Exit Right – Dissent Magazine

The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply ignore the demonstration, as one might have expected; rather, they exaggeratedly plugged their ears, made mocking faces, and, in one notable case, sarcastically mimicked the chant: “Eighteen years old!” Witnessing video of this event, my heart sank, not just at the moral grotesqueness of the display, but also in its sickening confirmation of the solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom. The conventiongoers offered a literal enactment of their lack of interest in the experiences of those outside their circle of concern. La-la, I can’t hear you—or, as Kamala Harris herself put it when challenged at a rally, “I am speaking now.” Not for long, as it turned out.

The best moment of the Harris campaign was the very beginning, when she got a chance to embody the collective sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s decision to bow out, and to offer something new. From there, it was all downhill. She and those around her seemed to think that purely superficial changes would prove sufficient. Harris pointedly refused to offer any criticism of the incumbent administration, or even suggest any way in which she differed from it. Whenever prompted on this score, she simply reiterated that she was not the same person as Joe Biden (or Donald Trump). Her surrogates and supporters often reacted with contempt, scorn, and even racism toward those who thought it fair to ask for something more. In this fashion, she squandered the wide lead she had opened in the summer. Although food insecurity and poverty—especially child poverty—had increased significantly after the expiration of pandemic relief measures, and inflation had outpaced earnings for tens of millions of Americans, Harris eventually settled into a campaign roadshow of billionaires, celebrities, and neocon Republican defectors, advocating for an ill-defined status quo. It was a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s “America is already great”: tone-deaf, incompetently targeted at a nonexistent moderate Republican voter, and often expressly hostile toward part of its own nominal base.

As of the present count, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020, suggesting he was far from unbeatable. But Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent.

In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?

Just as in 2016, Harris supporters have fallen back on the racism and sexism of American society as an explanation for defeat. No doubt these are hulking obstacles, but they don’t suffice as omnibus explanation. As far as winning elections, Barack Obama overcame the first hurdle, and racism’s decisive significance is thrown into doubt by Trump’s own rapidly growing appeal among voters of color. Many societies that would seem to be no less misogynistic and patriarchal have elected women as national leaders. Most important though, these are not static phenomena. Trump mobilizes these forces; the task of his opponent is to countermobilize and defeat them. A successful campaign draws on the material of the existing society and assembles it into a portrait of the present and a vision of the future: it does not simply reflect frozen facts of public opinion and common sense but reorganizes them and ultimately produces new forms. Racism and misogyny have intensified notably in recent years due to Trump’s own prodigious talents in this area.

The blame for the Harris catastrophe, though, goes far beyond the candidate herself. Biden deserves the lion’s share, for the outrageous narcissism that led him to remain in the race through the first half of 2024, preventing a competitive primary that might have screened out Harris as it did in 2019, or at least pushed her to articulate a more coherent politics. Worse still was the vacillation of the Biden administration about whether it sought a restoration or an adventure into a new style of governance. Infamously from the perspective of the American left, Biden ran on the idea that American society needed to be returned to its natural state of decency and expressly disavowed the need for “fundamental change.” The Trump phenomenon was an essentially external pollution in an otherwise healthy body politic. It was an interpretation that resonated with years of blame-shifting about 2016—to Bernie Sanders, to Russia, to progressive social movements and their rhetorical excesses, anywhere but the Democratic leadership.

After his 2020 victory, secured with the maneuvering of Obama and Jim Clyburn, Biden seemed to register that a more structural set of problems needed to be confronted. For this purpose, he absorbed some of the energy and ideas of the Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns, against which he’d previously arrayed himself as the sensible alternative. And his administration did make a game attempt, in its first half, at extending the U.S. welfare state in ways that would have represented a real effort to address the material sources of the Trump phenomenon. This, however, was too little and too late. By suppressing the challenge from the left in the primaries of 2016 and 2020, the Democrats had cut themselves off from the popular base that they might have rallied to this cause and that might have delivered a clear mandate for it. Lacking the legislative margin, they instead tried to horse-trade their way there. What they got was more than nothing, but not remotely enough.

By the middle of his term, Biden had become a de facto austerity president, overseeing the lapse of welfare state expansions, including not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid, all during a period of unified Democratic control. Gradually, Biden largely dropped the demand for progressive social policy and focused his fiscal discussions instead on the deficit—a repetition of the same posture that had condemned the Obama administration and created the opportunity for the rise of Trump in the first place. Emblematizing this capitulation, Biden decided to cave to corporate wishes for the pandemic to be over as a matter of public policy—particularly public policy that enhanced workers’ labor market power—even as it continued to rip through Americans’ lives. In place of earlier progressive ambitions, Biden offered an economic nationalism more or less borrowed from Trump and a new Cold War liberalism. Imagine if, instead of the Second New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt had sought reelection by campaigning on a weapons gap, like John F. Kennedy later would.

Worst of all, Biden continued to sign off on whatever Netanyahu wished to do, enabling a genocide in Gaza and the escalation of a multisided war. Whatever concept Biden had once entertained about the meaning of his own election in the global struggle over democracy and the rule of law, he reduced it to a grotesque mockery after October 7. (Here again, imagine Roosevelt had not only remained shamefully neutral in the Spanish Civil War but gave Franco the bombs to drop on Guernica.) While it is no doubt true that relatively few Americans named Palestine as their top voting issue in exit polls, the sense of a hypocritical and feckless foreign policy leading to global disaster must have done little to allay young voters’ accurate sense that America is, as neatly summed up by one pollster, “a dying empire led by bad people.” If Harris was, as she constantly repeated, working tirelessly for a ceasefire, where the hell was it? The insistence could only be received as a confession of incompetence or a lie—which, in fact, it was, as administration spokespeople would occasionally implicitly acknowledge. And what appeal to protect democracy and to stop fascism could possibly ring true, coming from a podium spattered with the blood of thousands of children? Witnessing Biden’s stubbornness, Harris’s unaccountable refusal even to allow a token Palestinian American to deliver a pre-vetted speech at the convention, and the campaign’s choice to send Ritchie Torres, AIPAC’s favorite congressman, to campaign in Michigan, one had to ask whether these politicians even cared whether they won or lost. They alternated between calling Republicans a mortal threat and promising to include them in the cabinet; they paused their warnings of fascist encroachment only to give cover to the world’s most militarily aggressive far-right and racist regime.

The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can. But the party’s leaders are to blame, not that many in the center have cared or even seemed willing to reflect on a decade of catastrophe. Has anyone who complained that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion would cost Democrats votes due to the extremism of its associated demands reckoned with the empirical finding that the opposite proved true? That the narrow victory of Biden in 2020 was likely attributable to noisy protests that liberals wished would be quieter and calmer? Has anyone acknowledged the unique popularity of Sanders with Latinx voters, a once-core constituency that the Democrats are now on the verge of losing outright?

The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and cultivate relations with corporate allies.

The party under Biden pivoted toward economic nationalism because it didn’t have a substantive or convincing program of progressive redistribution after the failure of Build Back Better, and it couldn’t find one that would be acceptable to its corporate wing. As Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, observed after the election, “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax credit elements in Build Back Better so we would have had concrete cost-of-living benefits to run on. People should reflect on which part of the Democratic Party denied us those agenda items.” Instead, Biden stole Trump’s idea: exit right from neoliberalism, get the weapons factories humming. Biden sustained Trump’s massive expansion of military expenditures, with national security providing the primary ideological justification for full employment and the pursuit of progressive social goals, as it did in the Cold War. In turn, the escalating geopolitical and geoeconomic confrontation with China supplied the logic of the unwavering U.S. backing for Netanyahu’s wars: renewed great power competition intensified the imperative of consolidating a critical strategic region under U.S. hegemony. Again continuing a foreign policy formula developed by Trump, Biden’s strategy has been to pursue this goal by resolving lingering tensions between Israel and the U.S.-aligned Arab states (Saudi Arabia most significantly, with the Gulf states and Morocco taken care of under Trump and Egypt decades ago at Camp David). Accomplishing this resolution requires the termination of the Palestinian national movement, the main obstacle to such a consolidation. The idea of a Potemkin Palestinian state may return some day, but only after a severe chastising and a stark numerical reduction of the Palestinian people.

The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand for?—and programmatic self-cancellation. Champions of the domestic rule of law and the rules-based international order, they engaged in a spectacular series of violations of domestic and international law. Promising a new New Deal, they admonished voters to be grateful for how well they were already doing economically. Each step taken by the party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in another direction. It is by this dynamic that a decade of (appropriate) anti-Trump hysteria led first to the adoption of parts of Trump’s program by the Democrats, and then finally his reinstallation as president at new heights of public opinion favorability. Nothing better than the real thing.

In our century, American politics has been blown open by the reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms: imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal. It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of containment that Trump’s obscenity comes to feel like a liberation for so many.

Although on the surface MAGA is nostalgic, Trump’s movement has been immensely historically generative: creating new modes of political expression, opening new arenas of policymaking: mass deportation, anti-trans assaults, vaccine skepticism. This is why it is so destructive. On the contrary, it is the Democratic leadership that is engaged in a backward-looking project. Only through restorationism can the party balance its competing commitments to social and economic justice and capitalist growth. It seeks to recapture a lost past in which these goals accommodated each other, and it suppresses any positive vision of the future that might require deciding internal tensions. Just consider the way that Biden and Harris both have championed reforms that everyone knows cannot be accomplished without abolition of the filibuster and reform of the federal court system, which they are both hesitant to contemplate, occasionally entertaining narrowly tailored, self-limited reforms. Such an effort, if undertaken more generally, would necessitate a wider critique of American society and the undemocratic institutions that define it—a critique at odds with an image of an America that is “already great.” Despite their various discrete policy goals, Democrats thus prove unable to tell a clear story about what those goals mean, how they fit together, and how we might get there; they can only insist that they are not Trump—and even this is no longer quite true.

Several decades ago, considering the triumph of Thatcherism, Stuart Hall observed a very similar problem arising for the Labour Party in the face of Britain’s emerging “authoritarian populism.” Since Labour, down to the present, has not managed to solve it, the case is worth serious consideration. (Notably, Harris drew significant advice from the Labour Party, which recently won a landslide election on a vacuous platform despite a diminished quantity of votes, thanks purely to the collapse of their opponent.) I quote at length:

I simply don’t think, for example, that the current Labour leadership understands that its political fate depends on whether or not it can construct a politics, in the next 20 years, which is able to address itself, not to one, but to a diversity of different points of antagonism in society; unifying them, in their differences, within a common project. I don’t think they have grasped that Labour’s capacity to grow as a political force depends absolutely on its capacity to draw from the popular energies of very different movements; movements outside the party which it did not—could not—set in play, and which it cannot therefore administer. It retains an entirely bureaucratic conception of politics. If the word doesn’t proceed out of the mouths of the Labour leadership, there must be something subversive about it. If politics energises people to develop new demands, that is a sure sign that the natives are getting restless. You must expel or depose a few. You must get back to that fiction, the ‘traditional Labour voter’: to that pacified, Fabian notion of politics, where the masses hijack the experts into power, and then the experts do something for the masses: later . . . much later. The hydraulic conception of politics.

That bureaucratic conception of politics has nothing to do with the mobilization of a variety of popular forces. It doesn’t have any conception of how people become empowered by doing something: first of all about their immediate troubles; then, the power expands their political capacities and ambitions, so that they begin to think again about what it might be like to rule the world . . . Their politics has ceased to have a connection with this most modern of all resolutions—the deepening of democratic life.

Without the deepening of popular participation in national-cultural life, ordinary people don’t have any experience of actually running anything. We need to re-acquire the notion that politics is about expanding popular capacities, the capacities of ordinary people. And in order to do so, socialism itself has to speak to the people whom it wants to empower, in words that belong to them as late 20^th century ordinary folks.

You’ll have noticed that I’m not talking about whether the Labour Party has got its policy on this or that issue right. I’m talking about a whole conception of politics: the capacity to grasp in our political imagination the huge historical choices in front of the British people, today. I’m talking about new conceptions of the nation itself: whether you believe Britain can advance into the next century with a conception of what it is like to be ‘English’ which has been entirely constituted out of Britain’s long, disastrous imperialist march across the earth. If you really think that, you haven’t grasped the profound cultural transformation required to remake the English. That kind of cultural transformation is precisely what socialism is about today.

Trump has remade the Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think the Democrats are capable of accomplishing this, although the possibilities of doing it by any other means are equally obscure.

The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.

Liberals have tried for a decade now to rid the country of Trump by ostracizing him as a grotesque aberration. They’ve pursued this through legal investigations, but also through elaborate and repeated demonstrations of bipartisan elite consensus against him. It has only made him stronger. Trumpism can’t be finessed because it speaks to real forces in American society—racism, misogyny, class frustration—and offers an obscene, satisfying expression to its addressees. It can only be beaten by direct confrontation—not just with Trump, but with what he represents, and the remaking of America he envisions. To call his movement fascism carries this unavoidable implication, which makes all the more galling the lack of appetite for such confrontation from so many who apply the label. “It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint, in a part of the world where complaining is still permitted, about the wickedness of the world and the triumph of barbarism, or to cry boldly that the victory of the human spirit is assured,” Brecht once wrote. “There are many who pretend that cannons are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses.”

The obstacle now presented by liberalism is especially frustrating because Trump’s coalition suffers from its own internal contradiction, isomorphic with that of the Democrats. J.D. Vance and Elon Musk would appear to want quite different things: Vance praises Lina Khan, for example, and seems to offer a vision of welfare chauvinism; Musk proposes to fire Khan, radically cut the state, and deliberately induce economic misery. Trump will of course redistribute wealth and power upward, in the name of popular empowerment and working-class rage. It should be difficult for him to pull this off, to hold these forces in balance. Yet the Democrats have configured their own coalition in such a way that they cannot credibly activate and gain leverage from this contradiction; just as they cannot speak of Trump’s yearslong association with Jeffrey Epstein—presumably because doing so would draw attention to Bill Clinton too.

If the solution were so simple as a frontal attack by forming a third party, we’d have accomplished it already. One thing that is clear, however, is that the appetite of liberal institutions for joining “the resistance” is much diminished from eight years ago. In one sense, this is frightening: the actual resistance will be smaller, more isolated and exposed, as powerful actors in our society tacitly defect to the fascist cause. Indeed, they already have begun to do so, validating Trump’s politics while declaiming his manners, which was exactly how Trump won again. Liberal corporations, the press, the universities—institutions that deplore Trump in name—have shifted in recent years toward carrying out elements of his program in miniature, seemingly uncoerced.

On the other hand, our role in defending the values once claimed by our employers, representatives, and self-appointed spokespeople will become harder to mistake or avoid. As Brecht also observed, “those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat.” To tell the truth instead is not in itself a solution, but it is the necessary, and only possible, first step.

Gabriel Winant is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, a member of the executive council of AAUP/AFT Local 6741, and a member of the Dissent editorial board.