Since the Democrats unceremoniously pushed aside incumbent President Joseph Biden as their 2024 candidate and anointed Kamala Harris to replace him, they’ve made significant progress stabilizing their party and presenting a new political image.
Donald Trump has united the Republicans, saying he’ll defend working people from the effects of the social and economic crisis in the U.S. and worldwide today. He’s aided in this by his running mate, J.D. Vance.
In contrast, Harris identifies herself with the politics and social outlook of former President Barack Obama, not because both are Black, but because they speak for an upper-middle-class layer they’re both part of. This layer has growing clout inside the Democratic Party.
The Republican and Democratic parties exist to defend the class interests of the ruling capitalist families against their rivals abroad and working people at home. But the way each party now presents itself and the classes they respond to are different.
During the rise of the modern civil rights movement, the Democrats broke with the Dixiecrats, the segregationists who ran their party in the South. They then relied on a three-legged coalition to turn out the vote — top union officials, middle-class leaders of Black organizations and patronage-based party machines in the big cities. Democrats like Biden presented themselves as modern-day replicas of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, falsely portrayed as an era where big government gave things to the people.
In recent years a bourgeois-minded upper-middle-class layer has grown into the tens of millions. A new generation of Democratic politicians has emerged out of this social milieu. Its growth and class character are described by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes in Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism.
They “pursue careers — in the universities, the media, ‘think tanks,’ and elsewhere — that generate ideological rationalizations for class exploitation,” Barnes writes. “To the degree they commit themselves to a course of action — often camouflaged as caring, feeling, thoughtful, and above all very intelligent — such policies derive from the needs and demands of their bourgeois patrons.” Their goal is “to postpone and buffer the explosive social and political responses by working people to our worsening living and job conditions.”
“Above all, they fear someday being ruled by those they worry could become the ‘great mob’: the toiling and producing majority,” Barnes says. Obama typified the political outlook of this layer. He sought to protect them from those he considered “ignorant, bad-tempered, flag-waving, gun-hugging, family-centered, religious — in fact stupid — ‘populists.’”
It was Obama who anointed Harris as the Democrats’ new candidate, telling her July 24, the “people feel very strongly that you need to be our nominee.” Since then Harris has begun reinventing herself, barely defending the record of the Biden administration. She’s thrown his advisers off her campaign team, packing it with former Obama staffers. Eric Holder, Obama’s former attorney general, was assigned to vet the vice presidential options, helping Harris settle on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Harris’ nomination was met with feverish acclaim in the liberal press. Harris could win, says Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon. But in a July 30 op-ed, he wrote, “She isn’t going to win lots of small towns in Wisconsin or the state of Ohio” and shouldn’t bother to “compete that hard” there. Obama infamously slandered working people in small towns in Pennsylvania. They “get bitter” he said, and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
Bacon says Harris should focus on winning “college-educated voters, people living in cities and suburbs, and the growing ranks of nonreligious Americans,” underscoring his contempt for large swathes of the working class and anyone who isn’t sufficiently “woke.”
The members of the social layer Obama emerged from and Harris lives in are fond of telling workers they “feel our pain,” while lecturing us on how we should behave. Obama reprimanded African American fathers on how they raise their children. Harris went further, threatening to lock up parents whose children played hooky when she was California attorney general.
As a prosecutor, she boasted, “I have a huge stick.” Some 600 cases her department prosecuted were thrown out, with judges condemning her for violating defendants’ constitutional freedoms.
Desmond Meade is the executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which led the 2018 fight to win back voting rights for former felons. When he heard Harris had called the 2024 election a race between a prosecutor and a felon, he protested. He said it was “name-calling” aimed at “robbing this country of the serious dialogue it deserves.” He said trying to villainize someone as a felon just “provides an excuse to throw people away.”
Harris didn’t hesitate to use the courts against political opponents. In 2016, she tried to force the conservative Americans For Prosperity Foundation to turn over the names of its donors. The federal court ruled that was an unconstitutional attack on free speech.
Harris events segregated by race, sex
Since Harris’ campaign launch, Democrats started hosting segregated fundraising events along racial and sex lines.
Hundreds of thousands took part in “White Women: Answer the Call 2024,” then a “White Dudes for Harris” zoom, joined by now vice presidential candidate Walz. “Latino Men for Kamala” and “South Asian Men for Harris” came next.
This is the polar opposite of what is needed — to unite the working class to fight for our own class interests — not to pit workers of different races and nationalities against one another.
But presenting the Democrats’ campaign this way is consistent with the cosmopolitan outlook among the upper middle class. It’s rooted in the notion that people are defined by their skin color — and what liberals call gender — not by their class.
On the Republican side, Trump says he’s the workers’ candidate, but focuses on fostering divisions among us, especially by trying to turn native- and foreign-born workers against one another.
Workers cannot let the bosses or their politicians pit us against each other. Our starting point needs to be our common interests with workers worldwide and the need for solidarity with each other’s struggles.
It’s along that road that working people can take steps toward breaking with the bosses parties and building a party of labor. That course is championed by the Socialist Workers Party 2024 presidential campaign.