“The decisive feature of American politics that has allowed the rise of Trump is the commitment of liberalism to suppressing its challengers from the left”
Gabriel Winant, US Writer and Academic
Labour Outlook’s Sam Browse reports on last Monday’s discussion with John McDonnell and US activists about how Trump won, and what next for the left.
Last night, activists and campaigners joined a panel, co-hosted by John McDonnell and Arise Festival, entitled ‘The Future of the Left after Trump’s Election’.
Chairing the meeting, McDonnell’s introductory remarks set out the importance of the British left reaching out to international activist – especially given the significance of the US elections, and what the rise of Trump means globally. He also gave apologies for Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a speaker who was unfortunately unwell and therefore couldn’t make the meeting.
The first speaker, Gabriel Winant, a US labour historian and trade unionist, said “the decisive feature of American politics that has allowed the rise of Trump is the commitment of liberalism to suppressing its challengers from the left.”
“The centre left of the Democratic Party”, he argued, “opted to at best ignore, or at worse supress, calls from the left for active contestation of the far right politics of the Trump campaign.”
This, Winant said, disabled the Harris campaign and made its platform incoherent – the Democrats were essentially left arguing that “things are better than the electorate thinks and they should be grateful for what we have delivered”. It also allowed the far right to politicise genuine problems, like inflation, on Trump’s own terms.
“This is a structural, endemic issue in the Democratic party because of the cross-party coalition it represents”, Winant argued.
The next speaker, Waleed Shahid, a former spokesperson for the Justice Democrats, said “one thing to make clear is that the Harris campaign is engaged in major spin to convince people this election was unwinnable, and put forward the line that every incumbent party in the Western world has lost re-election in 2024. The truth is, the election was winnable”.
He argued that a vast number of voters who switched from Biden to Trump were “low information voters” who make their choices late in the election and tend to engage less with the process.
“They could not point to a single concrete achievement of material benefit that either Harris or Biden had done for them in the past four years.”
Shahid continued that in the years leading up to the election “there was an immense culture war on things like crime, immigration, and trans rights, and the Democratic Party were asleep at the wheel on all those issues – or they adopted Republic-light policies. One of the major issues Harris suffered from is the same critique as Joe Biden – that she was ‘an empty suit of the establishment’ and no one knew where she stood on these issues.”
He said a key target should now be “to make the Democratic party a party that delivers for working class people, rather than talking down to them or around them.”
Responding to a point from Shahid about Harris and Biden’s refusal to do interviews, Dan Denvir, host of the podcast The Dig, said “they don’t do interviews for a reason. In Harris’s case, it’s because she doesn’t believe anything in particular. In this so-called age of populism, there’s this idea that you have to poll-test every single thing before you say anything – and the thing is, voters know when you’re doing that”.
“Democrats tend to speak in this mind-bogglingly vacuous language that does not make any of those connections with ordinary people.”
“We’ve heard centrist Democrats constantly talk about messaging. Talking about messaging instead of power is precisely the problem – especially as the Democratic party is so manifestly focused on poll-testing messages.”
“We need to focus on re-organising power in this country on the more tectonic level”, and he pointed to the need to organise in the labour movement, but also in communities – for example, amongst tenants.
He also insisted that we “don’t fall in the trap of talking about a purely domestic, social-democratic framework. We can’t ignore questions of empire, migrant rights, and the border because they’ll be points of mobilisation on the MAGA [“Make America Great Again”] right.”
“The genocide in Gaza and foreign policy in general also played major roles. But notably, the media in the US has been extremely resistant to exploring that role”.
“There were mass protests all over the country. Turnout collapsed amongst precisely the demographics who opposed Biden’s Gaza policy.”
“A second factor, is that Gaza combined with the war in Ukraine added up to a sense that the world was on fire under Biden – that under his watch the world had swung into violence and chaos.”
At a time when Labour in government is declining in the polls, and Reform is in the ascendance, it is vital that the left learns the correct lessons from the US elections: that we contest, rather than concede, to the politics of the far right; fight for a socialist economic strategy that delivers for working class people; and continue to stand up for a foreign policy based on peace and international justice.
- You can watch ‘The Future of the Left after Trump’s Election‘ or listen on the Arise Festival podcast.
- You can follow Arise Festival on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X; and listen to the Arise Festival podcast on Spotify.
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