In a two-horse race where you want both to lose, the crumb of comfort is that one of them will.  In this case the ‘lesser evil’ was an accomplice to genocide, which rather raises the question what the greater evil might possibly be?    Tested to destruction, the politics of the lesser evil failed spectacularly and all those US leftists who defend it have lost both the election and lost the argument.

Of course, this will be the beast that will not die and will raise its head again elsewhere, in, for example, the French Presidential elections.  We have already experienced it in Britain where Starmer’s Labour was the lesser evil alternative to the Tories; except that after a few months in office opinion polls show that its support has collapsed.

Trump now has the potential to control Congress as well as the Presidency, having packed the Supreme Court.  Only the permanent state apparatus lies between him and his implementation of policies most of the capitalist class opposes, and the US system already allows political appointments to the state bureaucracy.  The BBC quickly reported that he intends ‘an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior career government employees with political appointments.’

An initial question arises – how did he win?  This is usually framed on the left as – how did she lose?  The answers overlap but are not the same.  The support base for Trump has been well enough analysed and includes the significant reservoir of racism that exists in the US, as well as the incorrigible reactionary petty bourgeoisie and other demoralised layers of the population.  It also includes many who are alienated from what they see as the rigged political system that the Democrats call democracy, and which they called upon voters to come out to defend by voting Kamala Harris.

This was a key part of their campaign after an initial tack to the left, as reported by the US publication Jacobin.  The magazine reported that, what they call ‘populist ‘ and ‘progressive’ policies, were more resonant and popular than calls to protect democracy from the threat of Donald Trump.  Yet Harris pulled back from them, confirming her as being as untrustworthy as the system she was defending.

The Democratic Party had already tried to foist a cognitively impaired candidate on the electorate before unceremoniously dumping him, but only after months of denying there was a problem.  The Party machine and big donors proved that they control the ‘democratic’ process, not the millions of members who voted for Biden in the primaries.  The origin of this problem goes back to their necessity to defeat Bernie Sanders, who might have raised expectations of some genuine progressive change had he been the candidate. 

Not all of this will have registered with voters, but the alternatives were a false and lying claim to be the champion of ordinary Americans against the elite with its corrupt and rigged system; and a defender of the system on the equally false claim that it is democratic.  Of course, Trump will advance an attack on democratic rights but the US has already fallen from a ‘full’ to a ‘flawed democracy’, according to that shrill defender of US capitalism ‘The Economist’, and this fall didn’t just happen under Trump.

Having tried to hide Biden from the population, the Democratic party tried to do it again with Harris.  A US commentator in ‘The Irish Times’ noted that ‘after a month in which Kamala Harris was shot to the top of the ticket by her party elites, and in which she did no substantive interviews, she was clearly leading. She then spent a month introducing herself to the public. This was her big mistake. Thereby she fell backwards into a dead heat as Americans concluded she’d be better off not speaking.’

He summed it up by saying that ‘What we can say is that the 2024 election is between a man whom Americans know far too well and a woman Americans would rather not get to know.”

The top-down manipulation of the Democratic party’s traditional base failed, encapsulated in the failure of the leadership of the Teamsters Union to endorse Harris.  She didn’t give them any reason to do so.    Even the issue of abortion rights was not nearly enough to propel her to victory, while the identity politics so beloved of the Democratic party, especially parts of the left, also failed it.  

Trump targeted a lot of his media propaganda against the Democrats’ transgender agenda, which they then also retreated on.   Trans activists complained that ‘in a recent Gallup poll, transgender issues ranked dead last (out of 22 total areas) in importance to voters’, but don’t seem to realise that it is precisely its unimportance to many that meant that its previous prominence for the Democrat’s showed how out of touch they were.  This is only confirmed by the irrational and harmful demands previously championed; ranging from men in women’s sports to unproven or harmful medical interventions on vulnerable young people.

There is no reason to lament the defeat of Kamala Harris – the candidate of the war party and of genocide; of the biggest part of corporate United States; of a corrupt and rotten political system, and of fake progressive politics and truly reactionary identity politics. That a figure as repulsive as Donald Trump defeated her is testament to her and her party’s own abominable character.

The resistance to the Trump agenda will not advance through the politics or organisation he has just defeated, but through a critique of both, and working out how to break US workers from both Trump and the Democratic Party.  This involves bottom-up organisation and alternative politics to the fake claims of corporate-approved progressiveness.  The alternative is politics that puts forward what unites the working class, that opposes what divides it, and is clearly in their interest. This politics isn’t ‘populist’ or ‘progressive’. It’s socialist.