I have no blindingly insightful analysis to offer about Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party and the establishment portion of the Republican Party but here’s my tentative take: The presidential election wasn’t a vote for fascism or even a vote for Trump. My sense is that a sizable number of voters were saying “I don’t like Trump and I know my life won’t be better under him — but I’m voting for him or not voting at all.”
White folks in rural Iowa, Black voters in Detroit and Puerto Ricans in nearly Allentown found an opportunity to, in the words of Professor Keeanga-Yamantta Taylor, to “give the finger, to thumb your nose at the status quo…” Even NYTimes David Brooks surprised me with his op-ed “Voters to Elite: Do You See Me Now?” And in a PBS interview, Brooks acknowledged that race and gender had receded in salience as class was on the rise.
It’s hard to say what part foreign policy played in the election but a pollster cited by Gabriel Winant in Dissent, found that younger voters believe that America is “a dying empire led by bad people.” We do know that if Harris had been elected we’d simply have a female face fronting the US role in genocide. This would not be unlike the female Golda “Palestinians Are Cockroaches” Meir leading the colonial setter state of Israel. And Harris would have continued the conflict in Ukraine, the U.S. proxy war provoked against Russia that could have been avoided. As of mid-September 2024, it’s estimated the one million people have have been killed or wounded in this war. This affirms what Mike Parenti once argued that what matters is not what’s between the loins but between the ears.
To be sure, the vote was not transactional but it was evidence that the poor and working class have simply stopped believing the mainstream media lies and have only contempt for politicians who hector and patronize them, calling them “deployables” and “garbage.” This disdain extends to the institutions of government that have lost their legitimacy. For Blacks, it includes the Black misleadership class like the condescending Obamas and the sell-outs in Congress like Clyburn and Jeffries who “go along to get along.” In Philadelphia, where over 50 percent of Black people are living in poverty, the Black mayor confidently predicted that 680,000 votes would be cast for Kamala Harris. She received 547,000.
Nationwide, some half of those of eligible voting age abstained from the process. Here I think that the astute political analyst Garland Nixon is on to something when he suggests that pollsters not only include “likely” voters but also “unlikely” ones. I’d wager that we’d find tens of millions of people who’ve given up on politics because they know it has nothing to offer them. I mention this because these data would not only honestly flesh out the national narrative but highlight the grievances of a segment of the population that could potentially alter the country’s future.
Those pulling the puppet strings of our duopoly fear rule by the people and because their first allegiance is to maintaining the capitalist system — the ultimate cause of our crisis — they have no answers, only more misdirection. After the tone-deaf, reality-denying Democrats finish their ritualistic circular firing squad, the DNC will begin looking to 2028. Perhaps this time they’ll settle on a Gavin Newsom or a Josh Shapiro. We can hope so because that will prefigure the final death knell of the Democratic Party.
We are entering an immensely dangerous period with the moral monsters of late-stage capitalism thrashing about in our midst. But this is also a time of great opportunity to begin creating a mass working class party. We can’t squander the chance.