Socialist Alternative (ISA in the United States) Executive Committee
(This article was first published on 3 July 2024)
There’s a general feeling in American society that things are going to hell. A recent survey found that one in four Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, because we’re spending everything we have just to stay alive. Some economists are predicting an even worse economic crisis in the next months or years. We’re suffering through historic deadly heat waves because of climate change (during which we’re told to use less air conditioning, while AI companies use enough energy to power the entire country of Sweden).
As if that wasn’t enough, we’re being forced to live through another Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden (or whoever the Democrats choose to replace him with) presidential matchup. It’s hard not to feel like you want to just completely get off the carnival ride. But socialists and the left can’t afford to just sit this out – presidential elections especially are where many working people are far more engaged than usual, and we can’t just cede that ground to the corporate parties’ narratives. We need to use that opportunity to put forward a vision that things can be radically different.
Anything could happen between now and election day, but right now it looks like Trump has an excellent chance of winning. He has promised to carry out an even more reactionary agenda than in his last term, with a more determined team of operatives. And he even has a small but increasing section of big business and the billionaires starting to line up behind him. Meanwhile, Biden is still supporting Israel’s horrific onslaught on the people of Gaza.
All of this leaves a lot of working people with burning questions: Who can I vote for and still sleep at night? What do we do if Trump wins? If Biden wins, does that actually solve anything?
We hate both of them
Biden and Trump’s first debate at the end of June triple-underlined the horror that millions of Americans are feeling, that either choice leaves us absolutely screwed. It was an unmitigated disaster for the Biden campaign – headlines like this one from the Wall Street Journal summed things up: “Biden crashed in his first debate with Trump, delivering the kind of performance Democrats were fearing.” There is now a very real possibility that the Democratic Party tries to replace Biden with another candidate, but that won’t fix the real problem, that both parties answer to big business and the billionaires.
Even before the debate, corporate media outlets were dubbing a new category of American voter: the double hater. The “double haters” aren’t just radical college students protesting the war on Gaza and disgusted with both candidates, but also Midwestern retirees and one 64-year-old homemaker who begrudgingly voted for Trump in 2020 but now doesn’t know what to do – she told the Washington Post she’s praying every night that we have a different choice come election day.
Most Americans say the economy and inflation are their top issues this election. Biden has overseen an economy over the past four years that gives many Americans a sense of anxiety. Since early 2022, Americans have consistently been most likely to describe the economy’s current conditions as “poor,” according to Gallup polls. More Americans say that they are not as well off (43%) since Biden became president than those who say they are better off (16%).
In response, Biden and most corporate media are actively gaslighting us: they say the economy is actually doing really well, guys! Look at all those jobs they added to the economy that don’t pay enough! Please do NOT look up how much credit card debt Americans have!
Biden failed to implement even a $15 federal minimum wage (it remains $7.25), which is still far too low at this point. He has gone back on every climate promise, making the US the number one oil and gas producer in the world. In June, Biden announced an immigration policy so reactionary Trump was probably mad he didn’t do it first: a total ban on asylum-seekers entering the US whenever the government deems it necessary.
Trump’s answers on the economy are somehow worse, saying he’ll extend and expand tax cuts, especially for wealthy estates and big business. Many Americans associate Trump with the pandemic-era stimulus checks, but those aren’t coming back again. Trump has also promised to carry out mass deportations, build immigrant detention camps, and even end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants born in the US. He also plans to use federal troops to crack down on protests in Democrat-controlled cities.
Many working and marginalized people are absolutely correct to fear a Trump 2.0 presidency. But the “lesser” evil has also just become more and more evil. So how many times are we supposed to hold our noses and vote for the lesser evil before things actually get any better?
HOW is Trump happening to us again?
In 2016, working people were long fed up with Obama and the Democrats bailing out the billionaires while working people lost their jobs and homes. That’s when Bernie Sanders promised a political revolution of the 99%, speaking to millions of Americans who knew the establishment and politics as usual were rotten to the core. When the Democratic Party crushed his campaign and Bernie obediently got behind pro-corporate warmonger Hillary Clinton, Trump promised he would be the one to upend the system. With the main alternative being Hillary Clinton, many people who didn’t necessarily share Trump’s reactionary views, including some who voted for Bernie in the primaries, voted for Trump in a desperate bid for an alternative to the status quo.
In 2020, after four years of Trump’s right-wing chaos, enough working and young people came out and held their noses and voted for Joe Biden to defeat Trump (who still got 70 million votes). It was more a vote against Trump than enthusiastic support for Biden. But Biden winning didn’t make Trump or the right wing go away. So now we’re looking at the real possibility of another Trump presidency, even more dangerous than his first term, precisely because the Democrats have no answers to the multiple crises we face.
There is a growing reactionary core on the right, with many ordinary people getting sucked into the vortex of right-wing conspiracy theories and paranoia. Among young men, Trump is performing better than he did in 2020, which goes hand-in-hand with the anti-feminist backlash that has won over many teenage boys to deeply backwards ideas. But that is still a minority of young people, and even the Trump-fanatics are a small layer compared to the much wider layer who will vote for Trump because they feel that things need to change, even if they disagree with a lot of what Trump stands for.
Imagine if the Democrats had taken up the Bernie approach and held huge rallies to build a mass movement for Medicare for All, a massive expansion of affordable housing, and a higher minimum wage. Imagine if they won majorities in Congress and then actually used those to implement all of that legislation. If that happened, there would be very little reason for the majority of ordinary people to support a candidate like Trump. But the Democrats will never do that. They are a corporate party, and their billionaire donors in the health insurance industry, private housing industry, defense (AKA imperialist war) industry and other major corporations would never allow them to pass any meaningful reforms for the working class that would cost big business money.
We need a vehicle to express the desire of millions of working-class Americans for radical improvements to our lives – we need a party that actually will do all of those things the Democrats never will. We need a workers’ party that can be a political home for working and young people to get organized around inspiring demands, where we can run candidates who will be held accountable to the working class, and build movements that can actually change society.
We need a new party because our movements need a place where workers and youth can come together to discuss strategy and tactics, where unions and other working-class organizations can coordinate their struggles for a more powerful impact. That’s what the Gaza solidarity movement needs right now, in order to escalate and expand to involve a wider layer of the working class and youth. We need to get better organized if we’re going to beat the billionaires and the ruling class.
Vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West and build movements to stop the right wing
It’s time to end the idea once and for all that voting for the lesser evil will get us anywhere good.
Voting for Biden won’t stop Trump and won’t stop the growth of the right wing, it will just put it off to deal with in the future, when the right will only be stronger. The only way to actually stop the right wing is to confront it head-on and show a way forward based on class solidarity to address the real issues rather than the fake “solutions” they push aimed at maintaining divisions among working people. That means that regardless of whether Trump wins in November, we need to build mass movements in our workplaces and in the streets to fight for the things we need.
We should start this summer with the biggest possible protests at the Democratic National Convention, calling for an end to the slaughter in Gaza and for the billions spent on war to go to massively popular demands like Medicare for All and a huge expansion of affordable housing.
If Trump wins and tries to carry out the range of authoritarian attacks he has promised, only a mass movement led by the organized working class can stop him. That means we will need the labor movement to help lead the way with coordinated actions and strikes, like in 2019 when Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants threatened mass strikes and ended Trump’s government shutdown. If Biden wins, we will also need a mass movement to fight for real gains and against the right-wing attacks on immigrants, trans people, and the right to abortion.
In the meantime, those of us who recognize that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represent our interests should instead vote for the strongest left, anti-war independent candidate, Jill Stein or Cornel West. Independent candidates have a historic opening this election season, but neither Stein nor West have properly seized it to build dynamic, energizing campaigns based on movements and clear demands that working and young people could get actively involved in. Stein got arrested with campus anti-war protestors, which is very important, but there is much more that could be done to make hers and West’s campaigns engaging for a wider section of working people.
Despite that, either is still a radically better choice than continuing to accept the lesser evil. While they’re not likely to win, if left independent candidates get millions of votes, it could show many working people that there’s a hunger for these politics and put pressure on progressive labor leaders to launch a wider political organization or even a new party. Voting for Stein or West is an important step toward giving voice to the millions of us who want fundamental, radical change that neither corporate party represents.
Under capitalism, we go to the supermarket and we get choices no one really asked for between forty different kinds of toothpaste, but when we vote for president we’re forced to choose between two rancid, decrepit servants of the ruling class. Capitalism has failed, it’s a bankrupt system that has well outlived its usefulness. We don’t just need a new party, we need an entirely new system to save the planet, end wars, and give working people the kind of lives we deserve.
