Is this newfound hope in the Democratic Party justified? Not by a long shot
Teddy Shibabaw, Socialist Alternative (ISA in the United States)
(This article was first published on 23 August 2024)
Four years of existential dread with two of the most unpopular presidential candidates of the last few decades, Trump and Biden, seem to be over. Harris’ entry into the presidential campaign has lifted the spirits of the Democratic Party base. The Trump campaign has been knocked off balance. No longer an outsider, Trump now appears like an incumbent with 4 years of anti-worker attacks during his administration.
The dynamic was further turbocharged with Tim Walz being chosen for VP. However, it wasn’t long ago when Walz called for the largest mobilization of the National Guard to target non-violent protestors in the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd. Plus, Minnesota is far from a progressive paradise — corporations like Target and US Bank profit while deep levels of racism and homelessness remain.
Kamala Harris is and always has been — as Truth Dig referred to her in 2019 — an “Oligarch’s Dream Politician”. She is emblematic of the Democratic Party establishment and has deep ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley tech bros. She was birthed onto the political scene of San Francisco elite circles as an ambitious prosecutor who climbed all the way up the political ladder to Attorney General, and eventually Senator.
She was focused on locking up Black and brown working-class people and throwing away the key. Even people exonerated by the Innocence Project were forced to stay longer on technicalities. In 2013, an article with the headline “Kamala Harris mocked “Progressive Protesters Who Want ‘More Schools, Less Jails’”, noted that Harris laughed about putting the parents of truant kids in jail. She also jammed the bureaucratic gears to suffocate attempts to root out corruption and prosecutorial misconduct from her years as DA to her years as “Top Cop”.
On the issues — Harris goes whichever way the wind blows. When you take stock of Harris’ entire political career, you see a common feature of many corporate politicians — standing up on the record on some progressive issue when there’s no risk of it becoming policy, then unceremoniously chucking it out when no longer politically expedient.
In her 2020 campaign, when the environmental movement was riding much higher in the public eye and she needed to compete with Bernie Sanders, she committed to banning fracking. Now, she’s abandoned that position. Not only has Harris backed away from talk of abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but she has gone further in the opposite direction by supporting the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement. All of this has helped advance Trump’s central message.
Will Harris be better than Biden?
She has been willing to be the cold anti-immigrant messenger of the Biden Administration, famously dispatched to tell migrants from Central America “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” She has doubled down on this with major campaign ads in the last few weeks, touting plans for hiring thousands of border patrol agents and disrupting “border gangs” — essentially cosigning Trump’s formulation of immigrants as criminals.
While she called for a ceasefire in March, it means nothing without applying the concrete pressure available to US imperialism as the strongest backer of the Israeli state. As the Palestinian co-chair of the National Uncommitted Movement, Layla Abed, told Democracy Now, “Palestinian children cannot eat words.” Harris unceremoniously shut down Gaza solidarity activists who protested one of her campaign rallies to challenge the lack of concrete policy change.
On foreign policy overall, the Vice President is as deeply committed as Biden to US imperialism and its client regimes like the Israeli ruling class. As the US-China inter-imperialist Cold War becomes increasingly hot, Harris has not indicated any change in direction. Strategists under the Xi Jinping regime do not see any differences between the Trumpian right, Biden, or Harris on this issue that is increasingly defining all key international geopolitical trends.
In 2024, Harris backed away completely from Medicare For All. She adjusted her policy to maintain a role for private, big insurance companies through the Medicare Advantage program, which is almost nothing like Medicare proper. Her policy included false and misleading low premiums with big gaps in coverage for care and prescription drugs.
For all the talk about facing down “predators,” “cheaters” and “fraudsters” like Donald Trump, her record reveals the opposite. As just one high-profile example of many, OneWest Bank, accused of widespread misconduct that ruined the lives of many homeowners, somehow escaped her sights. The owner of that bank was none other than Donald Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. She was the only Democratic Party senate candidate he donated to in 2016.
Harris’s campaign “promises”
Harris is also campaigning heavily on abortion rights, promising to codify Roe v. Wade, just as Biden also promised under a new term. But they are in office right now! They could mobilize the Democratic base to force Congress to pass it and sign it, but instead, point to a mirage that will never bear water.
On what is arguably the most enduring top issue of the last few years — the unbearably high cost of living — the Harris campaign has begun making bold promises, such as bringing back the Covid-era child tax credit of $6,000 per child, banning price gouging on food, and providing $25,000 in support for new homebuyers. But the questions are: how would this be paid for, and how will she win support if the Senate and House flip during the elections? Despite these economic plans, Trump still leads Harris on the economy.
Is this newfound hope in the Democratic Party justified? Not by a long shot. They have neutralized their left wing, Bernie and the Squad, including dumping tons of money into primaries to deal stinging defeats to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush this year.
Even when Democrats have had majority control in all branches of government in the last few decades, they failed to codify Roe v. Wade, failed to pass the labor-friendly PRO Act, and have been overwhelmingly in favor of increasing funding for police and the mass incarceration state.
In fact, the Democratic Party is responsible for opening up the space for the right wing of the Republican Party — from the Tea Party in the Obama years to Trump in the last decade — because they spout empty rhetoric while failing to pass any meaningful reforms to help working people weather the crisis of capitalism.
The only thing we can count on is building independent mass movements of the working class in the streets, workplaces, campuses, and neighborhoods. The resurgent labor movement of the last five years, along with the movement against the genocidal war in Gaza and renewed movement to restore abortion rights, have real potential.
However, movements are undermined when they support politicians who betray them. We need a new mass political party of workers, youth, and oppressed, free from corporate cash and deeply accountable to our movements. In this election, we can register our commitment to this direction with a protest vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein, the only anti-war, pro-worker candidate on the ballots in most states.
