Fear of another Trump presidency means much of the left in the US is swinging behind Kamala Harris, weakening the movements that are needed to win real change, writes Matilda Fay
Kamala Harris’s rise in the polls after taking over as the Democrat’s Presidential candidate has generated a wave of enthusiasm from many of those fearful of another Trump presidency.
Donald Trump’s racist dog-whistle about Haitian migrants “eating the pets” in their presidential debate sent alarm bells ringing for anti-racists everywhere. Black and Haitian communities in Ohio have reported facing an upswing in racist harassment in the aftermath of his comments.
The threat Trump poses is real: the scars inflicted by the vicious border policies of his time as President run deep and he is promising to ramp up deportations if he takes office again.
But Kamala Harris presents no counter to Trump’s racism beyond the empty politics of “representation”, and she stands at the helm of a Democratic party machine that has crushed radical movements time and time again.
Border racism and imperialism
Far from standing against the current frenzy of anti-migrant racism, Harris is feeding into it.
In July she bragged of prosecuting “gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally” during her time as California’s attorney-general.
At times she has attempted to outflank Trump on the right, promising to “bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed”, put forward by the Democrats but rejected by Republicans in Congress, which she calls the strongest border security legislation in decades.
Under Democratic President Joe Biden, the US’s regime of ICE raids, deportations and detaining children has hardly changed since the Trump years.
Biden is deporting migrants at rates that match the Trump administration, and millions of migrants have faced expulsion at the border while trying to enter the US.
Combining deportations and expulsions, Biden has sent back more than 4.4 million people, which is more than any US President in a single term since George W. Bush.
Perhaps the bloodiest demonstration of the true politics of the Democratic Party has been their collaboration with Israel’s genocide on Gaza.
The Biden administration has kept providing weapons as Israel has indiscriminately bombed Gaza, killing more than 40,000 Palestinians, and while the death toll now climbs in Lebanon. The US has thrown its weight around in the UN Security Council, repeatedly using its veto power to protect Israel.
Biden gave Netanyahu a small slap on the wrist in May when the US delayed a shipment of 500-pound and 2000-pound bombs, in an effort to pull Israel back on its leash. But shipments of 500-pound bombs were quickly resumed in July despite Israel’s atrocities in Rafah and the US remains steadfast in its willingness to provide funds and weapons.
In August, the US approved a further $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel.
Harris has been careful to emphasise her continuity with the Biden administration on this issue. She met with Netanyahu just days after Biden endorsed her as the Democratic Party nominee and accused protesters who demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s July address to the US Congress of “despicable acts”.
In the presidential debate, Harris made a point of regurgitating Israel’s propaganda about 7 October and declared that she had spent her “entire life defending Israel”.
The Democrats are positioning themselves as the party of the imperialist establishment. Behind their critique of Trump’s “America first” policy lies a shameless declaration to the US ruling class: Harris wants it known that a Democrat government will be an enthusiastic champion of US military intervention overseas.
Whether it be in Ukraine, Palestine or Lebanon, a Democratic White House promises not to shy away from sending weapons and providing funds to influence wars around the world in the interests of US capitalism.
Following the money
The decision in the Democratic establishment to oust Biden in favour of Harris triggered a mood lift for big business.
In just a week after the decision, Harris’s campaign brought in over $200 million in donations. Yale management professor Jeff Sonnenfeld said that CEOs “are exhilarated over this choice”. The bulk of the ruling class see Trump as dangerous and unpredictable. Harris promises a steady hand that will protect their interests.
As a result corporate money has flooded into her campaign, which has already raised more than $1 trillion, giving the Democrats a big fundraising lead over Trump who has raised only $642 million so far.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans represent sections of US capitalism and a political system that is owned and controlled by big business.
Among Harris’s supporters are Wall Street financiers, billionaire “philanthropists”, tech executives and venture capitalists. Trump’s corporate backers are of a similar breed but tend to favour economic protectionism and social conservatism.
Both campaigns are funded primarily by large contributions of more than $200,000—making up 59 per cent of Harris’s campaign funding and 68 per cent of Trump’s. Neither party is on the side of working class people.
At various points in Biden’s term, the Democrats tried to position themselves as the “friend of the worker”, with Biden shaking hands for photo-ops at an auto workers picket line late last year. But 12 months before that, he intervened to halt a national rail strike, brokering a deal on pay that saw workers’ wages go backwards amid climbing inflation, and threatening to have Congress outlaw the action.
Biden’s economic program speaks louder than his union photo-ops. The US has plunged ever deeper into economic disparity, as consumers pay for high inflation while corporate profits climb.
Despite all this, many left-wing people in the US will fall behind the Democrats as a “lesser evil” to Trump.
The Democratic Socialists who rose to prominence as part of the opposition to both Trump and the corporate Democratic Party establishment are now working to corral the left behind Harris. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Harris at the Democratic National Convention, while Bernie Sanders has backed her as a “progressive” who is “doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election”.
But it’s a disaster for working class struggles and social movements to fall in behind the Democratic campaign. This means weakening the only force that can turn back the rise of the far right and will fight the racism, wars and attacks on workers that both parties champion.
To cede power on the streets to a campaign for the status quo would only produce more despondency. And despondency is the fuel of Trump and the far right.
The Democratic dead end
The history of radical movements in the US is littered with examples of struggles that were funnelled into Democratic election campaigns and soon quashed or betrayed.
Through the 1960s the civil rights movement pushed up against the Democrats’ racism and their actions in the Vietnam war. Leaders of these movements were pressured to dial down their militancy with promises of a seat at the table—promises that were inevitably broken.
In recent years the MeToo movement suffered a similar fate. What started as a watershed moment in 2017, in which millions of women took to the streets against Trump as part of the Women’s March during his Inauguration and spoke out over sexist harassment and abuse, became a vehicle for placing women’s hopes in installing a Democrat to oust Trump from the White House.
Leading figures in MeToo chose a path of campaigning in the media to wage an ideological war, rather than building their forces on the streets. A movement that had seen half a million people take to the streets of DC, and five million people march on one day globally, was quickly curtailed.
By the time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, robbing women in many conservative states of the right to abortion, MeToo campaigners directed the ensuing anger into a call to support the Democrats in midterm elections.
But having a Democrat in office for the last four years has done nothing to protect abortion rights.
In fact, the Democrats have had ample opportunity since the Roe v Wade ruling in 1973 to codify the constitutional protection for abortion but did not.
In 2007 Obama promised Planned Parenthood that passing legislation to protect abortion would be “the first thing I’d do as president”. But in 2009 once in office he described it as “not the highest legislative priority”.
Biden promised in 2020 to make Roe v. Wade “the law of the land” and could have done so in 2021 and 2022 but did not. And yet Harris has the nerve to campaign on abortion rights today.
The US in recent months has seen the same horror and outrage as its leaders back a genocide in Gaza, and political ferment as the cost of living bites, as elsewhere.
The US student encampments that began in May sparked a surge in the Palestine movement globally. Researchers have tracked more than 3700 days of protest activity at campuses across the US since 7 October, representing more than 500 colleges, universities, schools and school district offices across 317 cities and towns.
There is bubbling resentment at the tried and true Democratic Party politics that demands radicals be satisfied with “a seat at the table”.
In a speech to students in April, Princeton African American studies Professor Ruha Benjamin condemned a Black woman US ambassador to the UN voting against a ceasefire in Gaza, stating that “Black faces in high places are not going to save us”.
Some speculate that anger over Palestine will see Harris punished in key states with high Arab populations such as Michigan.
But the most important metric for socialists is to what extent this mood spills over into continued defiance on the streets, in the university campuses and in workplaces.
This is where we can build the power to turn the system around in our own favour and beat back the war-mongers, be they Democrat or Republican.
