Well… here we go again. What’s the line about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce? I feel like we didn’t really get enough time to let the tragedy set in, but here we are being shuffled along to the laughing portion of the tour. A sign of the times, I guess.
Like most of us, I’ve been absorbing the analyses of what went wrong, trying to synthesize them and hopefully glean a bit of insight along the way. One thing I’ve settled on for sure is that this is a situation where multiple things are true at the same time. I can’t point to a single conventionally obvious deficit. Instead, I think we should view this moment as a kaleidoscope of factors and failures. It’s challenging even to limit the scope of the discussion but I’d like to try and address a few things that have stuck with me.
To begin, a common observation is to simply write the majority of the country off as racist, sexist and irredeemable. This is a tempting critique that I believe via personal experience is somewhat true, yet insufficient. An analogy might be a game like tennis. Sometimes it’s played on grass, sometimes on clay. Sometimes the wind is blowing and the sun is in your eyes. You still have to win by two points. Those are the rules and conditions of the game. You know them going in and if you want to win you play accordingly. Bigotry is undoubtedly a factor in the game of politics but it’s not the sole driver of a population’s choices. We have conquered it before. I won’t accept it as an automatic game over. We must anticipate it and move to counter. If not, then what’s it all for? So I reject this excuse as a coping mechanism for failure and challenge us to clarify our goals.
A question we have to ask ourselves is, do we want a moral victory with norms and decorum intact? Or do we want power? Because the people we are fighting are ruthless and conniving. They don’t care about the rules. They don’t care if you know they’re hypocrites, they don’t care if Jesus would never do the things they do, they don’t care if they’re illegally profiting off it all, they don’t care if they have to nominate sex perverts and criminals to get what they want. They don’t care. This is a period of crisis in which classical democratic values are being undermined by their transparent inability to deliver prosperity to the bulk of the population, and our enemies are capitalizing on it to slowly but surely consolidate the necessary power to change the direction of the country in favor of authoritarian rule. We must imagine, articulate and effectively communicate a better future for people to believe in, or we will continue to lose the faith of the people we desperately need on our side.
That brings me to the narrative issue, which is that the Democrats simply do not have a coherent narrative except to say that Trump is bad. I was grateful to State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas for attending our November meeting and more so that I was able to ask her about this. My concern is that the party exists only as a reaction to the right. It’s very much a vote-for-me-or-else kind of politics and it’s not inspiring nor appealing to people who have nothing left to lose. This seemed to resonate and she gave us some reassurance that at the upper levels of the party, this is being addressed. I really appreciate that however to be honest, I’m skeptical. Listen to this interview with ex-Clinton and Harris 2024 adviser Philippe Reines on CNN, criticizing the “woke-left” for his loss. Legacy media and the administrative class of the party want SO badly to blame anyone but themselves for their own failings. This is a guy who by his own admission doesn’t even know what he believes in. In the interview, Reines says “I don’t know what I’d call myself. I just call myself a Democrat. I’m not a progressive. I’m not a lefty. [laughing] I think I’m to the right of some Republicans on some topics.” To an arrogant party hack like Reines, politics is not about what you believe in, or what is morally righteous. It’s certainly not about helping save the immiserated poor living on the streets of your own city. It’s simply a team that you play on that pays for your teenager’s Tesla and 2800 square feet on Park Avenue. How can this slime blame the left when it’s people like him who are literally in charge and lost twice? Harris ran exactly the sort of campaign that he is asking for. He should know. He was there. We aren’t living in the same universe if he thinks otherwise. For all his hatred for the left, it’s guys like this that should be kicked from the party with the steel-toed boot of a working person.
Finally, it comes down to Harris herself and the campaign she chose to run. Now that we’re on the other side of this I’ll just be honest and say that I was never really a big fan of Harris as a political candidate. She came in fourth place in her own State of California in the Democratic primary. Her proposals seemed completely unserious at the time. Back in 2020, when Democrats were actually running on issues, she said she would forgive Pell Grant recipient debt for people who started a business in a disadvantaged community and managed to stay in business for five years. This is peak centrist-brain stuff. David Graeber talks about the “extreme-center” of people like Obama and Macron, who are for both the market and bureaucracy but “at least they’re not Nazis.” To the extent that she believed anything at all, she was ultimately just another extreme-centrist. In the 2020 primary, as Bernie Sanders was positioned to win the nomination by centering Medicare for All as a central policy issue, Harris said that she agreed with his proposal. But once the Biden team worked with Obama to consolidate all of the losing candidates and squash the Bernie movement, they dropped all mention of it. Biden was ostensibly for some form of a public option but it never materialized. When given the chance, Harris said she no longer was a supporter of Medicare for All. The doe-eyed baby in me wonders if maybe she never really cared about it in the first place. The truth is that the extreme-center corporate liberals are so ideologically committed to their “norms” and decorum and plainly, of protecting capital, that they would rather lose on their own terms, than adjust to accommodate a platform that can carry the party forward. Remember when they could have overhauled immigration and potentially put a damper on much of the Trump campaign’s rhetoric? Oh no but the Parliamentarian! A fake job that no one has ever given a single whit to in history and I don’t care what some contrarian rule-thumper has to say about it. Pathetic! Instead they would rather beg us for money by threat of the end of democracy if they lose. How many texts a day did you get from the campaign? They raised a billion and a half dollars and then spent it on parties with the Cheneys. Because at the end of the day, they have more in common with the Bush administration than they do with you and me. And now that they’ve lost, Harris pledges to help Trump and his team with a “peaceful transfer of power.” Why? Is Trump a fascist or not? Was the whole fascism thing just politics or a legitimate existential crisis? Our words and actions are not aligned.
I had hoped that Trump was so transparently odious and incompetent that all of the challenges facing the Harris campaign could slip by. Certainly Biden took too long to pass the torch and a formal primary process would have given the Democrats a chance to solidify the message. The Harris campaign had a really short runway to get a national campaign off the ground. The right-wing media sphere is melting peoples’ brains and globally inflation is wrecking incumbent administrations. These all help to soften the blow to our ego, but my whole point here is that ultimately there are so many fundamental flaws and contradictions with the Democratic party that if we don’t resolve them now we may never be able to take back power again.
So where do we go from here? I believe that Bernie Sanders is correct in his assessment that it should come as no surprise that the working class has abandoned the Democratic party as they have abandoned us. In fact, the only time the Democrats seem to be as ruthless and coordinated as the Republicans is when they’re out stopping anyone to the left of Chris Christie. See India Walton in Buffalo, former Squad members Corey Bush and Jamaal Bowman, or even the time Obama came out to convince the NBA not to strike after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Typical play by Dems to recommend handing over all their leverage and then appeal to the better demons of our nature. Leadership will likely continue on this path and as long as that is the direction of the party, we can only hope to eke out victories on the backswing to what will undoubtedly be largely unpopular policies by future Republican administrations. But without delivering material improvement to Americans’ lives, these victories will always be fleeting. I believe the path is straightforward. When FDR ran on the New Deal he won the Presidency four times. He was so popular they had to amend the constitution to keep someone like him from ever winning again. Now is the time to replace the Philippe Reines of the national leadership, clean house and start with a new era of leaders with policies based on the material welfare of poor and working class Americans. Reconfigure society in a way that favors the quality of life of average people by pursuing Medicare for All, housing security, social services, antitrust legislation and protecting the environment. And crucially, as FDR did, instead of courting the campaign contributions of the corporate oligarchy, make a bitter ENEMY out of them.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
For my part, I was not heavily invested in the national election this year. Not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I saw the writing on the wall, and there really wasn’t much I could do about it. By all accounts, clearly, the Harris campaign didn’t want people like me anyway. So I focused on the local level. I did what I could. I wish it was more. But I did what I could to help progressives take back power in Culver City. And even though we face the same challenges in our own town; billionare overlords, partisan hacks, ideological centrists, and clueless rubber stamps, we still came out on top. Not a clean sweep, but POWER. It feels good.
So while keeping our eyes towards the nation, let’s work to build up our own community. Let’s welcome more people into it and share our resources and help each other succeed. There is a lot of space between where we are and where we need to be, but if we don’t have the ground swell of action rooted in community and humanity, we won’t be generating the future leaders we need for this new era. I’m so grateful to all of the wonderful people who worked so hard to bring change to Culver City and I have faith that by sharing space with each other we can do our small part to make the world collectively a better place.