The Rule You Followed Brought You To This

The Rule You Followed Brought You To This: Trump, Harris and the Aftermath

I’m Mr Bad Example, intruder in the dirt
I like to have a good time and I don’t care who gets hurt
I’m Mr Bad Example, take a look at me
I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in history

– Warren Zevon

IN the days to come, remember this: they got exactly what they wanted.

Not everyone, of course. There are, I am led to understand, quite a few throughout the United States who would like socialised medicine, an enshrined right to abortion, trans healthcare worth the name, student debt forgiveness, rent controls, the ability to afford food, an environmental policy which treats a burning world as something more than a minor inconvenience, and an end to US support for an ongoing genocide. They don’t get what they want. They never do.

Neither, it is worth mentioning, will the Palestinian people – at least, those of them left alive to have any such aspiration. The same day that America went to the polls, the Israeli military announced its intention to complete ethnic cleansing in the northernmost part of Gaza, stating: “This time, there is no intention to allow the residents of the northern Gaza strip to return to their homes.” Despite Israel’s assurances that “there are no more civilians left” in north Gaza, the UN estimates 100,000 people remain. Every day, the IDF seeks to correct that.

Obviously, Trump voters got what they wanted, with the intoxicating assurance that more is to follow: reality – after conspiring four years ago with the Deep State, a global pandemic and liberal elites hunkered beneath the nation’s pizzerias to betray the God-Emperor of Mar-a-Lago – has finally realigned itself to their liking. They have delivered unto the 45th/47th president of the United States a mandate he and his party intend to repay through the imprisonment and deportation of millions, the evisceration of whatever tenuous abortion-rights measures voters managed to pass at the state level, and the further elevation of Elon Musk, a man whose automatic response to victory, failure or simply waking up in the morning is to make the lives of as many people as possible measurably worse.

None of this might have come to pass if those whose job it was to prevent it had not, until the moment of their staggering defeat, gotten absolutely everything – the candidate, the campaign, everything – they desired and demanded. The got it all, and for that, the world will suffer the consequences.

Once more, with feeling

NO one seriously denies that Kamala Harris’ 2019 stab at the presidency was a disaster of epic proportions. The enduring disagreement – the one which set the scene for this week’s far more monumental catastrophe – lay in exactly why.

In the week she dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Harris’ national polling had, according to a Real Clear Politics average, crashed to about 3 per cent, putting her in sixth place behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, bobble-headed weirdo Pete Buttigieg and even Michael Bloomberg, the billionaires’ tribune. Her reward for quietly exiting the stage was the vice-presidency. 

When Biden himself was belatedly forced to announce he would not be running for a second term and Harris was coronated as his successor, post-mortems of what exactly went wrong five years before understandably took on fresh relevance. That’s when things got strange. 

Even – in fact, especially – amongst her most enthusiastic boosters, the narrative took hold that, in the wake of Black Lives Matter and under threat from Bernie Sanders’ rampaging hordes, Harris adopted an overly progressive stance incompatible with the wider American electorate. According to this analysis, Harris failed because, for a brief moment, she appeared to treat the American Left as something other than an irritant to be ground beneath her heel – an error which had to be corrected by any means necessary.

In retrospect, it might have behoved some commentators to consider an alternative theory: that Harris’s 2019 pitch to the Democratic left was the most unconvincing performance outside of Dear Evan Hansen, and the spectacle of California’s erstwhile self-proclaimed ‘top cop’ making a few awkward, half-hearted and largely performative pivots was never going to win over left-leaning voters, particularly while she was running against a cranky Vermont socialist in whom a great many had already invested their hopes, faith and loyalty. By contrast, the belligerently centrist campaign Harris pursued in 2024 was not just a calculation, but an expression of the politician she has always been.

Once Harris was hastily invested as the 2024 nominee, Jonathan Chait – one of those fortunate media professionals who has managed to turn being wrong into a multi-decade career – wrote in New York magazine: “Harris needs to adopt positions that will upset progressive activists. She needs to specifically understand that the likelihood a given action or statement will create complaints on the left is a reason to do something, rather than not do it.”

Chait did not need to wait long for a Harris campaign seemingly tailor-made specifically for him and his fellow hardcore centrists; a mere three days later, he smugly wrote: “In short order, [Harris] has repudiated most of the left-wing commitments she made in her shambolic 2020 campaign and proudly resuscitated her identity as a prosecutor… In four years, ‘Kamala is a cop!’ has gone from slur to tagline.”

Let’s watch what happened next.

Apocalypse 2016 Redux

IN its early days, the Harris campaign was gifted with a surprising (and almost entirely unearned) momentum, which it proceeded to blow faster than the marketing budget for Madame Web. This was due in no small part to the major disadvantage Harris chose to inflict upon herself.

While Trump’s enemies may be many, they fall broadly into the category of ‘all who stand before him’, and are thus subject to the same indiscriminate approach. Harris, by contrast, found herself engaged in a war on two fronts – against both Trump and the Left.

In pursuit of the latter, multiple Cheneys were unearthed and embraced. While the people of Gaza were granted periodic lip-service – too many of them were dying, apparently, as if there was an acceptable figure – unwavering support for Israel was guaranteed. At a scrupulously stage-managed Democratic National Convention, sheriffs – one in a ten-gallon hat – outnumbered Palestinians, and were wheeled out to assert Harris’ law enforcement bona fides for any goldfish who needed reminding. 

Those centrists and liberals who nodded sagely at the wisdom of this strategy had long told us that the nefarious spectre of the ‘culture war’ – a term loftily employed to suggest an overblown conflict over an issue of no real importance, unless of course you happen to be one of the poor suckers at the sharp end of it – could only lead to division and disaster, and that the Left must abandon such crazed, elitist, vote-haemorrhaging propositions as, say, recognizing the basic humanity of trans people, or suggesting that police not kill quite so many unarmed Black people. Once again, they got what they wanted.

The candidate who early in her tenure as vice-president implored immigrants to stay home and die without a fuss doubled down and committed to securing America’s borders; gun control, the death penalty and climate change went virtually unmentioned, and following a Republican blitzkrieg of transphobia, Harris stated her belief that “we should follow the law”, even as the law was being furiously refashioned to make trans lives unliveable. Amazingly, none of this paid off. 

The American IWW organiser ‘Big’ Bill Haywood once famously described a liberal as “a guy who leaves the room when a fight breaks out”. This remains true – only in 2024, the room in question is the Oval Office. 

What’s Left?

AS has become the common refrain, to be on the Left is to be repeatedly punished for being right too early.

Someone who spent of his life being right very, very early was the late socialist scholar Mike Davis, much of whose 1986 dissection of Reaganism Prisoners of the American Dream makes for uncomfortably familiar reading today. 

“Most of the pro-Democratic left”, Davis argued, “generally misread the direction of the class and racial polarization taking place in the United States and its impact on traditional electoral alignments. Starting from the misconception that a ‘left’ politics… could be re-established directly on the basis of anti-Reagan populism, it seriously underestimated the power of the petty-bourgeois insurgency which was sweeping both parties… By the same token, it wildly overestimated the attraction of the Democrats, who lack any serious alternative economic program, to a divided and socially dispirited working class.”

As it turned out, those drawn to the cultic promises of Trumpism would not be persuaded otherwise by the Diet Coke version of his policy platform. Who knew?

Having gotten absolutely everything on their Christmas list short of the administration it was all supposed to lead to, those who evangelized the strategy of the Harris campaign now find much of their comfort zone stripped away. Even their usual favourite scapegoats won’t work (not that they ever did – the only person who ever lost an election because of Jill Stein is Jill Stein). The only recourse left is denial.

In his post-election retrospective, Jonathan Chait gloomily concluded that Harris could not outrun either the legacy of Joe Biden’s supposed economic populism (your mileage may vary) or the fifteen minutes in 2019 when she appeared too progressive for the man who wrote a column entitled ‘In Defense of Punching Left’. Apparently, the campaign which curiously decided the best way to defeat fascism was by antagonizing the Left at every turn only lost because it was too left-wing.

Yet for all the vituperative and self-defeating opprobrium they heaped upon it, the Harris campaign and its acolytes got exactly the kind of Left they should have wanted. 

Over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, the greatest violence carried out was at the hands of a 20-year-old gunman whose politics, if he had any, will forever remain mysterious, thanks to a Secret Service sniper. Among the American Left meanwhile, even amidst widespread rage over genocide abroad and the untenability of life at home, there was neither violence nor any threat of violence; no rioting, looting or cop cars on fire. Nary a milkshake was thrown; the nefarious Bernie Bros did not rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes; no radical fringe mounted a Weather Underground tribute act. 

With astonishing discipline and dignity, they sat in peaceful encampments and marched through the streets in good order. Overwhelmingly, the American Left acquitted themselves by every standard supposedly held dear by those who flatter themselves as the defenders of liberal democracy. For this, they were rewarded with condemnation, sanction, arrest, police brutality and bilious fury for merely existing and pointing out that many, many children are dead.

That same Left has, along with the rest of us, just seen the Democratic Party re-enact 2016 once more with feeling. It is possible they may conclude that doing the same themselves – organising within the accepted confines of extra-parliamentary action, abiding by a set of norms the incoming administration takes palpable relish in rejecting – will not pay significant dividends. What alternatives they might arrive at remain to be seen.

For at least eight years, the Left in the United States have been told, even by some supposedly sympathetic to their cause, that no matter how valid their grievances were or what tactics they pursued, they went about it the wrong way. Any blowback they suffered – along with the rise of Donald Trump and the forces he represents – was therefore largely their own fault.

Well, guess what? The Harris campaign went about it the wrong way, and as a result, in the words of Ray Smuckles, “folded with a focus and intensity normally only seen in successes”. It will be others, however, who reap the whirlwind for this tragicomic series of entirely avoidable blunders, rather than any of those directly responsible. 

The administrations of both Trump and Biden fell in the wake of disaster. If that pattern holds true, then right now, the best those threatened and afflicted by the incoming regime can hope for is that the next four years can be survived, whilst also featuring a catastrophe so monumental, its stink cannot be shaken by whichever grinning brownshirt the GOP settles upon as Trump’s successor.

This, I imagine, is a less than inspiring prospect. Then again, the alternative – a political program which actually inspires enough people to overwhelm and defeat the plurality which just put Trump back in office – appears to be beyond the Democratic Party in its current form. Indeed, they seem to recoil from the very idea.

There are no doubt countless people across the United States who are now, with ample justification, living in terrible fear of what will happen over the next four years. I doubt having experienced it once before will do anything to lessen this dread.

Yet what is equally terrible is all that will remain the same. Change – a word once so loved and abused by the Democratic Party – was never on the menu. 

That is American democracy.