A Party Out of Touch

A Party Out of Touch

Without confronting the economic conditions that gave rise to right-wing populism, the Harris campaign could not meaningfully address a deepening crisis of liberal democracy.

There is not one kind of Trump voter. Of course there are the Nazis, the alt-right, the hyper-misogynist and hyper-racist—all those who feast on Trump’s wild promises, noxious insults, and boorish ways. There are those animated by hatred for the “libs,” whose contempt or mere disregard they absorb daily. There are Christians, Zionists, and even (late-breaking) Muslims who expect Trump to serve their cause better than the Biden–Harris regime did. There are those who want the southern border of the country fortified and recent migrants deported. There are small business owners who want lower taxes and fewer restrictions, and former mining and industrial workers who want jobs that would pay what union-protected ones did.

But none of them fully account for Trump’s historic triumph—the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since 2004. What does? Three things: Trump’s economic populism in a context in which the Democrats have become the party of the elite; the exhaustion of liberal democracy as a viable or trusted form; and the destruction of education, especially higher education, in the United States.

Economic Populism

Trump has been running on an anti-establishment economic position since 2015. Some call this economic populism.  It may not be sincere—he has plenty of support from capital and the mega-rich—but it addresses the extreme and growing inequalities in the United States. These, of course, are produced by neoliberal offshoring, outsourcing, and union-busting; by speculation that sent housing costs into the stratosphere; and by privatization of infrastructure ranging from transportation to higher education. Trump speaks directly to the anger and deprivation experienced by working- and middle-class families who cannot afford the cost of living nor see a better future for their offspring.

Harris made tiny stabs at this problem at the start of her campaign, with promises to stop “price-gouging” and to provide small subsidies for home ownership. But since the Bill Clinton years, the Democratic Party has been the party of the educated and (hence) better-off, a party aligned with business as usual, even as Obamacare and the Inflation Reduction Act advanced some new projects for that business. Moreover, the Harris campaign largely dropped economic policy concerns in the final weeks, instead concentrating on Trump’s unfitness for the presidency of a democracy.

Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy

Liberal democracy—its institutions and its values—has been unravelling for decades. In the United States, it has been corroded by neoliberal ambitions to replace it with markets and technocrats, assaulted by right-wing mobilizations and parties, and corrupted by the courts. The way it is entwined with capital has become more and more palpable, and moreover, the form is unable to control global powers, like Big Finance, or address global problems, like climate change or massive movements of peoples. As a result, liberal democracy has lost regard and trust among millions who see it, not wrongly, as rigged against them.

Trump’s manifestly anti-democratic rhetoric is neither particularly disturbing nor important to such people. They want a strong manager of the nation, one who doesn’t kowtow to other political or economic powers, one who will make their lives better than they now are, and one who will vanquish some of the danger and precarity that any sentient human feels in the twenty-first century. If that entails a different political form—authoritarian liberalism—so be it. The Harris campaign kept hammering away at the idea that democracy was on the line. How many voters shared the view of democracy that Harris was holding out? How many still equate it with more than what neoliberalism has reduced it to, namely the market and individual freedoms?

Dis-education

In the postwar period, the United States built one of the most democratic education systems in the world—one that offered free, accessible, and good-quality education to most white males and eventually to racial minorities and women too. Beginning in the 1970s, everything about this system came under assault: public funding was withdrawn, costs soared, classroom size expanded, and quality plummeted. In addition, curriculums were politicized and contested, vocational education was valorized over worldly knowledge and forms of thinking, and the right turned hard against universities, culminating in today’s direct campaigns against their “totalitarian brainwashing.” Compounded by siloed social media and a heavily politicized mainstream media, this dis-education makes for both an exceptionally manipulable citizenry and identifies education itself with elitism, wealth, and “wokeism,” i.e. the Democrats. Trump has long and openly cultivated what he termed “the poorly educated” as his base.

Put all these together and one can see how out of touch with the people and the times the Harris campaign was and the Democratic Party is. Indeed, even many voting for her did so not because she embodied their cares or hopes but simply to stop Trump and fascism. The Harris campaign did not address the economic conditions endorsed and facilitated by her party for decades nor could it address a crisis of liberal democracy and citizenship that calls for a new political form.

Trump’s Republican Party is taking us toward one version of that form. Will the Democratic Party finally recognize that it must advance another? One that serves the thriving of the many and the planet rather than the few and the profiteering? One that untwines capital from democracy and builds a transformative state project? One that takes seriously that democracy is rooted in an educated citizenry, not a manipulable electorate? One that is appropriate to twenty-first century powers, problems, and possibilities?

Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  Her most recent book is Nihilistic Times, and she is currently working on one provisionally entitled Reparative Democracy: A Vision for the Twenty-First Century.