The Democratic Party establishment is piling in behind vice president Kamala Harris after Joe Biden was forced to bow out of the United States presidential race.
Harris presents herself as a progressive choice to take on Donald Trump. But she’s backed up all of Biden’s corporate handouts, defended Israel’s genocide and enforced anti-migrant laws. She stands for all the failed policies that boosted Trump.
Biden quickly endorsed Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate, and endorsements from the rest of the Democratic establishment rolled in, including former president Bill Clinton and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Some of the wealthiest donors to the Democrats have also swung behind Harris, with donors giving $200 million in her first week in the race.
Harris will try and drum up support by painting herself as a defender of abortion rights. Yet the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, which recognised the constitutional right to abortion, happened under Biden and Harris’ watch.
It was the Biden-Harris administration that failed to pass a nationwide law protecting Roe v Wade—something they promised in their 2020 election campaign. As vice president, Harris has attacked migrants coming across the US-Mexico border, saying, “Do not come. Do not come.”
And she’s enforced a number of anti-migrant laws such as strengthening border police.
Harris has tried to express empathy for the suffering in Gaza in the hope of appealing to Democratic Party supporters disgusted with Biden’s embrace of Israel. But she remains complicit with Israel’s genocide, unwaveringly defending Israel’s “right to defend itself”. Previously Harris went as far as likening the creation of Israel “as the same commitment to justice” as those who marched in the US civil rights movement.
Harris presents herself as a “progressive prosecutor” after her time as attorney general of California. But in office she opposed criminal justice reforms and fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions secured through official misconduct.
She blocked payouts to the wrongfully-convicted and argued for keeping non-violent offenders in jail as a source of cheap labour. And she denied gender reassignment surgery to trans+ prisoners.
Biden’s presidency has failed to improve the lives of ordinary people. Harris is simply a continuation of Biden’s politics.
She will do all she can to channel social movements away from the streets and into boosting her election campaign.
Left’s failures
Millions of people have in recent years taken part in mass movements that have rocked the US state, and the left ought to be at its strongest in a generation.
Israel’s genocide—and Joe Biden’s and the Democrats’ support for it—has seen thousands of people take part in university encampments across the country.
And many activists targeted “Genocide Joe” by campaigning for “uncommitted votes” in Democratic primaries that chose the party’s presidential candidate.
The Palestine movement comes in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the abortion rights movement and opposition under Trump’s presidency.
And we’ve seen the beginnings of a revival in the working class movement. In 2023, unions staged the highest number of strikes in 23 years, albeit from a low base.
The likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the “squad”, who call themselves “democratic socialists”, found a much wider echo in the US working class.
But it is Trump and the right who have capitalised on the discontent in the US, and recovered in the polls for November’s presidential election.
Why? Because the left’s figureheads—Sanders and the squad—have worked to pull the radical mood into the Democrats’ business as usual politics.
As Biden floundered Sanders and AOC did all they could to keep him in the race. Sanders took to the New York Times to write that Biden had, “been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Mr Trump”.
He even pointed to the recent French election, arguing, “It’s time to learn a lesson from the progressive and centrist forces in France”. He wrote that “despite profound political differences” the left and centrists “came together… to soundly defeat right wing extremism” in the form of the fascist National Rally.
But the left backing centrist, neoliberal politics in an attempt to defeat the far right weakens our side. It sees the left line up behind politicians who back assaults on workers and migrants—as the left-wing New Popular Front did in France in urging a vote for them—and gives the far right an opportunity to pose as the “anti-establishment” force.
The real solution lies in more struggle, breaking with the Democrats and building a socialist politics based on resistance.
By Thomas Foster and Tomáš Tengely-Evans
Socialist Worker UK
