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EXIT RIGHT  
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Gabriel Winant
November 8, 2024
Dissent [[link removed]]

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_ Trump has remade Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing
less than the left doing the same. _

A campaign bus parked near an empty field after Kamala Harris’s
election night watch party on November 5, 2024 (Kevin Dietsch/Getty
Images),

 

The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was
generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when
delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of
dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply ignore the
demonstration, as one might have expected; rather, they exaggeratedly
plugged their ears, made mocking faces, and, in one notable case,
sarcastically mimicked the chant: “Eighteen years old!” Witnessing
video of this event, my heart sank, not just at the moral
grotesqueness of the display, but also in its sickening confirmation
of the solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom. The
conventiongoers offered a literal enactment of their lack of interest
in the experiences of those outside their circle of concern. La-la, I
can’t hear you—or, as Kamala Harris herself put it when challenged
at a rally, “I am speaking now.” Not for long, as it turned out.

The best moment of the Harris campaign was the very beginning, when
she got a chance to embody the collective sigh of relief at Joe
Biden’s decision to bow out, and to offer something new. From there,
it was all downhill. She and those around her seemed to think that
purely superficial changes would prove sufficient. Harris pointedly
refused to offer any criticism of the incumbent administration, or
even suggest any way in which she differed from it. Whenever prompted
on this score, she simply reiterated that she was not the same person
as Joe Biden (or Donald Trump). Her surrogates and supporters often
reacted with contempt, scorn, and even racism toward those who thought
it fair to ask for something more. In this fashion, she squandered the
wide lead she had opened in the summer. Although food insecurity and
poverty—especially child poverty—had increased significantly after
the expiration of pandemic relief measures, and inflation had outpaced
earnings for tens of millions of Americans, Harris eventually settled
into a campaign roadshow of billionaires, celebrities, and neocon
Republican defectors, advocating for an ill-defined status quo. It was
a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s “America is already great”:
tone-deaf, incompetently targeted at a nonexistent moderate Republican
voter, and often expressly hostile toward part of its own nominal
base.

As of the present count, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020,
suggesting he was far from unbeatable. But Harris stretched her
coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she
attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing
Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed
performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident
commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The
Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad,
but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always
offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a
generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the
candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than
the people they sought to represent.

In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but
many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred
2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather
than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers
that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his
opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger
version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also
opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her
hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to
later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now,
found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice
seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and
externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without
having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to
say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even
abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical
prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior
to _Dobbs_. How many times before had Democrats promised to
institutionalize and expand the protections of _Roe_, only to drop
the matter after November?

Just as in 2016, Harris supporters have fallen back on the racism and
sexism of American society as an explanation for defeat. No doubt
these are hulking obstacles, but they don’t suffice as omnibus
explanation. As far as winning elections, Barack Obama overcame the
first hurdle, and racism’s decisive significance is thrown into
doubt by Trump’s own rapidly growing appeal among voters of color.
Many societies that would seem to be no less misogynistic and
patriarchal have elected women as national leaders. Most important
though, these are not static phenomena. Trump mobilizes these forces;
the task of his opponent is to countermobilize and defeat them. A
successful campaign draws on the material of the existing society and
assembles it into a portrait of the present and a vision of the
future: it does not simply reflect frozen facts of public opinion and
common sense but reorganizes them and ultimately produces new forms.
Racism and misogyny have intensified notably in recent years due to
Trump’s own prodigious talents in this area.

The blame for the Harris catastrophe, though, goes far beyond the
candidate herself. Biden deserves the lion’s share, for the
outrageous narcissism that led him to remain in the race through the
first half of 2024, preventing a competitive primary that might have
screened out Harris as it did in 2019, or at least pushed her to
articulate a more coherent politics. Worse still was the vacillation
of the Biden administration about whether it sought a restoration or
an adventure into a new style of governance. Infamously from the
perspective of the American left, Biden ran on the idea that American
society needed to be returned to its natural state of decency and
expressly disavowed the need for “fundamental change.” The Trump
phenomenon was an essentially external pollution in an otherwise
healthy body politic. It was an interpretation that resonated with
years of blame-shifting about 2016—to Bernie Sanders, to Russia, to
progressive social movements and their rhetorical excesses, anywhere
but the Democratic leadership.

After his 2020 victory, secured with the maneuvering of Obama and Jim
Clyburn, Biden seemed to register that a more structural set of
problems needed to be confronted. For this purpose, he absorbed some
of the energy and ideas of the Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns,
against which he’d previously arrayed himself as the sensible
alternative. And his administration did make a game attempt, in its
first half, at extending the U.S. welfare state in ways that would
have represented a real effort to address the material sources of the
Trump phenomenon. This, however, was too little and too late. By
suppressing the challenge from the left in the primaries of 2016 and
2020, the Democrats had cut themselves off from the popular base that
they might have rallied to this cause and that might have delivered a
clear mandate for it. Lacking the legislative margin, they instead
tried to horse-trade their way there. What they got was more than
nothing, but not remotely enough.

By the middle of his term, Biden had become a de facto austerity
president, overseeing the lapse of welfare state expansions, including
not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief
but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid,
all during a period of unified Democratic control. Gradually, Biden
largely dropped the demand for progressive social policy and focused
his fiscal discussions instead on the deficit—a repetition of the
same posture that had condemned the Obama administration and created
the opportunity for the rise of Trump in the first place.
Emblematizing this capitulation, Biden decided to cave to corporate
wishes for the pandemic to be over as a matter of public
policy—particularly public policy that enhanced workers’ labor
market power—even as it continued to rip through Americans’ lives.
In place of earlier progressive ambitions, Biden offered an economic
nationalism more or less borrowed from Trump and a new Cold War
liberalism. Imagine if, instead of the Second New Deal, Franklin D.
Roosevelt had sought reelection by campaigning on a weapons gap, like
John F. Kennedy later would.

Worst of all, Biden continued to sign off on whatever Netanyahu wished
to do, enabling a genocide in Gaza and the escalation of a multisided
war. Whatever concept Biden had once entertained about the meaning of
his own election in the global struggle over democracy and the rule of
law, he reduced it to a grotesque mockery after October 7. (Here
again, imagine Roosevelt had not only remained shamefully neutral in
the Spanish Civil War but gave Franco the bombs to drop on Guernica.)
While it is no doubt true that relatively few Americans named
Palestine as their top voting issue in exit polls, the sense of a
hypocritical and feckless foreign policy leading to global disaster
must have done little to allay young voters’ accurate sense that
America is, as neatly summed up by one pollster, “a dying empire led
by bad people.” If Harris was, as she constantly repeated, working
tirelessly for a ceasefire, where the hell was it? The insistence
could only be received as a confession of incompetence or a
lie—which, in fact, it was, as administration spokespeople would
occasionally implicitly acknowledge. And what appeal to protect
democracy and to stop fascism could possibly ring true, coming from a
podium spattered with the blood of thousands of children? Witnessing
Biden’s stubbornness, Harris’s unaccountable refusal even to allow
a token Palestinian American to deliver a pre-vetted speech at the
convention, and the campaign’s choice to send Ritchie Torres,
AIPAC’s favorite congressman, to campaign in Michigan, one had to
ask whether these politicians even cared whether they won or lost.
They alternated between calling Republicans a mortal threat and
promising to include them in the cabinet; they paused their warnings
of fascist encroachment only to give cover to the world’s most
militarily aggressive far-right and racist regime.

The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms
of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and
hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while
demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as
though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can
constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s
leadership can. But the party’s leaders are to blame, not that many
in the center have cared or even seemed willing to reflect on a decade
of catastrophe. Has anyone who complained that the 2020 George Floyd
rebellion would cost Democrats votes due to the extremism of its
associated demands reckoned with the empirical finding
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the opposite proved true? That the narrow victory of Biden in 2020 was
likely attributable to noisy protests that liberals wished would be
quieter and calmer? Has anyone acknowledged the unique popularity of
Sanders with Latinx voters, a once-core constituency that the
Democrats are now on the verge of losing outright?

The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the
result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the
party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is
the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the
same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the
organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has
become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the
richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris
hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the
billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included
figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and
Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer
of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and
cultivate relations with corporate allies.

The party under Biden pivoted toward economic nationalism because it
didn’t have a substantive or convincing program of progressive
redistribution after the failure of Build Back Better, and it
couldn’t find one that would be acceptable to its corporate wing. As
Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic
Council, observed
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election, “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax
credit elements in Build Back Better so we would have had concrete
cost-of-living benefits to run on. People should reflect on which part
of the Democratic Party denied us those agenda items.” Instead,
Biden stole Trump’s idea: exit right from neoliberalism, get the
weapons factories humming. Biden sustained Trump’s massive expansion
of military expenditures, with national security providing the primary
ideological justification for full employment and the pursuit of
progressive social goals, as it did in the Cold War. In turn, the
escalating geopolitical and geoeconomic confrontation with China
supplied the logic of the unwavering U.S. backing for Netanyahu’s
wars: renewed great power competition intensified the imperative of
consolidating a critical strategic region under U.S. hegemony. Again
continuing a foreign policy formula developed by Trump, Biden’s
strategy has been to pursue this goal by resolving lingering tensions
between Israel and the U.S.-aligned Arab states (Saudi Arabia most
significantly, with the Gulf states and Morocco taken care of under
Trump and Egypt decades ago at Camp David). Accomplishing this
resolution requires the termination of the Palestinian national
movement, the main obstacle to such a consolidation. The idea of a
Potemkin Palestinian state may return some day, but only after a
severe chastising and a stark numerical reduction of the Palestinian
people.

The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of
the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The
accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies
produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand
for?—and programmatic self-cancellation. Champions of the domestic
rule of law and the rules-based international order, they engaged in a
spectacular series of violations of domestic and international law.
Promising a new New Deal, they admonished voters to be grateful for
how well they were already doing economically. Each step taken by the
party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in
another direction. It is by this dynamic that a decade of
(appropriate) anti-Trump hysteria led first to the adoption of parts
of Trump’s program by the Democrats, and then finally his
reinstallation as president at new heights of public opinion
favorability. Nothing better than the real thing.

In our century, American politics has been blown open by the
reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization.
They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms:
imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the
hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory,
and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and
immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural
disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats
have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the
bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal.
It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions
of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason
the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather
than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of
containment that Trump’s obscenity comes to feel like a liberation
for so many.

Although on the surface MAGA is nostalgic, Trump’s movement has been
immensely historically generative: creating new modes of political
expression, opening new arenas of policymaking: mass deportation,
anti-trans assaults, vaccine skepticism. This is why it is so
destructive. On the contrary, it is the Democratic leadership that is
engaged in a backward-looking project. Only through restorationism can
the party balance its competing commitments to social and economic
justice and capitalist growth. It seeks to recapture a lost past in
which these goals accommodated each other, and it suppresses any
positive vision of the future that might require deciding internal
tensions. Just consider the way that Biden and Harris both have
championed reforms that everyone knows cannot be accomplished without
abolition of the filibuster and reform of the federal court system,
which they are both hesitant to contemplate, occasionally entertaining
narrowly tailored, self-limited reforms. Such an effort, if undertaken
more generally, would necessitate a wider critique of American society
and the undemocratic institutions that define it—a critique at odds
with an image of an America that is “already great.” Despite their
various discrete policy goals, Democrats thus prove unable to tell a
clear story about what those goals mean, how they fit together, and
how we might get there; they can only insist that they are not
Trump—and even this is no longer quite true.

Several decades ago, considering the triumph of Thatcherism, Stuart
Hall observed a very similar problem arising for the Labour Party in
the face of Britain’s emerging “authoritarian populism.” Since
Labour, down to the present, has not managed to solve it, the case is
worth serious consideration. (Notably, Harris drew significant advice
from the Labour Party, which recently won a landslide election on a
vacuous platform despite a diminished quantity of votes, thanks purely
to the collapse of their opponent.) I quote at length:

I simply don’t think, for example, that the current Labour
leadership understands that its political fate depends on whether or
not it can construct a politics, in the next 20 years, which is able
to address itself, not to one, but to a diversity of different points
of antagonism in society; unifying them, in their differences, within
a common project. I don’t think they have grasped that Labour’s
capacity to grow as a political force depends absolutely on its
capacity to draw from the popular energies of very different
movements; movements _outside_ the party which it did not—could
not—set in play, and which it cannot therefore administer. It
retains an entirely bureaucratic conception of politics. If the word
doesn’t proceed out of the mouths of the Labour leadership, there
must be something subversive about it. If politics energises people to
develop new demands, that is a sure sign that the natives are getting
restless. You must expel or depose a few. You must get back to that
fiction, the ‘traditional Labour voter’: to that pacified, Fabian
notion of politics, where the masses hijack the experts into power,
and then the experts do something for the masses: later . . . much
later. The hydraulic conception of politics.

That bureaucratic conception of politics has nothing to do with the
mobilization of a variety of popular forces. It doesn’t have any
conception of how people become empowered by doing something: first of
all about their immediate troubles; then, the power expands their
political capacities and ambitions, so that they begin to think again
about what it might be like to rule the world . . . Their politics has
ceased to have a connection with this most modern of all
resolutions—the deepening of democratic life.

Without the deepening of popular participation in national-cultural
life, ordinary people don’t have any experience of actually running
anything. We need to re-acquire the notion that politics is about
expanding popular capacities, the capacities of ordinary people. And
in order to do so, socialism itself has to speak to the people whom it
wants to empower, in words that belong to them as late 20th century
ordinary folks.

You’ll have noticed that I’m not talking about whether the Labour
Party has got its policy on this or that issue right. I’m talking
about a whole conception of politics: the capacity to grasp in our
political imagination the huge historical choices in front of the
British people, today. I’m talking about new conceptions of the
nation itself: whether you believe Britain can advance into the next
century with a conception of what it is like to be ‘English’ which
has been entirely constituted out of Britain’s long, disastrous
imperialist march across the earth. If you really think that, you
haven’t grasped the profound cultural transformation required
to _remake_ the English. That kind of cultural transformation is
precisely what socialism is about today.

Trump has remade the Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires
nothing less than the left doing the same. Unfortunately, there’s no
reason to think the Democrats are capable of accomplishing this,
although the possibilities of doing it by any other means are equally
obscure.

The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its
formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that
virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has
been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from
below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers,
registering their objection to the means despite their abstract
support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state,
equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not
only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal
system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that
intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet
work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers:
student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid
encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s
work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon
that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal
institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name
of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a
source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already
represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical,
self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a
coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.

Liberals have tried for a decade now to rid the country of Trump by
ostracizing him as a grotesque aberration. They’ve pursued this
through legal investigations, but also through elaborate and repeated
demonstrations of bipartisan elite consensus against him. It has only
made him stronger. Trumpism can’t be finessed because it speaks to
real forces in American society—racism, misogyny, class
frustration—and offers an obscene, satisfying expression to its
addressees. It can only be beaten by direct confrontation—not just
with Trump, but with what he represents, and the remaking of America
he envisions. To call his movement fascism carries this unavoidable
implication, which makes all the more galling the lack of appetite for
such confrontation from so many who apply the label. “It takes
little courage to mutter a general complaint, in a part of the world
where complaining is still permitted, about the wickedness of the
world and the triumph of barbarism, or to cry boldly that the victory
of the human spirit is assured,” Brecht once wrote. “There are
many who pretend that cannons are aimed at them when in reality they
are the target merely of opera glasses.”

The obstacle now presented by liberalism is especially frustrating
because Trump’s coalition suffers from its own internal
contradiction, isomorphic with that of the Democrats. J.D. Vance and
Elon Musk would appear to want quite different things: Vance praises
Lina Khan, for example, and seems to offer a vision of welfare
chauvinism; Musk proposes to fire Khan, radically cut the state, and
deliberately induce economic misery. Trump will of course redistribute
wealth and power upward, in the name of popular empowerment and
working-class rage. It should be difficult for him to pull this off,
to hold these forces in balance. Yet the Democrats have configured
their own coalition in such a way that they cannot credibly activate
and gain leverage from this contradiction; just as they cannot speak
of Trump’s yearslong association with Jeffrey Epstein—presumably
because doing so would draw attention to Bill Clinton too.

If the solution were so simple as a frontal attack by forming a third
party, we’d have accomplished it already. One thing that is clear,
however, is that the appetite of liberal institutions for joining
“the resistance” is much diminished from eight years ago. In one
sense, this is frightening: the actual resistance will be smaller,
more isolated and exposed, as powerful actors in our society tacitly
defect to the fascist cause. Indeed, they already have begun to do so,
validating Trump’s politics while declaiming his manners, which was
exactly how Trump won again. Liberal corporations, the press, the
universities—institutions that deplore Trump in name—have shifted
in recent years toward carrying out elements of his program in
miniature, seemingly uncoerced.

On the other hand, our role in defending the values once claimed by
our employers, representatives, and self-appointed spokespeople will
become harder to mistake or avoid. As Brecht also observed, “those
who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament
over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who
wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing
to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily
satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat.”
To tell the truth instead is not in itself a solution, but it is the
necessary, and only possible, first step.

_GABRIEL WINANT is an associate professor of history at the
University of Chicago, a member of the executive council of AAUP/AFT
Local 6741, and a member of the Dissent editorial board._

_Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua
Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
many others._

* 2024 Elections
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* Donald Trump
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* Kamala Harris
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* Joe Biden
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* Hilary Clinton
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* Liberalism
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