, but into a defence of what the liberal historian Allan Lichtman called a “white Protestant nation”.
Despite media speculation to the contrary, <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support">Trump’s base is not the “white working class”</a>. It is a new incarnation of the 2010 Tea Party—specifically, <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/tea-party-donald-trump-ted-cruz/">in the words of Kate Aronoff, writing in Jacobin</a>, voters that the Tea Party movement activated who “are partial to candidates that buck the establishment, and thus extremely receptive to the billionaire’s appeals”.
Research has shown that these conservatives are less concerned with free-market nostrums, and more “worried about sociocultural changes in the United States, angry and fearful about immigration, freaked out by the presence in the White House of a black liberal with a Muslim middle name, and fiercely opposed to what they view as out of control ‘welfare spending’ on the poor, minorities, and young people” in the words of <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/jane-mayer-dark-money-review-koch-brothers-gop">political sociologist Theda Skocpol</a>.
Undercurrents of racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and socially conservative politics have long coincided with the economic conservatism supported by the more upscale voters among the Republican base. But the 2008 financial crisis discredited the kind of elite-friendly, neoliberal politics that the Republican establishment promoted, and shifted a section of the middle-class Republican base in a more extreme direction.
Of course, the irony here is that Trump—the supposed “populist” <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2018/01/04/the-phony-populist-delivers-for-the-rich">standing up for the “forgotten American”</a>—delivered as much, and probably more, for big business and the rich than any establishment Republican could have. Trump’s con game is so transparent—and, to date, so successful—that the rest of the party is following suit.
But it isn’t just the dynamics of US politics that will preserve Trumpian “populism” as a viable right-wing politics in the Republican Party. Trumpism is part of a worldwide phenomenon that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
In country after country, the recession produced a political polarisation that has firmly established the more extreme right. Longtime governing parties, from mainstream conservatives to social democrats, embraced neoliberal austerity, while right-wing “populist” parties like the National Rally in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, blaming immigrants and Muslims for deteriorating living standards, presented themselves as opponents of a corrupt status quo.
<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/104/choosing-or-refusing-take-sides-era-right-wing-populism">As the late Marxist historian Neil Davidson wrote</a>, these forces filled a vacuum created when the two major political blocs in capitalist politics—the traditional right and the social democratic or liberal “left”—converged around neoliberal economic policies. With substantive differences over economic policy taken off the table, differentiation between the two blocs often came down to differences on “cultural” issues like religion, race and immigration.
The Great Recession shattered whatever popular appeal neoliberal economics had, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/18/populism-european-politics-right-left-bavaria">breaking up the stable bipartisan regimes</a> that dominated most rich countries. As Davidson put it:
“The revival of the far right as a serious electoral force is based on the apparent solutions it offers to what are now two successive waves of crisis, which have left the working class in the West increasingly fragmented and disorganised, and susceptible to appeals to blood and nation as the only viable form of collectivism still available, particularly in a context where the systemic alternative to capitalism—however false it was—had apparently collapsed in 1989-91.
“The political implications are ominous. The increasing interchangeability of political parties gives the far right an opening to appeal to voters by positioning themselves as outside the consensus in ways that speak to their justifiable feelings of rage.”
In many countries, one part of the broader conservative side of the spectrum sliced off in an anti-immigrant or “populist” direction, with the mainstream right accommodating itself to that. For example, in the wake of a huge economic collapse in Brazil in the late 2010s, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won over sectors of the traditional right, like agribusiness, and a radicalised middle class that used to form the base of the mainstream neoliberal party of <a href="https://www.vientosur.info/spip.php?article14236">former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso</a>.
In the US, the same global forces are at work, but the US’s national particularities remain. Despite the seriousness of the 2007-08 recession, the US did not plunge to near-depression levels like Greece or Spain—or Brazil. So, the echo of the far right was fainter in the US, and it found a hearing in and around the main conservative party, the Republicans. So far, the polarisation that, in the Spanish state, cracked the previously bipartisan regime into, initially, at least four main parties, has mostly remained within the confines of the two main parties in the US.
The Trumpification of the GOP has proceeded apace since Trump first emerged on the scene. Indeed, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-electio">as socialist Sam Farber warned</a>: “The alliance of religious conservatism and white nationalism that Trump built may turn out to be more solid and enduring than the Republican neoliberal-religious alliance that preceded it”. That has remade the GOP into more of an “illiberal” anti-democratic party like Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary. It has also given license to the organisation of far-right forces like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—the street fighters in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot that tried to install Trump as president after he lost the 2020 election to Biden—under the broader Trumpist umbrella.
The story so far has been about how the modern GOP built itself as part of the conservative backlash against the gains of the 1960s civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But the GOP would not have gotten as far if the other part of the capitalist party duopoly, the Democrats, didn’t help—or at least not impede—it. Since 1992, the first post-Cold War election, Democrats have held the White House for 20 of 32 years. In that time, they became, in some ways, the most zealous advocates of market reforms, free trade and global military deployment for “humanitarian intervention”.
As Bill Clinton’s administration presided over an economic expansion in the 1990s, his party itself transformed, in the words of political analyst Kevin Phillips, “into a party of the wealthy cultural and technological elite, indeed one whose fortunes and supporting middle-class numbers in the North matched those of the GOP”. The Clinton administration pushed through conservative policies—such as ending welfare payments as a right and balancing the federal budget—that Republicans never could have implemented. Former Federal Reserve chair, the conservative Alan Greenspan, quipped that Clinton was the “best Republican president we’ve had in a while”.
Abetting the shift to the right in the Democratic Party was the atrophy and decay of the popular constituencies that comprised the party’s New Deal and Great Society coalitions from the 1930s through the 1970s. Organised labour’s continual decline (today representing about 10 percent of US workers from twice that in the 1980s) has left it without significant influence on the Democratic agenda. The same decay in vision and mobilising power among labour unions also took hold of civil rights and women’s rights organisations. Increasingly, these organisations became little more than lobbying groups whose independent political stances became indistinguishable from those of Democratic politicians.
“For far too many decades, the mainstream pro-choice movement has relied on Democrats to protect the right to legal abortion, even as Democratic Party politicians from both the White House and Congress have consistently failed to fulfill their pro-choice campaign promises”, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/abortion-rights-turning-back-the-clock-way-way-back/">wrote Sharon Smith in 2022</a>. “The consequence is that abortion rights have been so eroded over the last decades—with restrictive waiting periods, parental notification and consent laws, laws criminalising transporting a patient to another state to procure an abortion, and the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding for poor women’s abortions, reinstated each year by Congress since 1976—that there was little left to salvage.”
The current reality, after the Trump-packed right-wing Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, is a hellscape in much of the country. But the Democrats now see that abortion is overwhelmingly popular. Most activists knew that for decades, while Democratic politicians accommodated the right by insisting that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”. 
By running away from defending abortion, Democrats amplified anti-abortion messaging. Today, they are doing the same with their insistence, for purely electoral calculations, that they are “tougher on the border” than Trump. And they wonder why public opinion has shifted against the benefits of immigration to the US.
The hope that a Democratic victory in 2024 will defeat Trumpism is in vain. Trump may end up in prison, but the forces he helped to concentrate will remain. Without a mass upsurge in working-class or social struggle that alters the political balance of forces in the US, the same pressures will continue to batter the two-party system.
If the Democrats in power think that they can resume their normal, wonky bipartisan ways, they are in for a rude awakening. They might even face a more extreme right-wing opposition, whose leaders will be far more competent—and thus more dangerous—than Trump and his entourage.

Why is the US election so close?

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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With a little over a week until election day, the polls show the closest race in a long time. The final New York Times poll had the race tied 48-48, and the most recent poll for CNN showed a 47-47 race. In the polling aggregator 538, Harris led Trump by <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/">1.4 percentage points on 26 October.</a> In the seven swing states that will determine the electoral college votes, surveys show the race to be tied or within a point or two for either candidate. Democrats believe that Harris leads in the bare minimum states she needs to win 270 electoral votes: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and a single congressional district in Nebraska.
Most people who aren’t Trump supporters continue to ask themselves how the race can be this close. After all, Trump was a terrible president who tried to overturn the last election. He is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a fraudster, a bigot, a racist. Dozens of people who worked in Trump’s administration have called him a menace and endorsed Harris. Trump’s one-time chief of staff, John Kelly, a conservative former general, has labelled Trump a “fascist” and reported conversations in which Trump signalled admiration for Adolf Hitler. Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, may be more unpopular than Trump.
To understand how we find ourselves here, we need to take a step back and look at the national, international and historical backdrop to the 2024 election. There are conjunctural and structural reasons for Trump’s staying power. 
First, the conjunctural. By many accounts, the US economy has had the strongest recovery from the pandemic of all its peers. Yet it still suffered from an increase in prices unseen in 40 years. While the inflation rate has dropped closer to historic averages, prices are still much higher than they were pre-pandemic. This means that for most of Biden’s term, working people’s living standards declined. And the Biden administration ended COVID-era social supports. 
If we look across the world and elections over the last year or so, we can see that most COVID-era incumbent governments have lost to the opposition: Britain, New Zealand, Argentina and the Netherlands, to name a few. Polls currently predict a landslide loss for Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada. So Trump benefits from a “throw the bums out” anti-incumbent feeling. 
From this viewpoint, the strength of the US economy and the unpopularity of MAGA (“make America great again”—Trump’s slogan) might be the only things keeping Harris in the race.
The “structural” point is that there is a large conservative bloc representing about 46-47 percent of the electorate that supports Trump no matter what. Half of these people are Christian religious conservatives. This is where most people who support conservative politics and are averse to social change and the like gather. Trump’s politics might be called “restorationist”, as in returning the US to the 1950s—or even to the idealised pre-COVID Trump years. 
A second structural feature that keeps Trump competitive is the electoral college, a constitutional relic of the 1700s designed to preserve the support of slave-holding southern states in the early US republic. The votes that elect the president are cast state by state, and are disproportionately allocated to conservative and rural states. 
Even though the Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans in seven of the last eight national presidential elections, the Republicans (including Trump in 2016) “won” the presidency twice while losing the popular vote. This is why the entire presidential campaign is focused on winning seven “swing” states, whose electorates are closely divided between the two parties. 
While Trump winning the popular vote is conceivable, most observers assume that Harris will win the national popular vote. But Trump could still end up as president by winning enough “swing state” votes to win the electoral college.
Does all this mean that Trump will win outright? There is no way to tell. But we can assume that unless (or even if) Harris wins decisively, Trump will declare victory and claim that the election was “stolen” from him. Trump and the Republicans <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/opinion/trump-election-crisis.html">have laid the groundwork for a series of challenges</a> to votes in states and to election certification, and other court challenges that might prompt the Trump-friendly Supreme Court to rule in his favour. 
In contrast to 2020, when Trump relied on a Star Wars-bar collection of lawyers to prosecute his case, and when key Republicans refused to go along with his “stolen election” lie, the GOP is more firmly on board with Trump’s strategy today. 
Moreover, as pro-Democratic Party legal expert Neil Katyal points out, for Trump to have succeeded in 2020, he would have had to reverse the electoral votes in several states. If the election is as close as it appears today, it could come down to the vote in one or two states. That would give Trump’s strategy a better chance of succeeding.
The Democrats aren’t without advantages. Harris has raised an astounding $1 billion in the last three months. Democratic ads dominate airwaves, and they have a huge advantage in the level of organisation, including paid staff and volunteers across the swing states. Democrats say they are more <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/649397/democrats-drive-surge-election-enthusiasm.aspx">“enthusiastic” to vote than Republicans report.</a> The Democrats’ most motivating issue, abortion rights, will be on ten states’ ballots, including swing states Arizona and Nevada. Those referendums could bring a more pro-Harris electorate to the ballot box. The key question is: Will all these factors overcome the conjunctural and structural factors that support Trump?
Harris’s campaign appears to be aggressive, with a media blitz, many rallies and ridicule of Trump. Trump’s appearances reveal his incoherence and malevolence. The Harris campaign also seems to think (and presumably they have data to back this up) that there is a non-trivial section of Republicans who will cross over for them. This is why the Harris campaign has emphasised support from Trump’s generals and has campaigned with the likes of former Republican representative Liz Cheney. 
<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/">By some estimates, Biden won almost one-in-five of the minu</a>scule number of self-described “liberal” or “moderate” Republicans in 2020. But overall, Biden won the support of only 5 percent of Republicans, compared to the 4 percent who voted for Clinton. Perhaps Harris will gain more Republican support than Biden did, but that’s hardly a mother lode of votes.
And what message does Harris’ courting of Republicans send to the Democratic Party’s core supporters? Harris and her team wouldn’t allow the symbolic concession of a Palestinian-American elected official to endorse her at the Democratic National Convention. And now she’s celebrating former Vice President Dick Cheney, who millions consider a war criminal for his role in engineering the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. If nothing else, Harris’s welcoming of anti-abortion, conservative Republicans into the Democratic “big tent” tells you what the Democratic Party really is: a centre-right party of the capitalist status quo.
With the election as close as it is, and it hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states, there could be a hundred reasons why one candidate wins and the other loses. The Arab Uncommitted movement said it <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/uncommitted-movement-kamala-harris-trump/index.html">couldn’t endorse Harris, but it didn’t want Trump to win</a>. That can be interpreted as an indulgence to say that people who voted Uncommitted against Biden can still vote for Harris. But if they don’t or they vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or sit out the election, or skip the presidential line on their ballots, could that cost Harris Michigan? If so, the Democrats would have only themselves to blame.
No matter how the election turns out, its political meaning will be contested. If Harris wins, her supporters will take it as validation of the outreach to Republicans and inoculating themselves by endorsing the military and a “tough on the border” immigration policy. If Harris loses, no doubt Democratic “centrists” will say that didn’t <a href="https://thedemocraticstrategist.org/2024/08/teixeira-democrats-are-super-happy-working-class-voters-are-not/">move far enough to the right</a>. And social democratic progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will most likely say she wasn’t left wing enough. 
Right now, both sides are holding their fire and giving cover to Harris. If Harris loses, most of her supporters will despair of the country’s condition and wonder if they have completely lost touch with it.
The Democratic side feels <a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/closing-strong-with-nv-senator-cortez">optimistic about what they are seeing “on the ground”</a>. So far, the early vote and new registrations seem to be trending to them. Their side will oversee the election machinery at the state level in most of the swing states. It’s still too early to tell how the election will swing with only a few days left.
If nothing else, the current state of the election should point out the absurdity of the system, its complete domination by the rich and the fact that neither candidate is addressing the underlying issues facing humanity today: global warming, economic precariousness and a migration crisis.

The final stretch of the US election

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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To liberal pundits and Democratic Party-aligned commentators, Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech in Douglas, Arizona, following a trip to the southern border in late September, was a brilliant piece of political jujitsu. 
“The Vice President visited the US-Mexico border yesterday and gave a forceful speech about the border and immigration. I know many of you have weighed in how important you think it is that the VP lean into these issues, and she sure did last night”, long-time Democrat Simon Rosenberg wrote to the readers of his newsletter <a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/vp-harris-goes-on-offense-on-the">Hopium Chronicles</a>. 
“Voters want to hear about solutions on the border—all voters, white voters, Latino voters, Black voters”, Democratic-aligned pollster Matt A. Barreto, who specialises in polling Latinos, told the New York Times. “Voters want to hear, What are elected officials going to actually do to address the broken immigration system? And there was very high support for the bipartisan border security bill.”
One group of people who are most likely not cheering the Democrats’ “pragmatism” on immigration are Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, and other towns across the US. These people have been the target of a campaign of calumny verging on “blood libel”, which the Trump/Vance campaign has orchestrated.
The outlandish internet lies that Haitian migrants in Springfield were capturing and eating pets <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-jd-vance-and-a-virulent-neo-nazi-group-inflamed-tensions-over-migrants-in-springfield">emanated from neo-Nazi</a> political agitation. The Republican candidates for president and vice president deliberately elevated them to the centre of the political debate. Trump has since worked this vile racist nativism into each of his rally speeches, merely changing the group of migrants he attacks according to the location of the rally. 
As the election season careens into its last month, Trump is amping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric. As Natalie Andrews and Michelle Hackman note in the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-amps-up-rhetoric-to-keep-immigration-at-center-of-election-37ce53da">Wall Street Journal</a>: 
“The Republican presidential nominee and former president has long held sealing the southern border as his signature issue, but he is now drawing a direct line from immigration to more of society’s ills than ever, casting himself as the only one who can fix it. Trump and Vance, his running mate and the junior senator from Ohio, have alleged migrants are to blame for unaffordable home prices, high unemployment, infectious diseases, rising car insurance, unsafe elections and, perhaps most infamously, missing house pets.”
Trump’s strategy is clear, but so is Harris’. She is applying the Democrats’ tried-and-tested modus operandi: move to the “centre” (aka, the right) and assume that the liberal Democratic base and its organisations will follow along because “they have nowhere else to go”. 
The actions of the immigrant rights group United We Dream illustrate the cul-de-sac in which Democratic-aligned interest groups have found themselves. Last month, a coalition of 83 rights groups led by United We Dream <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y8GSbgtbCneEhbbxV1J55tkCUKSOO2TN/view">issued a letter pledging</a> to oppose the bipartisan “border security” bill that Harris has promised to revive. 
“It is shameful that instead of investing in welcoming the most vulnerable people who seek safety and a better life, and who make our country better by every measure, we’d suggest wasting our resources in ineffectual, inefficient deterrence policies that harm and kill these same people”, the letter read, in part.
Yet only days after issuing the letter, United We Dream endorsed Harris for president, pledging to <a href="https://unitedwedreamaction.org/2024/09/united-we-dream-action-is-going-all-in-to-push-kamala-harris-to-deliver-for-our-generation/">“go all in” to elect her.</a> This perfectly illustrates the logic of lesser evilism, which is dominant in liberal circles. 
The Democrats think they’ve found a way to parry Republican accusations about them being “soft” on “border security”: embracing Republican policies as their own. They don’t say so, of course, but that is what they did when the Democratic-led Senate negotiated the bipartisan border bill that gave the political right almost everything it wanted. Praise for the bill was on full display at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Yet the Trump-enthralled GOP couldn’t take “yes” for an answer. And so, in February, when the House leadership announced it wouldn’t even consider the bill if it passed the Senate, the Republicans abandoned the effort before it came to a vote. This handed the Democrats a talking point that they have used since: Democrats want to “solve” the border “crisis”, while Republicans want “chaos”. In fact, the Democrats think so highly of the deal that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced that he wants to revive it now. The liberal Senator Chris Murphy <a href="https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-announces-reintroduction-of-bipartisan-border-bill-my-hope-is-that-republicans-will-choose-this-country-over-donald-trumps-campaign">obliged Schumer and reintroduced the bill</a>.
It was fortunate that the GOP shot down the bill in February. It’s a <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/178845/border-deal-climate-denial-democrats">terrible bill</a> that supporters of a just immigration system should reject. It would have increased funding for the border security complex, including increasing capacity at detention centres and the number of deportation flights. It would have subjected asylum seekers to “security vetting” and included documentary requirements that most asylum seekers couldn’t fulfil. It would have given the Department of Homeland Security the authority to “close the border” to asylum seekers if 8,500 “inadmissible” migrants (i.e., people who failed the checks outlined above) arrived in a day. 
If implemented, the changes would increase the deportation rate. This is what the Democrats mean when they talk about “solving” the migrant crisis. The bill did not address the status of “dreamers”—migrants who came to the US as children—who have been protected from deportation and allowed to attend school and to work, but who lack a path to citizenship. Moreover, it left in limbo the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the US—the population that Trump and his acolytes promise to round up and deport should Trump enter the White House in 2025.
Harris has distinguished herself from Biden, and not in a positive way. In the September speech, she announced that any immigrant apprehended at places other than an officially recognised border crossing will be deported and prevented from immigrating to the US for five years.
It’s clear that the politics of immigration, which has always oscillated between the demands of US capitalism for labour <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/1924-us-immigration-act-history">and deep currents of white supremacy and xenophobia</a>, are shifting to the right in the current climate. Opposition to immigration and a “browner” US has been one of the—if not the main—motivating factors on the contemporary right since at least the Tea Party agitation in the early 2010s. Trump regularly injects Hitlerian rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation into his rambling rally speeches. 
Republicans have pushed the envelope on racist immigration policies—everything from the symbolic impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the anti-migrant policies emanating from right-wing governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott. Abbott, with the assistance of 25 other Republican state attorneys general, has led a challenge to the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration policy. In so doing, they are advancing a neo-Confederate viewpoint that the <a href="https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-texas-border-standoff-is-an-acute">US government is a “compact”</a> between sovereign states and that those states can opt out. 
Besides making migrants’ lives miserable in their states, Abbott and DeSantis have had much greater success in forcing their “red state” views into the political discourse of supposedly more immigrant-friendly “blue” states. Taking a page from civil-rights era southern segregationists, they have bused or flown more than 100,000 immigrants to cities such as Denver, New York and Chicago since 2021. 
Those cities’ responses—at times inadequate and other times <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-migrant-crisis-in-chicago-a-test-case/">bumbling</a>—have played into the hands of the right. Even in these urban centres where a large percentage of the Democratic Party base are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the migrant crisis has touched off a <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/04/19/migrant-influx-black-residents-response/">zero-sum politics of resentment against migrants</a>. In that climate, only the right benefits.
The Biden/Harris administration has not only capitulated to this sentiment (by, for example, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/biden-adds-to-trumps-border-wall/">continuing Trump’s wall boondoggle at the border</a>). Its policies have contributed to the zero-sum political environment. In a recent interview, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-haitian-immigrant-in-springfield-experiences-the-best-and-worst-of-america">Springfield, Ohio, Haitian community leader Viles Dorsainvil</a>
noted that agitation and hatred against Haitians increased after the Biden administration cut COVID-era social assistance programs in 2021-22. Winding down these programs was central to Biden’s claim that the administration “led us to the other side” of the pandemic.
For the first three months of 2024, the Gallup survey found <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/644570/immigration-named-top-problem-third-straight-month.aspx">immigration to be the top “problem”</a> Americans reported going into the presidential election. That certainly made Democrats take notice and accelerated their attempts to claim a “bipartisan” immigration deal. But a closer look at the polling trends shows that Republicans drive most of the national concern on immigration, with a more recent up-tick among independents. But this also emphasises how much the immigration issue dominates the Republican/conservative part of the electorate, while the majority has many other competing concerns.
In fact, even in polls that ostensibly show shocking levels of support for Trump policies like mass deportation, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/27/trump-and-harris-supporters-differ-on-mass-deportations-but-favor-border-security-high-skilled-immigration/">there remains widespread support</a> for a “pathway to citizenship” for immigrants, opposition to the deportation of undocumented people who have lived in the US for decades and support for “legal” immigration across the board. But liberal and Democrat capitulation to Trump—whether defended as <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/harris-trump-immigration-crime-analysis/">“savvy” or “safe” in this election year</a>—simply amplifies Trumpism. As the liberal New Republic writer <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/186487/kamala-harris-democrats-shameful-foolish-surrender-immigration">Felipe de la Hoz put it:</a> 
“So yes, if voters are on the one hand bombarded with a simplistic and all-encompassing vision of a country beset by the perils of masses of faceless immigrants and, on the other, hear crickets or a sort of tepid agreement with the promise that Democrats will actually be better at handling it, of course their opinions are going to trend in a restrictionist direction.”
Viewed from outside the realm of grubby electoral politics, the recent surges in migration are the product of decades of US imperialism and domestic political dysfunction across the Americas. Decades of neoliberal economic “reform” have helped to destroy whole sectors of the Central American economies. US-backed “drug wars” in Central America and Colombia have also contributed to flows of migrants fleeing paramilitaries. The US has meddled in <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/haitis-people-have-never-been-allowed-to-control-their-own-destiny/">Haitian affairs for centuries</a>. And US economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have made life unsustainable for millions in those countries. 
These are some of the forces pushing people to risk life and limb to seek asylum at the southern US border. They are willing to take their chances now via “unofficial channels” rather than spend decades trying to become US citizens through official pathways. That established immigrants are made to wait years to receive work permits also fuels anti-migrant sentiment against recent arrivals.
The paradox of all this is that while the US’s capitalist parties keep racing to the bottom, their paymasters in the US capitalist class need immigrants of all stripes to sustain their post-pandemic profits and growth. As the Marxist economist <a href="https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/us-economy-saved-by-immigrants/">Michael Roberts wrote</a>:
“The influx of immigrants to work and to study is helping the US economy—it’s keeping a high supply of labour available for employers particularly in the areas of heavy demand for labour: healthcare, retail and leisure, also sectors of relatively low pay.
“Net immigration is becoming vital to US capitalism. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the US labour force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks mainly to net immigration and the economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants.”
If capitalist “rationality” gives way to political pressure, it <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/06/trump-cuba-obama-normalized-relations">won’t be the first time</a>. But in an environment where both major parties are competing to portray themselves as “tough on the border”, the only direction this debate will go is down ... into the sewer.

Democrats follow Trump into the sewer on immigration

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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On Labor Day weekend in the United States, traditionally considered the beginning of the most important stretch of national political campaigns, there is much talk about workers and labour. This year was no exception, the talk coming from two directions. 
From the Democratic Party-aligned side of the political system come the promises of policies to help working people “not just to survive, but to get ahead”. Although Vice President Kamala Harris and most Democratic politicians say they are campaigning for the “middle class”, their trade union surrogates aren’t so constrained. After calling out former President Trump as “a scab”, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called Harris “a fighter for the working class” in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August.
From the conservative side of the political system comes a different claim: the Republican Party is now the “party of the working class”. That’s due to opinion polls and election-day exit polls that show Trump and the Republicans winning almost two-thirds of voters who do not hold a bachelor’s degree. This is the media-standard definition of “working class” in the US.
From a socialist point of view, it’s more accurate to say that neither major party—both capitalist parties—are “working class” parties by any stretch of the imagination. That’s true even though most people who vote for both are, by virtue of their occupations, non-supervisory workers. But in neither party are the interests of working-class people upheld, even though more trade unions (with a few notable exceptions) support the Democrats and work to get out the vote for them.
But let’s start where the bulk of media, and much liberal commentary, start: that is, with the Republican claims that Trump’s support rests on a foundation of a “left behind” working class that views the Democrats as representatives of a “woke” coastal elite that disdains them.
The first point to make about this claim is that it isn’t talking about the working class in general. The US working class is multiracial and disproportionately made up of people of colour. It includes both men and women, people with different gender identities, of different religions (and increasingly no religion) and different age groups.
When we narrow the focus to the “white working class” that is often invoked as most receptive to Trump, we immediately run into more definitional problems. For pundits and scholars alike, the most common definition of the “white working class” is whites without a university degree. By this definition, “working-class whites” comprise about 44 percent of the 18-and-over US population.
There are many problems with equating educational level with class, however. Most obviously, it doesn’t get at what a Marxist would consider the baseline for determining someone’s class: their job and its relationship to capital. Moreover, as Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in a critique of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the non-college-educated population in the US mirrors the general population’s income distribution. So a substantial number of wealthy people is included in the non-degreed population.
There are other problems related to the two points above. Most importantly, excluding people with university degrees means ignoring <a href="https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/educational-attainment.htm">most healthcare workers and school</a>teachers. Yet these workers have been at the forefront of trade union collective action in recent years. Second, as with the rest of the population, wealthier non-university-educated “workers” are likely to be small business owners and lower-level supervisors—so not part of the working class at all.
Political pundits frequently pigeonhole all white working-class people—and increasingly, Latinos and African American non-university-educated men—into the stereotypical picture of the conservative “base”: misogynist, gun-toting, Fox News-watching patriots and petrolheads. But beyond this caricature, there is a much more varied reality.
<a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/us-voting-patterns-shifting-class-dealignment-education-income">Even among white voters</a>, education isn’t an ironclad dividing line, especially when income (an insufficient but somewhat more direct proxy for class) is considered. Lower-income voters of all races are still more likely to vote for Democrats despite the party’s well-documented <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/have-democrats-learned-their-lesson-theres-reason-for-hope/2017/11/07/cab3e78c-c315-11e7-aae0-cb18a8c29c65_story.html">preference to rely on middle-class suburbanites</a>. 
This focus on less-educated, lower-income parts of Trump’s base also obscures the fact that Trumpism finds arguably its strongest appeal among middle- and upper-class people. It’s not just the Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires who have made news with their endorsements of Trump: it’s clear that a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/">middle-class “gentry”</a> provides some of his most fervent supporters. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/12/data-about-capitol-rioters-serves-another-blow-white-working-class-trump-supporter-narrative/">occupational profile of the more than 1,000 arrestees</a> from the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol revealed a high percentage of law enforcement, professionals and small business owners among them.
<a href="https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1225&amp;context=classracecorporatepower">If the equation “Trump supporters = workers” obscures more than it explains, does that mean that the Democrats are the working-class champions</a>? In a word, no. Despite support from most union leaders, the Democratic Party is still a neoliberal corporate party whose politics are closer to post-Second World War Christian democracy than to social democracy.
Harris’ economic agenda, a vague call for building an “opportunity economy”, so far includes a grab bag of (no doubt poll-tested) policies: down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, tax credits for families with children and a $50,000 tax deduction for start-up small businesses. 
It’s telling that the most generous of these is aimed at small business owners. During her 10 September debate with Trump, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/harris-2024-presidential-debate-policy">Harris hardly even mentioned health care</a> beyond the boilerplate promise to protect the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). And while the defence of abortion rights is certainly a working-class issue, so is supporting the rights of immigrants, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/both-major-parties-push-racist-immigration-policies/">who are a crucial part of the US working class</a>. But both Biden and Harris <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/harris-trump-immigration-crime-analysis/index.html">have essentially conceded the issue of immigration (along with crime)</a> to the Trumpist right. All of this does not add up to a robust working-class agenda.
The Democrats hope the fear of Trump and <a href="https://www.project2025.org/">Project 2025</a> will be enough to keep their supporters in line. But Trump maintains a polling lead among people who worry mainly about the economy and inflation—which hits lower-income people the hardest. <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/workers-and-the-biden-harris-economy/">Both issues work against the incumbent vice president.</a>
Trump may have cornered the market on middle-class and working-class racists. But Harris has proposed only the weakest tea for the millions who are not ideologically committed and looking for economic relief. No wonder the “party of non-voters” continues to be <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-presidential-election-voting-and-registration-tables-now-available.html">overwhelmingly working class</a> and that, despite Trump’s anti-working class agenda, the election remains too close to call.

No, Trump is not the choice of American workers—but neither is Harris

The Democratic National Convention ended on 22 August, launching the newly minted Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket into a two-month-plus race to election day on 5 November. What did we learn from it?
1. The Democrats didn’t let genocide spoil their party 
The most contentious issue surrounding the convention, as well as the main motivator for protests outside of it, was the Biden/Harris administration’s support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder and destruction of all elements of a functioning society in Gaza. 
Thirty “uncommitted” delegates, chosen to represent a protest vote of 740,000 votes in the Democratic primaries, tried to win the party’s support for an arms embargo against Israel—a measure the United Nations <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/arms-exports-israel-must-stop-immediately-un-experts">called for six months ago</a>. Harris made clear that the current administration opposes an embargo and that, if elected, her administration would, too. 
The uncommitted delegates then proposed something that should have been uncontroversial: that party leaders allow a Palestinian speaker—who would endorse Harris while calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance to Gaza—to address the convention. A proposed speaker, Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/dnc-speech-uncommitted-movement-harris-walz-ruwan-romman/">submitted for DNC approval a short speech that read in part:</a> 
“Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can—yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars.”
The party leaders’ answer, delivered by phone on the second to last night of the convention, was “no”. Out of options, some uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in in the car park outside of the convention. After months of negotiations that looked more like a concerted effort to string the uncommitted delegates along than a serious attempt by party leaders to address their concerns, the uncommitted movement left Chicago empty-handed. 
At this point, it’s unclear what impact the Democrats’ dismissal of Gaza will have on voters, even in the crucial swing state of Michigan. But the group Muslim Women for Harris, one of the Zoom-based rallying organisations like Black Women for Harris or White Dudes for Harris, announced that it was dissolving and withdrawing its support for the vice president’s White House campaign.
The Democrats’ swap of Harris for Biden generated hope among some uncommitted delegates—and among many rank-and-file Democrats opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza—that a Harris administration would adopt a less one-sided pro-Israel position on the war. Harris encouraged those hopes in a press conference after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 July. 
“To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you”, Harris said at the time. Even during her nomination acceptance speech at the convention, she expressed a desire that “the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”. 
But Harris’s approach to Gaza amounts only to a change of rhetoric for public relations purposes, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/killer-kamala-sending-bombs-killing-children-and-their-moms/">not a change in policy.</a> She has done nothing to break from the administration she still serves as vice president. The positions on a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance she has reiterated are the same ones <a href="https://twitter.com/1RobGunther/status/1826848501562581435">Biden has been promoting since May</a>. It should also be noted that “her people” were running the convention.
A commitment to arming Israel and providing it impunity to violate international law is a bipartisan pillar of US foreign policy. On that, Harris is and will be no different from her predecessors. But many ordinary Democrats and activists—including many on the protest marches outside the convention centre—will be encouraged to believe otherwise. And many who are completely clear-eyed about what Harris represents will still vote for her as a lesser evil to Trump. 
Even Abbas Alawieh, the main spokesperson for the Uncommitted National Movement, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/08/21/abbas-alawieh-delegate-gaza-dnc/">told the Washington Post</a>: “I know that the choice in November is a binary choice, and if I’m in the ballot box and it’s a choice between Trump and Harris, of course I’ll vote for Harris”. 
2. Democrats are courting conservatives 
It wasn’t just the “USA! USA!” chants and the sea of US flags filling the arena at strategic moments. Or that convention planners made room on the program for several conservative Republicans, but not one Palestinian speaker. Or the deployment of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz as archetypical Midwestern white guy/military veteran/Second Amendment supporter/football coach to balance the ticket with a biracial woman from “ultra-liberal” Berkeley/Oakland, California.
It was about what this stagecraft was meant to communicate. Some of it no doubt reflects a Democratic Party version of <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/10/popular-front-communist-party-democrats">what used to be called Popular Front politics</a>, where everyone from “never-Trump” Republicans to “socialists” like Bernie Sanders is considered part of the anti-MAGA coalition. Another part of it is the Democrats’ obsession, since at least the Bill Clinton administration of 1993-2001, with inhabiting an imagined “centre” in US politics. In 1996, <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/clinton-and-obama-gave-us-trump">Republican candidate Bob Dole complained</a> that he lacked a unique platform to campaign on because President Clinton had adopted so much of the Republican agenda.
In 2024, “capturing the centre” means reviving the <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/08/barack-obama-dnc-speech">“technocratic liberalism”</a> that Barack Obama’s administration practised. Harris spent the first couple of weeks after she declared her candidacy repudiating her previous (and brief) support for free universal health care for all, pro-immigration policies, and Black Lives Matter demands for fundamental criminal justice reform. As she sketches out her positions, she touts an <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/behind-harriss-new-mantra-the-opportunity-economy-ac179e74">“opportunity economy”</a> perfectly aligned with the capitalist ideology of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. She doesn’t talk about making health care or childcare a “right”, but “affordable”. Meanwhile, she and surrogates like former CIA Director Leon Panetta champion the US armed forces’ lethality and their intention to challenge China.
Democrats made a big play on the concept of “freedom”, tied to promises to pass federal guarantees of reproductive rights and voting rights. If Harris/Walz win the election, they will have to overpower stiff Republican, conservative and even Supreme Court resistance to keep these promises. Will Harris/Walz be up to it? Or will they end up like Obama did, reaching for an unattainable compromise that squanders whatever hope anyone put in them? With millions still reeling from the wreckage of the Great Recession, that hopelessness opened the door for a Trump victory in 2016.
3. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are deep inside the tent 
Given Harris’s plans to run to the “centre” (aka, to the right), the Democrats will lean on some time-tested strategies to keep their more liberal base from getting discouraged. One way is their deployment of a type of identity politics to associate any criticism of Harris from the left with Trump’s racist and misogynist attacks. 
Another is to deploy as surrogates people who have progressive bone fides. That’s where people like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) really show how they fit inside the Democrats’ big tent. Sanders and AOC both endorsed Harris at the convention. After slamming the “billionaire class” and Big Pharma and calling for the US to make health care a right, Sanders said: “I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda”. There’s no indication that Harris and Walz are interested in such an agenda. 
AOC’s praise for Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home” was even more cringeworthy. As AOC left the stage, delegates chanting her name, the national press started <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/23/aoc-mainstream-democrat-dnc-00175955">churning out articles on her newfound comfort as a “rising star”</a> in the Democrat “mainstream”.
<a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/08/online-left-democrats-occupy-sanders">Jacobin editor Matt Karp lamented</a> that a generation of people younger than “the original Berniecrats” see themselves as Democratic partisans rather than scrappy fighters against the Democratic Party establishment. Karp worries that “some of our best young people have been bought cheap”. He and his colleagues, who have spent years as virtual PR reps for Sanders’ and AOC’s promotion of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change—even “socialism”— should ask themselves if they also allowed themselves to be “bought cheap”.
4. Immigrant feel-good stories are a cover for anti-immigrant policies 
Vice President Harris’s story as a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica was key for the biographical documentaries and endorsement speeches at the convention. Harris wove her mother’s life into a patriotic riff about how “only in America”, the “greatest nation on earth”, could such a story be written.
Yet while immigrants served as talking points in many convention speeches, the Democrats were selling themselves as the party of “border security”. Responding to the anti-immigration core of Trump’s appeal, they presented themselves as the only party serious about cracking down on the southern border. 
“As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Trump] killed, and I will sign it into law”, Harris pledged. That bill, which failed to pass Congress this year, contained <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/analysis-senate-border-bill">provisions to make it more difficult for people to seek safety in the US</a> and allow for faster removals of asylum seekers. 
The previous three Democratic conventions featured undocumented speakers describing their plight. And the 2020 virtual convention featured special condemnation of Trump’s policy of “family separation” at the southern border. This year’s proceedings could not have been more different. 
The sheriff of Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas, spoke. Senior Latino politicians like Representative Pete Aguilar and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto vouched for Harris’s “toughness” on border policy and transnational trafficking. And all speakers who mentioned legislation touted Democrat support for the “toughest border bill” in decades, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/both-major-parties-push-racist-immigration-policies/">which conservatives largely wrote</a>. 
Unlike their counterparts at the Republican convention, Democratic delegates didn’t brandish “Mass Deportations Now” placards on the convention floor. But they’ve clearly decided to “counter” Trump by trying to steal his thunder.

What we learned from the Democratic National Convention

Of all the good news Vice President Kamala Harris has received since replacing Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, perhaps none was more surprising than the finding that more Americans say they trust her, rather than Trump, to steer the US economy.
The <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/08/12/harris-trump-economy-poll-2024-election">difference</a>
that the monthly Financial Times poll found—42 percent trusting Harris, compared to 41 percent trusting Trump—isn’t particularly significant; it’s more of a tie. 
But it was the first time the Democratic ticket was even in the running on this measure. And yet, for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/opinion/inflation-biden-economy.html">many liberal pundits</a>, the fact that so many people distrusted Biden on the economy was just a failure of Democratic messaging. 
Judged from the vantage of macroeconomic indicators, the US economy is, as an economist <a href="https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/economy-forecast-lower-recession-chances-1f24174b">quoted in the Wall Street Journal put it, “the envy of the world”</a>. Of all the advanced industrial economies, the US has made the strongest recovery from the covid crisis of 2020-21.
The lowest unemployment rates since the 1960s; the lowest rate of Black unemployment in 50 years; wage gains from 2019 to 2023 to the poorest 10 percent of the working class <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/#epi-toc-2">surpassing those of higher-income groups</a>; a four-fold increase since 2021 in construction spending for manufacturing—t<a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/lets-stay-focused-on-all-the-good?utm_source=publication-search">hese are all talking points that Biden/Harris partisans cite.</a>
Yet the incumbent Democratic president suffers from historic rates of unpopularity and was probably on track to lose to Trump in November before he stepped down. This was enough to befuddle all of Biden’s key advisers. 
But socialists aren’t so befuddled when taking a hard look at the reality of life and work in the US. From that vantage point, all of that economic glitter isn’t gold.
Start with real wages. An <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/econ-performance-pres-admin/">Economic Policy Institute analysis</a> of data going back to 1949 concluded: “Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House”. While the Biden administration is no exception, when compared to the Trump administration, one statistic stood out.
That was “percent growth of real wages of production and non-supervisory workers”. In non-statistical jargon, that means workers’ wages, adjusted to show their buying power. Two years into the Biden administration, workers had lost ground. The only other administrations in which real wages declined were the Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations—those in power when the employers’ offensive against labour, and high inflation, attacked workers’ living standards. According to this statistic, Biden did worse than Reagan and Bush.
The post-pandemic decline in inflation might push real wages into positive territory by the end of Biden’s four years. But the fact that this is no certainty is part of the explanation for why Biden wasn’t “getting credit” for the economic trends that most economists and politicians consider positive for incumbents.
It’s common for people to think about the price of eggs or petrol when they think about inflation. But aside from commodities like these, the prices of which fluctuate with supply and demand, there are essential commodities and services with long-term price increases. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-annie-lowrey.html">Rent, housing, child care, education and health care top the list here</a>. Each has undergone double-digit increases in real costs over the last several decades. This means that life’s everyday “background” expenses—especially for people under the age of 40—are a constant source of stress and debilitating debt, even for people with decent jobs.
“This is the most money we’ve ever made, and this is the brokest we’ve ever felt”, Nicole Lewis, a teaching assistant living with her husband and three children in Michigan, recently told the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/inflation-interest-rates-wealth-loans-51d4276e?mod=Searchresults_pos4&amp;page=1">Wall Street Journal’s David Uberti.</a>
Taking child care as an example, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-annie-lowrey.html">journalist Annie Lowrey notes</a>: 
“So childcare for [kids aged] zero to five, this is a cost that families are paying for a relatively short time in their lives. And it is absolutely, absolutely crushing. Average childcare costs for a year are between $18,000 and $24,000. And the problem is not just with how much people are paying, it’s that people don’t pay. A lot of folks cannot afford that. And we do not have enough coverage through programs like Head Start [a federally funded early child education program for low-income families]. Head Start is severely underfunded. One in five kids who would qualify for Head Start, gets Head Start.
“And so, folks drop out of the labor force. They rearrange their work schedules. They get family members to help. And the issue is that we have basically maxed out what people can afford to pay, and that still doesn’t mean that childcare workers who are among the lowest paid in American life have a living wage. Most childcare workers are still making $14 or $15 an hour. It’s just not enough.”
In a bout of covid-stimulated experimentation, the Biden government’s 2021 American Rescue Plan provided tax subsidies to working families. These had the dramatic impact of cutting child poverty in half in one year. But to restore capitalist “normality” and scotch any idea that working people should expect their government to look out for them, the administration allowed the tax credits to lapse near the end of 2021. The predictable result was an increase in child poverty—to levels <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/child-poverty-increases-sharply-following-expiration-of-expanded-tax-credit">higher than they were pre-pandemic</a>.
Biden scrapped plans for increased subsidies for child care, universal pre-kindergarten, and wage increases for childcare workers as his “Build Back Better” plan was rebranded as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The IRA took steps to address some costs, like the outrageous prices Americans pay for prescription medications. But the core of the IRA was billions in corporate subsidies and tax incentives to stimulate a transition to an electrified economy that can compete more directly with China. 
The Biden/Harris recovery has also been highly unequal. According to one estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, the bottom 50 percent of earners increased their incomes by almost 5 percent. But the top 1 percent has gained more than 10 percent. That is the highest return for that mega-rich slice of the population since the Reagan administration in the 1980s. 
The lowest-income workers have earned the largest wage gains in an economic recovery in decades. Yet, even working full time, these workers earn less than $30,000 a year. US income inequality is more extreme <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA">today than it was in 1963.</a>
It’s common to describe US politics as “polarised”. But it’s also clear that the economic conditions for millions of ordinary people contribute to that polarisation. It’s not just the reason the November election is a toss-up despite the Biden-Harris “strong economy”. It’s also why millions feel that the major institutions of government and business are rigged against them, no matter which party is in power.

US workers have gone backwards under Biden and Harris

What makes the Democrats different from, but the same as, the Republicans?

When momentous events happen in a media-saturated society, one of the first casualties is any sort of historical perspective. This became clear in the wake of the 14 July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
“An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation”, said President Biden in a White House press briefing the day after the attempt on Trump’s life. It’s true that in a liberal democracy, ballots, rather than bullets, are supposed to resolve political differences. But one would have to blind to history to accept that idea at face value.
Violence has been the backdrop of the entire arc of US history. The country was built on the violence of chattel slavery, the extermination of the native population, and wars of conquest. It fought a bloody civil war that killed the equivalent of 7 million people, in today’s population.
There have been 46 US presidents in the almost 250 years of the republic. Four of them have been assassinated in office. And others—for example, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford (twice!) and Ronald Reagan—have survived attempts on their lives. Combining assassinations and attempted assassinations, that’s almost one in five US presidents.
While certainly not the norm, it’s a distortion to say that political violence is a rarity in US history. And that’s just referring to assassination attempts against the US president.
We should also remember that assassination claimed the lives of three of the leading figures of the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s—the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Other lesser-known civil rights workers, such as Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Mickey Schwerner, or Viola Liuzzo, died at the hands of white supremacists. In 1963, the Klan bombed a Birmingham, Alabama, church, killing four young girls attending Sunday school.
Trump’s supporters are fanning out to accuse the “left” of fomenting a climate in which a 20-year-old man, armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, felt encouraged to take a shot at Trump. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, tapped on 15 July to be Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, wrote only hours after the shooting: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination”. 
South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott said the assassination attempt was “aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse”. Leave aside that the now-dead gunman was a registered Republican and a weapons enthusiast, his “motive” may not be any more scrutable than those of the disturbed young men who, in 2022, killed 21 at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, or seven at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
Trump’s supporters’ attempts to blame “the left” are calculated to cow Democrats and liberals into swallowing their criticisms of Trump. This seems to have already had the desired effect, with the conservative Democratic Representative Jared Golden stating: “We can start by dropping hyperbolic threats about the stakes of this election. It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism, or a battle against fascists or socialists bent on destroying America. These are dangerous lies”.
What are we to make of right-wing politicians’ celebration of political violence against the left? It’s hardly ancient history to recall that Trumpists made a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, the (at the time) 17-year-old vigilante who killed two Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. Or that Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently pardoned Daniel Perry, who was convicted of killing an Air Force veteran acting as a peacekeeper at a 2020 protest against police brutality. And when mobs of rightists attacked peaceful Palestinian solidarity encampments at the University of California, Los Angeles in May, virtually no one from the political establishment—either from the right or the Democrat side—spoke out against it.
And that’s not even to mention other mass shootings and atrocities that individuals, clearly influenced by far-right ideas that Trump has fanned, have committed. The attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. The racist shootings of Black and Latino shoppers, going about their business, in Buffalo (2022) and El Paso (2019). The mass shooting at the LGBTQ Pulse nightclub in Tampa in 2019. The mass shooting at a drag show in Colorado Springs in 2022.
These are more recent manifestations of an undercurrent of violent far-right activity that has festered for decades before coming “above ground” in atrocities such as Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 murder of 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. Or in Dylan Roof’s 2015 white supremacist murder of nine African American bible study participants in Charleston, South Caroline.
“This is not America”, pundits and politicians say after each such incident. It’s not what the country should be, but it is what the country is.
Trump’s mainstreaming of far right and violent rhetoric provides a “permission structure” that makes these kinds of right-wing attacks more likely. He regularly encourages his rallygoers to rough up protesters or members of the press. He mocked an attack on the elderly husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in what was a failed assassination attempt on Pelosi herself. If elected, he promises to pardon members of the violent anti-democratic mob that rioted at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s election.
But Biden is hardly an untainted messenger for unity, peace, and civility. In an Oval Office address on 14 July, he said: “We can’t allow this violence to become normalised”. But if he and other political leaders are worried that US society has become inured to violence, they should consider what Martin Luther King said in 1967. In his groundbreaking speech announcing his opposition to the Vietnam War, King noted: 
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam?”
Certainly, the would-be Trump assassin has nothing in common with the “angry young men” that King was referencing. But politicians who speak of violence as something alien to US political culture might want to ponder the question: “what about Gaza?” While the US political system—from Biden on down—is focused on an individual who almost killed Biden’s challenger (and did kill a rally attendee), it continues to fund, arm and support the <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext">mass murder of hundreds of thousands</a> of unarmed civilians in Gaza.
Within minutes of the appearance of the photo of a bloodied Trump raising a defiant fist as Secret Service agents manoeuvred him off the rally stage, pundits and politicians were declaring the election over, with Trump and the Republicans winning in a landslide.
Yet it’s far too early to tell what impact the assassination attempt will have on the overall trajectory of the race, and many more events will shift it in unexpected directions.* What hasn’t changed is that American society remains highly polarised. Both major party candidates remain extremely unpopular, and ordinary voters wish they had different choices. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx">Most Americans view major political institutions—the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court—with distrust.</a> In conditions like these, it’s folly to make confident proclamations about November from the vantage point of July.
* This piece was first published at <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/">International Socialism Project</a> before Joe Biden withdrew from the race.

US liberalism offers nothing for workers or the left

Most people didn’t vote for Trump, or Harris

Why is the US election so close?

The final stretch of the US election

Democrats follow Trump into the sewer on immigration

No, Trump is not the choice of American workers—but neither is Harris

What we learned from the Democratic National Convention

US workers have gone backwards under Biden and Harris

What makes the Democrats different from, but the same as, the Republicans?

Violence has been the backdrop of the entire arc of US history

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