How Did This Happen? What Comes Next?
The Democratic Party, at this point, stands for very little beyond serving the interests of its donor class
The Democrats have done it again. For the second time in eight years, they have failed to prevent the single worst, most unqualified major party candidate in U.S. history from capturing the White House. This time, Donald Trump, 78, can barely speak in coherent sentences as he rages about his desire to avenge himself.
The party of cosmopolitan neoliberalism has lost to the party of patriarchal, white-supremacist neoliberalism. Why did this happen? And where do we go from here?
The Democratic Party, at this point, stands for very little beyond serving the interests of its donor class and its incumbent officeholders. At the top, it’s an exclusive club. If you want in, you have to abide by the house rules. When Joe Biden, an aging, unpopular president, decided to run for reelection, other party elites fell in line to preserve their access to the White House — the public’s desire to move on from Biden be damned.
When Biden’s decline became impossible to deny after his disastrous debate performance, Vice President Kamala Harris was substituted in his place. Harris was a younger and more dynamic nominee, yet she struggled to articulate why she was running when she wasn’t in front of a teleprompter. Like Biden, Harris relied on promises to restore abortion rights and preserve the United States’ democratic institutions while refusing to speak to the pain of an inflation-ravaged working class. When she was pressed on her lack of policy proposals to support Black men — a demographic she was clearly struggling with — her campaign released a half-baked agenda that included commitments to help Black men open more weed shops and to protect their crypto investments. A cameo appearance by former President Barack Obama disparaging Black men for not falling in line with Harris like they did for him was widely panned.
Worse yet, Harris ran the same playbook Hillary Clinton did in 2016: She pitched her candidacy to suburban Republicans as a refuge to take shelter in. To underscore her Republican-lite qualities, she repeatedly bragged about her endorsement from former Vice President Dick Cheney, a leading architect of the Iraq War, and crisscrossed the swing states with his warhawk daughter Liz Cheney.
Harris could have built on her promise to protect abortion rights and democratic norms by loudly championing an economic populist agenda that included promising to crack down on price-gouging landlords and grocery store chains and increasing the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2007. But she didn’t. Nor did she break with her boss on continuing to supply Israel’s genocidal rampage across Gaza, Lebanon and beyond.
In the end, Harris and the Democratic Party decided they would rather risk the demise of American democracy than move one inch to the left to appeal to their base or to economically anxious working-class voters.
What’s Next?
When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, the Democratic Party had an alternative waiting in the wings in a resurgent left-wing populist movement led by Bernie Sanders. Sanders consistently outpolled Trump from 2016 to 2020, but party leaders helped crush both of his campaigns. They chose instead to revive Joe Biden like a zombie emerging from his political grave to claim the nomination and the White House. And now here we are.
Sanders is too old to be the left’s standard bearer. The Squad has been diminished by the defeats of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush at the hands of AIPAC. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will try to step into a larger role, but it remains to be seen if she can develop the same broad appeal to working-class people that Sanders had.
Meanwhile, Trump and his billionaire allies are out for plunder. To distract people from what they are doing, Trump will target immigrants, transgender people and other vulnerable groups. The Trumpies and their police allies will likely try to intimidate protesters even more than usual. But the worst thing we could do is “obey in advance” and not show up at all.
Avoid Despair, Join With Others
These upcoming years are going to be a bumpy ride with a lot of disheartening moments to come. Try not to become isolated in your thoughts, doomscrolling for hours as our billionaire tech overlords would have it be.
We’re going to need each other more than ever — and would do well to slow down our busy lives to enjoy moments of connection with each other and the natural world around us. One way to avoid isolation and political despair is to join a leftist political organization that feels like a good fit for you. “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness,” as the saying goes.
One organization to consider looking into is the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. With more than 6,000 members, NYC-DSA is the largest chapter in the largest socialist organization in this country in 80 years. Here’s a schedule of its upcoming introductory meetings for the socialism-curious.
I’m not a member, but we have covered their activities extensively. DSA has outworked and outmaneuvered the local Democratic machine and has elected nine socialists to the state legislature since 2018 and two to City Council. DSA Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens is running for Mayor in 2025. While its electeds work on the inside to push other electeds to support a working-class agenda, DSA simultaneously runs issue campaigns on the outside to pressure non-Socialist politicians to do the right thing. Its biggest victory to date was winning passage of the Build Public Renewables Act, the most ambitious piece of Green New Deal legislation to be enacted to date.
DSA is also organizing new labor unions through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee while growing rank-and-file-led caucuses inside established unions to move them to the left. It is deeply involved in Palestine solidarity work and has working groups for organizing tenant unions, expanding public-power plants and Cuba solidarity action, to name a few.
In a throwback to the Socialist movements of 100 years ago, DSA hosts a wide array of cultural activities: reading groups, discussion panels, movie nights, comedy nights, softball and soccer games, picnics, an in-house choir (the Solidarity Singers) and a group for parents (Comrades with Kids).
There are many other organizations worthy of mention, including the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign and your labor union, if you have one. For those with a more anarchistic bent, there are mutual-aid groups that have done amazing work over the past couple of years supporting recently arrived immigrants who have been ignored by the City. Our newest neighbors are going to need a lot of solidarity in the coming months.