Harris Archives - Consistent Democrats

A Reflection on the U.S. Scene

By Mark Andresen

More than anything, the public response to the result of the US Presidential Election has exposed how the Democrat-supporting wing of its media has learnt nothing from Trump’s first term. Many among their blue-collar audience, however, have finally begun to realise how they were being played; and, this time, they aren’t MAGA.

Kamala Harris’s godawful campaign highlighted her middle-class roots, thus overlooking that very audience. Too often she reverted to it as if, somehow, it might be a vote winner, assuming her party already had all of it on-side. Consequently, the justifiable contempt of the majority of the electorate – of both main parties – was assured; appointed by her party as sole candidate with no challenger; actually boasting about gaining the support of fellow warmonger (and Bush Republican) Dick Cheney; talking down to the black male community, (horribly doubled-down on by Obama, on camera, visiting a white collar office); the horrific Imperialist / anti-Gaza speech by Bill Clinton, again, speaking only to their middle-class; the parade of Hollywood elite supporters; Harris’s endless word salad answers to interviewers; the refusal to discuss policy; still live memories of Harris as a State Prosecutor who had no problem jailing working-class mothers, whatever the consequences to the children; the inappropriate, humourless cackling; all left the field open for Trump. In fact, all this would’ve left the field open for any political challenger. Meanwhile, television pundits made claims on inflated voting projection, which markedly contrasted with the results of the more (comparatively) independent pollsters. With no subtlety whatsoever, the electorate were being told what to think; only this time around, a much larger number realised it.

Last month, post-result, Brianna-Joy Gray of the Bad Faith podcast, pointed out that the Democratic Party ‘never call out Donald Trump’s inconsistencies that would actually matter to his base. Liberals consistently criticise Trump for things that Liberals care about. (e.g.) “Oh, he’s so orange . . . oh, he’s a racist . . . oh, he’s impolitic.” Guest Katie Halper added; “the way he treats the working-class, is the way they should be going.” Correct, but that would entail saying the quiet part out loud, so exposing the true aligned interests of both main parties. Something liberals, here in the UK, also conveniently avoid. Anya Parampil of The Grayzone neatly summed-up why the Dems lost: “They crafted a lie that no-one else believed. They mistook the reality they’d created for the actual reality Americans are living in.”

Why should this matter to Communists? Because unless this cross-party voter disenfranchisement with the status quo can be encouraged and somehow harnessed, a crucial opportunity for class politics and consequent radical change will have been missed. For it is the case that sections of the working-class American public have finally been waking-up. Identity Politics has become widely discredited (thanks, most recently, to the Kamala Harris campaign relying upon it), while, inevitably, the right has taken advantage; however, the disenchanted non-party aligned who weren’t already in Trump’s MAGA fan club, prior to 2020, will, I suspect, ultimately be reminded, during his second term, why he was never the antidote.

Independent US journalists have pointed out that, aside from the activists, Socialism – let alone Communism – is dead in America. As here in the UK, capitulating unions have ensured that. The state brainwashing has certainly done its job when Republicans can call fellow corporate imperialist Harris “Far” and “Hard Left” and have their voters parroting this. Reactionary authoritarianism is the new go-to as opposition. This might be funny if the implications weren’t so sinister. Yet, the conditions in which Communism can thrive is now revealed before their eyes, even if – so far – it daren’t be articulated. With a discredited, gloves-off Imperialism, so goes fake centrism and liberalism, once citizens start to make the connections; ones that may, finally, discredit the MSM and so enable a strong third-party, bottom-up movement to thrive.

In mid-November, Jon Stewart sat down with Biden’s Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco. It may be a surprise to Ms. Monaco that it shed light, to everyone else who watched the interview, on her department’s $850 billion budget and how Government funds are so casually mismanaged. In response to Stewart’s question on accountability, she asked for clarity. He added; “there’s a lot of waste, fraud and abuse within a system . . .

MONACO: “Audits and waste, fraud and abuse are not the same things. So let’s decompose (sic) these pieces.”

STEWART: “So, please educate me on what the differences are.”

MONACO: “Sure, so an audit is exactly what you just described, which is, ‘do I know what was delivered to each place?’ The fact that the GOP has not passed an audit is not suggestive of waste, fraud and abuse. That is completely false.”

STEWART: “So, what is it suggestive of?”

MONACO: “It’s suggestive that we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where. That’s not the same as saying that we cannot do that because waste, fraud and abuse has occurred.”

STEWART: (Ironically). “So,…in my world, that’s waste.”

MONACO: “How is that waste?”

STEWART: “If I give you a billion dollars, and you can’t tell me what happened to it, that to me is wasteful and that means that you are not responsible . . . If you can’t tell me where it went, then what am I supposed to think?”

Stewart then contrasted her the dismissive view to those being given so little for basic services, when the State Department seems so lax with such a large military budget. Remember Monaco’s admission. “It’s suggestive we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where.” I re-quote the above not because the content will be any surprise, but, the casual Governmental attitude accompanying it.

Subsequently, Max Blumenthal, during a debate with fiscal conservative Republican and former Trump speech-writer Darren Beattie of Revolver News, commented: “The Pentagon has failed its seventh audit in a row. One-trillion dollars is missing. Everything else pails in comparison to that. So, if you’re not going to go in there and force an audit of the Pentagon and then cut all of the waste, and all of the money going to the ‘beltway bandits’ – that are just corporate welfare for the upper-class in Northern Virginia – all of these corrupt programmes that do nothing (then what’s the point?) It’s all there. If Pete Hegseth (Trump’s proposed pick for United States Secretary of Defence) is actually willing to take that on, then I will cheer. Everybody supports that – except for Congress.”

I’d like to believe that the funding of the Gaza genocide had a major bearing on the anti-Harris vote, but, there was so much else out-of-touch in the Democratic Party’s re-election campaign, the extent of its effect is somewhat buried. The Democratic Party’s silence on it, however, only emphasised the working-class’s correct perception of their irrelevance.

Many of us have, like myself, been ‘friend requested’ by US Trump supporters simply because of our critiques of Biden and the Dems. Where once I may have mocked such requesters, today, I realise it is also a symptom of something far wider than racism alone, since an additional number of posters encompass all shades of US ethnicity, equally powerless from decades of neoliberalism and the lack of leverage to replace it. The next step must be to remorselessly discredit the demonising of the solution – in public – by articulating it in a way that links to those problems they recognise and experience on a daily basis.

This issue centres on the racist riots that convulsed Britain in early August, and the creditable response by the left in Britain. Both lead articles analyse the events from different angles, with the back-page lead focusing in more detail on the events themselves and the government’s attitude. It notes the racism and anti-migrant chauvinism which successive British governments, Labour and Tory, have promoted for many years, which provided the background to the eruption of violent racism, and the economic decline and decay which provides its economic basis. It touches upon the question of who funds the far right in Britain today, noting the Zionist interest and influence in promoting Islamophobia and targeting the Muslim population.

The other lead article goes into this more, noting the lack of any real political distance between the government and the far-right rioters, that both support the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza, though in the case of the government they are now trying to cover their tracks with fake ‘peace’ gestures. It notes that both the government and the far right have a common interest in punishing the Muslim population for their role in the mass movement against the genocide, which is now spreading to the West Bank. Starmer may may punish rioters and jail the most ardent and violent, but at the same time they agree in targeting and persecuting the left and oppressed minorities. It was not the Labour government and the cops that defeated the planned and announced mass pogrom on August 9^th – it was the left and anti-racist activists acting completely independently who out-mobilised the fascists by a ratio of sometimes hundreds to one and stopped this horror from materialising. This inflicted a serious tactical defeat on the fascists, for now at least.

Though the left, the trade unions and the labour movement need to create our own military organisations – we cannot trust the police and the racist Starmer government to deal with far-right thugs.

Other articles in this issue include a detailed programmatic analysis of the political roots of right-wing populism in the current state of decline of US hegemony and the inability of the imperialist bourgeoisie to break with the nation-state, an institution that is palpably obsolete. However, the bourgeoisie is bound to it, and when capitalist logic appears to point beyond it, we see the eruption of major factional wars within the ruling class between right-wing populists, on the one hand, and supposed ‘globalists’ on the other.

We also have a statement that was earlier agreed by our international organisation, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and the ClassConscious trend in the US and Australia, on the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July. This deals with the palpable threat of Civil War in the US. It is accompanied by an introduction by the Consistent Democrats noting what has happened since – the enforced retirement of Joe Biden from the Presidential election and the seeming rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to a stronger position in the contest with Trump.

It notes that even a Harris victory would not necessarily remove the threat of civil war, for what is driving much of it is the fear and hatred of ruling class white supremacists of the prospect of whites no longer being the majority population in the US, a change that is approaching. Egged on by Zionists who see Trump as their most fervent supporter. An entirely legitimate victory of the non-white Harris could easy precipitate an attempted overthrow. And though we abhor the Democratic Party and would not consider voting for this arch-imperialist party or especially this administration with its support for genocide in Gaza, we would advocate that the labour movement mobilise form a united front mobilisation, and in fact a military united front, to defeat any such attempt to impose Trump by such a coup.

Finally, we have a short piece noting the need for a new working-class party, addressing some of the problems involved in seeing George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain as qualified to take on that role. It is nowhere near as clear cut as that, as the article argues.