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.
--------------------
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.”

Lance Selfa

Most people didn’t vote for Trump, or Harris

The <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/2024-council-election-results">results are in</a> from Victoria’s local council elections, which took place via postal ballot in October, and there’s some good news for socialists. Victorian Socialists (VS) ran a much bigger campaign than in the last elections in 2020, standing candidates in 78 council wards, mainly across Melbourne but in a number of regional areas too. The party’s candidates received a total of 67,296 first preference votes, up from 20,210 in 2020, with an average vote share of 10.8 percent.
Had VS achieved a result like this under the old, multi-member council ward system, it’s very likely a whole new crop of five or ten socialist councillors would have been elected. This time, though, thanks to changes initiated in 2020 by the then Labor Party minister for local government and subsequently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/20/ministers-breached-codes-in-blatant-and-extraordinary-misuse-of-public-funds-to-fuel-branch-stacking-ibac-finds">disgraced branch stacker</a> Adem Somyurek, the elections were held in single-member wards across Melbourne (with the exception of Melbourne City Council) and in many regional areas. This change was designed to make things harder for small parties like VS, and the results of this election show it worked as intended.
When two or three councillors were elected from a single (larger) ward, minor party candidates were in with a shot even when up against candidates from established parties like the Greens and Labor. In multi-member wards, two higher profile candidates could be elected, and there would still be space for a third candidate to get up. This is what happened in 2020 with VS’s Jorge Jorquera, who was elected in the Yarraville ward of Maribyrnong Council after receiving a first preference vote of just 8.8 percent.
In single-member wards, victory depends on both a high first preference vote and a decent flow of preferences from other candidates. In traditional strongholds of Labor and the Greens, this was always going to be a tough ask for socialists. 
VS went into this election with Jorquera as its sole sitting councillor. To the extent there is bad news in the party’s result this time, it’s that it couldn’t build on that total. Jorquera, unfortunately, narrowly missed out on re-election. About two hours’ drive north from Melbourne, though, in the regional town of Bendigo, VS candidate Owen Cosgriff <a href="https://x.com/6NewsAU/status/1854407601720885695">was elected</a> as the representative for Whipstick ward in the City of Greater Bendigo Council.
In a three-candidate field, Cosgriff received a first preference vote of 40.7 percent, winning with 52.7 percent after the distribution of preferences. This was a significant breakthrough for socialist politics in an area not known, <a href="https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/7290147/inside-the-bendigo-rsls-battle-with-a-communist-trades-hall/">in recent times at least</a>, for its radicalism. 
Cosgriff told Red Flag that the result reflected the fact that “Victorian Socialists was the only progressive option on the ballot” (neither Labor nor the Greens ran a candidate against him). In addition, he said, “I was the only candidate who put forward a program of what I would attempt to do in office ... We promised concrete reforms like undoing the privatisation of aged care [and] lobbying for a commuter timetable for Bendigo trains, and we were rewarded for it”. 
Another bright spot for socialists was the re-election of Socialist Alliance’s Sue Bolton to Merri-bek Council. Bolton was first elected in 2012 off a first preference vote of 9.5 percent (in a multi-member ward) and this year received a first preference vote of 46 percent in a field of four candidates in the (single-member) Bababi Djinanang ward of Merri-bek, which covers the suburb of Fawkner and parts of North Coburg. Bolton told Red Flag that a big factor in her win was the work she has done to promote Palestine solidarity at a council level. In the last census, conducted in 2021, just under 35 percent of Fawkner residents <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/210031237">identified as Muslim.</a>
It’s significant that, even with single-member wards stacking the odds against them, VS candidates came within striking distance of victory in several other places. In the Harvester ward of Brimbank Council (which covers the suburbs of Sunshine and Sunshine North in Melbourne’s west) <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/liz-walsh-council">Liz Walsh</a>, who was the VS candidate for the Western Metro upper house region in the 2022 state election, received a first preference vote of 26.3 percent in a field of four, and ended second on 46.8 percent after the distribution of preferences. This result was particularly encouraging given that VS didn’t campaign in the area.
Other standout results include long-time marriage equality campaigner, local community activist and nurse <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/cat-rose">Cat Rose</a> getting a first preference vote of 32.4 percent in Darebin Council’s West ward (in the inner-northern suburbs covering Thornbury and parts of Preston and Northcote). In a field of three, Rose finished just 36 votes behind the Greens candidate, and less than 200 votes behind Labor. Had she finished ahead of the Greens, there’s a decent chance she would have moved above Labor on preferences and been elected. At the last council election in 2020, the VS candidate in this ward (Darebin had already moved to single-member wards) got a first preference vote of 7.7 percent.
In the Bulleke-bek ward of Merri-bek Council (which covers the area immediately to the west of Sydney Road in Brunswick), VS candidate <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/louisa-bassini">Louisa Bassini</a>, a community lawyer in the area of renters’ rights, came in second in a field of five candidates with 23 percent of first preference votes (behind the Greens candidate on 36.9 percent and ahead of Labor on 20 percent). Results in other wards in the area of the Victorian lower house seat of Brunswick were also well above the 8.1 percent that VS candidate Nahui Jimenez achieved there in the<a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/brunswick-district-results"> 2022 state election</a>.
No doubt some of the 67,296 people who voted for a VS candidate didn’t pay much attention to party affiliation. Council elections in Victoria are carried out in a way designed to depoliticise things as much as possible and encourage engagement with candidates as individuals, rather than representatives of parties or political world views. Holding elections via postal ballot contributes to this, as it precludes the possibility of party volunteers talking to voters at polling booths. And party affiliation isn’t listed next to candidates’ names on ballot papers.
VS pushed against this as much as possible. Its aim isn’t merely to get socialists elected, but to build the profile of socialist politics and to convince more people to join the socialist movement. Unlike many Labor and Liberal-aligned candidates, who (probably sensibly from a purely electoral perspective) preferred to present as “local independents” rather than associating themselves with their party brands, VS candidates put their political affiliation front and centre. Leaflets delivered by VS volunteers to voters’ homes encouraged them to “vote socialist for a council that puts people before profit”.
The main pitch to voters on these leaflets highlighted how “an out-of-control capitalist system is eroding the economic, social and environmental foundations of our society”. “We need councillors”, it went on, “who will stand up to the destructive, profit-driven agenda that dominates politics. Socialist councillors will fight for our communities, for workers and for those in need”. VS seriously campaigned in only a fraction of the 78 wards in which it stood a candidate. In those wards, which were by and large also the wards in which the party got its highest vote, it would have been hard for people to miss the socialist affiliation.
The results of this election will help to further establish VS as a serious socialist electoral alternative in Victoria. Heading into 2025 and the next federal election, the party has a growing membership and a higher profile than ever. In addition to the council campaign, VS members have this year kept up a hectic schedule of activism and organising in the Palestine solidarity campaign, rank-and-file unionism and many other areas.
In recent weeks the Murdoch press has run several hit pieces targeting the party. Most recently, the Australian <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1857577253590401530">published an “exclusive” </a>in which it revealed that the lead VS Senate candidate, renters’ rights advocate and well-known socialist radical Jordan van den Lamb (aka <a href="https://www.instagram.com/purplepingers/">purplepingers</a>), had—in a post on the social media platform X—shockingly labelled police as “pigs” and “Nazis”. Melbourne’s Herald Sun <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1847044199021240510">earlier called out</a> VS council candidates for, among other things, speaking at rallies in solidarity with Palestine and “calling for revolution”. This kind of attention from Murdoch’s attack dogs can only bode well for the future.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications manager.

James Plested

Big vote for socialists in Victorian council elections

The US election is symptomatic of a new, gloomier political reality facing those concerned with global efforts to avert climate catastrophe. Since the issue of climate change first gained widespread attention in the early 1990s, it has never been far from the centre of political debate in most Western countries. As the pace of warming has increased, and its impacts have become more visible, you might expect that it would retain that place or even gain in importance in the minds of politicians and the voting public. In the US this year, the opposite has happened.
Not even the multiple weather-related disasters the country endured during the presidential campaign could shift the dial. Hurricane Helene roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the southern Appalachian mountains in late September with devastating winds and catastrophic flooding. Entire towns were swept away, and more than 230 people were killed. Two weeks later another major hurricane hit Florida. It didn’t matter. The climate crisis didn’t rank as highly as it previously had in <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/">polls of voters’ concerns</a>, and it was barely mentioned by Joe Biden, his replacement as Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris or Donald Trump during their campaigns.
The lack of discussion of or concern about climate change in this election wasn’t a sign that efforts to limit warming are going well. Quite the opposite. The decades of green rhetoric by politicians and the never-ending round of global climate summits have got us nowhere. Total global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the rate of increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (which are the most accurate measures of lack of progress) is accelerating. 
Over time, the gulf between the rhetoric used by politicians hoping to establish their green credentials and the grim reality of a society still well and truly hooked on fossil fuels has become harder and harder to ignore. This is, no doubt, part of the explanation for the growing phenomenon of “climate apathy”. For many years now, every time an election comes around we’ve been told by supposedly progressive parties like the US Democrats and Labor in Australia that climate change is a major challenge demanding urgent action. Again and again, though, when these parties come to power they fail to do anything more than the bare minimum about it.
You might object, in the case of the Biden administration, that the green rhetoric was matched to a degree by action. To the extent that Harris sought to draw attention to climate policy at all during her campaign, it was to highlight Biden’s “trillion dollar” investment in clean energy. At the same time, though, she made clear her continuing enthusiasm for fossil fuels. She was proud, she said, that the administration had “increased domestic gas production to historic levels” and that during her time in office the US has carried out “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”. On both counts, she had every right to brag: in the 2010s the US overtook countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and it hasn’t looked back since.
Taking climate change seriously demands finding ways to wind down the fossil fuel economy. With something like this, you can’t “have your cake and eat it too”. However much you might invest in clean energy (and it’s true the Biden administration invested a lot), if that investment is being directly counteracted by significant increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels, then what’s the point? 
We’ve had years of “climate wars” and “climate elections”. This time it was different. This was, when it comes to the climate, a “what’s the point?” election. We shouldn’t be overly surprised. When—despite what the scientists have been saying for decades and despite their own green rhetoric—those in power continually send the message that it’s not only okay but commendable to continue to expand the fossil fuel economy, it’s only natural that some would start to question whether climate change is really worth worrying about.
Donald Trump, of course, was only too happy to capitalise on this sentiment. Unlike the Democrats, Trump has always been very open about his enthusiasm for fossil fuels and disdain for climate science. During his campaign <a href="https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1852547593873526930">he promised</a> to “terminate the green new scam, one of the great scams in history”, and scoffed at the prospect of sea level rises, saying “Who the hell cares?” and joking, in <a href="https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-and-donald-trump-interview">an interview with Elon Musk</a>, that “you’ll have more oceanfront property”.
Trump sought to link the Democrats’ climate initiatives to the inflationary wave that hit the US and much of the rest of the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Biden administration, he said in July in his <a href="https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/read-donald-trumps-full-rnc-speech-accepting-gop-nomination/3432055/">speech to the Republican National Convention</a>, has “spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam, and that’s caused tremendous inflationary prices”. He promised to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the cost of energy for US consumers.
The Democrats had no real answer to this. Having established that they too were enthusiasts for the “drill, baby, drill” mentality, they could hardly turn around and denounce Trump for it. So, by and large, they remained silent. This strategy, predictably, didn’t work well. While Trump supporters were thinking “What’s the point of action on climate change?”, many potential Democrat supporters were thinking “What’s the point of voting?”. Millions of those who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home this time. The Democrats’ promise of a “Trump-lite” administration inspired few.
Last time he was in power, Trump implemented a range of policies favourable to the fossil fuel industry—including reversing or rolling back almost 100 environmental regulations related to things like carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars. He also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, a (theoretically at least) legally binding international treaty committing countries that signed up to it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His second term in the White House is likely to bring more of the same.
“That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe”, Walter Benjamin once wrote. “It is not that which is approaching but that which is.” Another four years of Trump is no new catastrophe for the planet. The catastrophe was already here. The terrifying thing is that this election will reinforce the tendency for people in countries like the US and Australia to think “What’s the point in trying to do anything about it?”

‘Drill, baby, drill’: Climate change ignored in the US election

Is the Democratic administration of Joe Biden pro-worker or anti-worker? Opinions differ. Take Bernie Sanders. The day after the 2024 election, the Vermont senator issued a statement denouncing Biden, Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party for having “abandoned the working class”. The language was punchy, direct, withering and accurate. The Democratic leadership, Sanders wrote, has nothing to offer workers. The party, controlled by “big money interests”, does not understand workers’ “pain and political alienation”. As an inevitable consequence of this, workers of all races are abandoning it. 
But there are other currents of opinion about the Harris-Biden Democrats. For example, that Joe Biden is “the most pro-working-class president in modern American history”, with an agenda that speaks “to the needs of the working class”. He is “the most effective president in modern history”, “a good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment”, who “wants to tax the rich so that we can fund the needs of working families”. These were the words of, um, Bernie Sanders, a few months ago. 
It was easy to lose track of Sanders over the last few years. He has not been worth paying much attention to. But over the last decade, Sanders has gone from being the scourge of the Democratic establishment to one of its most reliable surrogates.
In 2016 and 2020, he stood against establishment Democratic candidates, achieved widespread support, was buried by the Democratic apparatus and then rolled over to campaign for the people who crushed him. Each time he ran, the process embedded him more deeply into the party machine. In 2024, he didn’t even challenge Biden or Harris. His email list has become a Democratic Party fundraising tool—reliant on worn-out catchphrases and in-jokes from his past presidential runs that are only marginally less groan-worthy than the coconut-pilled bratmongering of the official Harris campaign.
Sanders once used hard-hitting, pro-worker language to attack the record of the mainstream Democrats. But throughout 2024, he used the same rhetoric to demand loyalty and obedience to the leader —whoever that leader might be.
When even the corporate liberal press could see that Joe Biden had to step aside, Sanders and his protégés in Congress became the president’s most aggressive and reliable bodyguards. It was a head-spinning role reversal. Establishment mouthpieces like the Washington Post and the New York Times were stating an obvious truth: Biden was past it and would have to drop plans to run for a second term. 
Sanders devoted himself to a transparently dishonest campaign to defend and promote Biden as a champion of the workers. In a major Times op-ed, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/opinion/joe-biden-president.html">extolled</a>
Biden’s allegedly pro-worker record and demanded that Democrats “stop the bickering and nit-picking”. A couple of weeks later, Biden threw in the towel. Sanders, the loyal mouthpiece of the Biden leadership, was left holding the bag.
I don’t care who leads the Democrats. But the incident proved that Sanders was now officially part of the dishonest, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/13/biden-sanders-aoc-liberal-lifeline/">deal-making Democratic machine</a>. Even most right-wing Democrats weren’t as willing as Sanders to burn their reputation in defence of a collapsing Biden candidacy. 
It didn’t stop there—and it wasn’t only Sanders. When Kamala Harris took over the reins, Sanders carried on his role as a key public advocate for a genocide-enabling neoliberal (and former prosecutor). His extra-special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY">Palestine-themed video manifesto</a>, in which he demanded that Palestine supporters swallow their pride and fall in behind the vice president, was a low point. “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/4868310-bernie-sanders-liz-dick-cheney-kamala-harris/">I applaud the Cheneys</a> for their courage in defending democracy”: that was another.
His surrogates and allies, now an entrenched Democratic faction, joined in—and went further. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Democratic National Convention to praise “leaders like Kamala and Tim [Walz]”. Her speech could have come from the mouth of any careerist Democrat of the Bill Clinton generation. 
Sanders at least acknowledged he disagreed with Harris on Gaza. Nothing like that from AOC. She assured the audience of party officials and donors: “[Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home”. (No Palestinians were permitted to speak at the event.) The rest of the campaign brought further embarrassments. American politics moves quickly. AOC is now irrevocably cringe. To paraphrase George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future of the Democratic Party, imagine <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnKayYSStM">AOC livestreaming Madden with Tim Walz—forever</a>.
As Donald Trump’s election proves, dishonesty is not a decisive disadvantage in capitalist politics. Leftists with functioning memories might roll their eyes to see Sanders suddenly remember that the Democrats are actually quite bad. But many will be grateful to hear someone stating obvious truths and calling for pro-worker politics. Still, there are some lessons to be drawn from Sanders’ brat summer.
First: how quickly, and comprehensively, political “harm minimisation” turns into loyal advocacy. Maybe Sanders thought he’d extracted some concessions from Harris and Biden. Maybe he really believes that Trump is a fascist danger who must be stopped at all costs—fair enough. Either way, Sanders seems to think that a Democrat in power is a necessary condition for social progress. So any doubters must be convinced—even if they’re doubting for good reasons. By this mechanism, “pragmatic” leftists become delusional Biden loyalists. People like Sanders, with authority on the left, devote themselves to justifying—and lying about—the allegedly pro-worker and anti-genocide outlooks of people like Biden and Harris.
But a Democrat in office isn’t necessary for social progress. Yes, America needs a form of politics that is pro-worker, anti-racist and not beholden to the oligarchy. But just as much, it needs a form of politics that operates outside elections—and that can function no matter who’s in the White House, the Supreme Court and the Congress. It needs a pro-worker politics that draws its power from strikes and social movements, not fundraisers and TV advertising. That form of politics isn’t going to come from the Democrats.
If an alternative isn’t constructed, most of the people issuing these broad-left denunciations of the Democrats—no matter how strident and accurate—are going to end up back as captives of a future Harris or Biden equivalent.

D. Taylor

Bernie’s brat summer

Preliminary analysis by the Wall Street Journal points to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/voter-turnout-election-2024-927a102c">a stunning drop in turnout among Democratic voters</a> in the United States on 5 November. 
The Republicans swept the elections for president, Senate and possibly the House of Representatives (counting continues in several districts). The precise reasons for their victories will become clearer in coming months as the results are dissected and more data comes to light.
But one statistic, highlighted by staff writers John West and Kara Dapena, already appears to be among the most significant: voter turnout declined by around 6 percentage points in counties won easily by President Joe Biden in the 2020 elections. By contrast, in counties won by then-President Trump by more than 10 percentage points, voters turned out at higher rates this year—despite overall voter turnout being down across the country.
To put it a little simplistically: Trump motivated Republicans more than Harris motivated Democrats. 
For example, in counties with the highest share of Black residents, college residents, Hispanic residents or union members, voter turnout dropped by more than the national average. In particular, voter turnout was down by an estimated 4.7 percent in counties with the lowest median income, and by nearly 4 percent in counties with the highest share of Black voters.
In working-class Detroit, behind Memphis the second-largest majority Black city in the US, the city clerk only a week before the election <a href="https://www.bridgedetroit.com/detroit-clerk-predicts-turnout-for-presidential-race-could-be-highest-in-a-decade/">predicted a record turnout</a>. In the end, Democrats overestimated Kamala Harris’s pulling power in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/talking-gaza-in-detroit">the devastated city</a>, turnout being reported as 47 percent of eligible voters, compared to the Michigan statewide turnout of more than 73 percent, which was a record high.
“People don’t feel like they’re put back together coming out of the pandemic”, Branden Snyder, director of Michigan Election Defense Coalition, told Malachi Barrett from local news outlet BridgeDetroit. “[Harris’s] policy platform was more robust than Trump’s; he wasn’t offering any specifics. People were looking to hear what can government do, what can she do. That was a miss. There wasn’t enough conversation about the rising cost of rent, student tuition, good jobs.”
This sort of anecdotal feedback is common in media reports across the country. It confirms election day surveys, and polling for months in advance, showing that the economy was a decisive issue. 
Yet Democrats spent a great deal of energy trying to win over affluent Republicans—the so-called never-Trumpers—who are much closer ideologically to the elites who control the Democratic Party apparatus: wealthy donors and politicians in bed with the national security apparatus. 
There will be other stories to tell from this election, such as what now seems a clear and consolidated shift among Hispanic voters to the Republican Party, and the further fraying of working-class support for the Democrats.
But nothing thus far tells the story quite like Harris underperforming Biden by millions of votes.

The Democratic voters who stayed home

With the second election of Donald Trump, the US far right has cemented itself at the apex of world power. That the repugnant billionaire’s ascension to the White House is a defeat for US workers and progressive forces everywhere is nowhere more evident than in the spectacle of the anti-working-class scum celebrating his political resurrection. 
From Gina Rinehart and Andrew Bolt to Nigel Farage and Elon Musk—around the world, a who’s who of the “let them eat cake” set are beside themselves with glee that tens of millions of Americans venerate a wealthy and powerful con artist because he makes outlandish promises of national revival. 
Trump’s victory, they believe, has given them a renewed license for open and public bigotry. They can even say that bigotry and fabrication make for a winning political strategy, which is the only thing that seems to matter in capitalist politics. Their voices will now be amplified: it should be mandatory for any conservative party worth its salt to run like Trump. No more wet Liberals, just hard men and women who aren’t afraid to punch down. 
Anyone displaying the remotest sensitivity to the oppression or exploitation of their fellow human beings can now be publicly mocked, derided, beaten down—and labelled a communist of course—just as the oppressed and exploited ought to be mocked and beaten down for their weaknesses. Welcome to the new world order.
As if to prove the point, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a moment’s break from overseeing the holocaust in Gaza to gush about the “huge victory” in America. Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán called it “a much needed victory for the world”.
Wall Street then predictably surged, the Dow industrials index registering its biggest gain in two years on 6 November as the wealthiest 1 percent salivated at the prospect of yet more tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations while women bleed out in hospital parking lots, having been denied lifesaving reproductive care. Maybe Joe Rogan will dedicate a podcast to how these pathetic bleeders ought to toughen up, while he and his buddies banter about how funny a wounded vagina is.
Trump’s victory cannot be written off as a fluke, like in 2016, when he miraculously walked the narrowest of paths through the Electoral College to defeat the second most unpopular presidential candidate in recent history, Hillary Clinton. This year’s race was high turnout—not as high as the last presidential election, but it is projected to be the second highest voter participation rate since 1908. Compared to the results in 2020, Trump gained in many demographics, according to the exit polls, and in almost every geographic area, according to county returns.
He gained among Latinos and in the suburbs, among majority-white counties and majority-minority counties, among the old and among the young. He even gained in the big cities—fortresses of the Democratic vote such as New York City cracked or, in the case of Miami-Dade in Florida, crumbled. In fact, Trump won the popular vote, something considered almost impossible even for “moderate” Republicans in this age. And he won it despite a majority of the electorate openly admitting that they view him unfavourably. 
The Republicans gained control of the Senate. Potentially, they will win the House as well. If so, far-right reactionaries will control all branches of the US government—executive, legislative and judicial—from January next year. 
What of the Democratic Party? No one should shed a tear for that odious billionaire-driven killing machine. Kamala Harris ran the most right-wing Democratic campaign in recent history, first trading on fears of a Trump presidency to mobilise core party constituencies, then strutting her bonafides as a prosecutor, before pivoting to a love fest with the Cheney family in an effort to win over conservatives. 
Like Hillary Clinton, she failed. But like a terrorist bludgeoned by Bruce Willis at Dulles International Airport, she failed harder. 
“We’re not going back”, the vice president said repeatedly on the campaign trail. Well, the US is going backwards. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-is-the-us-election-so-close">As Lance Selfa explained recently</a>, that’s in no small part because of how the Democrats have governed in successive administrations: presiding over the economic ruin of communities and shifting politics to the right by constructing the worst sort of dog-eat-dog society at the behest of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce. 
Moreover, in this election, while Harris was parading her war criminal friend Dick Cheney’s endorsement and stumping over tea with his warmonger daughter in affluent suburbs, much of the electorate was pleading for economic relief. If you believe in fairy tales, then all the workers received magic puddings from the Democrats. In the real world, they were left drowning in debt and struggling to buy food while hundreds of billions continued to be siphoned to the military industrial complex and Liz Cheney’s friends.
If there was any positive news on Tuesday, it came with reports that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was challenging Harris in Dearborn, Michigan, where more than 50 percent of the population is of Middle Eastern descent and aghast that their own tax dollars are being used by the Biden-Harris administration to slaughter their friends and relatives in Palestine and Lebanon. Stein reportedly ended with 18 percent of the vote to Harris’s 36 percent, which was down from Joe Biden’s 69 percent—a stinging rebuke for her support for the genocide in Gaza. 
Small consolations aside, there was always going to be a fight after this election, regardless of the winner. While Trumpism might appear a uniquely American phenomenon, it is a symptom of a world in decay­. A tiny number of people living gated from the rest of the population have accrued obscene amounts of wealth while so many live in squalor and struggle. The parasites at the top, like Trump, deliver imperialist wars and increasing military budgets, environmental crisis and global warming, working- and middle-class debt bondage, health crises afflicting billions, migration crises, divide-and-rule politics, and far-right parties that have become normalised on every continent. The entire globe is a shitstorm.
There’s probably no country in which Trump’s victory will have a greater effect on political sensibilities than Australia. Not because this continent is primed for Trumpism, but because no other political class has such reflexively derivative political impulses. The political right here has no ideas of its own, even going so far as introducing the war on “woke” despite the word never having been part of the left’s lexicon. Exhibit A is the Herald Sun’s Bolt, who says that Harris’s defeat “is also a defeat of the horrendous woke army that’s run riot in the West for years” and that “Trump will now be the enemy of the woke”. 
“Woke army that’s run riot” is a euphemism for people having more progressive and accepting social attitudes, being more sensitive to the oppression of Indigenous people, being open to ideas about social solidarity and opposing imperialism and genocide. That’s what Trump and his acolytes globally want to wage war on: decency and working-class solidarity.
So it is utterly sickening, though unsurprising, to watch Labor politicians fall over themselves to congratulate the president elect. At the end of the day, they are all part of the same club. From Washington to Canberra, London to Beijing, competing cabals of rapacious ruling class thugs who ultimately share the same sensibilities: wealth and power for a few, work and drudgery for the rest.
That’s why this wasn’t just an American election, and it won’t be simply an American fight. It’s a worldwide contest for the soul of the societies in which we all will live.

Editors

Return of the beast

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.
--------------------
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?

The Liberal National Party decisively won the Queensland state election on the weekend, defeating Labor in many of its historic safe seats. 
Labor was hit hardest in the state’s north, losing key areas such as Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay. There were significant swings toward the LNP, largely fuelled by a “tough-on-crime” campaign. These losses are particularly striking; Labor had held Mackay for 99 years. While Labor retained many Brisbane seats, there were notable swings against it. 
The LNP victory is bad news for the Queensland working class. The centre of the conservatives’ campaign was a racially charged beat-up about youth crime—so expect the new government to unleash a range of punitive measures targeting Aboriginal youth. 
Labor has governed Queensland for 30 of the last 35 years. It has been defeated primarily because it failed to protect workers’ living standards, the number one concern for voters, according to polling. 
Over the last decade, wages increased by a quarter—but Brisbane house prices doubled, and unit prices rose 45 percent. Outside Brisbane, unit prices surged by 90 percent and houses by 60 percent. Once you factor in higher mortgage repayments, rent, bills, groceries, etc, there’s a lot for people to be bitter about. 
Facing an election wipeout, the Miles government rolled out last-minute cost-of-living policies, including free lunches for primary school children, 50 cent public transport fares, a new state electricity retailer and a 20 percent reduction in car registration fees. The measures likely saved Labor from what was expected to be a complete rout.
Another factor that helped Labor was the emergence of women’s rights as a campaign issue. 
Abortion access became a focal point after Katter’s Australia Party promised to overturn the 2018 decriminalisation of abortion if the LNP were to win. The LNP did not want this topic to dominate the election, given the high support for abortion rights among the public but the widespread pro-life sentiments of LNP members. 
Party leader David Crisafulli dodged media questions about the issue many times—primarily because LNP members have a clear history of opposing abortion rights. In 2018, all but three LNP members voted against Labor’s decriminalisation bill, Crisifulli included. 
The swing toward the LNP reflects discontent with Labor rather than general enthusiasm for the LNP’s platform. 
However, the party’s “tough-on-crime” policies did strike a nerve. Sixty percent of respondents to a Brisbane Times poll said crime was a “very important” issue.
The LNP’s central policy—“adult crime, adult time”—proposes giving youth offenders adult prison sentences. In campaign speeches, Crisafulli referred to a “generation of untouchables”, a euphemism for Indigenous youth, who pro-prison campaigners think are treated too lightly by the justice system.
The portrayal of a “youth crime crisis” is, in reality, a racist fabrication. Queensland’s Police Service data show an 18 percent decrease in unique youth offenders and a 6.7 percent drop in youth offences since 2021. 
And Queensland already leads the country in youth incarceration, Aboriginal children being disproportionately represented in detention facilities.
Why then did the LNP’s scare campaign resonate so much in north Queensland? 
Whenever Labor has faced pressure from the LNP on crime, they have historically capitulated. In the past three years, Labor has suspended the Human Rights Act twice, most recently to remove detention as a last resort for children. 
These concessions have legitimised the LNP’s rhetoric. Instead of diffusing right-wing pressure, Labor has amplified it, allowing the LNP to propose new measures like “reset camps” for young people.
The Queensland Greens were confident they could retain their two inner-city seats and potentially win more. But, while their statewide vote was stable, they lost ground in their target seats. 
They lost South Brisbane and are on a knife edge in Maiwar in the inner west.
The LNP’s decision to preference the ALP over the Greens in South Brisbane, reversing its 2020 strategy, likely contributed to this outcome. But the Greens’ primary vote also fell across inner-city areas because the ALP’s policies, such as low public transport fares and free school lunches, attracted more left-wing voters.
The incoming government has made its priorities clear. The first order of business is introducing punitive measures that would increase the Aboriginal prison population. 
Crisafulli has promised “no employment cuts” in the public service, distancing himself from the mass sackings that destroyed the popularity of the last LNP government. However, as he aims to reduce state debt while expanding youth detention, public service job cuts could still eventuate.
The right to abortion also looms large. The LNP might want to avoid a confrontation immediately, but it could become unavoidable if Robbie Katter pushes the issue in parliament. 
We must be prepared to fight the new government’s right-wing agenda.
The unions must fight if the party goes on the offensive against workers.
We need to build a movement against racism.
And we need to build a movement to defend abortion rights. 
A rally calling for the protection of abortion rights is planned for 6 pm this Friday, 1 November, in Brisbane Square. Within 24 hours of the election results, the rally details garnered more than 1,000 shares on Instagram.
Abortion rights could serve as a rallying point against the LNP’s broader agenda. It’s encouraging that resistance will greet the LNP’s first week in office.

Tierna Parker

Labor loses Queensland, fight against LNP begins

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.
--------------------
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.
--------------------
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.

Most people didn’t vote for Trump, or Harris

Big vote for socialists in Victorian council elections

‘Drill, baby, drill’: Climate change ignored in the US election

Bernie’s brat summer

The Democratic voters who stayed home

Return of the beast

Why is the US election so close?

Labor loses Queensland, fight against LNP begins

The final stretch of the US election

Democrats follow Trump into the sewer on immigration

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us