On Nov. 7, 2024, Daniel Denvir spoke to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about Kamala Harris’s catastrophic loss to Donald Trump, the prospect of a multiracial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here for an episode of The Dig.

Daniel I’m thinking back a lot to 2016, when the big story was white working-class voters shifting hard to Trump, and we can all really clearly remember the elite liberal refrain that these uneducated white people were just racist, plain and simple, and that that was the explanation for Trumpism. And racism of course played a role. It always plays a role here in the United States of America — that’s not novel. But after 2020 and then Harris’s loss this week, it’s really abundantly clear that this class dealignment from the Democratic Party is a multiracial phenomenon. What’s your diagnosis? What’s driving this class dealignment, and why does the Democratic Party seem totally incapable of confronting it?

Keeanga I think it’s really important to unpack what happened and who voted and what this is about. The problem is that the bottom of the Democratic Party literally fell out. And so I wrote in my magazine, Hammer & Hope, that the biggest problem for the Democratic Party was not necessarily the defection of Black men to Trump — although I’ll come back to that — but the indifference to the election itself. Trump wasn’t the biggest competition — it was the couch. Were people motivated enough to get up and go and deal with all of the nonsense of what it has become to vote in this country?

I don’t know exactly who voted in 2020 and didn’t vote in 2024. There’s still a lot of parsing through the exit data to get the full picture. Still, it is important to talk about the defections where they happened among Latino men and Black men in particular. One of the things that has been missing from the discussion about the Democratic Party’s campaign over the last few months is the way that the party was systematically missing the extent to which people are in crisis.

The heart of Joe Biden’s insistence that he remain in the race was that he had turned the economy around. By all conventional measures, the American economy was doing well: unemployment historically low, poverty low for African Americans, the rate at which people are living in poverty is at historic lows. Biden was correct that the rate of inflation had precipitously declined; I think it’s at around 2.1 now. Problem: falling rates of inflation are not falling prices, it just means the rate at which prices are rising has slowed down. And so we are still stuck. Whether it’s price gouging or not, the resting place of these prices is really out of whack with what people’s incomes are. Especially when you take into consideration the nest eggs that people had amassed through the Covid payments — whether it was enhanced unemployment, the stimulus checks, being at home and not having to pay for gas, rent moratorium — people were able to store away money, and that money’s gone. Savings over the summer began to dip as low as they had been in the recession of 2008. The Democratic Party seemed to have no consciousness of this. How does this economic picture play out in real life?

A historic rise in homelessness is on schedule to rise even higher at the end of 2024. Food insecurity is high. All of these kinds of barometers by which people measure the quality of their life pointed downward for working-class people. Median rent today is 20 percent higher than it was in early 2020. There was a study that showed in the first quarter of 2024, household debt had exceeded $17 trillion. To the extent that people are holding their lives together, it’s through credit cards, which of course we know is completely unsustainable.

You can go through the statistics, you can go through all of these kinds of measurements to piece together what a working-class person’s life is like, and you contrast this to the platform and the promises and policies that the Democratic Party has had on offer since the convention, and it’s like they’re living in a different universe. Take yourself back to the Democratic National Convention, where the theme was joy. Not only was joy perverse in the midst of a genocide in Gaza, but the theme of joy is just not appropriate when people are facing homelessness, when people are facing housing insecurity, food insecurity, so on and so forth. I won’t give them the benefit of saying that there’s a kind of strategic fumble, because I think these are the politics of the Democratic Party: a hostility to an expansion of the welfare state, a hostility to the Covid welfare state that was quickly assembled and then just as quickly disassembled. But what it did was show ordinary people that actually it is possible to use the government to improve people’s lives overnight. You can literally do this overnight.

The Democratic Party, which paints itself as the party of working-class people, the party of ordinary people, has not had a message to communicate that, because I just think it is not a part of their bag. When you look at what is actually on offer compared to what individuals are dealing with, there is a mismatch. And I think that the chickens have come home to roost with that. We’ve seen the dramatic fallout: to lose the presidency, the Senate, most likely the House, is a dramatic condemnation of the Democratic Party strategy.

Daniel Yeah, I think we can’t overstate the centrality of the housing crisis amid the larger cost-of-living crisis, amid a half-century-long process of neoliberal economic restructuring that has had a dramatic political impact, which I think even the Biden administration started to realize in some ways in terms of thinking through things like the Inflation Reduction Act and rebuilding the labor movement. This will rebuild the base that the Democratic Party needs to win. And that had been eviscerated under the Obama and Clinton administrations.

And yet even though Biden in these certain ways departed from neoliberal orthodoxy, he was still so constrained by neoliberal orthodoxy in that amidst a cost-of-living crisis, he could not consider price controls. In the United States, they were off the table. We saw zero concerted effort from the White House and mainstream Democrats to deal with the housing crisis by pursuing rent control. And as you just pointed out, all of this on the heels of Americans during the pandemic getting this glimpse of what a modest social democracy might look like — Oh damn, the government can just give me things.

Keeanga And it was extremely popular.

Daniel And then they took it away.

Keeanga And they took it away. I think it’s important to point out that in 2020, because there were 26 million people marching in the streets, exerting unprecedented pressure on the Democratic Party, Joe Biden was forced to go from telling donors in the fall of 2019 at the beginning of the primary season that not much would change if he were to become president to him having to change everything during the course of that election to try to transform activism in the streets into votes for him. And in doing so, the Democratic Party made big promises. We can go through the Democratic Party platform that was turned over to activists to basically rewrite in the summer of 2020: the promises to cancel student debt, to pay for family leave, to invest money in child care, on and on and on. And what happened?

Daniel Opposing regime change in Iran — that went out the window!

Keeanga What happened in the midst of all these promises? They won more votes than in any other presidential election in American history. So to go from that, to conclude with Kamala Harris that we need to run away from that, that we need to dump all of that, is absurd and really politically insane. The Biden administration, in an effort to rescue the economy that had been sidelined because of Covid and the demands that people stay at home, also had to enact dramatic reforms with the American Rescue Plan that were really effective and again demonstrated to people that this kind of government investment to make people’s lives better is good. It’s popular. Pew did a bunch of polls about investment and government: Is it for the good? Is it for the worse because we might go into debt? Consistently large majorities support government involvement in health care, government use of resources to mitigate poverty, government resources to ensure that people have housing, government resources to ensure that people have child care. People want investments in their schools. So it’s not like this narrative developing now that Americans are just right-wing and Trump gives them what they want, and what do they want? They just want to be angry and lash out. It’s actually not that. The people want reform. And the Democratic Party runs away from reform and has spent the better part of two generations trying to disconnect itself from the legacy of an earlier era of reform. And so Democrats don’t actually champion these policies. They champion horrible public-private partnership programs that mimic what real reform would look like, but they don’t want to be seen as a party pushing for the resumption of any kind of welfare state. They’re a party with a muddled message, whether it’s Joe Biden and searching for the soul of America or whatever the hell he described it as in 2020 or Kamala Harris and we’re the party of joy and freedom, whatever that means in a time of extreme political and economic crisis.

Daniel We saw support for government action to raise wages as well; minimum-wage referenda passed in red states this week. I think something that we always point to and that you’re rightfully pointing to here is that we on the left have majority support on so many of our core issues. But what we have failed to do so far is to create a bigger story, a bigger narrative, a new form of common sense, something that makes all this compelling as a cohesive form of politics that people will identify with. If we could run all of our left platform as referenda simultaneously throughout the nation, we’d have social democracy if not socialism overnight. But that’s not how it works. We need to construct some sort of cohesive political package that appeals to a majority, and that’s what we haven’t figured out.

Keeanga That’s the big vacuum. It can be described as the distance between what people want and the vehicle by which we can achieve that. The Democratic Party has always posited itself as that since at least the last three quarters of the 20th century. But I think in some ways, the end of Obama’s presidency marked a finality in a certain kind of belief in liberalism. This failed campaign of Kamala Harris’s really closes the coffin on that. It doesn’t mean that the Democratic Party is dead. I remember the summer of 2015, when the Republican Party was a laughingstock of the world because they seemed to be serious about putting Donald Trump forward as a presidential candidate. By the time he is inaugurated in January, it will be 10 years from laughingstock to the most powerful political party in the world.

In the two-party system, your fortunes can change very quickly, but there’s a structural problem that the Democrats have in that the working-class base, the core constituencies, are leaching from the party. And that to me is the most dramatic storyline of this presidential contest. Again, when you look at the exit polls, the solid working-class range of voters making $30,000 to $50,000, the majority go to Trump. It was Kamala Harris who won the big money in the U.S. context, $100,000 to $200,000 earners, the $200,000-plus earners. The vast majority of white workers without a college degree go to Trump. It is true that most Black workers without a college degree went to Harris, however. But the base of the Democratic Party is being frittered away. Significant portions are going to the Republican Party, and then other parts have just been left to float away into the ether because no one represents what it is that they want. So this is a structural problem for the Democratic Party. How will they reconstitute an electoral coalition that can give them an ability to compete in these races? And based on the kind of political framework that they are putting forward, which is vapid, vacuous commentary that is nothing-speak?

Daniel I think the vacuousness is really a big part of it. Poll testing everything that you say comes across to people as insincere, plastic bullshit.

Keeanga Because it is. In Philadelphia, what has been described as the poorest of the big cities for more than a decade, they’ve been having rock concerts downtown. There’s a housing crisis in Philadelphia. There is a crisis of poverty in Philadelphia. There are dramatically underfunded public schools in Philadelphia. And the Democrats come rolling in with the celebrities, and they have nothing to say about any of that except get out the vote. It is an embarrassment. And people pick up on that.

Daniel It’s insulting to people’s intelligence.

Keeanga It’s absolutely insulting people’s intelligence. There is the condescension and arrogance of Barack Obama, who likes to tell voters that change is incremental. These people tell us these are the most consequential elections of our lifetimes, and yet we shouldn’t expect much. There’s a mismatch between the low expectations and the idea that change is only incremental — the rent’s not incremental, right? The cost of living that changes from one year to the next is not incremental. And then there’s the lecturing from Obama, him telling Muslims not to bite your nose off to spite your face, lecturing to Black men that any economic concerns they have don’t exist, that actually it’s just sexism. There’s the condescension of the Democratic Party, there’s the elitism of the Democratic Party, and you combine all of this with their absolute inability to change anything on a national level and then on a local level. What people have is continuity from one administration to the next. The same sorts of conditions that exist under an Obama administration exist under a Trump administration and a Biden administration. So it does feel like, what’s the point? What is the point of going out to vote for this or that politician when not much changes for the good in my everyday life? There are many different factors that they’re going to have to overcome to reconstitute a voting coalition if they have any hope of being relevant in the near future electorally.

Daniel We see all these liberal pundits who are saying, It’s not Kamala’s fault. It’s the American people’s fault, which brings to mind that great Brecht line about dissolving the people and electing another. Unfortunately, in an electoral democracy you actually have to win people’s votes and they don’t take well to being condescended to, and that’s not just among the super party elite. In white middle-class neighborhoods, right adjacent to where I live in Rhode Island, I see signs everywhere that say “Harris Walz Obviously,” and it feels sort of exemplary of a problem. There’s a clip circulating in recent days from the late David Graeber, where he argues that there’s some kind of sick dialectic connection between this sort of elite liberal smugness that really prioritizes feeling good about oneself and virtue signaling and then these clown cartoon scam artists playing dumb on the right.

Keeanga Yes, I think there’s the playing dumb from the Yalies that is always hilarious and frightening and disgusting to watch. I have a class of freshmen, and I was wondering what their reaction would be. I remember in 2017 or 2016, the reaction was pretty much like someone had been killed: shock, terror, complete overwhelm and bewilderment. But I think for these young people, they’ve grown up with Trump as a political figure whereas we grew up with Trump as an entertainer, a kind of buffoon, as part of a seedy popular culture in the United States, which enhanced the shock value of him becoming president. For these students of mine, he seems like just a weird kind of unhinged, right-wing politician.

But I do think Trump’s anger and disgust resonates with people in this artificial world of mainstream politics. Trump isn’t offering any plausible solution to those economic issues either. It’s not like he actually has a coherent economic plan. His plan for housing is I’m going to deport 11 million people, and you can live in the places they used to live in. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s dangerous and disgusting, but it is also completely nonsensical and absurd. So it’s not like people are comparing policy platforms. Instead it is a kind of thumb in the eye to the status quo; even if you’re not getting anything in return, there’s some kind of strange satisfaction in having stuck it to these suits, the scolds, the people who have figured it all out and are here to tell you that you owe them your vote.

There’s an aspect of this that is beyond the kind of bread-and-butter policy discussion. There’s something so stifling and gross about American politics. Trump’s rambling rally speeches where people are streaming out don’t make any sense, and yet they’re not the canned political speech that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz offer, that by the 17th time we knew all of the applause lines, we knew all of the inflections, we knew exactly what they were going to say. Part of the Democratic Party’s political crisis is that they are the establishment, they are the status quo, and people are tired of that. They’re sick of that because they equate that with continuity in the conditions of their everyday lives.

Daniel Democrats protecting a status quo that so many people want to destroy and replaying 2016’s status quo protection campaign — I think it’s related to which voters the Democratic Party is pursuing. Democrats would like to believe that their strategy of courting anti-Trump Republicans, affluent professionals, and suburbanites is somehow unrelated to them losing working-class voters. But I think they’re obviously related; courting one for so many reasons entails losing the latter, and it’s a process that really took off under the Clinton administration. This is a political choice that entails certain policy choices. Could a multiracial working class be won over to a populous social democratic candidacy that was oriented toward class conflict? Is the basic problem that the Democratic Party as it’s currently constituted can’t do that because they can’t wage class conflict against the very elites they’re pursuing as their base?

Keeanga I think the first glimpse of that potential was in 2016 with Bernie Sanders’s surprise run even though people criticized Bernie for not having a particularly refined message about the problems of racism in American society. The campaign was truncated before we could see the full integration of young Black people who were certainly attracted to his political message and the economic reforms that he was championing. But by 2020, clearly Sanders’s campaign represented a totally different future for the Democratic Party: the kind of political coalition that we salivate over now, the multiracial political movement that I think has all the potential in the world. We can see the potential more clearly now than in the past 50 years, with the mutual evisceration of Black, white, and Latino life in this country.

We could talk about the economic categories or statistics, the study about the deaths of working-class white people that came out right before the pandemic, the so-called deaths of despair in which ordinary white working-class people without college degrees were dying of drug addiction, opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. What has happened through the pandemic to now, the rate at which white people were dying quicker, Black working-class people have caught up. And so the mutual immiseration of the lives of the multiracial working class absolutely lays the political foundation for a movement. The problem is not that that potential doesn’t exist, it’s that it has not been a part of any real political initiative in the U.S.

Black Lives Matter was so important in terms of raising the profile of the impact of racism in the lives of Black people in this country in ways that are hard to appreciate now because it’s become such an accepted and understood aspect of life for Black people in the United States. Ten years or 15 years earlier, there’s really an absence of discussion about the impacts of racism in the lives of Black people. One of the other things that the best parts of the Black Lives Matter movement did was demonstrate how the working-class character of Black life is part of what made Black people vulnerable to policing and to the overrepresentation of Black people in the criminal legal system. The problem, though, is that a movement focused purely or exclusively on the lives of Black people actually doesn’t have the social capacity to transform those conditions that make Black people vulnerable to policing in the first place. So if we say that social inequality and economic inequality are at the center of that vulnerability, then it actually takes a mass movement to transform that. A movement that defines itself as Black Lives Matter is not the vehicle that can actually build the mass multiracial movement that is necessary, because something has to capture the radicalization of white people and transform that into politics as well.

We saw in 2020 one of the reasons why the backlash was triggered was because of the radicalization of young white people. Because millions of white people were marching against racism sometimes in places where there were no Black people. And we have a left that often responds so cynically to that — like, Oh, do you want a cookie for fighting racism? No, people don’t want cookies for fighting racism. This is an important development in our political movement to try to build the type of mass movement that’s necessary to change the social and political conditions that are disproportionately affecting Black people but that are affecting the entire working class and poor people in this country.

That’s the kind of vehicle we need to organize and to build. And without that, what we are seeing is that the Republicans have successfully tried to step into that political vacuum. We can say that Trump’s political platform, his policy platform, and his economic plans are ridiculous and make no sense. But what the Republicans are doing is offering a narrative to explain why your life, your life chances, your quality of life have gone into the toilet. We’re going to offer you an explanation. We’re going to blame immigrants, and we’re going to blame crime. The Democrats don’t have an explanation for why this has happened.

Daniel No. They don’t have an explanation because they don’t have an enemy. Because the enemy is the base that they’re hoping to have.

Keeanga Absolutely. This is a political problem. Some parts of the left try to relate to the anger and despair of working-class people, but often it’s turned into the discourse of white privilege, which just sounds ridiculous when you look at the absolute destruction of working-class white life in this country. Another part of the left will crucify you if you say the wrong thing, including that you’re going to vote for Kamala Harris because you’re afraid of Donald Trump — that makes you a genocide apologist. I understand the sentiment, but it’s difficult to grow beyond what you are if you see everyone as the problem or everyone as a potential enemy. It means that the explanations that the left has — this is capitalism, this is racism, this economy is set up to fail for working-class people, we need to redistribute the wealth, we need to not give the U.S. Department of Defense nearly a trillion dollars every year, we don’t need to give Israel tens of billions of dollars while our schools, hospitals, public infrastructure is completely falling apart — all of the arguments that the left could be offering to fill this political void go unheard because often the left cuts itself off from that audience. There’s a critique of everything and everyone. There’s a sense of acrimony. The left is inhospitable to people who are not already like us. What we are reduced to then is groups of friends and groups of like-minded people who like to stay that way. We can’t grow like that. We can’t get big like that.

Daniel Little study groups and sects, which some people I think actually kind of perversely yearn to return to the comfort of, because being in mass politics and organizing, say, tenants in a building, some of them are Trump voters, and you need every single person on board. That is what a tenant union looks like. That is what a labor union looks like.

Keeanga That’s what the working class looks like.

Daniel A mass movement. There is a certain type of identity politics that really does play into the right’s hands. And this is something that mainstream analysts ahead of the election have really glommed onto, but they’ve done so in a really confused and confusing way because in fact the upshot isn’t selling out racial justice or trans people. It’s building a big movement that tells a cohesive, compelling story about what’s going on in this country and how to fix it. And that invites everybody in.

Keeanga That has solidarity at its core. The old Knights of Labor slogan that an injury to one is an injury to all and really explicating what that looks like and what that means — we were onto something with that in 2020, and that is part of the reason why the backlash was so fierce. I wrote about how Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin, said in 2022 when the Republicans were washed out in the midterm elections, that this is because of multicultural curriculums in schools, that if Republicans don’t change or address this, that they will never win another election. And part of that was not just critical race theory but a reaction to young white people marching militantly in the streets against racism. That was a critical opportunity to not just come out of 2020 having dumped Trump but really building a vehicle that could grow. Instead all of that energy got diverted into getting Joe Biden elected, then got diverted again into the Georgia Senate races in January 2021, and then was demobilized. Joe Biden, even as he was backing away from his promises and doing the bidding of Republicans in deconstructing the emergency Covid state, faced no resistance or opposition. The only hint of opposition and resistance to Joe Biden came last spring with the eruption of the Palestinian solidarity protest, because it was the one issue that could not be co-opted into the Democratic Party in ways that Black Lives Matter could, in ways that the immigrant rights movement could, in ways that the LGBT movement could. This is part of the problem, the demobilization. So here we are, faced with renewed political attacks, still lacking those vehicles to respond in a mass way.

It doesn’t mean that people won’t respond and that we can’t respond because people inevitably will when Trump tries to initiate deportations and all of the horrible things that he has promised to do. But on the left, we have big problems: the fracturing of the left, the lack of political vehicles, the entanglement with the Democratic Party. It’s not like Joe Biden just pushed a button and the left is demobilized. It’s also about how groups who believe that access within the Democratic Party gives them the ear of officials in the party, and perhaps that is the most effective way to get change. These are political debates that need to happen, strategic debates, tactical debates about what it is that we should be doing and how it is that we build ourselves out of the current crisis we’re in right now.

Daniel And I think we need to have those debates in, if possible, a comradely fashion that really assesses the conjuncture and possible paths forward strategically rather than moralistically.

Keeanga Absolutely.

Daniel Which probably means not on Twitter.

Keeanga But I think that is actually a big thing. How do we build our way out of this? Are we going to do it on these online platforms? Can we get in rooms together? Can we talk to each other? It sounds so touchy feely. But there is a culture problem on the left — the hostility, the intolerance, which I think has conclusively been proven to be a feature of online engagement. Something has to change because there’s not just going to be cycles of Trump comes in, there’s going to be a resistance, we resist and resist and resist and have a confrontation, and then we funnel all of our resources to get Josh Shapiro elected as president. It’s not happening because the Democratic Party’s core constituencies are breaking off.

There’s a real question about what we can do that has to be seriously addressed. There’s this idea from liberals that this has happened before. We’ve confronted this before. Let’s have a women’s march in January. Things are materially worse for people. The Trump administration is not going to be surprised. They were just as surprised as everyone else when they won in 2016. Stephen Miller has been planning since 2020 how to get back to the White House and intensify the deportation machine. Project 2025 is unfortunately a real thing. They have a plan of governance. It doesn’t mean that they just hit a button and execute the entire thing, but this is not a surprise: Oh my God, we have power. This is Yes, we’re returning to power. We have plans.

Daniel And there are no kind of old school establishment Republicans or deep state figures who are going to be in the room to mess it up for him. They’ve got a team that’s ready to go.

Keeanga They have the government. They have all the chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court. This is not 2016.

Daniel I think you’re rightfully pointing out the pitfalls of so much of the liberal and left liberal nonprofit industrial complex just banking everything on defeating Trump and then relying on access to the Biden White House. But conversely, on the left, debates about the electoral project we’ve had over the past decade or so have become so fraught because there are clear limitations to it. We’re obviously not anywhere close to fully winning yet.

But I want to reiterate what you said about Bernie 2020 and then expand on it. It traced the outlines of a possible working-class multiracial majority, especially given what’s happening with Latino voters right now. Look at California and Nevada and the vanguard role that working-class Latinos played in the social democratic struggle in 2020. But then, just as a counterfactual that we experienced, look at a presidential cycle where there’s no Democratic primary and there’s absolutely no left pole in the debate. Everything lurched way to the right.

Keeanga Everything lurched to the right to such an extent that the influence of 2020 was airbrushed from history. This to me was one of the most shocking developments with the Harris campaign, the just complete removal of Black Lives Matter and the antiracist movement. The most dramatic example of that happens with the Democratic Party platform. The Democratic Party had had an opposition to the death penalty as part of its platform since 2016. And they took it out.

Daniel That was so gratuitous! Who was even looking to check that?

Keeanga You don’t want to be weak on the death penalty. So you remove that, you remove any reference to police brutality, you remove any reference really to police reform, to discrimination.

Daniel And you attack Trump for not finishing his border wall rather than condemning the idea of the border wall.

Keeanga And they promise to do it! Yes, we’re going to sign the bill that spends a billion dollars to finish a wall that originally Kamala Harris called a medieval vanity project. And the flip-flop on fracking: Fracking is terrible; we can’t do it to I support fracking — in fact, my administration expanded fracking. But with Black Lives Matter, it was surprising to me the extent to which that part of the discussion was left out of the assessment about why Black people in general are so lukewarm on Kamala Harris. Eventually Black women’s votes for Harris matched what they had been for Biden, but Black women had also been trailing in support. I think that people have underestimated what it means to have Kamala Harris, a Black woman running for president, refuse to speak about racism, refuse to talk about racism as part of the campaign when the past 10 years have really been a period of struggles around Black Lives Matter. I believe that it was the abandonment of antiracism, as well as the continuity of economic marginalization and inequality experienced by working-class and poor Black people, that meant the freefall of Black support for Joe Biden that then was transferred to Kamala Harris. Other aspects of this don’t even warrant discussion in the mainstream media, like the abolition of affirmative action.

Even though the Supreme Court decision affected a small number of Black people, it set a tone of permissiveness around racial discrimination that you could then see play out with the attacks on DEI, which also affect probably a relatively small number of Black people but change the environment and discussion around racism, so much so that you then have Republicans denying that racism is an issue, denying that racial inequality is an issue. Very quickly, programs that might affect small numbers of Black people change the political atmosphere that affects the vast majority of Black people. And then all of a sudden you feel as if the issues that are most important to you are being ignored and excluded. Polling shows that vast majorities of Black people think that racism is responsible for putting limits on their ability to ascend socially in American society. Vast majorities of Black people think that the system is rigged against them, think prisons were set up to particularly constrain and hold them back. Pew originally classified this under “racial conspiracy theories,” but this is actually about Black life in the United States. The Democratic Party self-imposed an end to discussions about racism: We don’t want to be woke, so we’re not going to talk about affirmative action. We don’t want to be woke, so we’re going to take DEI out of the party platform. You can be cynical and Black and be like, Well, of course they have to do this. At the same time, it feels like once again the issues that are affecting us are completely marginalized and disappeared. Even if it doesn’t come out as a sharp critique, it does come out as a kind of Whatever about this election. And that is part of the disaffection with the Democratic Party that they have no solutions for, because they don’t want to talk about racism, because they don’t want to be the woke party, and they don’t want to talk about all of these issues that somehow can be ascribed to wokism, which then leaves them not a lot to talk about when trying to reconstitute the electoral coalition that they once had.

Daniel I think the Democratic Party adopting essentially a fascist position on Palestine, supporting a settler-colonial genocide of a mostly refugee population and in doing so waging an all-out political war against major constituencies that are typically Democratic voters, smearing huge swaths of American college students as antisemitic extremists, has been a key thing that has facilitated the larger rightward move of the Democratic Party. Exit polls show us, and just common sense shows us, that Gaza was not the number one issue for your median voter who showed up on Tuesday. But I think it was arguably decisive in Michigan, and I think it had huge knock-on effects across the board in terms of alienating young people, alienating progressives, obviously alienating Arabs and Muslims. Putting the Biden administration into the most brutal form of conflict with these portions of its base alienated those portions in a really profound way unlike anything I’ve seen in my entire life in politics. I’ve never been so disgusted by a Democratic ticket as somebody who’s been disgusted by pretty much all of them in my entire adult political life. But it’s also part and parcel of what made the Harris-Cheney alliance almost inevitable, because where else was she going to go after a year of their administration demonizing the antiwar alternative?

Keeanga I was trying to talk to my students, because they wanted to talk about the election, and it’s a class on politics, so it made sense to do so. One of the things that they were struggling to understand is why Liz Cheney campaigning for Harris was causing such a visceral reaction for some people. These are 18-year-olds, and they have absolutely no recollection of the Iraq War. I was trying to explain the hypocrisy and the betrayal — Barack Obama became president running against the legacy of Dick Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, and to just erase that history was demonstrative of the way that the Democratic Party engages in its own self-induced amnesia. We always talk about the right and the kind of hamfisted attacks on history that the right engages in; they ban books and ban classes and change curricula. But the Democratic Party is engaged in the same kind of exercise in parading Liz Cheney around as some kind of hero because she doesn’t like Donald Trump and in Kamala Harris thanking Dick Cheney for his service to the nation. What on earth does that even mean?

It lends itself to the utter cynicism that regular people hold this party in. When you look at the age categories of people and how they’re voting, that has to be a part of the mix. Many of us remember the U.S. war in Iraq, and to see Liz Cheney paraded around as some kind of hero for purely partisan reasons is really disgusting. I think that kind of cynicism and the U.S. sponsorship of the Israeli siege on Palestine really activated the anger and disgust of young people. The number of 18- to 29-year-olds voting for Harris compared to Biden also fell off dramatically. The war in Gaza is not the number one issue but is certainly part of what we sometimes refer to as the enthusiasm gap. A big part of it has to do with Kamala Harris’s pathetic response, which is Yes, I know thousands of people appear to be getting killed, and I’m not going to do a single thing to change any aspect of the policy. I think some consultant told her that it’s good to empathize with the pain people feel, so you should say something about how tragic it is, the number of people who are being killed, but then make sure that Israel cannot become a political issue for you.

Even if it’s not your central issue, it just is another example of the political doublespeak that these people engage in, which underscores their utter insincerity. The last thing I’ll say about this particular issue and how it factors into the collapsing support for the Democratic Party is the way that this election has been framed as our last-ditch effort at saving democracy. These people tell us that Trump is a fascist, that democracy is on the ballot, that this may be the very last election we can ever participate in. But yes, we’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to hand the keys to the White House over to Trump on Jan. 20, and we’re going to come together as Americans. I’m sorry, what?

Daniel It’s not congruent.

Keeanga It makes no sense. It underlines the utter lack of seriousness of this party, because either that was a gimmick and you didn’t really mean it, so now you look like idiots, or what are you talking about? This person is going to be responsible for ending democracy. He’s going to be a dictator on day one. And you’re just going to give them the keys to the White House? I’m sorry, what? So Israel, Palestine, the fact that Biden gave the okay for the political crackdown by the police last spring by publicly characterizing the Palestinian solidarity protest as violent, as antisemitic, gave the signal to administrators and the police that it was fine to go on the attack. I think students recognize and remember that. On the one hand, they were told that the Republicans are the big threat to democracy. Republicans are the threat to free speech and to the freedom to think. And yet it’s Democratic mayors who are calling out the police to beat the hell out of protesters, to shut protesters up, to move protesters off the streets. And it’s probably liberally aligned college administrators who also colluded with law enforcement and police to repress student protests. Not to mention the double standard around free speech, where speech in support of and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is absolutely policed and repressed. Anything said about Israel is looked at with a microscope with the intention of finding an excuse to punish, to marginalize, and to silence.

These contradictions are clear to anyone paying attention, and we know that tens of thousands of students around the country were paying attention. So it didn’t need to be the number one issue. It needed to be one of a thousand cuts that leached any kind of enthusiasm and hope that this campaign would represent something different and could cause people to equivocate or to just feel like it really doesn’t matter. Because if Gaza was your issue, you had no candidate in this campaign. And even if it wasn’t your central issue, the position of Kamala Harris was such a representation of the status quo that it had to cast a pall over everything that she claimed to be running on.

Daniel I think and worry that if we see a new wave of serious repression of the left unlike anything we’ve seen in my lifetime under Trump, we will look back at these liberal elected officials and administrators as having set important precedents and having legitimated it.

Keeanga And it’s not just on Palestine. The attacks on Palestinian solidarity are the Trojan horse, because at many of these college campuses where there’s a tremendous amount of union activity, they’ve changed the rules around protest. They’ve changed the rules not just around political content. Take Princeton, for example: it wants to restrict protests in front of the main administrative building to the walkways in front. Now of course the main administrative building is a central target for students because that’s where the president’s office is, that’s where the provost is. But if you’re in a union on campus, that’s where your employer is, that’s where the boss is. They don’t say just for pro-Palestine marches or protests, you can’t be on the grass. It’s for any protest. It is using the repression of Palestinian solidarity on campus to address other issues in the awakening of the campus as a workplace and as a site of political and economic conflict. They’re using these protests to change many rules that will manage the way these conflicts play out.

Daniel The repression that Stop Cop City protesters have faced feels like perhaps the most foreboding example of what we could be facing.

Keeanga I would be interested in seeing the exit polls from Atlanta and the way that the overwhelming and tremendous repression of the activist movement there plays out politically. Because if I’m thinking about this as death by a thousand cuts for the Democratic Party, how does local rule and the local repression by the Democratic Party affect the overall enthusiasm, interest, engagement of ordinary Democratic voters? In Atlanta the repression of Stop Cop City was so craven, reckless, abusive, and then the same political apparatus turns out and says, That’s why we got to get the vote out for Kamala. I mean, there’s a disconnect. You see that in Philly, though not to the same extent. The new mayor is not liked very much and is ramming through a billion-dollar new stadium for the local basketball team, the 76ers.

Daniel Next to one of this country’s most precious Chinatowns.

Keeanga Yes, the activists and organizers from Chinatown have been ignored and completely marginalized. It has no support apart from developers and a very small portion of people. No one likes this. Again, you have these local officials doing terrible things who then turn around and say, That’s why we got to get out the vote. I don’t think it’s the most consequential thing, but I do think there is something to say about the political mismanagement of the Democratic Party, the face of repression from the Democratic Party on the local level that is also a part of this mix. Because you can see Trump’s numbers in New York, in Philadelphia —

Daniel In Rhode Island.

Keeanga In L.A. Everywhere. It’s not just suburban and rural white people. Inroads everywhere in the heart of America. In Chicago. You cannot disconnect that from the utter dysfunction of the Democratic Party and local politics.

Daniel Yeah, 100 percent. I am redoubling my own commitment to building organized left power in an organized working class, in my case in Rhode Island, through tenant organizing and housing justice. Not only is it a good in and of itself, but we need to make deep blue states and cities into social democratic models. There’s no strategy for national power that doesn’t run through functional and appealing models at the local and state level.

Keeanga Absolutely. In that sense, all politics is local, but those local politics are connected to the dysfunctions of the national party as well. It also influences the dynamics around race and the dynamics around class, because increasingly in these cities, we have Black mayors, increasingly Black women who are at the helm of these cities. And it brings the issue of class to the surface in Black politics in these local arenas. I do think this has an impact that plays out in national politics. For the left, it means that we have to take up the local issues, too, and not just the national debates, the national campaigns. How are you organized on a local basis? How do we connect local struggles to national struggles to make sure that we have coalitions that exist on different levels as the foundation for building the mass movement that we’ve been talking about?

Daniel To be self-critical here: We’ve been talking a lot about the Democratic Party fueling mass cynicism and disaffection, which is all very true, but there’s also a real challenge for us on the left in reaching rank-and-file liberal Democratic Party stalwarts. Not the establishment party elite, but rather the millions of ordinary Americans who continue to make up the Democratic Party base. These are people who are Black, who are union members. These are people who are still the minority, maybe a third of working-class non-college-educated white voters who have not flipped to Trump. And these are rank-and-file liberals who in many ways share our values and our goals but are often baffled by our project or baffled that we’re not enthusiastically cheering Harris on. I met these people all the time campaigning for Bernie in 2020, who were like, Yes, I agree with you on the issues, but the Democratic Party as presently constituted is our best bet to achieve justice in this world.

I experienced it in a very weird way being an alternate uncommitted delegate to the DNC in Chicago. By and large what we were doing for the first few days was walking around with a QR code that would take delegates to a sign-on letter calling for an arms embargo. So I was one-on-oneing with delegates who are a retiree on a Democratic Party county committee in Florida or a school principal who just got elected. I didn’t meet a single person who thought what Israel is doing is good. I met people who signed the letter, and that was great. And then I met people who wouldn’t, and they would say, Biden’s trying his best to end this war. The war is bad, though. These were kind of exemplars of these ordinary liberals who as part of any kind of winning coalition we really need.

Keeanga Absolutely. This connects to what we were talking about earlier, which is how does the left become hospitable? We have to think about the entry points. How do we create on-ramps, entry points into organization and into discussions about this? An important part of left culture that has to be regenerated is one of political discussion and debate. There are so many questions that people have — questions about politics, questions about history, questions about how did we get here, questions about the nature of our society and no place to engage with them. The space where these discussions happen are Fox News, cable news.

Of course you can get a podcast or you can get some kind of forum online, but this is fundamentally different from bringing people together to talk about these things and figure out what it is that we do. That’s just basic organization building. How do we create a culture where people can engage in debate and discussion? That seems daunting and overwhelming — who knows how to do this. But if this election season does not demonstrate that we have to figure out what the alternative to the Democratic Party is, like a real third party, I don’t know what else needs to happen. I mean, that in and of itself is a debate, right? Can we just take over the Democratic Party? I’m deeply skeptical about our ability to do that because the Democratic Party as a party is really a figment of our imagination. It’s not a democratic party. It’s not a party in which ordinary people can come into it, act as a rank and file, and dictate and determine what the direction of that party is.

Daniel The Republican and Democratic Parties wouldn’t qualify as political parties in any other electoral democracy.

Keeanga Exactly. The idea that it’s too hard to create an alternative, so what we really need to do is focus on the transformation of the Democratic Party, I just don’t see any precedent for that. While I can agree that a viable third party seems and feels very impossible, I don’t know if it’s any more impossible than the idea that somehow we can transform this utterly corporate, utterly bought and paid-for undemocratic party. I don’t see the route to that. Creating a third-party alternative is not something that you can create an outline, and we take one, two, three steps, we’ll be there. I think that it’s possible in a situation like we had in 2020 where you have millions of people who are activated, who are marching and desperately trying to do something, but I don’t know exactly what the route is to doing that. I don’t believe that the Democratic Party is a receptacle we can take over and change. And yet the sentiment and the desire for a vehicle that can bridge that gap between what it is that people want and what is necessary to achieve it exists, and we have to figure out the route to making that happen. What is the mechanism that is necessary to make that a possibility? Because this ain’t it.

Daniel I’m not at all optimistic about taking over or transforming the Democratic Party, but I’m maybe even more pessimistic, at least in the short or medium terms, for a third party. Both of us have been around for a while, and I would put out as a stark point of comparison Nader 2000, which was my first big electoral involvement. I was 17, I couldn’t vote, but I threw everything into that campaign. I went to the mega rallies. It felt like the earth was moving beneath my feet. And then he couldn’t even get 5 percent. I think he got 2 or 3. And then Bernie 2020 and 2016, running within the party, mobilized so many millions more people to a left vision than we ever had been able to before — certainly more than Nader did in 2000, which was really the high watermark for left third partyism, and it was a low high watermark. My worry about third partyism is attempting to do that without first building the organized workplace and social power will be a cul-de-sac in which we pour a lot of energy without much result and please the Democratic Party in doing so, because I think that they would prefer us not to run Bernies.

Keeanga An initiative around a third party can’t be a boutique project of a handful of left sects who want to get together and then can’t agree on what to put on the agenda. That can’t be the vision. That’s what I meant when I was saying that it has to be something born out of a mass political situation in the first place. And yet also there has to be organizing in the interim because we know that in the midst of tens of millions of people marching and being activated, you can’t just throw a third party together. Bernie’s run in 2020 in particular showed the potential, but it also showed the extent to which the Democratic Party will close ranks in a heartbeat to destroy an alternative in its midst. There’s the Working Families Party, which exists as a thing but seems to function as an apparatus of the Democratic Party and not necessarily as an independent entity. I don’t know exactly what process or procedure would change these dynamics, but I do know that there is a desperate desire for a political alternative. Trump will attract some people, but the bigger issue is just the bottom falling out and people just being frittered into the ether.

Daniel And we need to catch them.

Keeanga They’ll be left on their own, contributing to the crisis of mental health, of loneliness, of despair. What that alternative looks like I don’t exactly know, but the desire for it is very real. There are plenty of things that we can point to that have shown that; Bernie’s runs in 2016 and 2020 brought actual genuine excitement into politics and showed the possibility of being organized and into politics. The desire is there. The vehicle has not presented itself. That’s part of the challenge that we face.

Daniel One entity that comes to mind that we haven’t mentioned is the Democratic Socialists of America, which is riven by really kind of brutal internal debates nationally right now. But I’ll point to New York City DSA, which maybe does begin to point toward this model of a kind of party behind the party that operates as a party even while running its candidates in Democratic primaries. They have a substantial number of people in the state legislature and the City Council who I believe do move somewhat in a party-like formation. Now we have Zohran Mamdani’s run for mayor. I don’t think he’s predicted to be a likely winner at this point, but number one, who knows? Number two, he will, without question, be a major force that drags the whole debate left, particularly on housing and rent control. So I think New York City DSA in particular is an interesting thing that merits closer study.

Keeanga There are big debates to have about left electoralism, because I think New York might be a particular model. There’s a curious thing developing in Chicago, where Brandon Johnson has been mayor for a year and a half, and there have been questions that have developed about his political leadership. There is an ongoing confrontation over the Chicago public schools. Regardless of the minutiae with that, one thing that looks clear from afar is that the Chicago left is trying to deal with the contradiction of what you do when it’s your person in office. How do you navigate that and how do you negotiate that? Especially when the mayor might have a proclivity for invoking those relationships and his part of the left in Chicago historically to explain policies that are incongruent with the left project there. You have a left that feels constrained because it’s their guy in office. And then you have your guy in office, who is invoking his relationship to the left to explain why he is enacting certain policies and practices that under other circumstances the left might be protesting.

My fear is that dynamic is more the norm than what may exist in New York. To me it means that there are still big questions about the electoral projects of the left and to what extent they undermine other kinds of organizing. And it doesn’t mean just having a kneejerk opposition to electoral politics. I know there may be a certain section of the left that just dismisses electoralism out of hand. But I do think there’s always a potential issue with resources and capacity and that electoralism can very easily present itself as the more reasonable, pragmatic, practical approach to politics. Then we have the issues with access and what happens when those political figures are in your organization and there is a certain amount of pressure to work it out, have a meeting to not initiate the protest, to not initiate activism for the sake of preserving the relationship. All of these things have to do with the balance of forces and what the level of struggle is. These are serious issues that have to be considered in terms of the strategies and tactics that the left needs to deploy in order to wield influence to be effective and to be able to actually grow in size.

Daniel I couldn’t agree more. There are inherent contradictions and trade-offs that need to be debated, assessed, and planned around. What’s important is that we be able to have spaces and organizations to have these sorts of strategic discussions that don’t feel so zero-sum and thus render rivals into enemies or people who have a different take, because ultimately the solution to some will be that different groups are going to try different things, and we’re not going to consider each other our enemies.

Keeanga It’s an important point to emphasize. Part of the problem as I see it is that in some ways we’ve put the cart before the horse — and to use that metaphor, the horse has already left the barn. It’s not like we can go back. But in many spaces we don’t have that culture of democracy, debate, political accountability. So we have emphasized electoral projects before we actually have the structures for political assessment, political accountability, actual democratic influence over the electeds who operate within our midst, because the electoral project is easier to engage with and unleash than establishing democratic norms within our organizations. While there are many different campaigns that may have varying degrees of success or failure, the relationship between the organized forces that helped to propel those candidates into office is still somewhat murky. What is the true relationship between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and DSA? She’s still in DSA, but it feels like AOC is doing her own thing. These are the questions that we have to ask but that are easy to circumvent because a campaign is easier to initiate and get underway.

Daniel I want to ask you about a major and increasingly weird ideological challenge we face exemplified by the role of Elon Musk on the Trumpist far right. I think it’s important, including in terms of multiracial working-class dealignment, because in the absence of a left populist alternative, what we’re seeing is neoliberalism remaking so many people into wannabe entrepreneurs, aspiring to make money from crypto or landlordism, any sort of escape from wage labor through hustling hard, achieving the new American dream of passive income.

Keeanga That’s what Harris was offering, right? Crypto and weed.

Daniel Yeah. To Black men.

Keeanga Fucking ridiculous.

Daniel What do you make of this fierce attachment to these avatars of American capitalism at the very moment when people feel more crushed by American capitalism than ever? What kind of model for being in the world are we putting forward as an alternative?

Keeanga It feels like the only way out. One of the first demonstrations I went to when I moved to Chicago in the late 1990s, early 2000s, was organized by Jesse Jackson. There was a public school across the street from a brand-new juvenile jail, a huge white mirrored building that took up two or three city blocks and towered over everything. He had called this protest at an elementary school because it had only one functioning toilet. The teachers would organize the students to make a trip down to the basement to use the bathroom once or twice a day. Jackson was drawing attention to the obvious contradiction of a multimillion-dollar facility to jail Black kids and a public school that had one functioning toilet in the basement.

Why is basketball, boxing, MMA, rapping popular? It’s a way out when nothing else seems to work and you can’t plausibly imagine anything working. If you go into your average working-class Black neighborhood school, there is no way that you walk in with any expectation that you can walk out and be set on the path to having a high quality of life for you and your family. No one thinks that. The jobs that are available to young Black people, just like the jobs that are available to young working-class, rural, poor white people, offer you no future, no hope. We wonder why there are deaths of despair, whether they are Black people in despair or white people in despair. It’s because we live in a society where there is no hope. It is absolutely true. People are bonded to debt with no job that can pay that debt. It means a lifetime of shitty work that you don’t want to do, that is meaningless. That is the future they have made for us — so much so that Kamala Harris talked for five minutes about a 5 percent rent cap until she realized that actually you can’t guarantee something like that, especially if you want to surround yourself with the Mark Cubans of the world, with the nice billionaires. Liberal billionaires don’t want to be hearing about rent caps. We live in a society that guarantees you the right to a job that can’t pay your bills, to a place to live where the rise in rent is unchecked and a landlord can charge you anything he determines you’re able to pay, that sees an increase in evictions, that underfunds every aspect of its public sector. And then we wonder why you want to be a rapper, you want to be a basketball player, you want to be Elon Musk. Who the hell doesn’t want to be a billionaire when that is your social reality?

Clearly the way you transform that is for people to have hope that their lives can be different. Hope is not a cheap religiosity that some divine intervention can change this. It’s a union job. It’s more than a living wage. It is capped rent, rent that’s 20 percent of your income. It’s parks, it’s libraries, it’s health care, it’s free college — not student loans, free college. It’s transportation. It’s vacation. It’s peace of mind. It’s quiet, it’s connection, it’s friendships, it’s relationships. That is what supplants the stupidity of the kind of vapid, venal, billionaire psychosis of Trump and his gold sneakers, Elon Musk and his rocket phallus. These are cartoon figures, but they are animated through the hopelessness of society the way that it is. We know this. That’s why polls show majorities want to use our public resources to make people’s lives better. Ordinary people recognize this. A good life is the secret to a long and meaningful life, but that’s hard to achieve in a society that promises you absolutely nothing except the right or capacity to find a job that is utterly meaningless and that can’t afford you or your family members a decent quality of life. That’s what this struggle is about: how to have a good life and not a life of debt and meaningless work.

Daniel I think we would both agree that the left has nowhere near the sort of mass organization that we require to govern instead of meekly petitioning the governing class. Where should we be strategically focusing our organizing efforts? Two things that always come to mind for me are labor and housing.

Keeanga I think labor is paramount, and it’s often missing in our discussions about what the future holds. We look at police brutality, we look at this or that campaign. But really in order to make a qualitative difference, these campaigns actually have to be connected to the labor movement. I think Chicago Teachers Union has always been a powerful example of how you tie bread-and-butter issues to the broader social issues and what they and others describe as social movement unionism. There needs to be more discussions and collaborations like that. Shawn Fain at the UAW is kind of a figure cut from that mold. To what extent has Fain been drawn into some of these broader political conversations about where we go from here. I know that Fain has been instrumental in stacking contracts for 2028, which I think is an exemplar strategy. How do we connect that to the social movements? How do we connect that to the social questions, the political questions that will find organizational expression in this period? That is a key issue.

And then the question of labor and insurgent union drives are important in the sense that these are often young people who are at work but are also connected to other kinds of social questions. To me the big issue is the need to break through this wall that sees the labor movement as some kind of old thing over there and separate from the social movements that don’t really have the political, economic, or social weight to accomplish their goals. How do we bring these things together? Those things don’t happen out of good luck. They don’t happen because they should. They happen because of political organizing. They happen because of political perspectives, and that is what we have to create the space for. Part of the ongoing frustration is that we haven’t created the spaces to map out those kinds of tactical, strategic, political discussions that are linked to historical, theoretical discussions about what is it that we’re fighting for. What is the ultimate intention of all of this activism? That has to be integrated into the discussion about what kind of activism or movement facilitates the possibility of the kind of social transformation that we’re talking about. These are multilevel conversations, because very quickly, there will be lots for us to respond to. Even though 2017 won’t repeat itself in the same way, we have some indication that part of Trump’s strategy in 2017 was shock and awe. There were just so many outrageous things happening at the same time as a way to really overwhelm the left. You’d have to respond to the Muslim ban. They probably won’t start with the abortion ban. They’ll start with legislation that makes the morning-after pill illegal. There will be an onslaught of things that we will be forced to respond to. But what can’t happen is that the rapid response to the shock and awe of the Trump administration undermines these bigger political questions about organization, strategy, and tactics that have to take place. Because this is what always happens, right? It’s the expedient response to the immediate issue in front of us, and then it feels like the next step after having to respond to every single issue is we’ve got to get the Democrat in.

The Republicans are going to have the three wings of government for the first two years of the Trump administration. The pressure to stop every single thing anyone is doing to win back the House in 2026 is just going to be unbelievable. Then 2026 comes, and if Trump’s not dead, there’ll be some Republican knuckle dragger who will be the worst thing we’ve ever heard of, which means all hands on deck. Everything must end now to get Josh Shapiro or some other hack from the Democratic Party into office. We know that’s the cycle, and everything that we do then gets put on hold forever because there’s never a good time when the Republicans are always lurking in the shadows. There’s never a good time to do the work that we need to do. This is part of the political challenge. These are the discussions that we have to be having now. How do we build these organizations and how do we continue to engage with these conversations while having to attend to the inevitable crises that are unleashed by whatever Trump, Bannon, and Stephen Miller have in store for us?