It Wasn't Just a Bad Campaign

The era of neoliberalism spawned an illiberal strongman. Labor and the left need a deeper analysis of what went wrong and a new direction to recover.

Artwork by Stephen Crowe

On Tuesday, I was at my part-time job in Midtown in Manhattan. Many of the people on the streets at lunchtime in Midtown are from the mid-level management crew. That includes a lot of men wearing the corporate uniform that’s currently in vogue: khaki pants and button-up shirts, topped with a vest from Patagonia (the kind of vests that the company prides itself on “drenching” in “vivid color”). I’ve got nothing against Patagonia really, but it’s a specific corporate look.

A lot of these guys had “I voted” stickers on their vests. At some point, a terrible realization dawned on me that many of them, if not a majority, probably wanted the same outcome on Tuesday that I did: for Donald Trump and the Republicans to lose, which meant that Kamala Harris and the Democrats in Congress needed to win. 

It was a grim thought, made worse when I started to think about what outcome the food-service workers preparing meals for them must have been wishing for at the same time. Maybe most didn’t care all that much. Maybe some of them are still loyal Democrats. Maybe some are part of the Trump wave that washed over NYC — bringing Democratic support in the city to its lowest point since 1988. The point is that something has gone terribly wrong when many in the vest-wearing managerial set are rooting for the “progressive” option, and more and more service workers aren’t.

Something Fundamental Must Change

I wrote up longer thoughts on the election yesterday, which I hope you’ll check out and give me feedback on. As I argue in the piece, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have lots of criticisms of the Kamala Harris campaign, and people should criticize the campaign. But don’t stop there, or focus too much on that at the expense of a deeper attack. 

The campaign was downstream of the Democratic Party’s economic strategy for decades. Criticizing the political choices made by Democrats in the last four months obscures the fact that the real problems lie in what was done (and not done) in the last four years. In my piece, I go over some of the key problems with the Biden administration. The summary is that tax credits and appointments to regulatory agencies do not make a left-wing, pro-labor presidency — the kind of administration that the moment and its economic problems called for. To continue to argue that there was something especially progressive and inspiring about the Biden administration is to help the center-right wing of the Democratic Party make its case. It wants to argue that the Biden administration went too far left. The administration didn’t, and we shouldn’t let the conservative wing of the Democratic Party get away with that argument.

The problems don’t just stem from the Biden administration however. This election is the culmination of five decades of policy and strategic choices:

[B]oth parties’ embrace and defense of the neoliberal model in the last fifty years primed the country for a backlash against mainstream politics. When Trump decapitated the Republican Party in 2016 and put himself in charge as the champion of an illiberal end to the neoliberal period, the ball moved to the Democratic court. Democratic leaders worked furiously and with atypical gusto and effectiveness to make sure that their response would not be Bernie Sanders. Instead, the Democrats’ response was to welcome the evicted Republican leadership into their party’s camp. Together, they made common cause to defend the old order against the ugly new one on offer.

To focus too much on the flaws in Harris’s campaign is to fall into the trap of treating politics as a marketing competition that occurs anew every election cycle. If we fixed how she campaigned, we could expect a different result. But politics is about so much more than that: it’s the expression of a deeper struggle between classes and social groups, between contending strategies and visions for the future. The Democratic Party is a party whose program is set by capital, whose leadership and operative layers are staffed by members of the professional class, whose reputation is permanently sullied among working-class people, and which has no internal democratic structures. For fifty years, it’s acted precisely as you would expect given those facts.

Changing just the party’s campaign tactics this year would change none of those basic facts, and I struggle to see how doing so would have produced a fundamentally different result. One could reply that we should also swap out all the party’s key aspects for something new. Replace capital with the labor movement as the party’s master, throw out its current leadership and operatives and replace them with good democratic socialists, refashion a totally new reputation for the party, and reinvent it as a democratic membership organization. But doing that essentially involves not just building a new party from scratch, but also doing all the work of tearing down and destroying an old one.

As anyone who watches home remodeling shows knows, starting from scratch (while not easy) is often easier than a gut renovation. That’s why the basic line of the left wing of the labor movement and of democratic socialists is as valid as it’s ever been. A future for labor and the left involves building a new party and a broader movement that is independent of the Democrats. We’re in a disastrous, self-limiting, and ultimately self-defeating alliance of convenience with the Democratic Party. Our base is demoralized by a party leadership that aids and abets a genocide in service of its aggressive geopolitical strategy, embraces the Cheney family and their ilk, and prioritizes the needs of its corporate donor class and affluent supporters. At the same time, their efforts to chip into the Republican base are stymied by their association with our politics: socialized health care, a humane border policy, a radically more progressive tax system. Our politics repel their base, and their politics repel our base. Our two camps (theirs orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than ours of course) are consigned to a vicious cycle of losing together, hating each other while out of power, winning together (when the Republicans inevitably fuck up), hating each other while in power, and then losing together again.

The best bet, as I see it, of delivering a definitive defeat to Trumpism and breaking out of this vicious cycle lies in letting both projects, the Democratic Party and broad labor left movement, do their thing — separately. Until we can bring that about, we’re living in our own state of denial.

The silver lining in all this is that the stakes this year never felt higher, and now that we’re living in some version of the worst-case scenario, most people would agree we need to think anew and take big risks. As I say in my piece, anyone who had a blueprint for a new strategy yesterday probably just had a set of well-worn slogans. But even Bernie Sanders, who has been a strong defender of Biden and kept alive hopes of realigning the Democratic Party, is now hinting at the need for “some very serious political discussions.” So let’s start to have them.