By Maciek Wisniewski on November 9, 2024
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty
Noting how in recent months Kamala Harris and the Democrats gambled on turning the U.S. election solely into a token debate about “democracy” and “Trump’s character,” rather than focusing on policy and solutions to the issues that voters pointed to in polls as their biggest concerns – the state of the economy, inflation, or the genocide in Gaza thus emulating, in effect, Hillary Clinton’s losing strategy of 2016, when she desisted from competing for the progressive and working-class vote, preferring to court suburban “Never Trump” Republicans, one could not help but get a sinister sense of déjà vu.
Just like Clinton, Harris gambled on running a right-wing campaign and openly disregarded the economic pain of American workers – whose white fraction in 2016 and now in 2024, already a whole “multicolored” section, turned to Trump – and just like Clinton – surprise, surprise– she got an identical result. This not only seemed “crazy” from the start, and ultimately ended in catastrophe, but it met, -literally-, the very popular definition of insanity: “doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result” (according to the saying attributed to Albert Einstein, but actually popularized by writer Rita Mae Brown). In the end, maybe it’s not that the Democrats and their resoundingly defeated candidate – Trump has not only decisively won the presidency, the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives, but also, unlike in 2016, the popular vote – are crazy per se, but they surely don’t learn from history.
With Trump winning his second term, it is worth remembering that within the Democratic Party there was never even the slightest reflection after he first won. Although the loss to the figure like him that – and this does not seem a coincidence – both Clinton at the time, and Harris in recent weeks, compared to Hitler (Biden, curiously, never embraced this sterile strategy and at least tried to promise something to working people), should make the Democrats reflect on their own mistakes, the party elite, starting with Hillary Clinton herself, found 100,000 ways to blame everyone else. The pinnacle of this denialist operation has been the bombastic narrative of “Russian interference” (Russiagate) made up from small real cases and which likewise today began making rounds in an effort to absolve Harris and her “brilliant campaign”.
Among the alleged culprits for 2016 were also the media that “exaggerated” the Clinton mails scandal or James Comey, director of the FBI, who announced an investigation against her shortly before the election “sinking her candidacy”. A good example of how strong this paranoid thinking still is (Richard Hofstadter dixit), has been the response of Clinton who, probed about Harris’ chances in this election, said that she was sure to win, because she -unlike Clinton-, “didn’t have her Comey”. I don’t think this has aged well.
To be fair, Harris did try to pitch, especially in the swing states, some messages focused more on the economy, but since she has never presented any specific program (sic) and her main message, like Clinton’s, was formatted “to the right” and the interests of billionaires (Mark Cuban), her efforts were weak and detached from reality. On top of that, his campaign, instead of being directed toward the Democratic Party base, has been conveniently directed toward and carried by its “professional class,” a constellation of NGOs and activists linked to the big foundations and who are disinterested in material political issues and focused only on fundraising and coalescing around the themes of “democracy” and “identity”.
When George Santayana famously spoke of “those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it,” he did not have in mind – as this dictum is often presented – “History” (with a capital letter) and its “lessons,” but what he considered the main difference between babies and adults: that the former do not remember the consequences of their actions and the latter do. It is in this sense that one could say that American liberals – usually presented as the “adults in the room” and narcissistically convinced of their own importance and infallibility – behaved like “babies”.
Not only at the political level, committing, because of their arrogance and contempt for average voters, for the second time, the same mistakes and ending up with the same result (and even worse), but also at the personal level. Just as Clinton did when she lost in 2016, Kamala Harris when it was already known on Tuesday night “that this rice had already been cooked,” childishly, also failed to come out and show her face to her supporters who came to support her.
When it came out in September that Hillary Clinton was advising Harris “on how to beat Trump” – being the last and least likely person in the entire universe to give lessons on this – someone joked that the only chance the vice president had was to take note of her advice and do it all the opposite way. Evidently she didn’t.
Source: La Jornada translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English