Democrats

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      The US needs more working-class political candidates | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

      by

      Dan Osborn’s performance this month was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak election cycle for progressives. Although he ultimately lost, the independent US Senate candidate outperformed Kamala Harris in Nebraska by 14 percentage points while running an assertively anti-establishment, pro-union platform. His formula was simple: connect with people about their economic problems, tell them who to blame for them, and tell them what he would do about it.Now he’s starting a new political action committee, Working Class Heroes Fund, to support working-class candidates, something our national politics direly needs.Throughout 2024, Osborn’s ideas shaped what should have been an uneventful race in a deep red state. He ran on a pro-union agenda that would have passed the Pro Act to aid organizing efforts, raised the minimum wage, and provided mandatory bereavement leave for all workers. His statement to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl – “I want to challenge the system because the system has to be challenged” – captured a common campaign theme.Osborn’s egalitarianism was profoundly connected to his personal experiences. “Thirty-thirty 16-hour shifts on Sundays,” he recalled in one of his closing campaign ads. “That’s what I had to do to provide for my family.” His story wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t one reflected in Washington (a city he hadn’t even visited until April of this year).Osborn led a strike in 2021 at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha and has spent most of his working life as an industrial mechanic – in fact, he’s already back working as a steamfitter. He made $48,000 last year, within a few thousand of the Nebraska median income. This background was highlighted by the Osborn campaign through the race, contrasting the candidate with a Congress where most members are wealthy: “My opponent, Deb Fischer, is … taking so much corporate cash she should wear [sponsor] patches like Nascar.”Osborn’s working-class identity isn’t just an affect; it’s something that connects him to the needs and aspirations of millions of other American workers. And the profound lack of people like him in Congress is one of the major reasons why working-class people have been treated as a political afterthought. Right now, fewer than 2% of congressmembers come from working-class backgrounds. There is virtually no one in government who speaks for, or speaks like, regular workers.But wait, isn’t advocating for more working-class candidates just another form of identity politics? That is, isn’t this just more of the same thing that hurt Democrats in the first place?It’s true that the emphasis on a person’s race, gender and sexuality as a demonstration of their moral and political rectitude has been an albatross for progressives in recent years. This has been especially true when it’s been presented as tales of personal trailblazing (think #ImWithHer and Hillary Clinton’s crusade to become the first female president) or to trumpet individuals simply because of qualities they were born with rather than the ideas they espouse. However, class is different. And, in the case of Osborn, his class background was key to his being able to deliver a credible populist appeal that challenged the rule of the wealthy.In other words, as a working-class populist, Osborn’s appeal could cut across the various divisions of race, gender, region and religion to unite working people, because to be working class, and to proudly identify as such, is not just to show voters that you “feel their pain”, as Bill Clinton once dramatized, but that you actually understand the world from their position. And that’s one reason Osborn thinks that getting more workers represented in office is such a good idea.We agree. After all, the fight for working-class political representation was part of the origin story of self-conscious workers’ movements everywhere in the world. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the battle to extend the franchise helped give rise to labor parties. In Germany, the Social Democratic party swelled under the leadership of August Bebel, a carpenter and woodturner. In Brazil, the Workers’ party, led by a metalworker with little formal education, rose to become a governing force.Even in the United States, at the height of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized the first-ever political action committee with the explicit aim of getting workers into Congress.In each case, and there are many others, the simple argument that workers – their organizations, and their interests – deserved representation in government generated immense excitement. And in each case, the parties that pursued such a goal became, at least for a time, the undisputed representatives of working-class interests in government.There are similar political opportunities in the United States today. While Nebraska might have had a particularly effective worker populist, there is evidence that people want to vote for workers across the country. A study by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that among working-class voters, hypothetical candidates with elite or upper-class backgrounds performed significantly worse than candidates from humbler backgrounds.Yet, in reality, there were few working-class candidates to vote for. Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics. Even if we broaden out the category to professionals like teachers and nurses, the number is still under 6%. Why? Mainly because it’s extremely expensive to run for office. Most workers simply do not have the fundraising networks or the ability to take time away from their jobs to run for office.What’s more, as Duke University political scientist Nicholas Carnes has shown, the burdens of running for office are much higher for blue-collar workers than they are for those in white-collar professions because they also include the considerable challenges that working-class candidates have in persuading political gatekeepers to endorse their candidacies over much more familiar options in salaried professions who speak the same language and run in the same social circles. Osborn’s new effort to help ease some of these burdens is laudable for this reason.The lack of working-class representation in government is also one major factor in explaining the dysfunction in our politics and the persistence of economic policies that seem to only benefit the rich. Working-class voters have been cut adrift. Their views and voices are invisible in Washington, and they see no real champions for their interests. One reason these voters are likely to prefer working-class candidates is that these candidates are much more likely to advance an economic agenda that benefits them.Osborn’s appeal might not be so unique if we can encourage more working-class candidates to run. Here the labor movement has a role to play in recruiting talented candidates, protecting their day jobs during the campaign, providing training and working with organizations like Osborn’s to get these candidates the funds they need to win elections. It’s not a silver bullet to fixing our broken politics, but it’s a great start.During his campaign, Osborn reminded a crowd that “the Senate is a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires”. It’s high time that the people who created their wealth got a foot in the door.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      James Carville on where he thinks the Democrats went wrong – podcast

      by

      Archive: Pennebaker Associates, McEttinger Films, Cyclone Films, CNN, CBS News, MSNBC, PBS Newshour, BBC News
      Listen to Today in Focus here
      Sign up to The Stakes, the Guardian’s free newsletter on the aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election
      Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/politcspodus More

    • 188 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      House committee reportedly told of second sexual encounter between Matt Gaetz and 17-year-old – live

      by

      According to CNN, the woman who says she had sex when she was 17 years old with then-Representative Matt Gaetz told the House ethics committee that she had two sexual encounters with him at one party in 2017.The CNN report cites unnamed sources, who claim that the second sexual encounter, not previously been reported, included another adult woman.The network also states that after being asked for comment regarding the new allegations, the former representative announced that he was withdrawing from the attorney general nomination.Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.The other woman in the alleged second sexual encounter, who was an adult at the time, has also denied taking part in the encounter, according to multiple sources familiar with her ethics testimony, CNN reported.Elon Musk, who Trump has tapped to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), has also faced allegations of sexual misconduct and overseeing a culture of sexual harassment at his companies.Guardian Opinion columnist Arwa Mahdawi recapped them recently:
      In 2021, for example, just weeks after the billionaire’s “Texas Institute of Technology” quip, a Tesla factory worker called Jessica Barraza filed a complaint alleging the car company had a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment … including frequent groping on the factory floor.” Barraza claimed she was frequently propositioned and subject to comments like “Look at those titties” and “She’s got cakes”. Barraza is just one of a number of former Tesla workers who have filed sexual harassment lawsuits against the Musk-led company.
      These issues aren’t confined to Tesla. Last week SpaceX (the entrepreneur’s rocket company) and Musk were sued by eight engineers who said they were illegally fired in 2022 for raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women. The plaintiffs allege that they experienced harassing comments from co-workers that “mimicked Musk’s [Twitter] posts” and created a hostile work environment. The court filings claim Musk also participated in a video making light of sexual misconduct which, inter alia, demonstrated the “correct” way to spank a co-worker. “Musk trumpets SpaceX as the leader to a brave new world of space travel, but runs his company in the dark ages – treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” the complaint proclaims. Tesla and SpaceX deny any wrongdoing.
      The SpaceX lawsuit coincided with a new Wall Street Journal report about the entrepreneur’s behaviour headlined “Musk’s boundary-blurring relationships with women at SpaceX.” Those blurred boundaries being that he, to quote the piece: “had sex with an employee and a former intern, and asked a woman at his company to have his babies”
      The progressive women’s group UltraViolet has celebrated Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as attorney general, but noted that several others among Donald Trump’s nominees have also been accused of sexual abuse.Shaunna Thomas, executive director at UltraViolet, wrote:
      Gaetz isn’t the only abuser who should have no place in our government. Trump has nominated an abhorrent cabinet of abusers thus far; including Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who was nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services; and Pete Hegseth, who was nominated to lead the Department of Defense. Both Hegseth and Kennedy have long records of allegations of sexual abuse–and in RFK, Jr’s case, owned up to groping his children’s babysitter. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, is also being sued for enabling child sex abuse.
      The Republican-controlled US House on Thursday passed a bill that would give the government broad powers to punish non-profit organizations it deems support “terrorism”.This was the second time members voted on the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, or HR 9495. Last week, after suspending House rules to fast-track the bill, the lower chamber failed to garner the two-thirds majority required to pass. This time, after passing the House committee on rules, the bill – requiring only a simple majority to pass – survived by a vote of 219-184. Fifteen Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the measure.The bill, which gives the treasury the power to strip non-profits it claims support “terrorism” of their tax-exempt status, does not require the treasury to adhere to any evidentiary standard in releasing its findings. Although groups targeted could appeal to the IRS or the courts for review, simply being identified as a supporter of terrorism could have a chilling effect on advocacy groups, critics warn.In the days since the first vote last week, non-profit organizations that have historically worked closely with Democrats have pushed against the passage of the bill, arguing that it would give Donald Trump sweeping powers to crack down arbitrarily on his political opponents in civil society. Thirty-seven fewer Democrats supported it during the Thursday vote than last week.The bill merges the non-profit measure with another, uncontroversial measure that would grant tax relief to Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad.“A sixth-grader would know this is unconstitutional,” said the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, during debate over the bill on Monday. “They want us to vote to give the president Orwellian powers and the not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador and Republican presidential hopeful, criticized two of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, calling his choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” and Robert F Kennedy Jr, tapped for health secretary, a “liberal Democrat” with no background in relevant policy.“So now she’s defended Russia, she’s defended Syria, she’s defended Iran, and she’s defended China,” Haley said of Gabbard on her SiriusXM radio show on Wednesday. “No, she has not denounced any of these views. None of them. She hasn’t taken one of them back.“This is not a place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer,” Haley continued, adding that the director of national intelligence “has to analyze real threats” to US security.Gabbard, 43, is a former progressive congresswoman who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 but who has since become a Republican.Kennedy, 70 and a scion of a famous political family turned vaccine conspiracy theorist, ran for the Democratic nomination this year before switching to run as an independent and then dropping out to back Trump.Haley said: “He’s a liberal Democrat, environmental attorney, trial lawyer who will now be overseeing 25% of our federal budget and has no background in healthcare. Some of you may think RFK is cool, some of you may like that he questions what’s in our food and what’s in our vaccines, but we don’t know, when he is given reins to an agency, what decisions he’s going to make behind the scenes.”Haley was governor of South Carolina before becoming UN ambassador in Trump’s first administration, resigning in 2018. This year, she ran second to Trump in the Republican presidential primary – a race in which she called her opponent “unhinged”, “diminished”, “confused” and not “mentally fit”, and said voting him into office would be “like suicide for our country”.Still, after Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley endorsed him. No job offer has been forthcoming.Here’s a look at where things stand:

      Matt Gaetz has withdrawn his name from consideration as Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general. In a full statement on Thursday, Gaetz, who has been swept in a series of sexual allegation controversies, said: “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”

      Donald Trump has released a statement on Matt Gaetz’s attorney general nomination withdrawal, saying on Truth Social. “I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be attorney general. He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the administration, for which he has much respect,” he said.

      According to CNN, the woman who says she had sex when she was 17 years old with then-Representative Matt Gaetz told the House ethics committee that she had two sexual encounters with him at one party in 2017. The CNN report cites unnamed sources, who claim that the second sexual encounter, not previously been reported, included another adult woman.

      Rainn, the US’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, has issued a response to Matt Gaetz’s attorney general nomination withdrawal, saying, “This decision was in response to survivors and advocates using their voices to demand accountability.” “We could not reconcile the justice department – the department responsible for providing survivors with avenues for justice – being led by an alleged abuser of women,” it said.

      Incoming Senate majority leader John Thune says that he respects Gaetz’s decision to withdraw. “I think everybody has to make a decision that’s good for them and for their family,” Thune said, according to CNN.

      A handful of Republican senators reacted to Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal, issuing a variety of responses. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell called the decision “appropriate” according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, senator Cynthia Lummis told CNN that it was good that Gaetz recognised he was a distraction, and that this will allow Trump to appoint someone “equally tenacious” to lead the justice department.
      A woman accusing Robert F Kennedy Jr of sexual assault says she chose to speak out following his release of a campaign ad based on an advertisement of his uncle and former president, John F Kennedy. Martin Pengelly reports for the Guardian:“I literally was just watching the Super Bowl and saw the ad and thought, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me,’” Eliza Cooney told USA Today.Released when Kennedy was running for president as an independent, the ad attracted criticism from members of the famous Democratic political family. Kennedy Jr apologized – but kept the ad online.Nine months later, after dropping out of the presidential race and backing Donald Trump, Kennedy is Trump’s nominee for US health secretary.A hugely controversial choice given his promotion of vaccine conspiracy theories and other disputed health claims, Kennedy is also one of a number of Trump cabinet picks to be accused of sexual misconduct.Cooney initially told Vanity Fair about how she went to work for Kennedy in 1998, when she was 23 and he was a 45-year-old environmental attorney. Describing a series of unwanted advances, she said Kennedy ultimately “came up behind her … and began groping her, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them up along her rib cage and breasts”, before being interrupted by someone walking into the room.For the full story, click here:The liberal super-PAC American Bridge 21st Century also responded to Matt Gaetz’s attorney general nomination withdrawal, saying:“Donald Trump simply didn’t care that he was nominating someone who allegedly preyed on children, engaged in sex trafficking, and bragged about it to anyone who would listen. Trump didn’t see a predator in Matt Gaetz; he saw a loyal henchman who would carry out his revenge fantasies and put their MAGA allegiance ahead of their commitment to the country. “Republicans in Congress who chose the path of least resistance and decided not to release the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gaetz are complicit in letting an accused sexual predator come within an arm’s reach of becoming the top cop in the nation. If they have a shred of integrity they will release the report and shed light on why Gaetz chose to leave his only job as a member of the House of Representatives. “Matt Gaetz is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Trump choosing predators and extremists to fill out major cabinet positions in his administration.”Rainn, the US’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, has issued a response to Matt Gaetz’s attorney general nomination withdrawal, saying, “This decision was in response to survivors and advocates using their voices to demand accountability.”
      “We could not reconcile the justice department – the department responsible for providing survivors with avenues for justice –— being led by an alleged abuser of women. RAINN heard you, Matt Gaetz heard you, and survivors will not be silenced.
      “For the other nominees facing allegations of sexual assault: We ask the relevant Senate committees to gather and consider all the facts before voting on any such nomination …
      Sexual assault happens to someone in the US every 68 seconds. It occurs in our places of business, our schools, our doctors’ offices; urban or rural, in private and in public. Every single political appointee will have to confront their role in sexual assault response, prevention and recovery. And it starts now.”
      Matt Gaetz has responded to Donald Trump’s statement following his decision to withdraw his nomination for attorney general.In response to Trump who said Gaetz “has a wonderful future”, Gaetz wrote: “Thank you President Trump!” on X.Gaetz has repeatedly denied the sexual assault allegations surrounding him and resigned from Congress shortly after Trump announced his nomination last week.It remains to be seen what Gaetz’s political future holds, now that he is no longer a representative in the House.Matt Gaetz reportedly called Donald Trump and JD Vance separately to inform them of his attorney general nomination withdrawal, CNN reports, citing a source familiar with the call.In a statement on Thursday, Trump said Gaetz “did not want to be a distraction” while JD Vance has yet to release a statement.Incoming Senate majority leader John Thune says that he respects Gaetz’s decision to withdraw.“I think everybody has to make a decision that’s good for them and for their family,” Thune said, according to CNN. “And, you know, for whatever reason, he decided not to pursue it, so we respect the decision.”Florida senator Rick Scott says he is “disappointed” about Gaetz’s withdrawal.“I’m disappointed. I’ve known Matt since I started running for governor, and he was a smart guy, worked hard,” Scott told CNN. “I had a great, great working relationship with him”.When asked about who should be nominated to the role now that Gaetz has withdrawn, Scott told CNN that “the American public has completely lost trust of the federal government, and so we’re going to have to have somebody in there that goes and creates trust.”Speaking to a reporter, Representative Michael Guest, who chairs the House Ethics Committee, said that Gaetz’s withdrawal should end the discussion about whether the committee should “continue to move forward in this matter.”This comes as just a day ago, the House ethics committee was deadlocked regarding the release of a report examining allegations of sexual misconduct against Gaetz.Lawmakers from both parties had called for the report to be released before the Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to confirm Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general.More Republican Senators are reportedly reacting to the news of former representative Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from the nomination for attorney general.Here’s a quick roundup of some responses:Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell called the decision “appropriate” according to the Washington Post.Senator Cynthia Lummis told CNN that it was good that Gaetz recognised he was a distraction, and that this will allow Trump to appoint someone “equally tenacious” to lead the justice department.“He must have gotten some signals yesterday during conversations that he was having with senators that this was going to be a distraction,” Lummis reportedly said.Senator Susan Collinsexpressed that she was “surprised” but “pleased” with Gaetz’s decision, adding that he “has put country first, and I’m pleased with his decision”.Senator Roger Wickerreferred to the withdrawal as a “positive development”.Republican senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma describes Matt Gaetz’s decision to withdraw as “probably a good decision”.“I think because of the reports that were coming out, it was probably a good decision” Mullin told reporters, adding that “I’m sure he talked to the President about it first.”According to CNN, the woman who says she had sex when she was 17 years old with then-Representative Matt Gaetz told the House ethics committee that she had two sexual encounters with him at one party in 2017.The CNN report cites unnamed sources, who claim that the second sexual encounter, not previously been reported, included another adult woman.The network also states that after being asked for comment regarding the new allegations, the former representative announced that he was withdrawing from the attorney general nomination.Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.The other woman in the alleged second sexual encounter, who was an adult at the time, has also denied taking part in the encounter, according to multiple sources familiar with her ethics testimony, CNN reported.Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says that he respects former Representative Matt Gaetz’s decision to withdraw from the attorney general nomination.His statement reads:
      I respect former Representative Matt Gaetz’s decision to withdraw his name from consideration and appreciate his willingness to serve at the highest level of our government.
      He is very smart and talented and will continue to contribute to our nation’s wellbeing for years to come.
      I look forward to working with President Trump regarding future nominees to get this important job up and running.
      Donald Trump has released a statement on Matt Gaetz’s attorney general nomination withdrawal, saying on Truth Social:
      I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be attorney general.
      He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the administration, for which he has much respect. Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!
      Gaetz reportedly informed Trump late Thursday morning that he will be withdrawing his nomination, ABC reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The Democrats must radically rethink foreign policy | Anatol Lieven

      by

      In domestic political terms, the foreign policy of the Biden administration has proved almost unimaginably successful – for Donald Trump, whom it enabled to run for president as the representative, however mendaciously so, of foreign policy restraint. A deep and searching debate on the Democratic party’s approach to foreign affairs is now essential.Since the second world war there has only rarely been a significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy. The most significant divergence around the time of the backlash against the Vietnam war (initiated by a Democratic administration) and Watergate. This, however, lasted barely a decade.After the end of the cold war, Democrats wholeheartedly adopted the “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, whereby the US should aim to be a hegemon not just in the world as a whole, but in every region of the world: in effect, an extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet. Barack Obama tried, to a limited extent, to push back against this, but was largely frustrated by the US foreign and security establishment – the so-called “Blob”.Can the Democrats break free from the hold of the Blob? If they were guided by US public opinion, it should be easy for them to do so. According to a recent poll, only 56% of Americans think that the US should play an active role in world affairs – among the lowest level recorded since the end of the Vietnam war. Only a third of Americans overall, and only a minority of Democrats, believe that spreading human rights and defending other nations are important goals. Large majorities in both parties prioritise domestic spending over foreign commitments.And indeed, responding to this public mood, Biden ran in 2020 on the slogan “A foreign policy for the middle class”. Very soon, this joined George Bush’s promise in 2000 to pursue a more modest and restrained foreign policy in the dustbin of history, and Biden was quoting Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, about America being “the indispensable nation”.Three overarching principles need to shape a new Democratic party approach. First, US policy needs to prioritise common threats to humanity, climate change first among them and international cooperation to address these threats. Second, to achieve such cooperation, the US needs to abandon its messianic strategy of spreading “democracy” through US power, which has become in practice little more than a means of trying to undermine rival states.Instead, it should return to relying on the force of US democratic example – if that example can in fact be renewed. There is after all a certain contradiction in Democrats calling the new US president a fascistic would-be dictator elected by a majority of illiterate bigots, and telling the rest of the world to adopt the US system.Third, the US needs to pull back from the pursuit of domination in every region of the world and instead adopt a limited and realistic strategy of defending America’s position on the world stage as a whole. In Europe, this means accepting a peace deal with Russia (if Trump can achieve one), abandoning Nato expansion and shifting the chief responsibility for European security on to the Europeans, with the US military functioning only as an ultimate backstop.In the far east, this involves drawing a lesson from the defeat of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by land-based missiles and drones and recognizing that the US navy will soon be incapable of defeating China close to China’s shores – though on the other hand it remains entirely capable of maintaining US dominance of the world’s oceans. This means that the US will need to share power with China and commit itself to the reunion of China and Taiwan, albeit only at some distant point in future.Finally, there is Israel and the Middle East. A progressive party seeking votes from the young cannot succeed without at least some measure of idealism. The sight of a Democratic administration supporting mass murder and ethnic cleansing abroad, while clubbing, arresting and expelling US students protesting against these crimes, will not persuade idealistic young Americans to vote Democratic. What it will do and has done is to persuade even more of them to do what many were doing already: to stay at home, in a mood of nauseated contempt for the entire US political system. The very least the Democratic party should do is to return to the policies of previous US administrations in setting limits to Israeli aggression.Such changes in their approach to the world would be extremely painful and difficult for the Democrats, but the deepening crisis of the western democracies demands radical new thinking. And if an electoral defeat this shattering does not lead Democrats to rethink some of their basic policies, then nothing will.

      Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

      by

      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

      I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

      The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

      I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

      I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
      Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

    • 238 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      With Trump heading for the White House, the Democrats must learn these lessons – and fast | Owen Jones

      by

      Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems was in fact Kamala Harris’s “Wall Street-approved economic pitch”, which her brother-in-law – chief legal officer at Uber – reportedly helped craft, and which “fell flat”.The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here’s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats “represent the working class” has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they “stand up for marginalised groups” has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class – in all its diversity – as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for “marginalised groups” rather than “the average Joe”. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third.This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.In this context, white American workers became increasingly associated with conservatism, as converts to Richard Nixon’s Republicans and the segregationist George Wallace. “The typical worker – from construction craftsman to shoe clerk,” wrote New York Times labour correspondent AH Raskin in 1968, “has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.” But as the working-class writer Andrew Levison wrote a few years later: “There is nothing strange in the fact that workers began deserting liberalism once liberalism so decisively deserted them.”There are obvious differences today. The previous backlash against liberal failures paved the way to Reaganism, which did at least offer a coherent vision for society. Trumpism, on the other hand, is more emblematic of what the American literary critic Lionel Trilling said of US conservatism in 1950, that it was a series of “irritable mental gestures”, defined by fiery opposition to perceived progressive sensibilities rather than a cogent plan for what the US could look like. Policies that favour wealthier Americans – rather than many of the struggling Americans who voted for Trump – piggyback on this emotive backlash.But Kamala Harris made her dividing lines abortion rights and the defence of democracy: crucial questions, no doubt, but not answers to the struggles of workers on stagnating wages. Trumpism, on the other hand, attempted to vocalise the rage many Americans felt about their difficult circumstances, and sought to portray the Democrats as driven by championing demonised minorities instead, such as migrants and transgender people. That Harris did no such thing in her campaign is irrelevant: the lack of a compelling cut-through message on bread-and-butter issues allowed the Republicans to “flood the zone with shit”, as Republican strategist Steve Bannon puts it.The answer, then, is not to throw minorities under the presidential Cadillac. That will alienate progressive Americans, and given Trump won a similar number of votes as 2020 – while Democrats haemorrhaged natural supporters who stayed home – this would be a political as well as a moral failure. It is also true that the majority of citizens in any country will never be driven by a desire to improve the lot of minorities, and nor should the left wish to focus only on the most marginalised.Instead, an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority – irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity – will drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised “other”. Instead of the Democrats being drawn into toxic rows about the existence of transgender people, the Republicans would be forced on the defensive instead: as Reagan once wisely put it, in politics, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”. The Democrats need a plan that unites the shared interests of low- and middle-income Americans in an age of crisis and turmoil.As for the siren voices demanding a corporate-friendly Democratic party which refuses to champion minorities: the voters were just offered that, and it lost.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris ran from the Biden policies that were actually popular with voters | Daniela Gabor

      by

      The post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits charge, pointing to the now infamous October appearance on ABC’s The View, where Harris said “There is not a thing that comes close to mind” that she would have done differently. But the pundits are wrong.Harris did distance herself from Biden where it hurt her most. She dumped his Rooseveltian transformative ambitions to bring back big government. Instead, she returned to the Obama-Clinton of a small or neoliberal state that highly influential Democrats like Jake Sullivan had already known was an electoral dead end during the first Trump administration.Freshly bruised from his experience as senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, Sullivan set out a new vision for the Democratic party in his 2018 essay The New Old Democrats. The nutshell: “It’s not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems.”The problem for Democrats, he warned, was not that the party had been hijacked by progressive forces (a familiar lament, now framed in the conservative language of “woke”) but the opposite. The political centre of gravity had shifted, leaving the Democrats behind an American public clamoring for more energised government. To stave off the long-run threat of Trumpism, Democrats had to abandon centrist politics and embrace a new policy playbook, a return of the state guided by Roosevelt’s principles of “bold, persistent experimentation”. The main task was to “embrace the fact that transforming our economy will require substantial public investments”, paid for through progressive taxation of wealth and concentrated corporate power – big government, beating back big business.As Biden hung a portrait of Roosevelt above the Oval Office fireplace after winning the election, his team, with Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, set to work on the return of big, transformative government. Even with congressional politics in the way, the several legislative initiatives together – Chips, IRA, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act – amounted to a $2tn push to reshape the American economy. The conflation of transformative ambitions and China hawkishness, once remarkably absent from Sullivan’s vision, worried some, but most took it as either imperative or the price to pay for bipartisan support.By late 2023, even ideological enemies approved of Bidenomics. The free market evangelists at the Economist applauded Biden’s as the most “energetic American government in nearly half a century”. It helped revive beleaguered unions, and “produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy”, with immediate results: investment in manufacturing facilities more than doubled, soaring to its highest on recent historical record. Similarly, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, was taming concentrated corporate power without destroying corporate profitability or slowing the record number of new businesses created during Biden’s first years.If the Economist expected four more years of Biden to mean even bigger government, Harris backtracked. Where Sullivan called for a Democrat-led economic revolution for America, her “opportunity economy” read like a sad list of bullet points on a crammed slide headed “Smallish Government”: boost child tax credits, increase deductions for new small businesses, help for first-time homebuyers, incentives for new developments.This was not the transformative vision that Biden had championed. Her plans to oppose price gouging framed corporate power as an occasional, rather than structural, threat against American consumers, and said nothing about American workers. Alongside speculation that she would bow to billionaire pressure to oust Khan, Harris dropped union leaders and her early position as a scourge of Big Business to instead court favor with Wall Street, Mark Cuban and the minuscule Liz Cheney fanbase.Under Harris, the Democratic party returned the mantle of change to the Trump campaign, and to a JD Vance prepared to denounce corporate power and voter economic misery often more trenchantly than Harris.What if Harris shifted to the right of Biden because she had no choice? The most energetic government in decades had failed to make it through to voters, who heard inflation when Democrats shouted Bidenomics. But here Sullivan, by now tainted by his unwavering support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, had already given the answer, or, rather, asked the important question in his 2018 essay: The New Old Democrats, he had insisted, should not ask whether transformative government, but how? How can transformative government both check corporate power and support workers and families?The hard truth about Biden’s transformative project is that it failed its ambitions to roll back the power of capital. There was a brief moment in 2021 when big finance spoke and nobody listened, when investors lamented being excluded from Biden’s old-style “government spending on infrastructure”. But then the “politics of the possible” in Congress curtailed that momentum, in no small part due to conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, private equity’s best friend.Bidenomics might not have started, but it certainly ended, as a capital-first, trickle-down-to-workers project. Its transformative ambitions morphed into generous subsidies (tax incentives) for private investors. These investors got to opt out of worker-friendly tax credits. Where Roosevelt would have decried the new generation of subsidy-chaser capitalists as class and democracy enemies, Biden invited the biggest of them all – Larry Fink, CEO of the asset manager BlackRock – to join him at the G7 meeting in Rome in June 2024. There, Fink delivered a long sermon on why the privatisation of social and climate infrastructure, with state subsidies for investors, is the only way forward.Biden officials might have waved a copy of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution on their way to the White House, but distributional politics hasn’t changed that much since the glory days of neoliberalism. The richest 20% by income account for 40% of spending, twice as much as the poorest 40%. This is the widest gap on record, according to Oxford Economics.Rich millennials got virtually all the $51tn gains to US wealth this decade. Having tried and failed to extend the Covid-19 social safety net, the Biden administration instead continued to hand big finance – in its private equity guise – chunks of the state’s social contract with citizens, from housing to healthcare, dentistry, prisons, retirement homes. Voters heard inflation because nowhere does the paycheck rule as it does in a deeply unequal United States.If Sullivan was right this time too, and there is little reason to believe otherwise, the winning strategy for Harris was to revive and even amplify Biden’s Rooseveltian dream of big government. Democrats now choosing to interpret her defeat as “progressive hijacking” would do well to heed Sullivan’s warning against a return to centrist politics, the most accurate prediction of his entire career.

      Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London. She is working on The Wall Street Consensus, a book on the return of the transformative state More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Why Kamala Harris couldn’t convince an anti-establishment America | Samuel Hammond

      by

      Two weeks have passed, and Kamala Harris’s convincing electoral defeat still has Democrats pointing fingers at who – or what – to blame. If only Biden had dropped out sooner. If only Harris had picked a different running mate. If only she went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If only, if only, if only.There is an obvious reason for the lack of consensus. From failing to defend Biden’s record on inflation and immigration to being perceived as too leftwing, Harris’s loss was in some sense wildly overdetermined. And while Democrats were quick to attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 to white racial resentment, that’s a harder story to tell against the backdrop of Republican’s sizable gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters.Harris was a bad candidate, to be sure. But more than any particular individual, this election was a referendum on America’s incumbent political establishment. Starting with Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, swing voters have repeatedly demonstrated a strong preference for change agents. This trend was only briefly interrupted in the 2020 primary, when the pandemic and chaotic dénouement of Trump’s first term allowed Joe Biden to campaign on a “return to normal”. Voters instead got prolonged school closures, surging inflation and a dramatic expansion of progressive cultural politics, putting change back on the menu.The backlash against the establishment is being driven by two longer-term structural trends. The first is the electorate’s political realignment along educational lines. The historic realignment of white, non-college educated voters toward the Republican party won Trump the election in 2016, and brought him to within a hair of re-election in 2020. With this election, the working-class realignment broke through to non-college-educated Black and Hispanics voters as well. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini explained on the Ezra Klein Show, minority voters finally “shed that sense of … racial group solidarity” and “moved toward the party that shared their basic ideological predispositions”.The second structural trend is simply the growth of the internet and social media. In his book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, the former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri observed how the tsunami of information unleashed by the internet tends to leave legitimacy crises in its wake, from the Arab spring to Brexit. With social media, corruption has never been more easily exposed, and mass movements never more easily mobilized.This election was a consequence and accelerant of both these trends. Rather than resist education polarization, the Harris campaign leaned in, targeting Liz Cheney Republicans and college-educated suburban women. Mainstream media, meanwhile, took a backseat to alternative media, Twitter and the podcast circuit.Gurri argues that the internet-era rewards politicians with a degree of unfiltered authenticity, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live to Trump’s meandering, marathon speeches. Harris’s authenticity gap, in contrast, was reaffirmed at every turn, from her unwillingness to do interviews, to her stock “as a middle-class kid” non-sequitur in the few interviews she did. Even Harris’s Call Her Daddy podcast appearance was manufactured – literally: the campaign spent six figures building her a bespoke set.Authenticity is ultimately a way to signal one’s independence. In a year when incumbents are losing elections worldwide, Harris had to not just signal her independence from the incumbent political establishment, but to do so credibly. Instead, Harris doubled down on the Democratic party as the defenders of “institutions” – the very institutions that many voters were clearly fed up with.Again, this was less the fault of Harris as a person than reflective of the constraints any candidate in her shoes would have faced. As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment?Democrats are thus guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from this election. They will focus-group economic policies that appeal to the working class and excise wokeness from their political messaging. They will try to engineer their own Joe Rogan and uplift candidates that shoot from the hip. But this will all be a version of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Until the elites in the Democratic party loosen their grip and allow authentic, anti-establishment party factions to arise organically, they will remain the party of control and stasis in a world hungry for change.

      Samuel Hammond is the senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation More