THIS was always going to happen. After the Democrats ran a pro-business, centrist, vision-free campaign and lost, progressives are being blamed to justify hurtling off to right. Whatever happened, the narrative spun by the corporate Democrats would have been to hammer the left. If Kamala Harris had secured the White House, the same faction would have loudly claimed it was vindication of rejecting progressive promises. Heads we win – tails you lose.

One anonymous Democratic aide declared “Our party must learn that outside of our tiny insular bubble, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) is toxic to the Democratic brand with swing voters. Her primetime DNC (Democratic National Convention) speaking slot played directly into the narratives that lost us this election.” Another Democratic outrider declared on television: “The progressive era should be over if they want to start winning again.” One pundit declared that the Democrats had lost because they had run on “extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity” and “defunding the police” – none of which had anything to do with Harris’s campaign at all.

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Indeed, Harris reportedly acted on the advice of her brother-in-law – the chief legal officer of Uber – to steer away from challenging corporate America, and made billionaire Mark Cuban one of its key figureheads. Another central fixture was Liz Cheney, the right-wing Republican and daughter of war criminal Dick Cheney, handing Donald Trump of people an open goal as he correctly identified George W Bush’s vice-president as a mass murderer of Muslims. When asked on television what she would do differently from Joe Biden, all she could profer was putting a Republican in her cabinet. As one CNN political correspondent put it, “she was not running as a progressive”. She instead “ran as a centrist, consensus driven Democrat, actively inviting Republicans into the coalition". 

(Image: Owen Jones) Indeed, there was a politician who called for the Democrats to run on bread-and-butter economic populism relevant to the lives of struggling working-class Americans. That man was Bernie Sanders, whose advice was ignored – even though the polling shows he was more popular among independent voters than Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney and other political figures. He issued a rightly excoriating statement, declaring: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He pointed out how working-class people were suffering, that 60% of Americans lived pay check to pay check, as well as a crucial fact which lies at the heart of the political tumult of the modern US: “Unbelievably, real inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.”

This great stagnation of living standards – leaving most American workers no better off than they were in the age of Richard Nixon – is something that was strongly impressed upon me as I travelled the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina in the run-up to the elections. Yes, for some Trump supporters, blatant racism was the key driving force – at a rally in Milwaukee, one young Trumper spat on the floor as he ranted about “illegals”. For others, the scapegoating of migrants is itself misdirected pain, blaming them for their acute struggles. Real wages have overall stagnated under Joe Biden. Since 2020, food prices have gone up by 35%. You cannot expect so many Americans to feel economic pain without consequences.

An obvious retort is such inflation has been felt everywhere, punishing incumbents, too. This is of course true – but the corporate wings of supposedly progressive parties make the fatal mistake of treating economic misery as like the weather, a fact of life you can do little about. What they should have done is loudly articulate the pain being suffered by Americans –squarely directing anger at a thriving elite, and offering compelling solutions. They failed to do so, allowing Trump instead to articulate that fury and direct it in all the wrong directions.

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It would be a mistake, too, to see this as a surge in Trumpism. Donald Trump has secured around the same number of votes as last time, when he lost. The difference is the Democrats have lost millions of votes. Who these non-voters are matters: Why weren’t they inspired to march to polling stations simply by dark threats of fascism? We do know that some were repelled by US complicity in Israel’s genocide – not least the Muslim American citizens I spoke to in Dearborn, Michigan. But for most, it was likely to be a lack of faith that Kamala Harris had answers to the burning injustices defining their lives.

The Democrats have a choice. They can simply hope that Trump will simply disintegrate in office, and they can swoop back into the White House by default, without having to offer much. This would be a grave mistake. The system is broken in the US, and most Americans know it. Unless the Democrats offer actual answers then the future of the US – and the world at large –will be very dark indeed.