2016 was a pivotal year. Even then you could feel it – that it was a moment which marked the death of one era, and the birth of another; the year when ISIS was spreading terror across the world, when the surprise result of the Brexit-referendum shook Europe, and when Donald Trump, contrary to all expectations, won the American election.
But that moment, that year, can and has faded from memory, being replaced by new and more relevant events in the endless churn of the media-cycle. Brexit didn’t kill the EU, and further talk of leaving the Union has largely subsided; even in Britain, Brexit has disappeared from mainstream politics. ISIS, for all its atrocities, has become a footnote in history, its last vestiges isolated and under siege. The exception is Trump, who seized control of the Republican party and has refused to let go, remaining – over eight years later – as its presidential nominee. He alone keeps the moment of 2016 alive, as he is still featured daily at the top of the headlines and is still on everyone’s lips and in everyone’s minds.
Thus, Kamala Harris has been anointed as the chosen champion of the Democratic party to put an end to these years of upheaval – to “break the fever”, as high-ranking Democrat Pete Buttigieg put it – and return to normalcy. But what is normal? Part of the answer to that question can found within Harris’ political journey, and how that has come to define her character.
How Kamala Harris views politics
Born to academic parents in California during the heights of the Civil Rights Era – as a “mixed race” child (black father and Indian mother) – when the Democrats under President Lyndon B. Johnson were increasingly turning their backs to their openly racist “Dixiecrat” faction in favour of championing social justice, Kamala Harris was deeply submerged in a “liberal” environment from the second she entered this world. But to construe her as an “ultra-left liberal”, as Trump likes to do, would be a mischaracterisation.
Her first career-move, in fact, was to become a prosecutor, something which would come back to haunt her in the 2019 primaries, where “progressive” credentials were what mattered. But becoming a prosecutor back in the 1990’s, alongside the steady climb up the ladder that followed, shows us much of how she views politics: as Harris reflected in her 2019 memoirs, she “knew there was an important role on the inside, sitting at the table where the decisions were being made.”
Much of the criticism that Harris faced during her initial 2019 run for the presidency was derived from scrutiny over her record as prosecutor, especially because of the fact that she was changing her positions on controversial – and therefore political – matters as she ascended up each rung of her career, going from a local deputy state prosecutor, to Attorney General of California. In the 2000’s, time and again she flip-flopped between stances, opposing the death penalty before upholding it, supporting criminal justice reform before opposing it, and so on.
Tulsi Gabbard (then also running in the primaries) seized upon one such transformation during the Democratic debates, accusing Kamala Harris of sending well over a thousand people to jail for marijuana violations as a prosecutor – before coming out in favour of legalisation when she had moved on to the U.S. senate. This public revelation was a powerful rebuke of “Kamala the Cop”, coming at a time when she was trying to re-brand as a progressive candidate in tune with the left-wing of the party, and effectively sent the Harris campaign into a death spiral.
It would be unfair, however, to write her off as a political chameleon willing to say anything to get elected: as merely yet another careerist without conviction. Rather, this kind of political maneuvering reveals her deep commitment to the Democratic party and to the way it has operated for the last several decades. The art of striking a balance between the political currents shifting and shaping her party while pushing and pulling on certain points is the art of the “bit by bit” politician that Kamala Harris self-identifies as. Reflecting on what kind of prosecutor she intended to be she writes:
“You can want the police to stop crime in your neighborhood and also want them to stop using excessive force. You can want them to hunt down a killer on your streets and also want them to stop using racial profiling. You can believe in the need for consequence and accountability, especially for serious criminals, and also oppose unjust incarceration. I believed it was essential to weave all these varied strands together.” – The Truths We Hold, Kamala Harris
The weaving of the varied strands is a distillation of Kamala Harris’ entire mode of politics: the attempt to mix and match without ideological hang-ups while remaining agile enough to maintain the modern Democratic coalition, and seeking only to improve the system without upending it. It is not an accident that her background and style of politics was, and is, so easily comparable to that of Barack Obama. Because she is following the formula laid out by him (and by Bill Clinton before him), or more accurately, the formula of the Democratic establishment.
The “varied” and contradictory network the Democratic party has built – with both organised labour and big businesses, as an example – typically needs a leader that is flexible with principles, that can navigate the balance and be charismatic enough to please everyone. To do this the Democratic establishment seeks out youthful fresh faces to lead an electoral movement of “Joy” (á la Harris), or of “Hope” (á la Obama), while governing as a benevolent manager of the American system. That was Bill Clinton. That is Barack Obama. That would be Kamala Harris.
Her 2019 run is, in this context, an attempt to fall in line with the direction her party was heading in order to get a seat “at the table where the decisions were being made.” Implied in this, however, is a tacit acceptance of the status-quo as it is: the paradigm of improvement means you are confined by the framework of the system as it is, unwilling to break and twist it, even if for the greater good. “I’m not trying to restructure society,” Kamala Harris said in 2019. “I’m just trying to take care of the issues that wake people up in the middle of the night.” Unfortunately for her, that managerial style of politics is faltering, buckling under the weight of a failure to restructure a decaying society.
What Kamala Harris certainly isn’t, however, is a frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic. She is, by most accounts, smart and reasonable. What surprises many then is that she stands a real chance of losing to a man that generally embodies none of the qualities that an establishment figure like Harris would associate with a President.
How Donald Trump acts as an antithesis
Many wonder how Trump could be winning. In many ways he is an exhausted man – the energetic and raw populist anger that he successfully brought with him in 2016 now sounds a lot more like the meandering ravings of an embittered man, angry not at the system, but at the fact that he lost. He is by now a known quantity, having even served a term in office. In other words, there’s no youthful and charismatic energy present like that of Kamala Harris. But in one respect – and it is the one that truly counts – he’s still a potent force: he remains, in the eyes of the disgruntled masses, a weapon against the establishment.
The things that we don’t associate with a “normal” campaign haven’t made Trump a guaranteed loser. Despite making ludicrous and false comments about the eating of cats and dogs, despite openly calling for violence against his opponents, despite completely misunderstanding the nature of the race – by calling Kamala Harris a communist and Marxist of all things, despite her being anything but – and even saying things that run entirely counter to the interests of his working class voter base – such as endorsing Elon Musk firing striking workers – this all, ultimately, feeds into the narrative of him being a fighter. Bruno Maçães writes this after visiting a rally in Michigan: “They see themselves in his struggles. A majority of his supporters in Warren wore shirts emblazoned with “I am with the felon”.” Or as Nate Silver somewhat more crudely puts it, “[…] he’s an asshole. But he’s your asshole.”
While Donald Trump has, like Harris, changed his policy stances as it has suited him, he has been remarkably consistent in the broad strokes of his critique of the American system. Even in the 1980’s he thought that the political class was largely incompetent, that the trade deals America was making were terrible, and that, more broadly speaking, the United States was being ripped off by others. The fact that such a message now resonates so strongly with a significant part of the American electorate, and can be the foundation of a successful presidential campaign, highlights the underlying causes of the current political climate.
Looking back to understand the present
The 2024 election has been a long time coming. Fundamentally, it is a monumental collision of socio-economics forces; a tearing apart and polarisation of American society largely along class lines, with working class voters increasingly going to the Trump’s Republican party, and vice versa with educated and the suburban middle-class. This shift might seem confusing given that it was the Democrats who ushered in the New Deal, and who still have a friendly (if increasingly fraught) relationship with the labour movement. But it is something which the Democrats ultimately brought upon themselves.
In 1992 the Democrat Bill Clinton won the presidency by running as a “New Democrat”, a pragmatic centrist bringing a new generation to power (Clinton was the first baby-boomer to become president, a sign of youth at the time), from the Southern state of Arkansas. In charismatic Clinton, devoid of ideological underpinnings and with only the “newness” of a politics of “hope” and “joy” in his electoral sails, the assembling of the modern Democratic establishment could be seen.
He made the sort of grand, bipartisan “compromises” that some still recall with longing; on “law and order”, for instance, he crafted a new crime bill that would set in motion the mass-incarceration that America is now notorious for – because that was what he thought make the Democrats seem more responsible and moderate. Cutting welfare and de-regulating the banks and industries, Clinton worked dutifully with the system that the Reagan Republicans had left him, bringing into existence NAFTA, a free trade agreement which accelerated the destruction of the manufacturing sector in America.
This sharp turn away from the “New Deal” coalition that had once secured the loyalties of vast swathes of America – including rural farmers and Midwestern factory workers – started the crystallisation of the electorate. Those states which benefited from the cheap imported results of offshored production, and who used the de-regulated financial sector to invest in capital-intense tech-companies, turned into deep blue states (since Clinton’s 1992 victory the electoral heavyweights of New York and California have never again been competitive for the Republicans).
But 30 years later, and at the other ends of the country, that neoliberal coalition is falling apart at the seams. An establishment built off pleasing a prosperous middle-class is now running into the long-term consequences of their own politics. The American middle-class is shrinking, and what’s more, it is increasingly confined within the boundaries of certain states: the uneven redistribution of neoliberal politics has made the regional economies deeply unequal. The corrosive effect of de-industrialisation of the area appropriately called the “Rust Belt” (primarily Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan) has severely hampered the ability of this establishment to continue finding success in the American electoral system. The good-will of the old Democratic party has evaporated, and states that once were Democratic strongholds (West Virginia is another prime example) have turned irrevocably red.
That the Kamala Harris campaign is running to the “middle” of politics, as it is often said in the media, is a misnomer. Rather, it is the desperate attempts of a dying establishment to cobble together enough energy to win one last time. That Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, was proud to proclaim that their supporters now included both Taylor Swift and Dick Cheney – an unrepentant neocon, war hawk, and driver of the de-regulatory agenda of George W. Bush that culminated in the 2008 financial crash – speaks volumes. The last true defenders of a system already fading away are closing their ranks and rallying their troops.
Kamala Harris has even promised to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, in some bizarre zombie-version of a bipartisanship that died a long time ago, which sounds as if it was ripped straight from the pages of an Aaron Sorkin script for some ultra-nauseating episode of the “West Wing”. Only in the episodes of old TV-shows do those reality-detached fantasies of what once was remain alive. If you are looking for a quick laugh, you may enjoy the irony of the fact that, while openly calling Trump a “fascist” and a threat to democracy, Kamala Harris is resurrecting the same kind of bourgeois “great coalition” that famously failed to stop Hitler from taking power in the Weimar republic.
The Donald Trump-Joe Biden Continuum
Donald Trump’s initial victory showed that there was an immense anger in the country, and that in 2016 that anger had reached a crescendo of such proportions that you could ride it all the way to the Presidency. That alone was a shock to the system, especially for the political class who had taken it for granted that Trump’s vulgar populism was doomed to hand a landslide victory to Hillary Clinton, who was just about as close as you could get to a literal embodiment of the Washington establishment (a neo-liberal and a war hawk, the wife of a President, with a deeply questionable record in government, credentials only the greyest of bureaucrats could appreciate, and many shady connections to boot).
The next four years was hell-on-earth for a certain kind of liberal, who got to watch as their newly elected president tore up precious agreements on climate change, reversed key foreign policy decisions, and, most importantly, completely upended the accepted consensus on trade and the economy. What is so cogently explained in an excellent piece by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker, is that the crisis of conscience triggered by those years produced a remarkable transformation within a subset of the Democratic party. It was a recognition of the failures of business-as-usual politics, and a burning ambition to rectify them before it was too late.
It is perhaps the greatest of ironies that the person that would ultimately come to embody that transformation was Joe Biden, a man deeply ingrained in the Washington milieu. However Biden surprised many when, after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2019-2020 primaries, the former forged a pact with the latter, ensuring that the fiery left-populist wing of the Democratic party was not shut out as it had been in 2016 (as an aside: Sanders would come to highly praise Biden for his accomplishments, sticking by him until the very end of his doomed 2024 campaign).
The result of that pact is Bidenomics, which, despite its typically establishment-sounding name (think Obamacare), is genuinely revolutionary in comparison with what came before it. Venturing boldly into a brave new “post-neoliberal” world, Bidenomics both identifies the key problem – that America’s modern tech-and-service economy has immiserated certain regions – and rejects the principle that state power shouldn’t be used to forcefully address it. In this way, there is a strange sort of continuity between Presidents Trump and Biden which is not often discussed.
Donald Trump’s creation of tariffs, primarily directed at China, was the most significant disruption of the Washington economic consensus. The idea of prioritising domestic jobs and production over the unfettered growth of the GDP was an almost heretical idea prior to 2016. But that doctrine, if less so the concrete policies of Trump, has carried on into the Biden era. While retaining the tariffs Trump implemented, Biden has even increased some of them in order to protect vulnerable American industries. Katherine Tai, Biden’s trade representative, has consistently defended tariffs on principle (sacre bleu!) as a tool of defending the interests of the American people, and has openly scorned the devastating effects on jobs and communities brought about by mindless neoliberalism.
Likewise, scepticism of the unhindered operation of big business has returned to the halls of government with the appointment of Lina Khan as the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission. She has zealously gone after a whole host of abuses perpetrated by corporations who were so used to having only blind eyes directed at them. Her impressive effectiveness is only furthered by the fact that many even on the right, including Trump’s running mate JD Vance, have openly praised the work she is doing.
The restriction put on the state, arguably first by Clinton, then kept by Obama, was that only indirect measures could be used to generally “improve” the economy, preferably through de-regulation and tax cuts. Here, again, Biden stands as a revolutionary. Trillions of dollars have been poured by way of direct investments into infrastructure, renewable energy, and manufacturing, through a triplet of legislative acts: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. The result? Factories are popping up across the country, especially in areas devastated by previous de-industrialisation. America’s crumbling infrastructure, often bemoaned by angry motorists and commuters, is finally undergoing a serious effort to not just be fixed, but to be expanded. That the U.S.A is actually building high-speed rail is a double-whammy of state planning; both reducing the disgraceful car dependency of the transportation system, as well as addressing climate change.
Another core principle of Bidenomics – which isn’t even necessarily economical, but rather ideological – is the increased power and importance placed in the executive branch. When this phenomenon is discussed, however, almost all the focus is on the Trump side of the equation: we have all heard the horror stories emanating from Project 2025, or of Trump’s personal authoritarian impulses. But the gradual weaponisation of the Presidency – its shift from an almost monarchical role meant to primarily represent the American people as a figurehead, to speak on their behalf as the patriarch of some great national family, to an entity which overshadows the U.S. congress in practical activity – is something Biden has embraced. Not just in the promulgation and promotion of agencies like Khan’s, but in aggressive unilateral action meant to serve the common good, even at the risk of “unconstitutionality”. The prime example of this has been Biden’s repeated attempts to cancel student debts by going over the heads of a reluctant congress – and an actively hostile Supreme Court.
It is then unfortunate that Kamala Harris’ “Politics of Joy” and “New Way Forward” are anything but. They are the retreading of old roads, dishevelled by years of use. She has said that her presidency would not be a “continuation” of Biden’s, and she means it. Primarily this means the re-creation of the old Clinton-and-Obama-era neoliberal coalition; practically, it has meant the open courting of corporate interests, especially those unnerved by Biden’s plans for both regulatory and fiscal policy. This has meant a dramatic scaling back of any proposed corporate and capital tax increases, a conspicuous distancing from tariffs – which she only discusses when attacking Donald Trump over them (tariffs kept by Biden), using the standard neoliberal terminology of them being detrimental to the economy and a “tax” on the consumer – as well as worrying rumours that she intends to fire Lina Khan, who naturally has drawn the ire of the corporate interests she has challenged, and which Harris now intends to ally.
All this signals a retreat from President Biden’s agenda to stimulate a drastic re-alignment of Democratic politics and to recapture the hearts and minds of the working classes, and, in a sense, to pay reparations for what his own party had wrought upon their communities and livelihoods. Above and beyond if this is a good electoral strategy for the impending election (of which I have my doubts), it is doomed in the long run. To return the Presidency to a managerial role, where free markets are trusted with the well-being of the American people, and where the questioning of that system is tacitly forbidden in favour of manageable “improvements”, would be to repeat the mistakes of the past.
The future?
If Kamala Harris follows through and succumbs to her “pragmatic” instincts, by scaling back Bidenomics, firing Lina Khan and her peers, and putting an end to the regulatory revolution currently ongoing, then America will slump back into decay. The “Politics of Joy” will seem increasingly ridiculous and out-of-touch with the brutal reality of American late-stage neoliberal life, and will, in 2028, be nothing but a bitter joke. The fundamental problems of the system will be tinkered with, but never resolved. And a new generation of ideological Trumpists, free of Trump’s most repellent personal qualities, with youthful vigour and energy, will stand ready. Already figures like JD Vance are taking the Republican party in directions hitherto unknown, surpassing even Trump, who still retains many of the ingrained dogmas of dead Republican generations.
If Trump wins a second term, he will harness the unbridled destructive power of populism on a scale never seen before. In that maelstrom the neo-liberal establishment will be torn down to its foundations, as Trump and his allies pursue the extirpation of any “rogue bureaucrats” who might object to his agenda. And while the spell of neo-liberal voodoo-economics which has enthralled Washington for so long would be broken, with its wizards blown away by the wind, never to be seen again… it would also mean that the institutional walls will be left unmanned, opening the gates to a deluge of radicalism. A radicalism characterised by many of the darkest instincts of humanity.
The party that ultimately triumphs and becomes dominant will be the one that can craft a stable post-neoliberal order and claim it as their own. There is no going back – not even if you call it a “New Way Forward”.
But for now, and for the last time, the establishment rides forth into battle. Win or lose, after this they will be crushed into dust by the material realities of 21st century America, and finally disappear into the pages of history.
↓ Attribution
Cover art: The White House via flickr // Licensed as U.S government work
