Reflections on the Democratic Party After the Election

November 7, 2024

Philadelphia. Thursday afternoon, November 7th. The election results came in pretty quick this time; or at least it was easy to call it early. I thought an early call would be beneficial to Harris, but that was wrong. I was so exhausted from long days of campaign work - and doing my own work on top of it - that I decided to go to bed at 10:00pm. Maybe the results will improve over the night. (Spoiler alert: they did not.) I haven’t spent too much time looking at election data yet. The combination of exhaustion and disappointment is too much right now. But I do have some thoughts on why we got the result we got. This post is really a reaction piece; something more like an opinion column than analytical piece. It’s not the first time I have done this, but it is all I got at the moment. I’ll be back to it next week.

Art credit: UFCW Local 328

On Tuesday, we saw too many working class folks – of all races and genders – choose for president a narcissistic fascist who has already tried to overthrow the Republic and been convicted of crimes. This is at least the second time in 100 years that I can recall a fascist being made leader of a major Western democracy through a democratic process after having once tried to overthrow the country and been convicted of crimes. The other one came to power in Germany in January 1933. The similarities between the two don’t end there, but they are not identical persons either. However, one thing that is also similar between these two men is that they recognized the problems of the working class, saw how the liberal party was (or was perceived to be) failing to provide results for them, and knew how to harness grievance to gain power.

We are right to worry about what the future holds, but let’s not panic just yet. Trump appears to use grievance simply to gain personal results he is interested in. Hitler was a true believer in authoritarian rule and killing any who opposed him. It is unlikely that Trump will go to the lengths Hitler did in gaining and wielding uncontested power, but I am not sure I would say the same about his christofascist vice president. That is for a later conversation.

It can be difficult to understand how so many Americans can choose such a despicable person who leads a political party that is soundly opposed to their interests. But this is not a new problem. There is an entire literature devoted to understanding how Germans allowed the Nazis to come to power and why they supported it. The German system was more susceptible to authoritarianism that ours is right now. Hitler’s party did indeed win the most votes in the late 1932 parliamentary election, but he was well short of a majority and could not form a government on his own. Mainstream conservative politicians decided to work with him and let him lead a new government. Hitler was able to govern by decree – something that is not part of our Constitutional system.¹ So, Germany’s system allowed Hitler to come to power with minority electoral support – much of which was indirect in the first place. It made it difficult for Germans to stop it from happening and once Hitler got power he made sure it was fatal to oppose him.

On Tuesday, an apparent majority of American voters chose Trump. A majority! This is a guy who never did better than about 47 percent in an election or in approval ratings. And after everything that has happened since 2020, it’s really surprising that a majority of voters would pick this guy. But it looks like they did. And while we don’t really know the composition of the electorate yet, it appears that a lot of working class and poor folks voted for him. Not just white one (although they absolutely led the way). How could this happen?

One of my intellectual (and political) heroes is the late Staughton Lynd. He was a historian who left academia to go to law school and become a union lawyer. I admired his commitment to using his intellect for the public good. When he felt he could not accomplish that as a member of a faculty, he left a successful - and hard to break into - career to become and advocate and an activist. He did not stop writing. In the late 1980s, I read his article “The Genesis of the Idea of a Community Right to Industrial Property in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, 1977-1987.”² It was perhaps the single most influential piece of writing in my life. I read it as a young union activist and it not only fired the imagination, but it was one of several influences that led me to become a lawyer.

Lynd explains a novel strategy to prevent capital flight from destroying communities, particularly one reliant on one or two large employers. The strategy uses eminent domain to seize steel plants that were being left to rot while capital fled south and put them in control of the workers and communities. The article left a lasting impression on me about what we can do, and how we can use democratic means, to make truly significant social change. Later, when I was working as a housing advocate I saw similar utility in the community land trust model to provide lasting affordable housing and community stability. The solution is not to focus on getting rid of an ever-resilient capitalism altogether (that is, at best, a long-term goal), it’s to take capital out of the marketplace where and when possible. It also taught me one other thing: capitalists will do everything they can to stop any attempts at non-capitalist projects, and Democrats will largely capitulate to the interest of these capitalists.

This was before Clinton. While many Democrats had not yet bought into neoliberal economics and were still trying to push forward a pro-labor, anti-poverty economy, when it came to taking decisive action and taking the fight directly to capital’s interest (as opposed to indirectly through regulation) Democratic leaders continually hesitated. The economy was moving quickly to a post-industrial model, which was at least as much about undercutting the power of organized labor as it was creating more efficient operations. After all, from the capitalist’s viewpoint lowering labor costs and getting rid of workplace rules make things more efficient for them.

Even before Reagan had come to power, Democrats - with huge majorities in both houses of Congress and the presidency - could not reform federal labor law to rid the nation of the anti-labor rules Republicans had put in place in the 1950s. The closure of steel and auto plants across the Rust Belt devastated communities even more than it benefitted corporations and the investor class. Before the Democrats could take much of the blame for inaction, Reagan came away and gave us a credible enemy who could be blamed (and, to be clear, he bears a lot of the blame - but he was also from the party of the bosses - that point is important, don’t forget it). It would not be until 1993 that Democrats were back in power, and by that time the devastation wrought by neoliberalism could not be understated.

And it was just at that moment, when Democrats could have taken decisive steps to build a more equitable economy that Clinton declared that Reagan was right all along and embraced neoliberalism. He would stake his presidency on a free trade agreement that benefited only capital and investors. The idea that this free trade would produce benefits down the road for workers and the poor sounded suspiciously like trickle-down economics. And that’s because it was. I hope you can begin to see now why I think the working class³ in this country has soured so much on the Democratic Party.

It is absolutely true that this country is infected with the plagues of white supremacy and misogyny, and that those plagues were important and widespread contributors to the results in Tuesday’s election. It is also absolutely true that corporate money and widespread disinformation campaigns made the playing field unequal. But these things are so influential in our politics now because neither party offers answers to the economic problems workers, the poor, and even the middle class face in this country.

We had an opportunity to change course again in 2009. We had just elected a Democrat as president and had majorities in both houses of Congress. The Republicans had crashed the economy (although Clintonism is not blameless) to the point that nearly everyone agreed action had to be taken. However, the banks were bailed out (yes, I know that happened under Bush), no banker was ever held accountable for the fraud the perpetrated on the global economy, a very weak “stimulus” bill – half of which was tax cuts – was enacted, public sector layoffs – which were part of an austerity approach right at the time that deficit spending on public services and other investment was most needed – were happening everywhere, and millions of regular Americans were foreclosed on by the very institutions that created the Great Recession in the first place.

It was such wasted opportunity to refocus the Democratic Party as the party for regular people.⁴ Instead, for some reason I still cannot fathom, Obama decided to appoint an economic team composed entirely of Clintonites who favored, and in some ways created, the very system that was the cause of the problem. People may no longer complain about NAFTA, but I still hear a lot of people complain about how Democrats helped Wall Street rather the Main Street when they had their chance. The missed opportunities build upon one another over time creating a narrative of party failure that finally is cemented as its reputation.

By 2016, with decades of disinvestment in working class and poor communities - including decades of Democrats more often than not supporting the policies of the bosses - and a blown chance to create an economy that works for people and hold corporate criminals accountable, was it really wise to turn to a presidential candidate named Clinton?

Hillary Clinton may have been the most-qualified person to ever win a major party’s nomination - she certainly was among them - but it was tone-deaf for a party that believes working people should support it. I know I am a little biased here, but I think we can now make a solid argument that Democrats really should have nominated Bernie Sanders in 2016. The party had to break with neoliberalism. It had to change course and be the party of working people, not the party that expects working people to support it. It is important to keep your promises, even the implicit ones. The Democrats were not supposed to be the party of the bosses – they already had one in the Republicans.

Trump recognized that working people were fed up with nothing changing and life getting harder rather than easier, and he knew how to capitalize on it. When people are desperate, it’s easy to motivate them with fear and get them to turn on the Other. It is classic fascist strategy. And when you hear disingenuous right-wingers⁵ claim that fascism is socialism, there is a kernel of truth in that. Fascism offers its supporters citizenship into a community that allegedly redistributes benefits to its members, while casting the Other outside this community. Fascism in some ways is socialism, but only for some. In a certain sense, fascism is the bosses telling workers they will let them in on some goodies (maybe) as long as they relinquish their freedom, do what they are told and don’t complain, and focus their grievances on the Other. They might need them for cannon fodder, too, because war is good for business. But that’s how they can show their patriotism and feel proud.

So, as for Tuesday. There is no single explanation for why Democrats lost, but the party’s functional abandonment of workers, the poor, and even the middle class in the interests of serving neoliberalism is a foundational one. No one outside die-hard party activists really thinks Democrats have done enough to help them. Sure, they do a lot more than Republicans ever do - but Republicans are the party of the bosses. When you call yourself the party of the common person, you will lose credibility if your actions don’t match the rhetoric. You can’t tell people that you are on their side and then continually not show up, or perhaps worse, tell them that the other side is right about the fundamentals but you’ll be a lot nicer about it than they will. In the end, those folks will go to the other side because what they have left is grievance, and Trumpism is all about grievance.

The situation is more serious than Democrats lost another election. We need to have a serious conversation about how to make the Democratic Party fulfill its promise to be the party of regular people. That might mean finally having a significant and honest critique of capitalism and its impacts, not just on people’s lives, but on the party’s electoral viability going forward. Worrying about being called communist is just a lazy excuse for doing nothing.

It’s not messaging, or fundraising, or which places were or were not targeted. Harris ran a great campaign, we did way more GOTV than Republicans did. None of it seem to matter very much in the end. The failures of the Democratic Party are not tactical or strategic, they are at this point foundational. It’s not time for new messaging or rebranding or another useless campaign post-mortem. It’s not good enough to know that in fact the Democrats are better than the Republicans for working people. It’s not good enough to simply be putting bandages on problems that are the result of a neoliberal system working exactly as intended. It’s time for the Democratic Party to do the hard work and recreate itself as a true social democratic party.

1. Rule by presidential decree is part of France’s constitutional system, which is why I think the fascist RN’s real plan was not to win the recent parliamentary elections but to win the presidency in the next election and rule by decree.

2. Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 3, December 1987, Pages 926–958, https://doi.org/10.2307/1902160.

3. I am not using that as a metaphor for white people, or the uneducated, or rural residents, or some combination of the three; I mean people who work for a living, regardless of race, gender, or religion.

4. Just imagine if we had purchased homes in foreclosure, put them into community land trusts, and made sure the residents were not evicted. It was such a missed opportunity to genuinely help people rather than capital, and it was also an epic failure of the political imagination.

5. I call them disingenuous because they are trying to do is make “socialism” a slur, not explain something in good faith.