Why Socialists Must Defeat Trump

Dan La Botz

WITH VICE-PRESIDENT Kamala Harris now the Democratic Party candidate, there was first a sigh of relief and then a burst of enthusiasm among Democrats. Many Democrats now say, “we just might be able to win.”

After President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in his first debate with former president Donald Trump, followed by the failed assassination attempt, which many of his evangelical followers took to be the result of divine intervention, it seemed that there was no way to stop Trump from winning the presidency.

It was a terrifying thought, since most of us on the left in the broad sense fear that should he win, we would enter a period of authoritarianism, the anteroom to fascism. That is why many of us believe we must vote for Kamala Harris.

And she could win. Kamala Harris’ entry into the campaign, which only began on July 21, has been phenomenal, In the first couple of days there was a Zoom call with 40,000 Black women supporters.

Democratic Party leaders, donors, and influencers quickly rallied to Harris, whose campaign united the Democratic Party. In a week or so she raised about $300 million, holding huge rallies of incredible enthusiasm and as large as Trump’s rallies. She chose the liberal Tim Walz as her running mate. As I write this on August 10, the New York Times/Sienna Poll found that Harris led Trump by five or six points in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three battleground states where before President Joe Biden had been trailing.

The prospect of electing the first Asian and first Black woman to the presidency of the United States has excited many sectors of the Democratic Party base and independents. Many women are thrilled to support a candidate who might be the first woman president. Black people too are excited to support a woman who identifies as a Black candidate, and young voters are now more energized. Many South Asians are also excited about her candidacy, though they represent only one or two percent of all voters.

Let me say that I remain, like virtually every member of Solidarity, committed to the idea that we must create an independent working-class political party with a socialist program — although as we know from the experiences of the Labor Party (of the 1990s), now defunct, and the Green Party, the political rules of the game make it extremely difficult to do so.

I do not believe, as DSA does, that the left should have a strategic orientation to the Democratic Party. I believe that decades of attempts to reform or realign the Democrats have failed and there is little likelihood of success in the future.

Nevertheless, because of the threat of authoritarianism that Trump represents, I believe today, as I argued back in 2020 when I supported Biden, that we must back the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris.

On the Record

Yet, while I believe we should vote for Harris, it is not because she is in any way progressive. Some Democratic Party progressives argue that voting for Harris is itself progressive, because she is a Black/Asian woman. While I, like many Americans, would like to see a woman of color as president, we should have learned from the experience of Barack Obama that being a person of color does not necessarily mean that one has more progressive politics.

And the role of women such as secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton made it clear that gender does not dictate politics. Both implemented U.S. imperialist policies.

In fact, Harris has never been one to stake out progressive positions and fight for them. She has never been on the cutting edge of any progressive policy. Much like former president Barack Obama, to whom she is often compared, she has carefully avoided political controversy. She administered and voted in her previous offices, whether as attorney general of California, U.S. senator, or vice-president, as a moderate.

Vice-presidents historically have never presented their own views, and neither did Harris. On domestic policy, she fully supported Biden’s liberal economic and social programs, the most significant in half a century. The most notable were the American Rescue Plan Act ($1.9 trillion) to support business and workers during COVID, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion) and the Inflation Reduction Act ($369 billion) to deal with climate issues.

In immigration policy, she had a mixed record as California attorney general, and as vice-president she fully supported Biden’s policies on immigration and regulating the border. These policies violate U.S. and international law by making it impossible for many to enter the country and seek asylum, create obstacles, detain and expel others without due process, while leaving many hanging in legal limbo for years.

While assigned to get to the roots of the immigration problem in Latin America, particularly in the northern triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) — a thankless and impossible task since it means somehow correcting the results of decades of U.S. warfare, neoliberal policies, corrupt authoritarian governments, and the proliferation of cartels and gangs — she could do little but smile and give a little aid to some NGOs.

Harris has been an outspoken defender of abortion rights, the first high-level elected official to have the courage to visit an abortion clinic. There is no doubt that her defense of reproductive rights has won her a large following among women. Yet this is a defense of a federally protected right — the right to choose an abortion under certain circumstances that has now been lost. It is a fight to restore the status quo ante, not a new progressive position. One won’t expect her to fight for free abortions on demand or free day-after pills to all who ask for them.

Harris also get credit for Biden’s support for the United Auto Workers and its successful strikes in the fall of 2023, which she is now taking advantage of as she speaks to UAW audiences.

In foreign policy she completely supported Biden’s backing Israel and its war on Gaza, supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion, and opposing China’s rival imperial ambitions. Harris’ reputation for being more progressive regarding Israel is based on statements like one she made a few days after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. … The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time — we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.”

Then she added, “I will not be silent.” Okay, but she has not said how she would change U.S. policy, if at all.

Yet, though she is a mainstream Democrat with all that implies — a supporter of American capitalism and imperialism, a person dependent on the banks and corporations, one who will become commander in chief of the world’s largest and still most aggressive military establishment — we should vote for her because the alternative is far worse.

The Threat

Donald Trump’s character and his psychology are well known. He is a narcissist, selfish, acquisitive. He succeeded through his reality show “The Apprentice” in making himself first a household name and then a national, charismatic figure. He has a brilliant ability to read the minds of his followers and to make himself beloved by them. He holds misogynistic, racist and xenophobic views and has projected them and normalized them in American society. He has used fear to speak to the insecurity of white people and to evoke latent attitudes and feelings of resentment toward women, Black and LGBTQ people and Latines. If hostile attitudes were not already present, he has instilled them.

In this way Trump has built up a mass following among tens of millions, about two-fifths of the American people. While not easy to measure, he has the backing of a large percentage of white working-class voters, including many union members. Over the last eight years, Trump’s personal political views have come to coincide with the ideology of white Christian nationalism. He has very strong support from the white Evangelical churches and their largely working-class congregations.

His allied rightist organizations, such as Miller’s America First Legal, Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and Michael Flynn’s America’s Future have received millions of dollars from the Bradley Impact Fund. He has won the backing of far-right militias and extreme rightwing groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud boys.

Most important, he has completely taken over the Republican Party, given it greater discipline, and moved it to the right. He, from above, has been constructing a far-right political movement and party that is extremely dangerous.

We learned between 2016 and 2020 how Trump would govern. Then he did not yet have a political team and only limited influence in the Republican Party. Yet he carried out some of the most significant attacks in decades on American democracy and on the working class.

First, in 2017 he passed a $2.3 trillion tax cut that dramatically affected the distribution of wealth in the country. He appointed three rightwing justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — to the U.S. Supreme Court, which then overturned Roe v. Wade, ending federal protection of abortion rights. He pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords.

There were also many other attacks on the social programs and federal regulations that benefitted the American people. We should not forget that he was also responsible for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths during the COVID pandemic because he failed to follow the scientific information, encouraging people to ignore and resist proper health practices such as masking and avoiding crowds.

In 2020, he denied that he lost the election and worked to subvert the counting of the votes and the certification of Biden. On January 6, 2021, he organized an insurrection and attempted coup to install himself in power.

The threat upon taking office in 2025 is that Trump and his advisors plan to substantially remake the U.S. government, a plan made easier now by the U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent rulings.

The Reality in 2024

We all wish that there were a credible working-class, leftist political party that represented an alternative. But unfortunately, there is not.

Professor Cornel West’s campaign has been a chimera, it has never materialized. The Green Party holds many progressive positions, but its candidate Dr. Jill Stein mimics Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s positions with his war on Ukraine. Still, some might want to vote for the Greens to defend the principle of independent political action, but it cannot and should not be done in swing states where it might contribute to a Trump victory.

Socialists should from now until November support the Harris-Walz ticket, not because they represent a significant progressive alternative, but because it gives us four more years in our democracy — such as it is — to organize social and political movements to fight for the working class and the oppressed and raise the ideal of democratic socialism.

September-October 2024, ATC 332