Throughout the early months of 2024, the US presidential race appeared to be trudging zombie-like toward November with little to suggest that the coming rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was going to yield much in the way of surprises. Trump and Biden made for one of the least desired matchups in American history – the perfect avatars of a sclerotic political establishment in an age of gerontocracy, spiralling inequality and environmental collapse. Then, at a speed virtually no one had expected, the race changed.
After Biden’s historic debate meltdown in late June, Democratic elites realised they could no longer hide their candidate’s mental decline nor wish away the growing number of polls that suggested his presence on the ticket would all but guarantee a Trump victory. Two weeks later, amid the ensuing and entirely unprecedented public fallout between Biden loyalists and liberal power brokers, Trump’s near-assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania raised the race’s temperature even higher.
With Biden’s ousting and replacement by his vice-president Kamala Harris at the end of July, a campaign that had initially appeared stale and predictable seemed to have abruptly given way to something altogether more volatile and laden with possibility.
And yet with less than two weeks to go before America’s 2024 presidential vote, it’s hard not to feel a creeping sense of déjà vu. Far from shaking up the political dynamic, this summer has instead crescendoed to a moment that is eerily reminiscent of 2016: a coin toss election that pits the most unabashedly right-leaning Democratic campaign in modern history against a menacing Maga effort with an alarmingly real shot at victory.
The outcome is, at this point, anyone’s guess. But whatever happens, a campaign that momentarily hinted at a break from the ossified patterns of American politics has become just another exhausted expression of them.
We’re (not) going back.
The years since 2016 – punctuated by systemic shocks, mass protests, populist agitation and a global pandemic – might have spurred a rethink among America’s elites, if not a more profound realignment of its politics. Instead, the current moment speaks to a political class that has only grown more conservative in response to challenges and upheavals, to competing party machines that have only doubled down on their most primal drives and instincts and to a political establishment that seems unable to break from old habits even out of self-interest.
For Democrats, this has meant a reaffirmation of 1990s centrist bromides – paeans to bipartisanship; appeals to “pragmatism”; the explicit rejection of ideology in favour of hazily-defined “solutions” – and the shedding of ostensibly core commitments – healthcare reform and opposition to Republican border policies, for example – in a risky rerun of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 strategy. Being a mainstream liberal from California and a sitting vice-president, Kamala Harris was never going to run as a leftwing firebrand. Still, Biden’s unprecedented exit offered the party a golden opportunity to distance itself from the unpopular policies of an unpopular president and run instead on a narrative of change and renewal.
Predictably, the surprise entry of a new and younger candidate into the race generated both a fundraising windfall and a palpable sense of enthusiasm, as did the somewhat unexpected addition of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to the ticket. As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic observes, Harris’s slogan “We’re not going back” suggested not only a moral contrast with Trumpism but also a departure from the catastrophic leadership of Biden’s last two years.
By the time of August’s Democratic national convention (DNC), however, it was apparent that the ethos of the Harris campaign was instead going to be one of conservative continuity – and in tone, substance and strategy her subsequent candidacy has in many ways been a mirror image of Hillary Clinton’s. Stuffed with celebrities and replete with cringeworthy liberal fan culture, the DNC itself was mostly a week-long celebration of troops, cops and technocratic fixes to economic and social problems (eg public-private partnerships, tax deductions for small businesses and the removal of medical debt from people’s credit scores). As spectacle, it signalled at once a partial backing away from the uneven left-liberalism of the Biden era and a doubling down on many of Biden’s worst policies and instincts.
Nowhere has the latter been more apparent than on the issue of Gaza. Throughout her campaign, Harris has rejected even rhetorical distance from the White House and repeatedly reiterated her support for Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. (In addition to being morally reprehensible, polls suggest Harris’s hawkish stance could also significantly hamper turnout among both younger voters and Democrats in key battlegrounds like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania).
In a posture that strongly echoes Hillary Clinton, the Harris/Walz campaign’s deliberate antagonising of traditional progressive constituencies has run parallel with exaltations of bipartisanship and effusive outreach to conservatives. When asked in an interview earlier this month, Harris could not name a single thing in the past four years she would have done differently than Biden beyond appointing a Republican to her cabinet. Warmly embracing the endorsement of former Republican vice-president (and torture enthusiast) Dick Cheney, Harris has similarly brandished the support of dozens of former staffers for Ronald Reagan, George Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
As part of the same effort to win over imagined Republican moderates, Harris has also cast her domestic approach as “pragmatic” and not “bound by ideology”. Rhetorically, this has involved talking up her love of personal firearms and pledging to maintain “the most lethal military in the world”. In policy terms, it has meant a series of rightward pivots on everything from the environment to immigration. Running away from her past opposition to fracking, Harris now touts record oil production. On healthcare, arguably the most salient issue in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, her topline offer – to “make affordable health care a right, not a privilege by expanding and strengthening the Affordable Care Act” – is a meaningless fudge.
When it comes to the border – the area Democrats most regularly invoked during the Trump era as evidence of his singular cruelty – she has meanwhile sought to “flip the script” by embracing the Republican party’s flagship border legislation. While the 2020 Democratic platform condemned Trump’s “unnecessary, wasteful and ineffective wall” and demanded an “end [to the] prosecution of asylum seekers,” Harris is now presenting herself as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor with the ability to succeed where Trump failed. “I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case and I won,” she declared at one summer rally. “Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.”
Whereas the Democratic campaign of 2020 at least gestured toward the left, the priorities of the party’s progressive wing are now barely visible. Notwithstanding a few items such as a Medicare expansion for seniors, a hint at some pro-union industrial policy and the expansion of the child tax credit, Harris’s proposals are markedly less ambitious than those on which Biden (let alone Bernie Sanders) ran four years ago.
After a brief interregnum, the Democrats have reverted to a triangulating style rooted in the old Clintonite belief that the party’s future rests with owners, managers and affluent educated professionals rather than a multiracial coalition with a significant base among blue-collar workers and young people. In a purely electoral sense, precedent suggests this is an extremely dangerous gambit. The same approach failed Hillary Clinton because it demobilised core liberal constituencies in swing states without delivering the promised windfall of moderate suburbanites in return. If Harris does win, it will almost certainly be in spite of this strategy rather than because of it. It will also be owed to the diminished electoral vitality of Trumpism since 2016.
Tired Trumpism.
Unapologetic racism notwithstanding, Trump’s unexpected victory eight years ago most owed itself to unorthodox messaging that enabled him to carry Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This included not just populist broadsides against Beltway elites but also selective attacks on the market dogmas traditionally embraced by Republicans. As the US political scientist Corey Robin observed in 2018: “Trump’s critique of plutocracy, defence of entitlements and articulated sense of the market’s wounds were among the most noteworthy rhetorical innovations of his campaign.”
Having swept to office with a supposedly insurgent project in hand, Trump became a congealed mashup of conventional Republican priorities and his own erratic personal style. The result was something like a gaudier version of the usual conservative program – with Trump’s would-be embrace of statism and appeals to the downtrodden quickly giving way to the likes of tax cuts and deregulation.
Lacking 2016’s aura of insurgency, Trump’s current campaign is missing a key element of his original formula. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has partly compensated by doubling down on ever darker attacks on immigrants – pledging “the largest deportation effort in the history of our country,” suggesting that migrant criminality is geneticand (with an assist from his running mate JD Vance) attempting to incite racial violence against a small community of Haitians living legally in Ohio.
Unhinged and sinister as ever, the Maga movement has been unable to discipline its most electorally toxic instincts or establish effective daylight between itself and the most unpopular elements of conservatism. Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of abortion rights. Since the US supreme court’s (hugely unpopular) overturning of Roe v Wade, a deluge of grotesque state-level anti-choice bills has been an electoral albatross for Republicans, arguably costing them their expected landslide in the 2022 midterms. In a few weeks’ time, they could cost Trump a second term as well.
2016 redux.
It goes without saying that no two political moments are exactly alike and, in this sense, there are obvious differences between the campaigns of 2016 and 2024. Nonetheless, the basic facts of a feckless elite liberalism and a nail-bitingly close election that could see Donald Trump capture the presidency make the comparison very difficult to ignore.
Indeed, surveying America’s political landscape in October 2024, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that many significant events since 2016 had never happened at all.
Reeled by institutional shocks, electoral upsets left and right, a spiralling climate crisis and an unprecedented global pandemic, America’s political culture could very well have changed or adapted. Instead, it has produced an election that feels like a bad pantomime of eight years ago. Again and again, the political order has been shaken and battered only to wrench itself back to equilibrium.
Bernie Sanders came tantalisingly close to success, twice. But beyond seeding a few aspects of Bidenism Bernie does not seem to have achieved a lasting ideological realignment in the Democratic party, one whose leaders today tout law and order, embrace Dick Cheney and applaud Benjamin Netanyahu. For their part, centrist liberals have periodically seemed to indulge the idea of a new direction. But neither the progressive bent of the 2020 primaries nor the supposedly Rooseveltian ambitions of Biden’s early presidency have sustained themselves much beyond the level of rhetoric.
Much the same can be said about both Trump and Biden’s flirtations with big spending and interventionist governance during the pandemic. In material terms, Covid-19 represented the biggest sustained shock to the American body politic since the second world war – presenting Democrats and Republicans alike with an opportunity to exploit the crisis, for better or for worse. Initially, both parties appeared to recognise this fact.
Trump, of all people, ordered a temporary federal ban on evictions and passed legislation giving billions in direct financial support to a majority of Americans. Biden’s $1.9trn American rescue plan, passed in the early months of 2021, was still more far-reaching. However, the administration failed to lock in key provisions like the child tax credit and, having overseen what was effectively Americans’ first-ever experience with a European-style welfare state, virtually the whole thing was dismantled on Biden’s watch. In a similar vein, mass protests following the brutal police murder of George Floyd failed to bring about any significant shift in policies around policing despite record numbers of people taking to the streets.
At every turn, America’s leaders have seemed unable to metabolise significant upheavals in a manner that produces durable, structural change, and today, they seem to be coasting on little more than inertia. The result is a constellation of political institutions too enervated to change or transform themselves but too entrenched in their patterns to accede meaningfully to democratic pressures or respond creatively to crises.
However the losing side in next month’s election opts to process defeat, nothing about the current moment suggests those at the machinery of either party will be flexible enough to change direction: a defeated GOP can be expected to continue down the road of election denialism and conspiracy theory, while defeated Democrats will likely conclude they did not move sufficiently to the right.
The popular front.
If there is a hopeful conclusion to be extracted from this bleak and paralysed election cycle, it lies in the fact that the American people themselves have not grown more conservative or averse to reform.
They are deeply unsatisfied with their leaders and the workings of the political system in general. They overwhelmingly support replacing the electoral college with a simple popular vote and are fed up with Congressional deadlock. They categorically reject the Republican push to restrict abortion rights and by a large margin favour replacing their country’s draconian healthcare regime with a socialised model. They increasingly disapprove of the Israeli assault on Gaza and oppose their government’s continued arming of the Israeli war machine.
Polls suggest the American public is to the left of both party leaderships on questions of taxation and redistribution, a majority support increasing the minimum wage and more than two-thirds view the ongoing revival of the American labour movement favourably. According to the authors of a recent study by the American academy of arts and sciences they on the whole “believe the rich and powerful have designed the economy to benefit themselves and have left others with too little or with nothing at all”.
American politics may be exhausted but, in spite of it all, the ingredients exist for a potential renewal that cannot – and will not – come from either elitist centrism or Trumpian reaction. Until Americans’ inchoate sense of their country’s paralysis can find expression in a creative left populism, 2024 suggests they will remain trapped in a cul-de-sac that looks far too much like 2016.
Luke Savage is a Jacobin columnist and the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History.