The Democrats lost to Trump on the economy, but he will not rule in the interest of the have-nots
Trump’s landslide victory in the US elections has sent shockwaves throughout the broad tent of liberal-centrist media and commentariat. But as with his victory in 2016, or the Brexit referendum held that same year, centrists have failed to draw any serious lesson.
Instead, their default reaction has been to blame the voters – Trump won (again) because so many people are racist or sexist or simply ignorant. This kind of account reflects the broader trend of boiling down the ongoing rise of the populist right across the world to the ‘culture wars’. But, as that old cliché goes, “it’s the economy, stupid”.
Sure, no-one can dispute that a significant share of Trump’s vote was driven by racist or anti-immigration feelings; or that the right-wing mainstream and social media alike exert a major influence on public opinion, persuading ordinary people to vote for privileged demagogues like Trump. But this misses the bigger picture and – perhaps not accidentally – the Democrats’ responsibility for it: people’s material conditions of life.
In the run-up to the elections, pro-Democrat voices claimed the economy had been doing great under Biden: inflation started to go down after its 2022 peak, wages were on the rise, and unemployment hit its lowest level since 1969. Why would people complain about the economy, then, if not because they were manipulated by the right-wing media appealing to their phobias? What this reflects, however, is the gap that can often emerge between a country’s macro-economic situation and the living standards of ordinary people. It also reflects how cut off from the latter much of the liberal commentariat is. Because
the reality on the ground, as experienced by people themselves, looked much bleaker than generic indicators suggested.
During the past four years, the price of groceries went up by 22% and rents by 21%, while real wages have overall decreased since Biden came into power. On top of that, despite the rumours about the ‘death of neoliberalism’, his administration duly implemented fresh new austerity measures, ranging from the abolition of the child tax credit to cuts to the healthcare system. And while inflation was primarily driven by the huge boost in corporate profits (which reached a historical all-time high at the end of 2023), the Biden regime chose to tackle it not by taxing those profits but by increasing interest rates, which generally tend to disproportionately hit ordinary people paying off the mortgage or student debt.
Such a drop in living standards was bound to shape public opinion in the run-up to the elections. One survey showed that for 40% of the voters “high prices for gas, groceries and other goods” was their top concern, with roughly two thirds of them voting for Trump. In the national exit polls, too, among the 31% of all voters who identified the economy as their main priority, almost 80% voted for Trump. So did 80% of the nearly half of the electorate who said their family’s economic situation was worse off now than four years earlier.
While this public opinion trend did not come as a surprise, Harris’ campaign team nevertheless chose to stay away from economic issues and focus on Trump’s threat to democracy. Harris’ close advisers included her brother-in-law Tony West, former chief legal officer of Uber (a company particularly bad when it comes to workers’ rights), who convinced her to court business elites. That seems to have worked: not only did Harris’ campaign attract more billionaire donors than Trump, but according to post-election estimates, compared to 2020, the Democrats won 7 million more votes from the section of the electorate earning over $100,000 a year. However, they also lost 13 million votes from those with incomes below that threshold.
By reinforcing their ties to corporate America and sidelining the material concerns of ordinary people, the Democrats managed to make the unelectable electable – for the second time in eight years.
It is tempting to call out this massive strategic blunder of the Democratic Party. And to urge them to draw lessons from it. But this is mere wishful thinking. Because it fundamentally overlooks the class character of this political party. Unlike European social democratic parties, the Democrats have never been a workers’ party, but the party of various factions of US capital: first agrarian, then mercantile, later on financial. It is a party of capital at its core – and it would rather lose elections than lose that core. Despite what mainstream pluralist political scientists and commentators might say, the overarching purpose of a pro-capital party is not to win elections but to serve the interests (of certain fractions) of capital. Winning elections is just a means to that end.
But this does not make Trump the anti-establishment maverick that he portrays himself as. If the Democrats are – as aptly summed up in this thoughtful analysis of the elections – “the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism”,
Trumpism represents a coalition of fractions of capital that feel they do not have enough political sway or wish to maintain it – from Silicon Valley billionaires to fossil fuel to the auto industry.
While eclectic in many ways, this coalition of economic elites is brought together by a shared opposition to the ‘green transition’ in particular and to state regulation, public investment and workers’ rights more generally.
Just like during his first time in office, when he gifted substantial tax cuts to big business, Trump will govern in the interest of these privileged groups rather than the people who voted for him because of the rising food and housing costs. Many know this already, as they see the Democrats and the Republicans as two sides of the same coin. Thus, while Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate in twenty years to win the popular vote, with over 76 million votes, nearly 90 million eligible voters did not vote at all. This signals a deep crisis of representation in one of the ‘cradles of modern democracy’.
The task of the left in the years ahead is to appeal to these disenfranchised voters, as well as to working class Democrat and Republican voters, by putting forward a political alternative that places the interests of the popular classes above those of corporate elites. This means abandoning any illusion in reforming the Democratic Party from within and breaking away from it to build a new mass left-wing party. Just because it has not been done until now it does not mean it can never be done.
As the intertwined crises of capitalism will deepen, so will people’s appetite for a genuine alternative to this system and its political representatives.
Cover photo by Gage Skidmore.
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