The race to the White House is closer than ever, with polls showing Harris and Trump neck and neck. As we get closer to Election Day, we’ve seen an astounding round of interviews from Kamala Harris. Despite cosplaying as a progressive in the 2020 presidential primaries by calling for Medicare for All for a few weeks, her strategy now is to appeal to potential Trump voters by moving further to the right on virtually every issue. Frankly, on many issues, it’s hard to tell the difference between Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ platform today and that of the Republican Party 20 years ago.
Why does it feel like society is just going backwards?
The Democrats have never been a party for the working class, they have just historically used more of a progressive face to try and win elections. Now, they see the popularity of Trump’s right-wing rhetoric and are trying to take a page out of the same playbook.
The reason right-wing figures like Trump have been able to gain popularity around the world is because many working-class people are suffering under this deeply rotten system. Trump has been able to capitalize on this mood by pointing people’s anger away from the system as a whole and towards scapegoats like immigrants and trans youth. He poses as an anti-establishment alternative when he really represents the billionaire class as much as the Democrats. Trump is also benefiting from the fact that many working people felt better about the economy during his presidency, partly because he was forced to distribute COVID stimulus checks to avoid complete economic collapse, and the worst of inflation hadn’t yet set in.
Harris and the Democrats are incapable of countering Trump’s dangerous rhetoric in any meaningful way because as a capitalist party, they’re more afraid of giving credence to left-wing ideas and empowering the working class than of the growth of the right wing. They know the right wing will never pose a threat to capitalism. That’s why they fought so hard against Bernie Sanders, because he represented a movement against the billionaires that could have potentially become bigger than Sanders and a serious threat to their system.
So Trump has dragged the overall political narrative in the US much farther to the right, and the Democrats are scrambling to catch up instead of fighting it. Due to Sanders and the Squad completely giving in to the Democratic establishment, and the failure of the labor leadership to break with the Democrats, the working class has no political party that actually represents us and there is currently no organized left force with the power to counter this rightward trend.
The Environment
When Kamala Harris first ran for president in 2020 she ran on banning fracking, a position she has made every attempt to distance herself from in 2024. Just to be clear, fracking hasn’t become any better for the environment since 2020. It actually still emits dangerous levels of greenhouse gasses, contaminates water supplies, and can devastatingly disrupt ecosystems. The only thing that changed was Harris’s willingness to oppose it, as US imperialism demands more oil and gas drilling to expand the military and establish “energy security.”
All the Democrats feel like they have to do to get the vote of the climate movement is to say they “believe” in climate change, an unacceptably low bar at a time when disastrous climate tipping points are staring us in the face. The Inflation Reduction Act, so far the most sweeping “climate policy” the Democrats are capable of, focuses only on the production of electric vehicles to tackle climate change. The icing on the cake is that this drive towards EVs is more fueled by competition with Chinese EV production than addressing carbon emissions. What we actually need is fully funded mass public transit, green union jobs for all, and taking polluting companies into public ownership for a transition to renewable energy. The pro-capitalist Democratic Party will never do this.
War In The Middle East
The Biden-Harris administration has been entirely complicit in the genocidal war on Gaza, which has now escalated into a regional war in the Middle East. They completely refuse to stop arms shipments to Israel (and in fact continue to ramp them up, with Biden recently sending $8 billion more in aid to Netanyahu’s murderous government), and numerous Democratic administrations across the country have played a leading role in violently repressing student protests against the war.
In an interview where Harris was asked about people voting third party or not voting at all because of the war, she completely dismissed these concerns. Instead she said that those voters should also care about “lowering the cost of groceries.” We’re supposed to simply accept that the massacre of Palestinians, and now war on Lebanon and Iran, is not a question up for debate. We reject the notion that working people have to choose between the bloody massacre in the Middle East and lowering the price of groceries. Democrats spend billions of our tax dollars on arms to Israel instead of funding public services, affordable housing, and aid to families in poverty! We will not be fooled.
LGBTQ+ Rights
According to one of her most recent interviews, Harris has promised to “follow the law” when it comes to gender-affirming care for trans people (which is oftentimes lifesaving healthcare). To do nothing more than follow the law in many states would mean denying crucial gender-affirming care to trans youth, for example. This is a far cry from even the lip service Biden gave in 2022, when he told trans youth “You are loved, you are heard, you are understood,” in the face of right wing attacks on trans rights.
Much like with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the Democrats will feign tied hands at a federal level, swearing that there’s nothing they can possibly do because of the mean Republicans. The Democrats could have instituted executive actions or pushed legislation through Congress when they had majorities, but for decades they have refused to use this power to codify Roe or protect trans people. The federal government even mobilized the army to the South during the integration of public schools in the 1950s to protect Black people from attacks. The fight for LGBTQ+ rights will not be won through a party that is willing to capitulate to the right wing at every turn.
Immigration
Immigration is a top issue for many voters in this election. While Trump has gone on the Presidential debate stage and flat out lied saying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are “eating the cats and dogs,” Harris and the Democrats have been hard at work trying to prove that they’re just as tough as Trump on immigration. The Biden administration has been responsible for multiple executive orders to crack down on immigration, making the process more difficult for those seeking asylum.
The 2024 asylum bill, put forward by the Democrats, would have been wildly popular with Republican politicians just 20 years ago. Many policies in it are eerily similar to the strict Sensenbrenner immigration bill from 2005, which passed in the house with support from 92% of Republicans and opposition from 82% of Democrats. They both include much stricter asylum eligibility requirements, increased deportations, and building more physical barriers at the border.
Migration is going to continue as we see more climate disasters and escalations in deadly wars. The bosses profit more when undocumented workers face fears of deportation and can be forced to take a lower wage, which pushes down wages for all workers. Working-class movements are strongest when all working people fight together in solidarity, which is why the bosses try to divide us. We must stand against attacks on undocumented workers and fight for full citizenship rights for all people living in the US, to cut across the capitalist class’s attempts to divide native born and immigrant workers. Only the bosses benefit from these racist attacks!
The Billionaire Class Has Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own
The platforms of both parties are no coincidence, nor are they merely a reflection of what is popular amongst their voter base: first and foremost they’re a reflection of the interests of their different corporate backers. The needs of big business in this period are clearly aligned on policies like the drive towards war and militarization (and the increased oil and gas dependence that comes with that) to assert the dominance of US imperialism internationally, and scapegoating immigrants to distract from their inability to solve capitalism’s crises.
Harris is backed by the majority of the billionaire class, however Trump does have the support of some newer billionaires like Elon Musk who believe Trump’s presidency will further enrich them. But ultimately, the needs of the capitalist economy define the policies of both parties.
During the era of globalization, there was unity on policies like free trade and increasing trade with China. A move away from these policies in both parties is a symptom of the new period of inter-imperialist conflict we’re in today between the US and China. This period will be characterized by increased state intervention into the economy to achieve maximum “national security,” i.e. imperialist supremacy.
Looking at the platform of Harris and the Democratic Party today, it’s easy to see that they’ve abandoned any semblance of progressivism and are just hurtling further to the right. Questions like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal are nowhere close to being on the agenda, and now Democrats don’t even feel pressure to give lip service to these ideas. But this abandonment is because they were never actually willing to fight for what working people need; they’ve always been a party of their corporate interests.
The two parties of big business seek to divide working people along the lines of Republicans and Democrats, or liberal and conservative. The only way to cut across racist lies and divisions is to point towards the most fundamental divide in society: ordinary people versus the bosses and the billionaire class.
Defeating Trump and the far-right cannot be tied to a different party of big business that is perfectly willing to capitulate on issues like fighting climate change, racism, and oppression. The question of defeating the right comes from how strong of a working-class alternative we can build. We need a party that is able to pull people away from right wing ideas by offering a viable alternative solution to their problems. Ultimately only a socialist program that places the interests of working people of all races, genders, and nationalities over those of the billionaire class can succeed in doing that. A new working class party would be able to play a key role in building movements, like the anti-war movement, on the streets, campuses, and in workplaces. It would also be able to prevent Trump and other right-wing figures from falsely posing as anti-war.
Fight The Right – Build A New Anti-War Party
Every election we’re told that we have to vote for the Democrats because they’re not the Republicans, but where has this strategy really gotten us? It’s gotten us to a Democratic presidential candidate campaigning with Liz Cheney—but in 2004 and 2008, Dick Cheney and George Bush were the exact “evils” that the Democrats were running against! While Kamala Harris pledges to make the US “the most lethal and best fighting force in the world,” working people can’t afford groceries and rent.
Socialist Alternative calls for a protest vote for Jill Stein this election as the strongest anti-war and pro-worker candidate. We reject the notion that we must submit to the dead end cycle of lesser-evilism!
At one point in time millions of people held hope that reforming the Democratic Party could be possible. Bernie Sanders and the Squad were able to garner massive support and millions-strong volunteer networks around their campaigns. But Bernie’s two presidential runs were completely crushed by the Democratic Party machine. And after staging a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018, the Squad are some of Pelosi and the Democratic establishment’s most trusted allies now. AOC fiercely defended Biden against the calls for him to drop out earlier this year when it was clear as day he was never going to beat Trump.
Whether or not policies that benefit working class people are on the agenda depends on the power of mass movements fighting for them. But we need more than just forcing the Democrats to talk about progressive reforms, we want to actually win them. And in order to win, we need an independent political expression—a new party for working people, armed with a socialist program—as a tool to fight.
It’s never going to be easy to build a new party; this system was built to try to trap us into the dead end cycle of lesser evilism. The threat of the far right, and the Democratic Party’s unwillingness and inability to truly fight and defeat these dangerous ideas, make it more important than ever to start building that today.
This fight doesn’t start or end at the ballot box, but if we want to build a viable third party then we need to stop voting for Democrats and Republicans. This means registering the strongest possible vote for the anti-war and pro-worker candidate on the ballot this November, Jill Stein, to show that millions of people are ready to fight for something new. But a strong protest vote alone won’t stop the trajectory that capitalism is heading down. We need movements on the streets, in our workplaces, and on campuses that can stop the dangerous path of war, divisive scapegoating, and climate destruction that both parties profit from. These movements need to fight for a society where workers democratically control society to dismantle the rotten capitalist system once and for all!