By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
Nov. 8, 2024
I know there are already lots of post mortems, finger pointing, and pundits with all sorts of theories as to why Kamala Harris lost in a massive landslide. Like many others, I supported Harris because I knew she would uphold the rule of law and the constitutional order, and maintain the stability of the nation.
Yet, the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party leadership had not only a messaging problem, but also a vision problem. Even as she touted the "New Way Forward," a more frequent slogan was "We're not going back." Ironically, the campaign was about going back to the glory days of the Obama era. As two important populist movements that emerged during the Obama presidency -- the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement -- despite their seeming differences, agreed that the income inequality was widening and the middle class was eroding. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans did the hard work of addressing this problem at a fundamental level, because their elites were beholden to their billionaire donor class. The Republicans learned earlier that the Bush-era neoconservatism of the big multinational businesses was losing its appeal, but the Democrats did not learn. Even as Democrats leaned in on performative identity politics, they offered little to help the low-income working class who are barely getting by on two or more jobs, and frankly, do not have time for activism or politics.
There is something called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you cannot afford to pay for gas to get to work, if you cannot afford to put food on your table, if you are struggling to pay for housing, the last thing you're worried about is democracy or freedom or any other lofty concepts.
The Harris campaign made a point of "expanding the middle-class" with a suite of policy proposals that appeal to the middle-class and the professional class. What did they offer to eradicate the extreme poverty so many Americans are suffering from, in what is supposed to be the richest country on Earth? What was the Harris program for a whole-of-the-nation approach to end all houselessness? During the Biden era, unsheltered houselessness became extremely visible due to the perfect storm created by COVID-19. It has been one of the top voter concerns since 2021 in every urban region across the United States. Kamala Harris' talks of first-time homebuyer credits would not help these people. What would, however, is a massive investment in basic public housing and non-profit social housing, starting with constructions of tens of thousands of SRO units. Her campaign promise of cracking down on "price gouging" was spurious at best. How would one define malicious "price gouging"? And government-imposed price control in other countries (for example, Argentina) did not solve the problem but only exacerbated it in a long run.
The campaign has moved itself too much to the center that some of Harris' speeches sounded like those of George W. Bush. Had Kamala won, and if the Republican Party gained the majority control of Congress, she could have become another Bill Clinton -- a law-and-order president and a GOP lapdog who waged war on the poor and the immigrants, and bragged about doing so. Mass deportations and "remain-in-Mexico" and the wall could have happened under the Harris-Walz Administration, they would just be less blatant, less spectacular, and outside the scrutiny of the mainstream media.
And the average voters in the Middle America saw right through this and saw the shallow "Champagne Democrat" elites who are wholly out of touch with the ordinary people. They didn't vote for DJT because they were racists, homophobes, transphobes, or misogynists. They didn't vote for him because they want a "Christian" nationalist theocracy. They voted for DJT because inflation (whether or not Biden had anything to do it) sucked, and because the Democrats seemingly conflate between foreign gangsters who abuse the asylum law and typical undocumented immigrants who have been here for years and decades as part of their communities -- and refuse to deal with the former because they want to protect the latter. It is telling that more Latinos have voted for DJT this year, despite that "Puerto Rico is an island of garbage" gaffe. Many Latinos either came from, or are familiar with, countries where corrupt and incompetent government had ceded powers to organized criminal warlords, who imposed a reign of terror on the people. They came to the U.S. to be safe from the likes of the Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the MS-13, not to be hunted down by them across the border. But then again, the Harris campaign platform did not say much about comprehensive immigration reform, a chronic Democratic talking point once a bipartisan talking point (yes, George W. Bush called for it), aside from a brief and marginal mention of an "earned path to citizenship," whatever that means (this is a non-starter for GOP, as the Republicans falsely assume that newly naturalized undocumented immigrants will all become Democrats).
Again, the Harris campaign was really weak on policy that could have helped those who are struggling just to survive. And that's why she lost. The Democratic Party will become irrelevant unless and until it embraces and centers the mass movement that is built from the ground up, by low-income folks, working-class people, and a multiracial and intersectional coalition that is laser-focused on common visions that uplift the bottom.
End of rant. Peace out.
W
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