Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
To accuse Kamala Harris’ campaign of reflexively repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic did recently — may sound like drive-by leftist snark, carrying an unfortunate (and presumably unintended) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader anxiety felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: Polls are dead even, 10 days before what has been billed (fairly or not) as a world-historical presidential election. After the sugar-high of the Biden-to-Harris switch and the exhilaration of the Democratic convention, this is a difficult future to face.
Among the media and political classes, the operating assumption at the moment is that Donald Trump — by any normative standard, a disastrously undisciplined and erratic candidate — is likely to win that election, even without resorting to skulduggery or mob violence. That “gut feeling” has zero predictive value, to be clear, and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016.
But liberal stress and bewilderment presumably isn’t improved by seeing Democrats doing exactly what they always do in the latter stages of a national campaign: skewing sharply rightward to emphasize a commitment to national security and corporate profits, in the supposed pursuit of “persuadable” independents and wavering Republicans. (Or perhaps just in pursuit of the donor class, which is not technically the same thing.)
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We have seen Harris out herself as a gun owner in a sit-down with Oprah, embracing Wall Street-friendly economic policies and campaign with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who supported literally every aspect of the Trump agenda before his overt attempt to subvert the 2020 election. All of this, of course, reflects conventional wisdom as imparted by highly-paid consultants, and it’s not inherently illogical: Chiseling away even a handful of conservative voters who don’t much like Trump, but are reluctant to vote for someone they’ve been told is a radical socialist Black lady who wants to turn everyone trans, could make a crucial difference in several of the most important states.
If the Harris campaign’s last-ditch Liz Cheney triangulation doesn’t work, and the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway’s elite caste are once again revealed as fatally flawed, the consequences will be ugly.
The leftist response is also logical, on its own terms: Democrats have tried this before, hamster-wheel style, without conclusively defeating the increasingly fash-flavored right. So maybe it’s time to stop doing the same thing that doesn’t work over and over again — admittedly a radical notion — and try something else instead, such as leaning into broadly popular social-democratic policies on health care, taxation, student debt and green-energy transition, and hoping to win elections by driving high turnout among younger voters, people of color, LGBTQ voters and so on. (Let’s not get into canceling the blank check issued to Benjamin Netanyahu — but sure, maybe that too.)
I’m personally sympathetic to that road-not-taken argument, but to recycle another of the Democratic Party’s quadrennial hamster-wheel themes, none of that matters in the face of an existential emergency. In any case, nothing about the party’s exhausting, alarmist messaging or its murky self-image is going to change dramatically in the last week before a do-or-die national election.
If the Harris campaign’s last-ditch Liz Cheney triangulation doesn’t work, and the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway’s elite caste are once again revealed as fatally flawed, the consequences will be ugly.
There are signs that the Harris campaign intends to go hard on abortion rights in the final days — a potentially decisive wedge issue — alongside the Cheney pivot and the strategic decision to directly label Trump with the F-word. But minor tactical adjustments in late October are hardly the point. The Democratic Party is what it is, a fundamentally unstable coalition of affluent metropolitan white folks and working-class people of color, whose interests are beginning to pull them in different directions.
Right now the paramount question — for many people, understandably enough, it’s the only question — is whether the Democrats’ campaign strategy will work this time around, or at least work a little better than it did eight years ago. Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump did in 2016, but the distribution of those votes turned out to be an insurmountable problem: If we subtract California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York from the overall total, Trump won the rest of the country by 5 million votes.
Most of us in this business have been cured of making confident predictions based on “how things work,” because these days nothing works the way it used to, or works at all. Time runs in flat circles, scientific research has been subjugated to “doing your own research” and a presidential candidate can tell the nation, on live TV, that immigrants are eating their pets without suffering significant political damage. Neither you nor I nor anyone else has the slightest idea whether the Harris campaign’s scramble for the patriotic middle ground will reel in the potentially decisive electoral votes of Michigan or Arizona or North Carolina. (It’s safe to say that whichever candidate can win two of those three states is overwhelmingly likely to be the next president.)
But here’s one thing I do know: Don’t count on the confident pronouncements of supposedly hardheaded insiders whose Realpolitik bibles have been through the washing machine too many times. I read James Carville’s New York Times op-ed predicting a Harris victory this past week and felt a dim but distinct longing, somewhere inside, for a vanished world of reassuring wisdom. Then I felt a much deeper longing — a longing to spend the next two weeks drinking whiskey and watching old movies, because that guy hasn’t backed a winning Democrat in this century. If that wasn’t the kiss of death, it was an awfully good simulation.
And one more thing I know for sure is that if the Harris campaign’s last-ditch Liz Cheney triangulation doesn’t work, and the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway’s elite caste are once again revealed as fatally flawed, the consequences will be ugly — 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’s bad enough. But because of how that happened and under what circumstances — and because the only American political party that pretends to stand for constitutional democracy, rational government and broader equality will once again blame its own voters, or the Russians, or the ignorance and bigotry of people it views with contempt, for the catastrophic consequences of its own incoherence and uncertainty, and for the fact that it could not prevent the entire system it claims to cherish from collapsing into clownish anarchy.
Opinion by Evan Barker – Search
Last winter, I checked in with a friend in Democratic politics. “Life is weird sometimes,” she wrote back, and told me she was staying at Alexander Soros’ Hamptons house. I made a joke about coming to visit her—growing up in a midwestern working-class family, I’d always enjoyed getting a glimpse into the lives of the rich and powerful. “Sorry, it’s for people of color leaders only,” she wrote back. “It would be odd if you were there.”
As a former Democratic fundraiser, you’d think I would be numb to this kind of discrimination, but the truth continues to pain me: The Democratic Party, once the champions of civil rights in response to real injustices, is now the primary driver of racial division in America today. Lee Atwater’s Southern strategy pales in comparison to the modern DNC‘s approach. No organization is more systematically racist.
How did we get here?
The Democrats‘ long-term strategy is to stoke racial resentment to build their coalition and energize non-white voters. The rhetoric is designed to convince minorities that America is irredeemably, structurally racist, and only Democrats will look out for them. Social justice ideology, DEI, and wokeness are used in businesses, institutions, and schools to enforce Democratic rule and used internally to enforce party discipline. Note how Democrats united an entire coalition around Kamala Harris. No one wanted to look racist for suggesting there might be a better option.
During the summer of 2020, I was a fundraiser for progressives and saw crazy things. Campaigns started replacing consultants and campaign staff with BIPOC staffers to appear more inclusive. A prominent Democratic group announced funding was reserved solely for organizations led by non-whites. Another campaign pitched a donor-backed plan to source poor white people from Craigslist, pay them to be interviewed, then bait them into racially insensitive remarks. The candidate could then expose their racism as a “white whisperer” who could change their minds. The idea was insane and shut down by consultants who knew better, but still came disturbingly close to happening.
At first, I went along with the Democratic crusade for racial division. I was scolded for using yellow emojis in Slack, which are complicit in white supremacy, so I switched them to white. When speaking to BIPOC consultants, I made sure to mention how white women are the worst, so they knew I wasn’t racist. While reviewing resumes for potential hires, I tracked their race to ensure all people of color received interviews, and ignored most resumes from white men.
The author at the DNC in Chicago.
But deep down, this all started feeling wrong to me.
It started to feel blatantly racist. Yet I was terrified to speak up.
My personal breaking point came when a BIPOC colleague accused me of being an entitled white woman who needed “DEI training” after I disagreed with her over fundraising strategy. This was bizarre to me, being born with a genetic disease that put massive financial stress on my family. My parents never finished college and were married 11 times between them. I attended a dozen different schools growing up, including an inner-city school where I was in the small minority as a white person. We lived in apartments, houses, and sometimes a mobile home park. I paid for college with Pell Grants and loans that are still outstanding. Contrary to DEI ideology, not all white Americans have privilege.
This person knew nothing about my background and tarnished my reputation based on snap judgements about my skin color. I tried to argue with other operatives that it hurts the progressive movement when people weaponize their identities and de-legitimizes instances of actual bigotry. They would agree privately but refuse to publicly support me.
Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide – POLITICO
The author with Michelle Obama
Finally, my boss caved and demanded I take DEI training, eventually I was demoted from the campaign by consultants. People in Democratic politics would be terrified to publicly admit this bullying happens regularly, but they all know it’s true.
Unfortunately, many in the Democratic Party see nothing wrong with it. Oppression works as a currency that can reap lucrative rewards, like giving a candidate an edge in a crowded primary race, assisting someone rise to become the leader of a powerful organization, or helping a consultant land a campaign media contract. Ultra-wealthy elite donors like the Soros family perpetuate this ideology because it presents zero challenges to their wealth. Americans uniting along multi-racial class lines scares them more than anything.
Democrats are suppressing their compulsion for division today as Harris downplays her identity, running on color-blind messaging similar to Obama’s. But people don’t forget. They are now losing the working class in droves, including union rank and file. Kamala couldn’t even earn a Teamsters endorsement.
Clearly, racial division is no longer working as an electoral strategy. Fighting racism with more racism is deeply unpopular.
The author with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The Squad (United States Congress) – Wikipedia
If Harris loses, prepare for a full-blown meltdown of epic proportions. They will seethe at the racist deplorables who again elected Trump, and they will refuse to acknowledge racial changes in support because it contradicts their ideology. They will blame misogyny for the Black and Latino men who switched sides. You will hear terms like “white adjacent” and “internalized oppression” trotted out to explain why people of color voted for Trump.
Democrats have done so much damage. They infantilize Black and brown people, treating them as victims with no agency. Instructing whites to never correct a minority is textbook racism, implying they can’t handle criticism.
Unfortunately, individuals steeped in DEI will not change their minds lightly, and those who use it for social power will never change. The only way Democrats will learn is by losing elections repeatedly while hemorrhaging minority votes. Racial dealignment between parties could turn the page and open a more hopeful chapter in American politics.
Evan Barker is a former Democratic campaign operative, campaign finance reform advocate, and podcaster. You can follow her on X @evanwch.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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