The presidential debate last night looked significantly different from the last one – instead of a debate between a billionaire landlord and a senile warmonger over who has a better golf game, new Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris took the stage ready to “prosecute” convicted felon Donald Trump. 

Liberal media outlets declared a victory for Harris on Tuesday night, fawning over her prosecutorial cool-headedness while she put Trump repeatedly on the defensive. But either of these candidates “winning” the debate, or winning the election, means working people lose in this sick capitalist system, both in the US and abroad at the hands of US imperialism. 

At the heart of the issues for both candidates is the drive to put “America first” in the era of inter-imperialist conflict, the driving force of global events. Harris laid out the heating up of the US-China conflict explicitly, saying “Our policy on China should be making sure that the US comes out first … and make sure that we win the race on AI and computing technology.” This tech war is not just about smartphones and electric vehicles – it’s about high-tech weapons of war in an existential power struggle for resources, profit, and imperialist domination.

First, The Economy

The debate opened with questions on the economy. While there are a number of issues that voters care about in this election – abortion, the war on Gaza, immigration, and more – economic issues still rank number one, including amongst young people.

Harris put forward an economic plan that she claims will address the cost of living crisis, including federal funds to help families put a downpayment on a home, a new child tax credit, and support for small businesses. She calls it the “opportunity economy,” and Trump accused her of being a “Marxist” for her plan. We wish. Harris’s blatantly pro-capitalist economic plan has nothing in common with how a socialist planned economy would be run, by and for the working class.

These are lofty “promises” for the Vice President of an administration that failed to deliver on canceling student debt and expanding Medicare. In a completely tone-deaf moment, Harris bragged that her economic plan has been endorsed by Goldman Sachs, the multinational investment bankers who, along with their billionaire friends, carry responsibility for the 2008 financial meltdown where millions of American families lost their homes. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’s CEO, has an estimated net worth of $150-200 million. Harris’s campaign has been supported by a number of Wall Street leaders and wealthy executives, but we’re supposed to be moved by the fact that she “grew up in a middle-class family.” Capitalist scourges like him thinking an economic plan is good is a pretty big hint that working people will get screwed.

Trump, meanwhile, wants to lower taxes and cut government spending. Lowering taxes on the working class would be very welcome but what Trump is really focused on is lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, like his fellow billionaires, who already have dozens of loopholes in the US capitalist tax system. Many economists say his plan to dramatically increase tariffs on foreign exports could worsen inflation and slow the economy.

Climate Policy (Or, Lack Thereof)

Trump provides no answer to the climate crisis, and even evaded whether he still thinks it’s a hoax. Harris claims climate change is part of her “values,” but her weak climate policies, if they can even be called that, point in the opposite direction. She said, “I am proud that as vice president over the last four years we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” in the same breath as she said, “we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.”

Harris and Trump tried desperately to outdo each other over who loves fracking the most. Evidence has been mounting for years that fracking poisons groundwater and leads to birth defects, childhood cancer, and premature elderly death. It also releases methane, a greenhouse gas that is up to 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide, speeding up climate change. And yet Harris said, “I will not ban fracking, I have not banned fracking, and in fact I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act that signed a lease to increase fracking.” What great “values”.

Immigration: Blatant Xenophobia Vs. Somewhat More Subtle Xenophobia

Trump is somehow still managing to be even more virulently racist than we’ve come to expect, accusing immigrants of eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and lying that he’s watched it happen on TV. Trump’s disgusting anti-immigrant comments made it into almost every answer he gave, regardless of the topic or question.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is not just a page from Trump’s presidential playbook, but a feature of right populism globally, especially in Europe. Xenophobic policies are weaponized by the right to provide a scapegoat for the problems caused by capitalism and the ruling class. The anti-labor and austerity policies of the right are not popular amongst ordinary people – so, figures like Trump rely heavily on pitting the working class against each other.

Instead of confronting Trump’s vile racism and xenophobia head on, Harris talks about her record of prosecuting multinational cartels, and how Republicans blocked Biden’s border bill in May, which was called “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” Biden kept most of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies in place and added an even harsher asylum ban, and Harris doesn’t plan to change that.

A socialist answer to the immigration crisis means recognizing, as we said in a recent article, that “all workers, regardless of nationality, share the same interest in struggling against the bosses.” The crisis at the border should not have to be a crisis for working people: there is more than enough money in the hands of the billionaires that should be used to ensure we all have affordable housing, healthy food, a stable job, and everything else we need to live good lives.  

Harris is right that Trump uses race to divide the American people. But racism is inherent in and perpetuated by capitalism – working people have more in common with one another than what divides us, but we have nothing in common with those who uphold capitalism, like Harris.

Gaza – Neither One Will End The Massacre

Gaza was talked about, but barely, and certainly not reflecting the gravity of the ongoing genocidal war waged by Israel which has left more than 40,000 dead and climbing. The debate came only four days after an IDF sniper brutally murdered Ezgi Eygi, a recently graduated student from Seattle and formerly a member of Socialist Alternative, for peacefully protesting in the West Bank. Ezgi’s parents have not been fooled by the crocodile tears of top Biden administration state department officials, and we shouldn’t be fooled by Harris’s feigned sympathy for the people of Gaza either.

In the debate, Harris said she would always “give Israel the ability to defend itself,” clear code for continued (and probably in the coming years, increased) US weapons shipments to Israel. But you can’t exactly be “working around the clock for a ceasefire,” which she also said, when you’re also sending billions of dollars in weapons to the Israeli military. 

We can’t rely on Trump or Harris to end the genocidal war on Gaza – it will take struggle and mass pressure from below in the Middle East and around the world – because neither candidate will be willing to nor capable of abandoning their strategic partnership with Israel in the Middle East. It’s too crucial for US imperialism to have a key ally to counter Iran (and by proxy, China) in the region, and both Harris and Trump recognize this.

Project 2025 – The Real Threat Of The Far Right And How To Fight It

The authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan from the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, is a key concern for tens of millions of young and working people, especially given the already-widespread threats to abortion rights and trans rights. It warns of the very serious potential for Trump to take a turn in an authoritarian direction were he to be re-elected in November.

Harris tried to associate the 900-page right-wing policy plan with Trump, and he tried to distance himself from it, saying he “has nothing to do with it” and won’t read it. The reality is that Project 2025 represents the very real threat of the far right that has grown in the context of the Biden administration not solving a single crisis facing ordinary people, and will continue to grow if the root cause is not directly challenged.

The Democrats will not put up a fight against the far right. While Harris promises to sign Roe v. Wade into law, she feigned helplessness along with the rest of the Democratic Party as it was overturned. Ultimately, we cannot rely on the Democrats to win back, and protect, what was lost under their administration. It will take building mass movements to defeat Trump and the far right, the kinds of multi-racial, multi-gender movements that won Roe in the first place.

We Need A New System, Not A New Democrat

In her closing remarks, Harris said, “Before you are two presidential candidates – one looking forward [Harris], and one looking in the past [Trump].” 

This vague liberal narrative obscures what’s actually going on. Harris is trying to satisfy millions of working people who urgently want solutions to the cost of living crisis and who broadly support progressive policies, while at the same time trying to satisfy the demands of the billionaire class and US imperialism. The question is which promises she will actually keep if she wins, and the answer is those that serve the capitalist system, not the working class.

What happened to so many of the promises Biden and Harris made to working-class people during their 2020 campaign? It feels like we’ve said it a thousand times, but really, where’s that federal $15 minimum wage? How about the federal abortion protections? In 2020 Biden said, “No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” and then proceeded to approve more than 6,000 permits to drill oil and gas on federal land, outpacing even Trump’s administration.

Harris is promising a $6,000 child tax credit. Well, Biden promised an $8,000 child tax credit that never saw the light of day. Harris is already walking back a Biden promise from just a few months ago: she’s proposing to raise the capital gains tax (which taxes stock market profits and impacts the wealthy) to only 28 percent, instead of the 39.6 percent proposed by Biden.

On Ukraine, Harris claimed “Trump would just give up. That’s not who we are as a country.” We can’t afford blank checks to support a brutal stalemate that is destroying the lives of ordinary people on both sides of the battlefield, while our most basic needs of affordable housing, healthcare, and food are not being met. 

Harris likes to market herself as “the future.” If you follow the logic of her record, that will be a future where millions die in increasingly unprecedented climate disasters, where billions more taxpayer dollars go to “ensuring we have the most lethal fighting force in the world” (in Harris’s own choice words during the debate) so that millions more can die in US imperialism’s increasingly bloody wars.

That’s not a future we have to accept, and not one we have to vote for. Only workers and young people getting organized, protesting, and striking, and building mass struggle – and ultimately carrying out the full-scale socialist transformation of society – can win the future we need. That’s why Socialist Alternative endorses independent left-wing anti-war candidate Jill Stein, why we campaign for a new mass working-class party so we don’t keep having two-bad-option elections, and most importantly why we fight to build the socialist movement to end poverty, oppression, and war once and for all.

Socialist Alternative Calls For Fighting The Right With Independent Working-Class Politics:

• Vote against war, imperialism, and oppression. Vote for the strongest independent left anti-war candidate, Jill Stein – not Kamala Harris or Trump!
• For a working-class alternative to the two corporate parties! Republicans are using divide-and-rule scapegoating against migrants and other oppressed communities because the GOP has no real answers to the questions facing working people. But the corporate Democratic Party offers no effective resistance to right-wing attacks and has repeatedly failed to use its majorities to protect our rights. We need a new party with a blatantly pro-working class program.
• Take the hundreds of millions of dollars labor unions waste on supporting Democrats every election year and use it to organize every worker into a union. Launch an independent political party that refuses corporate donations and fights to unite working-class people at the ballot box.
• Build a revolutionary movement of workers and young people to take on the system of poverty, war, oppression, and climate catastrophe. For a socialist world with a democratic socialist plan for the economy based on the common interests of working people everywhere!