By Branko Marcetic
WASHINGTON DC: If you want to see the two competing visions of the Democratic Party’s future coming out of Tuesday’s electoral catastrophe, just compare the responses to the Democrats’ thumping from Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Harris’s concession speech was part and parcel of the strategy that just saw her and her party go down in flames, full of inspirational-sounding generalities and the attempts at soaring rhetoric that no Democrat has quite managed to nail since Barack Obama. An often cheery Harris talked about how her campaign had “been intentional about building community,” vowed to keep fighting for freedom and the like through voting and the courts, but also “in how we live our lives by treating one another with kindness and respect,” and urged her supporters to light up what looked like a dark future with “the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.” She didn’t once mention bread-and-butter issues, and one of the biggest cheers came when she promised to “engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
A palpably disgusted Sanders, meanwhile, put out a short statement excoriating the party for failing to speak to the economic concerns that were by far voters’ leading motivation heading into Election Day.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said.
First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Sanders rattled off a host of facts and statistics about the material hardship that drove voters to throw the Democrats out of power this week: record inequality, two-thirds of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, declining living standards, high prescription drug costs, and the absence of basic provisions that citizens of other countries take for granted, like public health insurance and paid family and medical leave. He also called out the billions of dollars being put toward the “horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children” in Gaza despite overwhelming public opposition.
He then closed by torching the venal constellation of profit-driven interests that had led the party to yet another electoral and political disaster:
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.
Sanders’s statement was, unsurprisingly, not warmly received by the interests he was criticizing. Outgoing Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison — a former corporate lobbyist whose main political qualification for the position he’s leaving was losing a different election, his own, four years ago — struck back that it was “straight up BS.”
But Sanders is objectively correct. The Harris campaign’s whole game plan was that they would simply ignore the electorate’s years-long complaints about the economy, offer a handful of laudably populist but ultimately meagre policy responses to them (banning price gouging, a $25,000 first-time homebuyer grant, an expanded childcare tax credit, and having Medicare cover retirees’ home care), and make the election all about abortion rights, the future of democracy, and Trump’s character.
It’s hardly a shock that millions of working-class voters of different racial backgrounds either rejected this or didn’t feel inspired enough to vote at all. In a time of skyrocketing housing costs, the Harris campaign’s only housing policy was for aspiring homeowners (a Trump-leaning constituency) and offered nothing to renters, who are disproportionately young, lower income, and not white. Harris offered no health care policy for anyone under sixty-five, even though it remains the average American’s top source of financial anxiety. She didn’t campaign on a higher minimum wage, at a time when nearly a quarter of American workers, or 39 million, earn low wages (defined as $17 an hour, or $35,000 a year), including roughly a third of black and Latino workers.
You could go on and on. The failures of this campaign are clear, and Sanders is right that “some very serious political discussions” need to be had in the weeks and months ahead. And judging by the discussions already being had among those responsible for this failure — with the Biden whisperers at Morning Joe calling for the party to turn even further away from progressivism, and Third Way’s Matt Bennett insisting, despite Tuesday’s result, that “the one way to beat a right-wing populist is through the center” — he’s right about something else: the interests behind the Democratic Party aren’t going to learn a damn thing. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Jacobin