After the shock of the 2016 election, as I felt I was emotionally drowning, I recall writing more than once that the only thing I could do going forward was try to see things as clearly as possible and convey that to the best of my ability. It’s not easy at times like this, and it’s especially difficult when your own friends and allies are often siezing on the opportunity to validate their priors and ride their hobby horses without a whole lot of evidence. It’s human to do that but I’m rarely persuaded by those arguments at times like these and I suspect most of you aren’t either. It’s just too soon and there are too many variables to be sure of any particular analysis.
I have missed reading Michael Bérubé in recent years. As a founding member of the old liberal blogosphere his wit and wisdom were hugely influential of me so I was glad to see that he’s written one of the best critique of the critiques I’ve yet seen. You’ll see what I’m talking about:
By now, everyone knows why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump: because she didn’t do the thing I wanted her to do.
As with every other crushing Democratic defeat since 2000, the usual suspects have emerged to say precisely what you would expect them to. Right on cue, Bari Weiss, former New York Times columnist and founder of The Free Press, claimed that running on “extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police” was out of touch with “ordinary Americans.” Since the number of Democrats who ran on these issues was precisely zero, and since Harris herself made a point of touting her career as a prosecutor, one suspects that this strange utterance might in fact be code for “Democrats refused to throw trans people under the bus,” in which case, they are guilty as charged — though in the coming months, they will surely be urged by other familiar voices to do precisely this.
On the left, two hot takes have gained serious traction. One is that Harris lost because of Gaza; the other is that she lost because the neoliberal technocrats of the Democratic Party have given up on the working class. The first of these is hard to substantiate, though the broader criticisms of Harris’ position on Gaza have merit. The second is demonstrably wrong, and wrong in a way that points to a deep and long-standing problem on one wing of the American left.
He takes on Gaza with sensitivity and I think it’s well worth reading so click over to do that. I’m more interested in the economic argument because I feel like we’re about to party like it’s 2000 and 2016 and that’s not good:
If the Gaza argument is vexing, the economic populist argument is simply maddening. It has a 20-year history, dating back to Thomas Frank’s influential book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” It was always dismissive of cultural and social issues, seeing the culture wars as a sideshow meant to distract the rubes from their exploitation by plutocrats. In an oft-cited passage, Frank claimed that right-wing culture warriors aren’t really serious about the things they crusade on: “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished.” I’m guessing that Frank would like a do-over on that take today.
This year, the economic-populist left came out of the gate storming, as Bernie Sanders issued a day-after statement that “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.” As MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen noted, this “amounted to the proverbial act of coming down to the battlefield and shooting the survivors.” As Cohen also noted, it “simply isn’t true.”
Still, if one wanted to debate this claim on its merits, one could start by looking at Harris’ policy proposals: things like childcare tax credits, earned income tax credits for families without children, subsidies for first-time homebuyers, incentives for building affordable housing, an increase in the minimum wage, tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases on people making over $400,000 a year, support for unions and protection for workers seeking to unionize, lower costs for health care and prescription drugs, student loan forgiveness, support for in-home medical care and legislation to combat price gouging (which was immediately ridiculed by sensible centrist commentators like The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell). In what world is this not an economic plan targeted to the working class?
More importantly, one could look at recent history — not just some candidate’s wish list, but the real, demonstrable accomplishments of the Biden administration. As Nicholas Lemann recently pointed out, those accomplishments not only mark a decisive break with 40 years of neoliberalism; they are also astonishing political achievements, given the razor-thin congressional margins Biden was working with. “On Biden’s watch,” Lemann writes, “the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.”
Let’s zero in for a moment on the fact that so-called “Bidenomics” focused on reenergizing American manufacturing and strengthening unions. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act created 700,000 manufacturing jobs. Biden also managed some oh-by-the-way victories like saving the 40-hour work week and resolving a longshoremen’s strike that threatened to tank the economy at the worst possible time. (That resolution alone should have sparked coast-to-coast celebrations.) And on the symbolic-and-therefore-important front, Biden was the first U.S. president to walk a picket line, in support of the United Auto Workers strike in September 2023. You would think that things like this might be important to economic populists.
But don’t take my word for it. Check out someone with much more experience with economic populism:
The Biden administration, as a result of the American Rescue Plan, helped rebuild the economy during the pandemic far faster than economists thought possible. At a time when people were terrified about the future, the president and those of us who supported him in Congress put Americans back to work, provided cash benefits to desperate parents and protected small businesses, hospitals, schools and child care centers.
After decades of talk about our crumbling roads, bridges and water systems, we put more money into rebuilding America’s infrastructure than ever before — which is projected to create millions of well-paying jobs. And we did not stop there. We made the largest-ever investment in climate action to save the planet. We canceled student debt for nearly five million financially strapped Americans. We cut prices for insulin and asthma inhalers, capped out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and got free vaccines to the American people. We battled to defend women’s rights in the face of moves by Trump-appointed jurists to roll back reproductive freedom and deny women the right to control their own bodies.
Who, you ask, spoke so generously — and accurately — about Biden’s economic record? If you guessed “Bernie Sanders, in the pages of The New York Times this past summer,” you win today’s “spot-the-political- opportunism” prize.
The reason this matters — the reason that Sanders’ postelection statement isn’t just garden-variety political opportunism — is that Biden was, remarkably, almost precisely the kind of president that economic populists said they wanted. (I say “remarkably” partly because I was an Elizabeth Warren supporter in 2020 and didn’t expect much from Biden. I was pleasantly surprised at almost every turn.) Perhaps Sanders was simply more simpatico with Biden than with Harris; it certainly sounds like it, since his op-ed was explicitly an argument for keeping Biden as the nominee. I will not offer hypotheses about this possibility. I will simply point out that the Bernie Sanders who wrote that op-ed knew perfectly well how to argue that the Democratic Party had not abandoned the working class.
The economic populist left is not wrong on the merits. Quite the contrary. It has been clear for four years that working-class and middle-class people were feeling the effects of inflation, that their pain was real and that the costs of everything from eggs and gas to childcare and housing weren’t just opportunities for right-wing demagoguery. They were lived experiences, day to day. That issue, together with immigration (fanned by hysterical xenophobia and propaganda), turned out to be decisive for this election. Should Biden himself have done more to promote and publicize his administration’s considerable achievements? Absolutely — although communicating them was not his strong suit. That’s where the economic populists with better communication skills should have stepped up and said, “Folks, we feel your pain, and we really do have a plan. Some of it is already in place, and there’s more like that to come.”
Don’t get me wrong. This would have been the right message, and it would have done justice to Bidenomics. But I’m not saying that messaging would have worked. On the contrary, I’m fairly sure it would not have. To return to Michael Cohen: “under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.” I’m just saying that the argument that Biden and Harris neglected the working class is false.
Instead, I’m in the camp that believes my side lost because every incumbent party in every wealthy democracy paid a political price for presiding over post-COVID-19 inflation, whether they deserved it or not. Granted, it’s galling that the American version of this global phenomenon entailed losing to a petulant and amoral individual with a criminal record, who continually flirts with the idea of political violence. That loss is incalculable, and may wind up being worse than the debacles of 1980 and 2000. I hope for the sake of future generations that it is not.
But I’m also in the camp that believes that although Harris didn’t run a perfect campaign (most likely because there is no such thing) and should at least have given voters a clearer sense of how she would be different from Biden (because of the stench of incumbency), the 2024 election was looking like a Trump landslide four months ago. The amazing thing, then, is that a Black woman fighting the headwinds of racism, misogyny, gale-force far-right disinformation and the mainstream media’s “sanewashing” of her opponent managed to boost her favorability rating in record time, crushing her only debate with Trump, ably battling Bret Baier’s bullying on Fox News and coming within a whisker of holding the Blue Wall states that would have secured her the presidency.
The question shouldn’t be: “What did the Democrats do wrong?” The question should be, given the profoundly inauspicious political conditions they faced as an incumbent party in a country where two-thirds of the population thinks that things are on the wrong track: “How did they come so close?”
It is always tempting to believe that your candidate lost for the reasons you care about most. I feel that temptation every single time. But there was so much more going on in this election: Latino men moving to the right, the widening gender divide among white voters, the struggle for reproductive rights and affordable health care being muted by the delusional belief among low-information voters that Trump would protect these things, and the stubborn, unavoidable fact that long-term investments in working-class families mean less to many people, on a day-to-day basis, than the cost of groceries and gas.
We are now left to live with the bitter irony that many of those long-term investments in American manufacturing and infrastructure will bear fruit during Trump’s second term. Sometime in late January 2025, I suspect, we will begin to hear how Trump tamed inflation and reinvigorated the American working class simply by taking office. And we will continue to hear, as Bidenomics takes root and Trump takes the credit for its successes, that the Democrats lost by turning their backs on that working class.
I don’t want to give up on the idea that another, better world is possible. It’s all that keeps me going. For now, I just want the left to remain in the world it once claimed as its own — the world of the reality-based community.
That’s pretty much where I’m at. I will point out that there is another hot take gaining traction on the left, or center-left, and that is that the Democrats must win (duh) and therefore it is imperative that they move to the center on culture war issues. We’ve been there before too. And it’s a post for another day.
I’m not going to get too worked up about this (yet) because I think it’s mostly a primal reaction to losing to that freak again. It’s understandable that people would grasp for any explanation for that except the idea that way too many people believe the garbage that Trump spews and really like what they are hearing. It’s disorienting. So we need to believe that it isn’t that they like him it’s that the Democrats just aren’t “messaging” right or “delivering” enough.
But I’m afraid our problem is bigger than that. I’m trying to keep the faith that we’ll all calm down soon in the face of what these monsters are doing and accept the truth that that isn’t the real reason people keep voting for the Trump circus. They aren’t living in the same reality the rest of us are living in and figuring out what to do about that is far more important than fashioning a better economic message.
