On the Election, Blame, and the Way Forward

Let this be the end of something that needs to end.

Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris for the Presidency of the United States. Even after everything he did in his first term, even after the impeachments, the insurrection on January 6th, the convictions, and the increasingly fascist rhetoric, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris—and it wasn’t even very close.

I want to offer two—if not explanations, then ways of understanding what happened. The first is pragmatic and political; the second, deeper and metaphysical. My political analysis is that this result should be a repudiation of the Clintonite Democratic Party that co-opted Republican economic positions in the 90s. (They adopted some Republican social positions too, as on crime and immigration, but even those have an obvious economic valence). When they did so, America was left with two pro-corporate parties pushing neoliberal economic policies at the expense of the working class. Since both parties were in basic agreement on how they thought the economy should function—namely, that it should enrich the class to which the politicians and donors of both parties belong, with perhaps some of the wealth “trickling down”—they could only distinguish themselves on social issues, which lead to the deepening of the culture wars that have carried through to this day. 

What neither party establishment appears to have understood is how dissatisfied most Americans have become with the state of their lives under this socioeconomic system, and with good reason. The general economic trend of the last 40+ years in America (and in other countries to which neoliberalism was exported) has been the weakening of social services, increased costs of living, stagnant wages, deeper debt, deeper precarity, and rampant economic inequality, all accompanied by a profound collective mental health crisis marked by skyrocketing levels of drug addiction and increased suicide rates. Add to this the worsening climate crisis, about which nearly nothing has been done (arguably due to the government’s embrace of market-friendly regulatory ideology), and it should have been obvious that the way we organize our society needs to fundamentally change.

Change. That was the promise that swept Obama into office in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. He was given an overwhelming mandate to transform our government into something that would serve the people at the expense of the powerful. And he failed. I’m not going to talk about why I think he failed or whether it was even possible for him to succeed; I only wish to make the point that through eight years of the Obama presidency, the people’s desire for fundamental change went unsatisfied.

That brings us to the 2016 election. On the right wing, the voices calling for fundamental disruption eventually coalesced around Donald Trump, the classic strongman demagogue who promised to be the people’s avenging angel against the elites who’d been screwing them for decades. On the left wing, those voices coalesced around Bernie Sanders, who sought to fight right-leaning populism with left-leaning populism and reclaim the Democrats’ historic role as champions of the working class. Republican voters, despite initial opposition from establishment politicians like Jeb Bush and John McCain (and then cynical endorsement by others such as Mitch McConnell), nominated their populist candidate. Democratic voters…didn’t. Whereas the Democrats had been the anti-establishment party under Obama, they now became the pro-establishment party, advocating for more of the same. In a moment of such obvious populist fervor, the result should have been predictable. And so, we got our first four years of Trump.

I suspect that Biden’s victory in 2020 had much more to do with the fact that he got to play the anti-establishment candidate against Trump’s status as incumbent, and with the unique economic conditions presented by the pandemic, than with any actual policy substance. And now, in 2024, we got virtually the same result from virtually the same contest we had in 2016, only moreso. 

What’s the lesson? Americans have been voting to screw the elites in every election since at least 2008. We can talk about whether those votes have had or will have the desired effect (they haven’t, and won’t), but I think it’s obvious at this point that that’s what they were meant to do. If we are going to keep our country from descending into fascism and/or obscene corporatism, there needs to be a political party that runs first and foremost on a platform of working class solidarity, of the many against the few. It’s become a cliche, but it’s true: Bernie would have won in 2016, and he would have won in 2024. I expect that the only person who will be able to beat the representative of the Christofascist/corporatist wing of American politics in a Presidential election, assuming we continue to have those, is someone running on Bernie’s basic platform of progressive, working class solidarity. Adopting this platform will mean fewer donations from billionaires, fewer positions on company boards, and fewer lucrative speaking gigs. Sadly, this might be enough to dissuade the people presently at the helm of the Democratic Party from doing so, since they make at least as much money out of power as they do in power (I mean, my god, think of how much money the Harris campaign raised, and who got to pocket it). But if they actually want to win, this is what they must do.

But all of this is only a preamble to the point I really want to make, and which I’m probably more willing to stand behind. I am, after all, not a professional political commentator (for what those people’s expertise has proven to be worth), nor do I honestly spend much time at all thinking about electoral politics. That said, I don’t think any of the arguments I’ve made are particularly original or even controversial among political progressives, and strong cases have been made for them by people much more qualified to do so. Plus, most of the counterarguments I’ve heard, such as those that point to positive economic trends under Biden, somehow discount the validity of massive popular dissatisfaction on the basis of quantitative abstractions like “economic growth.” The response to such counterarguments is: “if everything’s going so well, why is everyone so angry?” The latter is the fact, not the former.

But no, the deeper point I want to make is about the dangers of blame and moralistic thinking, by which I mean the belief that some people can and should act otherwise than they do, and that the reason they don’t is that they are somehow unreasonably malevolent. Specifically, of course, I’m talking about the tendency of some people to attribute the outcome of this election to bad people acting badly rather than understanding it as an expression of the state of our society as a whole. If we think about this election as the former, as bad people acting badly, we too quickly absolve ourselves of any responsibility we might have had for the outcome. In a superficial sense, this should apply most of all to the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party as an institution. They should be made to explain how they failed to convince enough people that their vision for the country’s future was better than that of a mentally deteriorating criminal racist/misogynist. For all the money they collected from Democratic voters, whom they terrified with the rhetoric that Trump was bringing fascism to America, the Harris campaign and the Democratic establishment owe us an explanation for their failure that is more substantial than “I guess most Americans are racist.” In this moment, and always, we need to resist the notion that voters can fail politicians; rather, we should demand an account of how they came up short without blaming people for not already seeing things their way. Harris and the Democrats failed to make enough people believe that their lives would be considerably better voting Democrat than voting for Donald Trump to tear everything down. And what a failure that was.

Even more deeply, though, it’s all of us who need to reflect on how we’ve allowed our society to come to this. How is it that Harris was the best we could do? How was her non-vision for a future America that was in no way different from the America of the past four years the best we could collectively imagine? Why do we allow massive corporations and billionaires like Elon Must exert so much control not only on our political lives but our personal lives as well? Why do we spend most of our time working to enrich corporations at the expense of our own spiritual well being? Why do we trade freedom for comfort? Why do we pay taxes to a government that spends them on bombing children rather than housing and feeding our neighbors? This, again, is not about blame; it is a call for us to try to understand why we’ve made the choices we’ve made and, perhaps most importantly, what we believe is valuable and good in life. I have argued before that there can be nothing good that is only good for any of us individually, or for some of us at the expense of others. What is good is only good when it is good for all. We need to remember this whenever we are urged by those in power to fearfully cling to some perceived good at the cost of denying it to others, because even if we cling to it, it will no longer be good. What I’m saying, what I’ve been saying, is that none of us individually can be what we’re meant to be until we understand that we are all part of a whole, and our individual interests are the same as our collective interests. We need to realize this, and then expand our imagination of the kind of world we want to have. What does this look like? No surprise: solidarity. Mutual aid. Ecological stewardship.

In closing, I am not pleased by the result of the election, but I believe it was in some sense necessary, and I am cautiously optimistic that it will mark a turning point in our expectations of what we expect from our government. This is not to say that the next several years won’t be ugly—they will—only that, with some luck and enough self-interest on the part of the billionaire class to keep the country functional enough to keep making money, I hope this will be the end of a particular corporatist trend in American politics, and the beginning of a more progressive one. Let’s all hope for that.