Henry Hubbard, Socialist Alternative (ISA in the United States)
(This article was first published on 23 July 2024)
The chaotic lead-up to the 2024 presidential election has taken yet another unprecedented turn. On July 21, Joe Biden announced he would be ending his reelection campaign and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic ticket. This election cycle, which originally promised an uninspiring repeat of Biden vs. Trump has been rocked by historic events in the past month, from an agonizing debate to an attempted assassination, and now the first incumbent dropping out in over half a century.
Traditional capitalist parties and institutions are in crisis the world over. In the UK, the Tories just suffered their worst defeat in 190 years. Snap elections in France saw the growth of both the left and the right, as voters abandoned President Emmanuel Macron and the dead-end right-centrists. In Kenya, mass protests defeated an IMF-sponsored austerity package. Working people are eager for a path forward, and establishment parties and politicians offer nothing. The craziness of the 2024 US presidential election can only be understood as part of this global trend.
Up until last week, the Democratic party leadership was doubling down on Biden as the only candidate who could beat Trump. While it’s true that incumbents usually win their party’s nomination, the real reason for backing Biden and avoiding a primary was to fend off even the possibility of a progressive challenge that would threaten to expose Biden’s out and out corporate servitude. When faced with Biden as their only option, over 650,000 voters chose to stay “uncommitted”, while others lodged protest votes through write-ins or leaving their ballots blank. In many states, Biden’s top contender was essentially an empty space.
The Republican party is even more energized and unified behind Donald Trump coming out of their national convention and the assassination attempt. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been scrambling to convince their 81-year-old leader to step aside, and are now forced to find a nominee less than a month before their own convention. But who gets to choose this new nominee? As always, the party is driven by big money and corporate donors who want to exercise their control over the political process.
After Biden’s botched debate, polls immediately showed other candidates faring better against Trump. But it wasn’t until some of the Democrats’ biggest donors started withholding checks that Biden finally threw in the towel, understanding that in the party’s view, a viable campaign is one that can convince the donors. In a nauseating example of the influence mega-donors have over the political process, the super PAC Future Forward withheld $90 million in funding, including multiple commitments over $10 million, until Biden dropped out.
After receiving Biden’s endorsement, Kamala Harris immediately got to work galvanizing support, holding a number of private conversations with wealthy individuals including Silicon Valley executives, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Wall Street mega-philanthropists George and Alex Soros. Harris’ campaign is already emphatically pointing to their record-breaking fundraising from a large number of small donors who gave to the campaign in its first hours. But when she says she plans to “earn and win the nomination,” the Vice President knows this means courting the mega-wealthy. Back in 2019, Kamala Harris gained early success tapping into past Obama and Clinton “bundlers”, high wealth individuals who fundraise from their networks in order to pass along large six- or seven-figure donations. These are the people Harris is really accountable to, not working class Democratic voters.
Is Harris better than Biden?
While it might be a relief to some to see that the Democratic Party is no longer pinning its hopes on an “elderly man with a poor memory”, Biden’s age was never the main problem. The real issue is his pro-corporate, pro-war track record as president, and the dead-end Democratic Party as a whole. The current administration has funded a genocidal offensive by a right-wing Israeli government, failed to address a historic cost of living crisis, continued Trump-era immigration policy, and escalated the inter-imperialist conflict with China, while completely abandoning any pretense of fighting for climate action or healthcare reform. They revoked the right to strike from railroad workers shortly before a train derailment caused a chemical disaster in Ohio, and increased oil drilling on public lands. This is what the Democrats stand for.
A section of the Democratic Party base is energized by the switch to Harris, ready to commit time and money to get her elected. The Democrats now get a chance to reboot their failing campaign, and they could have a degree of success with this among voters who don’t like Trump but who were not going to bother going to the polls to vote for a Joe Biden in evident decline. The question is, will this initial enthusiasm translate to a presidential ticket that can outrun the failures of the Biden administration and Trump’s ability to pose as a Washington outsider who will break the system?
The real issue with Kamala Harris is that, just like Biden, she is a corporate Democrat through and through with a record of pushing policies that are anti-working people and pro-billionaire.
The self-described “top cop” in California from 2011-2017, Harris led a controversial and often contradictory tenure as Attorney General. She has consistently painted herself as a progressive, pushing for abortion rights and ending the death penalty. But in practice, she was an ally to elites over the needs of everyday people. Despite spearheading programs to usher offenders into jobs instead of prison, her office kept innocent people locked up on technicalities.
She presided over a surge of non-violent drug related convictions fueling mass incarceration (whose architect, Bill Clinton, has already endorsed Harris). She also led a years-long campaign to penalize parents for their children’s truancy, promising that they would “face the full force and consequence of the law” with fines or jail time. Truancy and absenteeism are essentially “crimes of poverty,” disproportionately affecting low-income working class families, and often linked to issues with housing, childcare, transportation, or physical and mental health.
Lawyers on her staff strongly argued against the release of non-violent prisoners who were paid wages from 8-37 cents per hour, stating that this would deplete an important labor pool. Harris introduced anti-racial bias training, but also defended law enforcement officers accused of misconduct and failed to investigate police killings. Notably, she won higher settlements from banks at fault for the mortgage crisis, but refused to prosecute guilty banks like OneWest, whose CEO Steven Mnuchin would later become Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump.
These examples are not just to tarnish Harris’s record. The same contradictions present decades ago still taint Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole, who have shown time and time again that they are unwilling to fight for working people. As Vice President, Harris was tasked mainly with overseeing immigration reform, but this did not happen through progressive legislative measures or standing up to the right.
Instead, Harris focused on securing private sector investment in Central American countries, while notoriously telling Guatemalan migrants seeking safer, more stable conditions simply to “not come”. This move is even more grotesque taking into account the role that US imperialism played in creating these dire economic and social conditions in Central America through decades of trade deals, the “war on drugs,” and directly supporting coups to undermine left-wing governments. On the whole, the Biden administration promised a more humane approach, but continued Trump-era policies like Title 42, then ushered immigrants into a fundamentally broken legal system while drastically increasing border arrests and deportations.
If Kamala Harris wins the nomination and goes on to defeat Trump in November, the US would have elected not only its first woman, but first person of Black Caribbean and Indian descent to the White House. While this would be a historic milestone, would it be sufficient to create the change working people need or curb the growing right wing? We have repeatedly seen the limits of representational politics, why being younger or a person of color does not in itself mean one has the interests of working people in mind.
We can draw lessons from the current left-wing of the Democratic party to illustrate this. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad were elected on a wave of working class organizing to “reform the Democratic party” in a younger, more diverse image. But as of today, they have been thoroughly corrupted, pursuing a dead end strategy of changing the system from the inside. This has pointed them away from a movement-building approach toward backroom negotiating, ultimately providing cover for the party establishment.
Just two days before Biden announced he was dropping out, AOC gave an hour-long monologue on Instagram live fully backing the President, relying on fear-mongering and legalistic arguments for why he shouldn’t be replaced. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Biden for President”. They were propping up Biden when even wealthy donors wouldn’t! Where Bernie and the Squad have ended up is the logical conclusion of their attempt to reform the Democratic Party. It is not you who changes the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party that changes you.This short-lived wave of reformist left Democrats has decisively ended, leaving millions of disaffected voters feeling betrayed and vulnerable to the “pro-worker” posturing of the right wing.
Can Harris beat the right wing?
With Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, the Democrats will likely fare better in November, but it will still be extremely difficult for them to beat Trump. Harris won’t deviate from the overall approach of Biden’s campaign, and she will have to defend his highly unpopular administration.
Trump is a real and terrifying threat, we only need to look at the contents of Project 2025 to see that. This proposal, created by the Heritage Foundation, calls for expanding the powers of the president to create an authoritarian regime, along with dismantling the Department of Education, abortion rights, and replacing thousands of civil servants with hardline conservatives. The Democrats are relying on this fear to propel their campaign.
But it’s the pro-corporate program of the Democrats that has left the space for the right wing to grow in the first place, dating all the way back to Obama bailing out Wall Street while millions of working families lost their homes in the wake of the 2008 recession. The right wing pretend to put forward answers to the very real problems facing working people today – they are the wrong answers, but for millions of Americans it can look better than what they’re getting from the Democrats, which is saying over and over that the economy is actually doing great, you’re just too dumb to see it.
A candidate to decisively defeat Trump would need to decisively break with the Democrats’ capitalist policies and offer working people and youth actual solutions. That would mean going against the interests of the Democratic Party’s billionaire donors, and against the interests of the capitalist system itself, which requires the rest of us to work long hours to keep a small minority obscenely wealthy at the top.
The Democrats can’t stop the right wing precisely because of their corporate politics and their inability to break from capitalism, as one of the two main capitalist parties. It’s not just that they won’t fight the right wing, they fundamentally can’t. And that means workers and ordinary people can’t keep voting for the Democrats as the “lesser” evil and hope that it will be enough. Even a Harris victory based on fear for Trump would give the populist right new opportunities based on continued Democratic policies.
As Socialist Alternative has outlined in previous articles, the Democrats not presenting real solutions to working people isn’t just insufficient, it actually emboldens and grows the right. Harris may talk about supporting abortion rights, but regular people have witnessed her – and her party’s – unwillingness to codify Roe v. Wade or do literally anything to win back rights since its overturning. Despite hollow statements of solidarity, the Democrats have taken no real steps to curb the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ bills proposed across the country, including the hundreds of anti-trans bills proposed in 2023 alone. The Democratic party is in crisis, loosely held together by a fear of Trump, but unable to propose a winning strategy to beat him and solve the myriad crises facing working people.
We need a new party, not a new Democrat
The left wing of the Democratic Party isn’t coming to save workers and young people. It’s time to abandon this party completely and build something new. The United States is the only advanced capitalist country in the world that has never had a workers’ party.
As society moves from one catastrophe to another, working people can see more clearly that the ultra-wealthy and their political servants have no answers for capitalism’s constant crises. The growth of the right is not an arbitrary phenomenon we can wait out, nor is it a proverbial pendulum that will automatically swing back to the left. It is an expression of disenfranchised, disaffected workers and young people in the absence of an organized force that can point the way to what is necessary to uproot this rotten system and build a future based on the needs of people, not profit.
Workers and youth need to urgently organize to build an independent party that will actually fight for our needs, on a class basis, against the capitalists. This means a definitive break from the Democratic party, instead focusing on building movements around labor unions, against the war in Gaza, and supporting and initiating struggles around other issues that working people care about. We could use this new party’s electoral campaigns by genuine left, anti-war candidates to build these movements, instead of propping up the defunct two-party system.
A new party will run into limits of what’s possible in the framework of capitalism and will need to adopt a socialist program to meet our class’ needs. Capitalism will inevitably create crises that give the far right fertile ground to grow, if the left doesn’t offer a way forward. Ultimately, we need to uproot the system of capitalism that leads us endlessly into disaster after disaster.
What we call for:
- Mass struggle against Trumpism and the right wing, not just Trump, and that means building a viable left alternative in the streets, schools, and workplaces.
- No votes for Democrats! Register a protest vote for left independent, anti-war candidates Jill Stein or Cornel West.
- Instead of flirting with Republican mega-donors at the RNC or endorsing Democrats, labor leaders like Sean O’Brien and Shawn Fain should call a conference this Fall to launch a new pro-labor, anti-war party!
- Socialist Alternative will be protesting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and you should join us!
