Even before the first polls closed and the gut-wrenching results of Tuesday’s election began to roll in, there were many things we could assert with certainty about the world we confront today: A US-funded war machine would continue to grind Gaza to dust; border militarization and the mass deportation of immigrant workers would accelerate; reproductive rights would remain under existential threat; fossil fuel extraction and fracking would continue to boil our planet; police murders of Black people would continue unabated; our bosses and landlords would continue to squeeze us at both ends of our working day; and regardless of who won the vote, the far right would be stronger today than it was yesterday.
This is not to deny that a second Trump term will be catastrophic. Lives will be destroyed, and long held rights will be rescinded. We are facing the worst-case-scenario, and we need to fight. This has not changed.
It is also not to assert there is no difference between the two candidates or the outcome of the election was trivial. Liberals love to reduce the Left’s criticism of the lesser evil to a denial of all nuanced analysis. But multiple things can be true at the same time: that Trump is worse than Harris, and that Harris could not, ultimately, be an alternative to Trumpism. The ground in which Trump’s right-wing populism takes root is prepared by the politics of lowered expectations that Harris represents.
In the coming weeks Democrats will engage, as they so often do, in self indulgent, tedious “soul searching”. They will scrutinize polls and demographics. Some will blame minority groups that didn’t come out in the numbers the Party thinks it deserves; some will blame the left or the Uncommitted movement. The best among Democrats might–correctly, but only partially so– blame Biden’s ongoing support for genocide in Palestine. But at the end of the day, this soul-searching among Democrats can only go so far. The nature of the party, beholden to the interests of capital, will not be questioned.
We know we live in a two-party system. Some on the left critique that system by ignoring all differences between the parties. Meanwhile, Liberals defend the system by overemphasizing those differences. But by focusing on the few places the parties differ in policy, they miss the degree to which the very unity at the heart of the modern Republican party is composed around something the Democrats are structurally incapable of producing: a vision of a future that is qualitatively different from the broken present we inhabit. It is a cruel, heartless, brutal vision, but we ignore it to our peril.
Any path forward has to start by understanding the successes of Trumpism not just as a byproduct of retrograde racism and misogyny, but on its own terms. Even in 2020, when Trump lost, his base had grown. He secured 11.2 million more votes than he had when he won in 2016 but lost the popular vote. As of writing this, Trump has won 72,601,116 votes, 4.7 million more votes than Kamala Harris, winning the popular vote and the Electoral College in what feels like a landslide. Liberal media has attributed this to a platform of hate, xenophobia, and racism, but this cannot be the whole story, and while his overall numbers remained relatively stable, he pulled in more Latino and Women voters than in 2020. What continues to bring people out to vote for Trump is a broad, utopian economic vision for the future that targets the tangible day-to-day needs of working people. Of course, like all ideological projects, the Republican vision is riven with contradictions and inconsistencies. Of course it will be incapable of delivering on its utopian promise (and will produce a dystopian reality for most people on the planet), but at its core is an ambition the Democrats inherently lack.
Their fetishistic focus on middle-class values, individual civil rights like abortion, and their decision to campaign alongside Republicans and Billionaires instead of labor leaders, lost them over 13 million votes- and these votes didn’t go to Trump, they didn’t go to left candidates, these voters just didn’t come out. While the Republican Party rallies people around a vision and seeks to disenfranchise those it can’t politicize, Democrats produce broad depoliticization, all while symbolically sticking up for narrow and legalistic definition of politics. Above all, they come together in fear of Republican violence while moving closer to them. They hold our civil liberties hostage to manipulate their base into voting for the “lesser of two evils”, to “save abortion rights”, “stop racism”, and “protect LGBTQ rights”. Meanwhile, the Democrats have had a full majority for a total of 10 years over four different presidents, and even Roe v. Wade, the pillar of the Democratic Party’s platform, has never been codified into law.
When the Democratic party sits down to debrief this election, the only mode of thought it can thus engage in is more of the same: trying to imagine better tailored messaging that can suture together more disaffected constituencies into a temporary coalition that only exists during elections. But because this coalition includes at its core contradictory and opposed elements: bosses and workers, cops and overpoliced communities, immigrant families and border guards, ardent Zionists and (perhaps decreasingly so) anti-zionist progressives, the lessons that the party is even capable of learning are always couched in terms of optimizing the number of groups in the coalition by articulating the most median demand: promising just a little change to everyone. What is never on the table is politics in the broader sense of activating new political subjectivities around an affirmative vision of a qualitatively better world.
But enough is enough. The hell that a second Trump administration will produce for so many people requires a bolder strategy than simply trying to stitch together a slightly bigger electoral coalition in 2028. For the Left, this vision has to go beyond mere words. It has to grow out of our own organic institutions of working class power: labor unions, tenant associations, community organizations. If we want to challenge not just President Trump but Trumpism and the whole current of rising right-wing extremism globally, it is time to get involved in organizing, and that means joining organizations.
DSA is an organization that is committed to this work, and we invite you to join us! Our goal is not to be part of some symbolic #resistance that exists primarily on social media and occasionally at one-off demonstrations or vigils for democracy. Instead, our focus, as an organization of organizers, is in sharing resources, education, lessons, and skills with one another. We want to empower our members to go out and build new layers of organization in a working class that has been dis-organized by a century and a half of American capitalism.
Join us, join your union, or form a union at work or with your neighbors. Organize!
In 2016 when the late communist historian and organizer Mike Davis was asked where he stood on Socialist cultural critic Raymond Williams’s assertion that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’ he responded: “Hope is not a scientific category. Nor is it a necessary obligation in polemical writing. On the other hand, intellectual honesty is and I try to call it as I see it, however wrongheaded my ideas and analyses may be. I manifestly do believe that we have arrived at a final conflict that will decide the survival of a large part of poor humanity over the next half century. Against this future we must fight like the Red Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. Fight with hope. Fight without hope. But fight, absolutely”
