Kamala Harris’ real problem: who are the Democrats anyway?

Accuse Kamala Harris‘ campaign of reflexively repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign 2016 — as Jacobins Branko Marcetic did recently – may sound like left-wing snark, with an unfortunate (and probably unintended) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader fear felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: In fact, the polls are dead, ten days before what has been billed (fairly or not) as a world-historic presidential election. After the sugar high of the Biden-to-Harris switch and the excitement of the Democratic conventionthis is a difficult future to face.

Among the media and political classes, the operational 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 cheating or mob violence. That “gut feeling,” to be clear, has no predictive value whatsoever and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016.

But the liberal stress and bewilderment is unlikely to be helped by seeing Democrats do that just what they always do in the final stages of a national campaign: a sharp turn to the right to emphasize commitment to national security and corporate profits, in the supposed pursuit of “persuasive” independents and wavering Republicans. (Or maybe just looking for the donor class, which isn’t technically the same thing.)

We’ve seen Harris himself as a gun owner in one sit down with Oprahembrace A Wall Street-friendly economic policy and campaigning with former Republican congressman Liz Cheneywho supported literally every aspect of the Trump agenda before his overt attempt to undermine the 2020 election. Of course, all of this reflects the conventional wisdom as imparted by highly paid consultants, and it is 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 have elected. It has been told that a radical socialist black lady who wants to make everyone trans could make a crucial difference in several of the key states.

The left’s answer also makes sense, on its own terms: Democrats have tried this before, in hamster wheel fashion, without definitively defeating the right. So maybe it’s time to stop doing the same thing that doesn’t work over and over again – admittedly a radical idea – and instead try something different, like leaning on broadly popular social democratic policies on health care, taxes , student debt and debt. the transition to a green energy, and hoping to win elections by driving high turnout among younger voters, people of color, LGBTQ voters and so on. (Let’s not get started on canceling the blank check issued to Benjamin Netanyahu – but hey, maybe.)

Personally, I’m sympathetic to this argument that the path is not taken, but to recycle another of the Democratic Party’s quadrennial hamster wheel themes, none of that matters in the face of an existential emergency. Be that as it may, nothing will dramatically change the party’s exhausting, alarmist messaging or its dark self-image in the final week before national elections.

There are signs that the Harris campaign plans to crack down on abortion rights in its final days — a potentially decisive wedge issue — in addition to the Cheney pivot and the strategic decision to directly label Trump with the F-word. But small tactical adjustments in late October are hardly the point. The Democratic Party is what it is: a fundamentally unstable coalition of wealthy big-city white people and blue-collar workers of color, whose interests are beginning to pull them in different directions.

Right now the most important question – for many people, understandably enough, is the only The question is whether the Democrats’ campaign strategy will work this time, or at least work slightly better than it did eight years ago. Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, but the distribution of those votes proved an insurmountable problem: If we subtract California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York from the overall total, Trump won. the rest of the country with 5 million votes.

Most of us in this industry are 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 is subject to “do your own research,” and a presidential candidate can tell the nation on live television that immigrants are eating their pets without suffering significant political damage. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any idea whether the Harris campaign’s battle for the patriotic middle ground will win the potentially decisive electoral votes of Michigan, Arizona or North Carolina. (It’s safe to say that whichever candidate can win two of these three states has a good chance of becoming the next president.)

But I do know one thing: don’t count on the confident statements of supposedly stubborn insiders whose Realpolitik bibles have been through the washing machine too many times. I read that by James Carville New York Times op-ed I was predicting a Harris win last week, and somewhere inside I felt a vague but distinct longing for a vanished world of comforting 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 supported a winning Democrat in this century. If that wasn’t the kiss of death, it was a very good simulation.

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And one more thing I know for sure: if the Harris campaign is the last-ditch Liz Cheney triangulation not If the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway 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 is bad enough. But because of How that happened and under what circumstances – and because the only American political party that pretends to stand up 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 regards with contempt, for the catastrophic consequences of its own incoherence and insecurity, and for the fact that it could not prevent the entire system it claims to foster from descending into clownish anarchy.