by KSHAMA SAWANT
What happened in this year’s election was not some kind of flowering of American fascism, but a rebellion against a hated, out-of-touch Democratic Party elite.
The primary driver of the election outcome was an angry working-class rejection of the status quo and deep cost-of-living crisis proudly presided over by the Democrats. Traditional Democratic voters who had faced sky-high grocery prices, gas, rent, alongside crumbling social infrastructure were told to buck up and vote for Kamala Harris, or else. They were told to ignore the genocide in Gaza, and worse yet to vote for the genocider. The only thing the Democrats offered to working people was a recycled anti-Trump campaign.
Predictably, the Democrats hemorrhaged working-class support and managed to lose ground in virtually every part of their base: the Arab and Muslim American community, Black voters, Latino voters, young people, and even women.
As the Financial Times reported, “the majority of lower-income households or those earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Trump this election. Conversely, those making over $100,000 voted for Harris, according to exit polls.” Tellingly, this last demographic was the sole one where Harris gained ground: voters who make $100,000 or more voted 42% for Biden in 2020, and 51% for Harris.
Harris abandoned a raft of progressive policies that are wildly popular, some of which were featured on ballot initiatives that won by big margins in states that went for Trump. Voters approved minimum wage increases, including to $15/hour (Alaska and Missouri), expanded workers’ ability to earn paid sick leave in three states (Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska), rejected school vouchers (Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska), and opted to ban anti-union captive audience meetings (Alaska).
The media narrative that Harris lost because working-class voters are moving to the right is false. That’s not to say there weren’t elements of right-wing ideas reflected in the result. Both parties’ disgusting embrace of anti-immigrant ideas has whipped up anti-immigrant sentiment, which was without a doubt reflected in the Trump vote. But fundamentally, it’s the Democratic and Republican Parties that are moving further and further to the right, as they attempt to make working people pay for the long-term crisis of capitalism.
While the vote for Trump was largely against Harris, there are millions who do have a false nostalgia about Trump, with positive illusions that he will bring back lower prices and end the wars.
All such ill-founded hopes will soon come crashing down. Despite his isolationist rhetoric, and his false claims when talking to Arab-American audiences that he would bring peace in the Middle East, Trump is every bit a warmongering representative of the billionaire class as is Harris. Trump is no friend of working people, and he will double down on his past attacks on oppressed groups. In terms of the genocide in Gaza, he will certainly do his best to help Netanyahu “finish the job.”
The Democrats Are Not a Lesser Evil — Nor Are the Republicans
Outrageously, the Democrats are looking to scapegoat working-class voters, telling them they are racist and sexist for not supporting Harris, while themselves undoubtedly preparing to make further overtures toward the erstwhile Republican establishment.
But we should not be surprised because the Democratic Party was never a working-class party. They were always a party of the bosses. They were originally the party of the slave owners, then after that the party of brutal Jim Crow segregation. They carried out vicious attacks on the labor movement, including many times calling in the National Guard to attack striking workers. They have actively supported, or led, every single bloody war of U.S. imperialism, including launching the Vietnam War. Now they’re responsible for a genocide.
Led by Biden-Harrris, the Democrats broke the strike of the railroad workers. They stabbed Bernie Sanders and working people in the back twice, making sure that a candidate with working-class demands would not be allowed to represent the party in the general election. Rather than fight back, Sanders in turn sold us out by backing Biden and then Harris to the hilt.
Then there is the long line of Democratic Party “reformers” who were elected as part of a new left wing of the party, including AOC, who were almost immediately absorbed into the machine rather than doing battle with the party leadership.
Sanders and AOC have spent the last four years shilling for the Democratic Party and gatekeeping working people’s movements. They should not be given an ounce of credibility in their attempt to appoint themselves as leaders of Resistance 2.0 against Trump 2.0. They would take us right back down the dead-end road to the Democratic Party.
In my ten years of elected office in Seattle, as a socialist councilmember, the Democratic Party was at every stage an enemy of our movements. There are no Republicans on the Seattle City Council, so the Democrats alone carry the water for big business. I don’t mean Democrats were sometimes a hindrance. I mean they fought tooth and nail to either block everything we fought for or water it down — from the $15 minimum wage to our Amazon Tax on big business to our renters’ rights bills.
The Democrats are not the lesser evil, they are one of the most powerful capitalist parties in the world.
The Republicans are also in no way shape or form a party of working people, either, and never will be. They are a thoroughly anti-union, pro-war, vicious right wing party, and were so long before Trump.
The problem is systemic — it’s about which class the Democrats and Republicans represent. They represent the capitalists, as do the vast majority of parties around the world under capitalism. And they will continue to do so ruthlessly, regardless of any attempts to reform them. Even if it costs them crucial elections, as it just did the Democrats.
This is the reason why Marx and Engels emphasized in 1850 that the working class must have its own parties and candidates:
Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.
No Votes for Genocide!
My organization, Workers Strike Back, endorsed Jill Stein and energetically campaigned for every possible Stein vote, including in the swing states. We didn’t do this because we expected Stein to win, or get 5% of the vote, or because we think the Green Party is the new major party working people need.
We campaigned for Stein as the strongest independent left, antiwar candidate, with the goal of building the antiwar movement and the workers’ movement, of using the campaign to illustrate why working people must completely reject both parties of the bosses, and to then take that momentum beyond the election to begin to build an alternative.
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