Not to be used as a navigation device
– Legal disclaimer on a popular Maryland/Delaware beer, whose logo is a map of Chesapeake Bay.
Hahahaha Aaron Sorkin. Hahahaha New York Times. Desperate for a new angle as the Biden removal dragged on, the Gray Lady went to the patron saint/holy fool of mainstream liberalism for a head-snapping take from the “radical centre”. The creator of The West Wing — a show best read as a slow excoriation of the foolishness and delusion of establishment liberalism — did not disappoint. What’s the one way you could cross over, take everyone with you, and turn out the mainstream independent vote? With the unerring application of a wrong take, Sorkin landed on the suggestion that the Democratic candidate should be… Mitt Romney.
This was funny enough when it landed over the weekend. Now that it’s sticking around on the front page, it’s hilarious. Every dopey, fundamental misunderstanding of what America is now is wrapped up in that single commission. They must have been subbing it even as Joe, hunkered down with COVID in his summer home on Delaware’s charmless holiday coast, was grinding his teeth and cursing his betrayers and shouting his failed spells to his dutiful women, a Bed Bath and Beyond Prospero, on an island of tasteful furnishings.
Yes, okay, so much for the set piece. For all the reports of Biden’s raging about betrayal, and how he has done more in foreign policy than anyone etc etc. That may be true, but it may also be the case that Biden knows — and his supporters such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knew — that he remained the best hope the Democrats had to hold off Trump in the rust belt states, where Trump is likely to win.
The theory is that Joe Biden still has the support of the labour movement, and it still has the ability to get out the vote for him (which it didn’t have for Hillary, and which her 2016 campaign didn’t do much to encourage) in a way that neither Harris nor any other likely candidate could manage. The logic goes that the Democrats will get 66% of the Latino vote whatever happens, 95% of the Black women vote, and a huge cut of the college-educated white vote. The only swing votes are Black men and non-college-educated whites.
That last group is the prize, and what terrifies the Democrats is that Kamala Harris is not merely someone they will not come out for, but someone they will vote against. That would vary between men and women, but not as much as feminists would like to believe or insist. In 2016 Trump only won 35% of college-educated white women, but 56% of non-college-educated white women. They are voting not via sex and gender, but by class — both rough economic class, and also the “knowledge class” as I have spoken of it.
They — and still less, non-college white men — are not going to recognise in Kamala Harris a striving person coming out of poverty, a little-person-big-dreams type. Or rather they are, and will reject it. They have now been through a decade and a half of tough times, since the 2008 crash, with a recovery that wasn’t, a Trump extravaganza that promised much and delivered little, and then a Biden administration that coincided with COVID and the final end of quantitative easing, and its scarifying effects on work, wages and community.
Thirty trillion dollars of easy money has been tipped into the world economy, doing little more than to keep it spluttering along, and pumping money into speculation centred on knowledge and information tech. As millions have seen their wages shrink, and straightforward jobs disappear, they see the world they do not have the educational tools to understand the workings of soaring away from them. They can understand it enough to know that it is destroying the forms of value — repetitive, solid labour, the making of things — on which their lives were based.
For the past 40 years, the fate of this group has been the fulcrum around which both society and the Democratic Party have swung. An old New Deal controlled the party until the 1990s. They waved through the Michael Dukakis in 1988, an “elite liberal” if ever there was one. Dukakis didn’t win many states, but one he did win was West Virginia — because America was still voting on pure, unvarnished class. When there was no Reagan on the ballot they would come back to the Democrats whatever happened.
Dukakis’ loss galvanised the creation of a centrist, centre-right group called the Democratic Leadership Committee. They allied with a charismatic Arkansas governor, and dominated the party for two decades. They were a generation from various sources who had all pretty much been converted from New Deal class/universal liberalism to targeted social market policies, via John Rawls and his insistence that true fairness and social justice involves doing relatively more for the worst off, than trying to equalise conditions per se.
This happily coincided with the Democrats need to find new sources of funding, as the unionised industrial working class declined. That new source was new capital — entertainment, law, comms, tech — and its distinct sector interests against old, still protected manufacturing. Hollywood and Silicon Valley ceased to be add-ons to a working- and middle-class party and became its financial and intellectual centre. By 2008, this identification was so overwhelming, and so important to the party’s viability, that Barack Obama could snatch the laurels from Hillary from the left, and then govern from the right. Hillary took it over in 2016 and was dragged down by it.
The haunting fear is that this will happen all over again. Or worse. It’s now possible that the Trump-Vance ticket — and Vance is a connection to the new Silicon Valley, by back channels, the Randian-Nietzschean change-your-blood-monthly-on-Mars Silicon Valley — will take an overall majority, and the rust belt as well. Trump promises an absolute fantasy: that labour-intensive manufacturing can be returned, as can the cheap goods that make low-income life affordable. It’s the same one he promised last time.
Didn’t happen then, won’t happen now. A manufacturing revival will be high-automation, same as the Chinese are doing, marching towards the abolition of labour altogether. Could it generate new jobs? Yes. Better jobs? No, not really. They will be service jobs, extra jobs, fluid, bitty, ungrounded. Anyone who thinks that this will be sufficient to assuage the raging anger of a Western working class thrown on the scrapheap has been deluded by the abstract notions buried at the heart of the discipline of economics.
But that’s to come, if it comes. For the moment, the promise Trump is making will be compelling even though he has made it before and it didn’t happen. With this sense of being ungrounded, there comes an overwhelming fear and hatred of the waves of immigration coming in across the southern border. Having a relatively anti-illegal immigrant left position was the making of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Softening it destroyed them both.
Harris will be caught in the crossfire of this from both wings of the party, and I will be very surprised if, with four months till showtime, she manages to find a formula to escape it. Liberals’ desperate appeals against Trump — “he’s a felon! He has a civil finding of rape against him!” — are not going to swing it, and to believe it will is evidence of the Sorkinian self-delusion of the elite as to how much belief is still left in America, by its growing lumpen.
Well, one could say that this election might be a test of the politics of culture vs class affiliation — if the Democrats had done enough for the economy as a whole, and for the poor in particular, to claim an unvarnishedly class vote. There won’t even be the fun of West Virginia right-wing ex-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin III staging some sort of populist revolt at the convention. The state that once elected Dukakis can now only be kept Democratic by a senator so rightward he ended up quitting the party. But he might have served to remind the party how much it has to get back to the cultural centre to be in with a chance
The tides have wrecked ol’ Joe on the sea coast of history, yet the idiots like Aaron Sorkin are still under the spell of a liberalism that refuses to dissipate among a deluded elite. Whatever they think next, it is not to be used as a navigational device.
Do Democrats have a better chance with Harris than they did with Biden? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
