Kamala Harris’s real problem: Who are the Democrats anyway?

Accusing the Kamala Harris campaign of reflexively repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign—as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic recently did—might sound like a left-wing snark with an unfortunate (and seemingly unintentional) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader concern across the liberal-progressive spectrum: the polls are dead even 10 days before what has been declared (fairly or not) to be a world-historic presidential election. After the excitement of the Biden-to-Harris transition and the excitement of the Democratic National Convention, it’s a difficult future.

The current consensus in media and political circles is that Donald Trump—by any normative standard a catastrophically undisciplined and unsustainable candidate—is likely to win this election even without resorting to fraud or mob violence. This “gut feeling,” to be clear, has no predictive value and may be nothing more than lingering 2016 PTSD.

But liberals’ stress and confusion don’t appear to be eased by what Democrats do exactly what they always do in the final stages of the national campaign: a sharp swing to the right to emphasize a commitment to national security and corporate profits, in a supposed pursuit of “persuasive” independents and swing Republicans. (Or perhaps just looking for a donor class, which isn’t technically the same thing.)

We’ve seen Harris perform as a gun owner on Oprah, support Wall Street-friendly economic policies, and campaign with former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who supported literally every aspect of Trump’s agenda until his open attempt to undermine the 2020 Election. year. All of this, of course, reflects the conventional wisdom conveyed by highly paid consultants, and it is not inherently counter-intuitive to weed out even the handful of conservative voters who don’t really like Trump but don’t want to vote for who they have. They say that a radical socialist black woman who wants to turn everyone trans could be the difference maker in several of the most important states.

The left’s response is also logical in itself: Democrats have tried this before, hamster wheel style, but have never completely defeated the increasingly fashionable right. So perhaps it’s time to stop doing the same thing that doesn’t work over and over again (admittedly a radical idea) and try something different instead, such as building on the widely popular social democratic policies of areas of health care, taxation, student debt and the green energy transition and hope to win elections by ensuring high turnout among younger voters, people of color, LGBTQ voters and so on. (Let’s not get into the voiding of the blank check given to Benjamin Netanyahu—but of course, that’s possible, too.)

I’m personally sympathetic to this road-not-traveled argument, but to echo another four-year theme of the Democratic Party’s hamster wheel, none of this matters in the face of an existential emergency. In any case, nothing about the party’s tired, alarmist statements or its gloomy self-image will change dramatically in the final week before a do-or-die national election.

There are signs that the Harris campaign intends to fight hard on abortion rights in the final days (a potentially make-or-break issue) along with Cheney’s U-turn and the strategic decision to directly brand Trump with the F-word. But small tactical adjustments in late October hardly matter . The Democratic Party is what it is: a fundamentally unstable coalition of wealthy metropolitan whites and working-class people of color whose interests are beginning to pull them in different directions.

Now the primary question – for many, for obvious reasons, is only The question is whether the Democrats’ campaign strategy will work this time, or at least work a little better than it did eight years ago. Let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, but the distribution of those votes proved an insurmountable problem: If we subtract California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York from the total, Trump wins. rest of the country by 5 million votes.

Most of us in this business have become cured of making confident predictions based on “how things work” because these days nothing works the way it used to, or at all. Time flows in flat circles, scientific research is subservient to “doing your own research,” and a presidential candidate can tell the nation on live television that immigrants are eating their pets without causing significant political damage. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any idea whether the Harris campaign’s fight for a patriotic middle ground will affect potentially decisive electoral votes in Michigan, Arizona or North Carolina. (It’s safe to say that the candidate who wins two of these three states has an overwhelming chance of becoming the next president.)

But one thing I do know is that don’t count on confident statements from supposedly hard-nosed insiders whose Realpolitik bibles have been in the washing machine one too many times. Last week I read James Carville’s New York Times article predicting a Harris victory, and somewhere inside I felt a vague but distinct yearning for a vanished world of hopeful wisdom. Then I felt a much deeper desire—a desire to spend the next two weeks drinking whiskey and watching old movies because this guy didn’t support the winning Democrat of this century. If it wasn’t the kiss of death, then it was an awfully good simulation.

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And one more thing I know for sure: if the Liz Cheney triangulation attempted by the Harris campaign last time, doesn’t If the work underlying the political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway elite caste is once again proven fatally flawed, the consequences will be dire—for the Democratic Party, for the future of our so-called democracy, and for the trajectory of the entire world. in this century.

Not just because Donald Trump will win the election and become president, although that is bad enough. But because How it happened and under what circumstances – and because the only American political party that claims to support constitutional democracy, rational government and wider equality will again blame its own voters, or the Russians, or the ignorance and bigotry of the people it treats with contempt. , for the disastrous consequences of his own inconsistency and uncertainty, and for his failure to prevent the entire system he claims to cherish from collapsing into clown anarchy.