Why “the left” didn’t buy what the Democrats were selling

We now know the results of what many American corporate media outlets and politicians assured us was the “most important election of our lifetime.”

I’m more than old enough to remember hearing this before. In fact, each one of the eight US presidential elections that have occurred during my adult lifetime has been described in a similar way. We’ve been told each time that this election — which has been every election — would decide whether the United States would be plunged into abyssal darkness if the other candidate won. Like a big tent revival preacher warning his fevered congregants of imminent damnation, the centers of power have warned us that the soul of American “democracy” has always been just a vote away from the fires of hell.

And no doubt, many are feeling that’s exactly what has happened. Democracy has died, and a demonic force has begun to animate its rotting corpse. That’s certainly what we’re told, anyway, and perhaps it’s true. But if so, it likely died long before this most recent election.

I’m also more than old enough to remember how the next few weeks and months will go, no doubt exactly the same way as they did in 2016. Pundits, journalists, politicians, and every keyboard activist in the United States will find some group, some spoiler, or some force to blame for the results. It was the narcissism of third-party candidates and the refusal of those who voted for them to “grow up” and “be realistic.” Or it was foreign interference, the propaganda from an enemy government manipulating Americans in exactly the same way the US government does to their people. Or it was misogyny (despite all the women who voted against the female candidate), or it was white supremacy (despite all the black and Latino voters who voted for the white candidate). Or it was that word thrown around so many times in the last eight years that it means absolutely nothing anymore: fascism.

And this time around, I’m certain we’ll again hear the scapegoating of a group named by a word that has even less meaning than fascism: “the left.” Especially on the matter of Palestine and Israel, we’ll hear it was the fault of “unreasonable leftists” — those who refused to compromise their principles, preferring to vote “in protest” for third-party candidates or even not vote at all, rather than support the slaughter of children — that ruined democracy for everyone.

Never mind that those “leftists” had plenty of other reasons not to vote for the person no voter even got a choice in selecting for the candidacy. Harris was appointed by the party elites, rather than by caucuses and primaries. Worse, she’d consistently refused to offer any significant policy decision on anything — even by election day, no one knew what the Democratic Party’s anointed would actually do. Yet despite these and countless other reasons, it will no doubt be those leftists’ refusal to bend on US funding of Israel’s pogroms against the Palestinians (and now also the Lebanese, and who knows whom Israel will target next?) that will be blamed most of all.

If this election was really “the most important election in our lifetime,” if democracy was truly “dying,” and if Trump really was a “fascist,” then certainly something went wrong, and perhaps someone must be to blame. But we should of course interrogate these statements before we go hunting for that scapegoat.

All three of those statements are essentially variations of the same thing. Each held up before the electorate a stark, live-or-die choice with all the shrill urgency of a large corporate retail chain, warning “These deals won’t last forever.” But this deal was that you could either have democracy by voting for one candidate, or lose your democracy forever by voting for the other, or for a third option, or by not voting at all.

This certainly doesn’t seem like a democracy worth saving. In fact, you’d be forgiven for suspecting that such a choice was actually quite, well, undemocratic. Yet, that’s precisely what was on offer on the 5th of November, and it’s therefore not all that surprising that some didn’t really like that choice.

Still, in times of great emergency — as when a purported fascist is about to seize control of one of the most militarily powerful nations in the world — it might potentially make sense to vote for someone you don’t really prefer in order to prevent such a calamity. Rebecca Solnit’s trite warning that an election isn’t a “love letter but a chess move,” comes to mind here, despite the fact that no Democratic Party presidential candidate has ever treated the poor and working classes any better than mere pawns. But we really must start to wonder why, if the DNC truly believed Trump was a fascist, they ran such a shallow candidate against him.

And let’s say it. Trump is not a fascist, any more than Harris was a communist. Instead, he’s cut from the same cheap fabric as other authoritarians. He’s an Orban, a Bolsonaro, a Burlesconi, a capitalist strongman full of populist economic promises and personal vendettas, but blessedly uninterested in territorial expansion or even keeping the empire running.

And it’s this which the Democratic Party and its out-of-touch managers failed most to understand. Despite the shoddy state of public education in the United States, Americans can still do math. $17.9 billion dollars of military aid to Israel in one year, and $113.4 billion redirected to Ukraine since 2022, yet no money available to rebuild crumbling infrastructure, reduce medical or educational debt, create affordable housing, fund public transit, or invest in job-creation? Really?

Americans aren’t idiots, but the DNC repeatedly treats them as if they are. In 2016, while she met privately with Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions, Hillary Clinton repeatedly told Americans the economy was much better than they thought it was. Kamala Harris, the DNC, and every liberal-leaning media outlet did this exact same thing again, somehow believing no Americans would look at their own bank account balances and piles of unpaid bills.

And like that last time, they lost to a billionaire with a gold toilet who at least gave lip service to how much the working class struggled, even if he won’t do a thing for them.

No, Trump doesn’t actually care about the poor or the working classes. Neither, though, did Kamala Harris. American “democracy” is set up explicitly to prevent anyone who likes those parts of society — let alone actually coming from those parts — from ever becoming president. Americans will never get the option for voting for someone who’d actually change the system, or for any other thing that might benefit anyone else but the rich.

That’s why we’ll hear lots of blame for Harris’s spectacular defeat placed at the feet of the “left.” It’s what happened the last time the Democrats offered their latest model of neoliberal capitalism, promising more social “equality” but nothing that would actually help people pay rent, afford medicine, or buy groceries. Then, as with now, many chose to vote for third-party candidates or to not vote at all, and they’ll be the neoliberal elites’ chosen scapegoat. The problem will never have been the useless candidate they offered us, but rather our stubbornness in thinking much better is still possible.

We do need to be clear, though. There isn’t really a left in the United States, or not what was once meant by that term. There are certainly millions who believe that capitalism is an awful economic system and that American imperialism needs to end, but there are no really-existing institutions or organisations which represent those beliefs anymore.

What’s usually described as “the left” in the US is instead a tendency, mostly now identified with academic social analysis rather than class struggle, and it has no actual political power to manifest its goals. Unlike in Europe or many parts of the Global South — where leftists don’t just have one political party but rather multiple parties constantly forming coalitions — there’s no group or organized movement representing this tendency in the United States. Decades of anti-communist propaganda and covert government actions have ensured any attempts to organize such a movement fail, or implode from within, leading to a situation where the US left is at best a series of disconnected “moments,” like the anti-globalization protests and anti-war protests of the early 2000’s, Occupy in the late 2000’s, or Black Lives Matter in the last decade.

Moments and tendencies can also be co-opted by the neoliberal establishment, but the political desires behind them — better wages, affordable housing, an end to US-funded slaughters — remain. And those beliefs will persist despite every attempt to uproot them, especially against liberals narrating them as mere consumer preferences.

Consumer preferences can be changed, while beliefs aren’t so easily uprooted. Preferences affect what you buy, but beliefs affect what you do. That is, beliefs have consequences.

Harris and the DNC refused to listen to what people actually wanted, thinking — like all capitalists — that the right publicity and advertising would suffice to convince people to buy what they were selling. They failed to understand that some of us actually believe the things we say we do and that we refuse to betray our deepest values no matter how much we’re threatened.

It should be more than clear by now that the Democratic Party is never going to even try to represent those beliefs, let alone make any effort to manifest them. For those of us who hold these beliefs, there can be no doubt about this, and the more they blame us for Harris’s loss, the more evidence we’ll have of what is truly needed. It’s time for what we once called the left to thread together our moments into a movement again, to build really-existing structures to manifest our beliefs. Whether we call ourselves the “left,” the “old left,” or something else entirely is much less important than how we build those structures, what kind of power we cultivate, and especially how we refuse to buy the lies neoliberals constantly try to sell us.

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