Liberalism's deepening crisis of legitimacy

Like many people in the United States and around the world, I spent hours last night glued to my devices, alone and at watch parties, anxiously waiting for the U.S. presidential election to unfold. While I did not strongly favor any candidates in any of the races, I felt the looming anxiety and uncertainty that many of us were feeling, still feel. Throughout this presidential race (and now knowing the results), there are several reasons why I believe the Harris campaign — and most critically, the Democratic Party — strategy failed:

• The Democratic Party sloganized their campaign around “saving democracy,” yet we’ve seen the Democratic Party establishment undermine democracy time and again — by coalescing against Bernie Sanders’ popular presidential bid in 2020 in favor of Joe Biden, by undergoing impeachment trials against Trump during his first presidential term, which many working class people saw as an attempt to overturn their electoral win, and by launching Kamala Harris to the presidential ticket without winning a nomination through the primary election, thus deepening their image as an “establishment ticket,” and strengthening Trump’s image as a “people’s choice.” The rapid, near-immediate backing of Harris by the corporate media, the publishing industry, and huge swaths of celebrities — in essence, the propaganda arm of the capitalist media — did not necessarily help her case as a people’s choice. Despite Trump’s actions, wagging their fingers at Donald Trump alone as “the greatest threat to American Democracy” while at the same time politicking in the ways they did came across as hollow and fiercely hypocritical.

• The Democratic Party establishment — and many liberals and so-called progressives — writing off all Trump supporters — tens of millions of people in the U.S — as racists and homophobes instead of addressing the reasons many Americans do support Trump: distrust in a mainstream media run by corporate oligarchs vastly serving their own interests, uncertainty about healthcare and electoral integrity, the disastrous costs of living and the struggle to make ends meet, wanting solutions to violent crime, property crime, and the drug crisis (misplacing blame on undocumented immigrants instead of on wealth inequality created by the capitalist class), wanting to create more jobs at home instead of offshoring labor, the desire for social and economic security, and wanting endless wars to end. While I don’t believe Trump offers a lasting solution to these crises, Trump does know how to speak to them, exploit, and capitalize on them; writing off the millions of working class Trump supporters has only increased their sense of alienation and abandonment, their often-times justified image of a left-leaning moral superiority complex, and is one of many grave errors of American liberalism.

• A failure to offer any indication that they will enforce or even adhere to international law by continuing to spend billions of our hard-earned tax dollars on weapons shipments and aid to the state of Israel as they continue to conduct internationally-convicted war crimes against the Palestinian people. Kamala Harris’ explicit stance that she would not break from Biden’s policy on Israel, and her failure as a whole to divorce her own campaign from the widely unpopular Biden presidency, was critically significant.

• Assuming and taking for granted a perceived loyalty of young people and people of color to the Democratic Party without working for it, or earning it.

• A third-consecutive presidential election in which the Democratic Party overly-emphasized themselves as “not being Trump” instead of offering a palpable, concrete vision and plan for a future that people could wholeheartedly believe in.

Today, millions of people are also in despair, rightfully afraid of another presidential term in which the fringes of the MAGA movement that attracts White Nationalism and Right-Wing Terror are emboldened and uplifted. The reality is, that regardless of whether or not there was a Trump or Harris victory, these segments of society are here and growing through the vast underbelly of American isolationism. Capitalism creates the conditions for this kind of ideological extremism, not Trump alone. For the majority of people in the U.S., their suffering is real and should not be so dismissed or unaddressed. Yes, Harris did make moderately successful efforts to speak to some of our needs, but the Democratic Party as a whole failed to capture the hearts of a nation enough to compel us into movement, and there needs to be a serious interrogation and inventory about why that is. The U.S. needs a working class party, fueled by a working class movement, not by a bourgeois, two-party system, not by Super-PACs, billionaires, or the electoral college, but one rooted in economic justice, journalistic integrity, environmental protections, healthcare and housing rights, and forward towards peace, stability, and the end of endless war.