I want to rant a bit more.
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Nov. 8, 2024
I know there are already lots of post mortems, finger pointing, and
pundits with all sorts of theories as to why Kamala Harris lost in
a massive landslide. Like many others, I supported Harris because I
knew she would uphold the rule of law and the constitutional order,
and maintain the stability of the nation.
Yet, the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party leadership had
not only a messaging problem, but also a vision problem. Even as
she touted the "New Way Forward," a more frequent slogan was "We're
not going back." Ironically, the campaign was about going back to
the glory days of the Obama era. As two important populist
movements that emerged during the Obama presidency -- the Tea Party
and the Occupy Movement -- despite their seeming differences,
agreed that the income inequality was widening and the middle class
was eroding. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans did the hard
work of addressing this problem at a fundamental level, because
their elites were beholden to their billionaire donor class. The
Republicans learned earlier that the Bush-era neoconservatism of
the big multinational businesses was losing its appeal, but the
Democrats did not learn. Even as Democrats leaned in on
performative identity politics, they offered little to help the
low-income working class who are barely getting by on two or more
jobs, and frankly, do not have time for activism or politics.
There is something called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you
cannot afford to pay for gas to get to work, if you cannot afford
to put food on your table, if you are struggling to pay for
housing, the last thing you're worried about is democracy or
freedom or any other lofty concepts.
The Harris campaign made a point of "expanding the middle-class"
with a suite of policy proposals that appeal to the middle-class
and the professional class. What did they offer to eradicate the
extreme poverty so many Americans are suffering from, in what is
supposed to be the richest country on Earth? What was the Harris
program for a whole-of-the-nation approach to end all
houselessness? During the Biden era, unsheltered houselessness
became extremely visible due to the perfect storm created by
COVID-19. It has been one of the top voter concerns since 2021 in
every urban region across the United States. Kamala Harris' talks
of first-time homebuyer credits would not help these people. What
would, however, is a massive investment in basic public housing and
non-profit social housing, starting with constructions of tens of
thousands of SRO units. Her campaign promise of cracking down on
"price gouging" was spurious at best. How would one define
malicious "price gouging"? And government-imposed price control in
other countries (for example, Argentina) did not solve the problem
but only exacerbated it in a long run.
The campaign has moved itself too much to the center that some of
Harris' speeches sounded like those of George W. Bush. Had Kamala
won, and if the Republican Party gained the majority control of
Congress, she could have become another Bill Clinton -- a
law-and-order president and a GOP lapdog who waged war on the poor
and the immigrants, and bragged about doing so. Mass deportations
and "remain-in-Mexico" and the wall could have happened under the
Harris-Walz Administration, they would just be less blatant, less
spectacular, and outside the scrutiny of the mainstream media.
And the average voters in the Middle America saw right through this
and saw the shallow "Champagne Democrat" elites who are wholly out
of touch with the ordinary people. They didn't vote for DJT because
they were racists, homophobes, transphobes, or misogynists. They
didn't vote for him because they want a "Christian" nationalist
theocracy. They voted for DJT because inflation (whether or not
Biden had anything to do it) sucked, and because the Democrats
seemingly conflate between foreign gangsters who abuse the asylum
law and typical undocumented immigrants who have been here for
years and decades as part of their communities -- and refuse to
deal with the former because they want to protect the latter. It is
telling that more Latinos have voted for DJT this year, despite
that "Puerto Rico is an island of garbage" gaffe. Many Latinos
either came from, or are familiar with, countries where corrupt and
incompetent government had ceded powers to organized criminal
warlords, who imposed a reign of terror on the people. They came to
the U.S. to be safe from the likes of the Tren de Aragua, the
Sinaloa Cartel, and the MS-13, not to be hunted down by them across
the border. But then again, the Harris campaign platform did not
say much about comprehensive immigration reform, a chronic
Democratic talking point once a bipartisan talking point (yes,
George W. Bush called for it), aside from a brief and marginal
mention of an "earned path to citizenship," whatever that means
(this is a non-starter for GOP, as the Republicans falsely assume
that newly naturalized undocumented immigrants will all become
Democrats).
Again, the Harris campaign was really weak on policy that could
have helped those who are struggling just to survive. And that's
why she lost. The Democratic Party will become irrelevant unless
and until it embraces and centers the mass movement that is built
from the ground up, by low-income folks, working-class people, and
a multiracial and intersectional coalition that is laser-focused on
common visions that uplift the bottom.
