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 

 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?

 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 

 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.

 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.

Protesters holding a George Floyd banner in Foley Square, New York City, May 29, 2020. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.

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?

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

 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.

 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.

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?

A homeless encampment on Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa., April 2023. Photograph by Teun Voeten/Panos Pictures/Redux.

 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.

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.

 It’s insulting to people’s intelligence.

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 

 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.

 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.

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.

 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?

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking at a campaign rally in Rindge, N.H., Feb. 6, 2016. Photograph by Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post, via Getty Images.

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.

 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.

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.

 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.

 That’s what the working class looks like.

 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.

People gathered at the Black Lives Matter Plaza on 16th Street, near the White House, Washington, D.C., June 19, 2020. Photograph by Probal Rashid/LightRocket, via Getty Images.

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.

 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.

 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: 

Yes, we’re returning to power. We have plans.

 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.

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

 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.

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.

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

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.

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

Donald Trump speaking in front of the border wall near Pharr, Tex., June 30, 2021. Photograph by Sergio Flores/AFP, via Getty Images.

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.

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, 

. 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 

 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.

 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?

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?

A protest on the eve of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Ill., Aug. 18, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Hatcher/AFP, via Getty Images.

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?

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.

 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.

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.

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

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.

Stop Cop City activists in the Atlanta Forest in Georgia, March 4, 2023. Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis, via Getty Images.

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

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, 

. 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 —

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.

 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.

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?

Hammer&Hope

Daniel Denvir

@DanielDenvir

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Donald Trump’s Victory, the Elitism of Democrats, and the Need to Build a Hospitable Left

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