On this day in 2016 I had to leave work early. I could not get anything done. I was absolutely shocked and numb. I could not believe that such a cruel and crass person ascended to the presidency.
In 2024, I work from home thanks to a pandemic horribly mismanaged by the man who will soon be returning to that post. I am getting things done today because I mentally prepared myself for this outcome. A few days ago, I was saying to friends that my gut felt like the results would be a landslide for Harris, at least electorally. I was absolutely wrong. In trying to define that calculus, I believed that the abortion issue would outpace Harris’s inept campaign. I thought paling around with the worst war criminals from the George W. Bush years would not matter in the face of bodily autonomy. Incorrect!
To quote the last effective Democratic campaigner, let me be clear: I did not support Harris enthusiastically. I live in New York, and while the results here should be eye-opening to the Dems, my vote was never going to truly matter in this contest. She made no attempt to break away from Biden on anything of significance. She refused to waver on unflinching support for the genocide in Gaza. She was just another part of an evil machine that often feels impossible to fully halt. Every four years we pull levers to ratchet its output of misery either down a few notches or up to the redline. In 2020 we decided to drop down to a seven or so on the dial. The machine continued to output at about an eight. The Harris campaign essentially said we will keep this at eight, the other guy will take it to a ten.
Prices are high. Inflation outpaces wage increases in many parts of the country. Yesterday the nation seemed to remember the evil machine’s setting circa 2019, and decided they wanted that option, they wanted Trump back.
Last night as the proceedings kicked off on network news, I decided I wanted a pizza for some comfort food. I ordered pickup to save a few bucks. The total was $31.62 before tip. It did not cost that much in 2019. I know a Trump presidency will not change this, but I’m not one of the voters deciding this election. The Harris campaign offered some mealy-mouthed statements about “grocery price gouging.” This is a perfect display of the problem with Democrats: they are now the party of the managerial class. Like the Republicans, they are fully in service of capitalist hegemony. Any policy that would negatively affect the bottom line of billionaires is unthinkable among their strategists. This is not a new development; it began with the Carter administration. We are now at the point though where they can offer no policy proposals to address the price of a pizza. Alternatively, Trump can simply lie and say, “prices will drop,” and pick up 20,000 votes in swing states.
Don’t worry though, the Democrats have the endorsement of Dick Cheney! Do you know what this means? Sure, they will lose those 20,000 swing state voters who either don’t care about Cheney or hate him for starting the war that killed their son. However, they will gain the support of three opinion page columnists. A true moral victory if there ever was one!
It is easy to say all of this in hindsight. Maybe there were some so-called experts in the Harris camp noticing all this and like me, thought the Dobbs decision would put them over the line regardless. They get paid for that reasoning though, I’m just some guy. If that was the internal line of thought, then you have to hope those consultants will never work in a campaign ever again. I highly doubt that happens though. It seems that world is a nexus of upward failure.
So, what happens now? The future is unwritten, but if I had to hazard a guess it will include the following: another giant tax cut for the wealthy. The Departments of Education, Labor, Interior, and Transportation will be further hollowed out to pay for it. American bombs will continue to rain down on innocent people in the Middle East. Voting rights will take another hit, and the older cohort of Supreme Court justices will retire to be replaced by new blood-thirsty Heritage Foundation ghouls. The margins of society will be further marginalized. Everything will continue to get worse while the Earth slowly cooks in a stew of fossil fuels.
There will be a response. The Democrats will decide what the official answer is. Will they continue to appease the corporate monolith? Will they reach for culture war issues alone while ignoring the financial difficulties plaguing the working class? Or will someone within their fold finally be able to break through their internal delusions–offering novel solutions for stagnant wages, high cost of living, and towering home prices?
Given that they had almost a decade to do this, and that every attempt to do so got thwarted by the apparatchiks, I am not very hopeful. It might be time to accept that the American Experiment was a failure, that the staggering wealth of people like baseball owners (see, I can bring it to the theme of this blog!) corrupts our institutions to the core. We must demand a redistribution of wealth, which results in a redistribution of power. Voting alone will never accomplish this, but we must find a new source for electoral pushback from the left. The Democrats continue to fail us. Perhaps it is time they felt a little heat.
The more progressive Democrats need to lose the delusion of pushing the party leftward. People like Rashida Tlaib, who won re-election handily in a place Harris lost, should look to break away. Form a new party. It won’t be an overnight success. The work will be long and hard, but the corporate slavishness runs too deep to ever reform the Democratic party from within. In a weird twist, it will be the threat of competition–that Smithian concept that capitalists love to cite–that can push Democrats back to their political lane of the mid-20th century. The left will be slightly bifurcated, but it may be the only way to ensure that our exhausting two major parties do not devolve into German fascism versus Spanish fascism.
This is only an idea on how to address the crisis of the moment electorally. There are so many other avenues of organizing and responding to the uncertainty ahead. Don’t be afraid to explore them.