The Center Cannot Hold
The Democrats’ Inability or Unwillingness to Address Economic Resentment Doomed Them
Donald J. Trump will be president. Again. He defeated Vice President Kamala Harris handily, likely winning the popular vote as he cruised to an Electoral College victory.
I wish I could say I was surprised. Saddened would be more accurate. Angry. But not surprised. The seeds of this electoral disaster were planted in 2020, when Democratic leadership cleared the field for Joe Biden. Biden, at that point, was struggling to connect with voters. He seemed old. He would turn 78 after the election, making him the oldest man — always a man — to be sworn in to office.
Biden would win that race, pushed past the finish line by Trump fatigue and Trump’s Covid mismanagement, despite avoiding traditional campaigning, despite offering a milquetoast message on the economy.
Biden ran on a kind of “return to normalcy” — Warren G. Harding’s slogan. It may have some sense in 2020, but like Biden’s age and history it ultimately set the stage for Trump II.
This may seem counterintuitive, but stick with me.
Joe Biden was first elected to national office in 1972, when he won a long shot Senate race, and he served until becoming vice president in January 2009. Thirty six years in the Senate. Biden made his mark as a somewhat hawkish Democrat and a compromiser. His record on racial issues was spotty, partly owing to the times (he entered the Senate when white voters were punishing politicians who supported civil rights legislation). The same could be said about his commitment to women’s issues — see Anita Hill.
Biden opposed the 1991 invasion of Iraq, but not on moral grounds. And after 9/11, he supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
My point here is not to relitigate these positions. He evolved across his 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. The issue is not the specific positions but what the breadth of his experience and his commitment to work across the aisle no matter what says about Biden and how it affected his position within American political culture.
We need to go back to 2015, when Trump rode down the escalator and announced his campaign for president as a Republican. Hillary Clinton was slotted as the likely Democratic nominee, called the most experienced candidate in our history (debatable). Biden was floated in the press as a possible challenger to her, but decided to sit it out.
Clinton would go on to win the popular vote, but lose in the Electoral College after running a highly technocratic campaign. That gave us four years of Trump.
Trump was seen as an anomaly, a momentary blip. The real anger among his base was ignored or dismissed by mainstream political players, who cast his supporters as uneducated, racist, and sexist. I was guilty of that, as well. Too many of us let that element of his base — which was definitely there and at that point his strongest supporters — obscure something deeper, a dissatisfaction with our economy’s underlying structure, with its damaging inequality.
The real feelings of voters that they were being left behind, that they were less important than the banks and the corporations, pulled Bernie Sanders into the 2016 race (I supported him). Sanders, a socialist independent, generally sided with the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, but was also pushed to the margins. The focus of his campaign was income inequality — sometimes to the exclusion of what is called identity politics — and he turned what was supposed to be the coronation of the former First Lady into a real race.
My point is not that Sanders should have been the candidate in 2016 — or 2020, when he scared the Democrats into backing Biden. My point is that Sanders was exposing the kind of systemic weakness that would ultimately result in Trump’s ascendancy to the White House. (We could go back to the bank bailouts of 2008 and the Tea Party reaction, as well, which were fueled by similar economic fears, but couched in resentment and conservative social issues.)
Trump, as the polling shows, appealed to a lot of different constituencies this time around. Certainly, he was buoyed by the racists and sexists, the troglodytes who wish to control women’s bodies and keep trans kids in the closet. But the polling showed something else, as well. Trump appealed to voters who saw the economy as malfunctioning, who saw the nation as on the wrong track. That Trump was as much to blame for the damage didn’t matter. Trump was a change agent, a system breaker, and the system needed smashing and rebuilding.
Democrats had a chance to do that. Biden’s record was mixed but positive, but inflation never fully abated. Prices — in particular, rent and food prices — remained high and ate away at wage gains. Biden was pro-labor, except when he wasn’t, stepping in to prevent rail workers from striking. More damaging, Biden was seen — rightly — as part of the foreign policy establishment, as pro-war, and therefore compromised.
He was an establishment figure in every sense of the word, an agent of the status quo. It was not only an image he couldn’t shake, but one he had not interest in shaking. And this, more than anything else, doomed his party.
We can argue about his policies, about Kamala Harris’ plans, about how the Republicans and Trump have no interest in really fixing what is broken. Trump is a fascist and fascism is not about policy, not about ideology, not about demonstrable truths. It is about grievance. Democrats did not understand this. Plucking Biden from the trash heap, as the party did in 2020, stripped the party of its ability to portray itself as a change agent going forward. Trump capitalized on that, as all fascist candidates and movements do.