Washington“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people now finds itself abandoned by the working class. As long as the party leadership continues to defend the status quo, the american people will be angry and want change. And he will be right.” Signed: Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s senator furthest to the left of the entire parliamentary arc.
Nothing else needs to be added. When inflation has destroyed the family economy of so many people, working people have voted for Trump. When the years go by and healthcare continues to cost a fortune, what good is a “progressive” party? When going into debt to pay for tuition at an expensive college won’t give children better prospects for the future than their parents had, what good are the socially impeccable speeches of the American center-left?
It is customary to say that each presidency is a consequence of the previous one. George Bush’s Iraq War lies and the 2008 financial crisis brought Obama to the White House. It’s possible, but let’s pause the movie here for a moment. In 2006, when Obama has been a senator for Illinois for just two years, Obama is getting siren songs to come forward and talk to Ted Kennedy about whether he thinks it would be too soon. And Kennedy replied: “You don’t choose the moment. The moment chooses you”. It is very true. It was Obama’s time. And if Kennedy saw it, the system also saw it clearly: that 45-year-old senator, son of a Kenyan and a white woman, was the moderate change (conveniently presented as historical change) that the status quo could digest.
And so, how is it that after Obama came Trump? Obama was blinded by the gods when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year after winning the election, and when he killed Bin Laden with surgical precision. Obama was at the top, and he bet on Hillary as his successor. In retrospect, it is clear that Obama’s best replacement in 2016 would have been Biden (the only one who has been able to defeat Trump) and not Hillary Clinton, a perfect representative of progressivism who travels in first class, who could not embody the change in any way. After Trump’s indecent campaign against Obama, lying when he said he was not born in the United States, Obama retaliated with a speech in which he laughed at Trump at a gala dinner, in front of everyone. If he had any doubts about showing up, that night Trump must have thought that revenge is a dish that is eaten cold. And for the second time, he was able to with everyone. The luxury list of celebrities who have campaigned for Harris has been of no use: Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Gere, LeBron James, Martin Sheen, Harrison Ford, Scarlett Johansson, Madonna, Arnold Schwarzenegger…
Who was to blame for the resounding defeat of the Democrats? Certainly not Harris, who already did enough by tying the polls. Biden and all those who looked the other way in the face of the president’s obvious motor and cognitive impairment, and maintained the lie that he was fit to run, must bear some responsibility.
But the accelerated construction without internal debate of a candidate falls into the category of serious strategic error. What we’re talking about here is the structural error of getting the question wrong about what kind of party we are and what the difference is between what we’re supposed to stand for and the lives of the people we say we stand for. Many workers have not believed that the Democrats will fight for them. And they preferred Trump. With the aggravating that Trump only looks out for him.
