The 2024 U.S. Presidential election warrants a post-partem analysis, not so much to affix blame, but primarily so the electorate might grasp the perils when the elite of a political party refuses to apply self-restraint in order to keep the party-wide platform and campaign speeches from reducing to the elite’s own favorite ideology even though it is not held by a significant number of the “rank and file” members (i.e., voters), not to mention independents. In other words, running a massive political party to serve the ideological agenda of what Bertrand Russell calls “the inner ring” can cost a party dearly on election day. I contend that this applied to the Democratic Party, which had become a center-left party still dependent on its non-college, working-class, members, whose cultural values were not necessarily progressive. To be sure, substituting managerially-oriented political calculation for visionary leadership and broad policy proposals that are based on principles rather than particular political interests can easily be perceived generally as small, especially in the context of the horrific military attacks against civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. It is paradoxical that Harris lost working-class voters who were socially conservative, and thus “anti-woke” (e.g., against men in women’s bathrooms and playing in women’s sports) even as she lost some liberals who believed that Harris, in explicitly stating on The View that she would not deviate from Biden, was too timid in standing up to Russia’s Putin (e.g., by withholding long-range missiles) and Israel’s Netanyahu rather than enabling the horrific military crimes against humanity with continued shipments of weapons as if the UN’s court were irrelevant to international law.
I begin with the immediate
historical context of center-left parties. The parties on the left in the U.S.
and E.U. shifted to the center in the 1990s and 2000s. The parties were able to
pick up moderate voters, but at the risk of losing ideological distinctiveness (from
the center-right parties), and thus their raison d’etre in terms of broad
principles and policies. The 2024 U.S.
Presidential election can be fit within the broader shifts since the 2000s that
have rendered center-left (rather than far-left, or even socialist) parties
less successful in elections. Bill Clinton brought the Democratic Party closer
to the center in part due to the losses of Edward Kennedy in challenging the center-left
Jimmy Carter in 1980 and of Walter Mondale in challenging Ronald Reagan in
1984. The party’s political elite paid attention to these losses, which went
down like lead balloons, and Bill Clinton was a result of the ensuing effort to
move the party closer to the political center. Crucially, both he and Barak
Obama were able to win with support from the middle class (i.e., labor), which
was still primarily voting on the basis of economic interest, including redistribution.
Then, two shifts began that
caused the Democratic Party’s working-class, relatively conservative, faction
to gradually peel off. The first shift can be described as a negative reaction
to the increasingly business-friendly aspect of the party moving to the center.
Historically, center-left parties in North America and Europe were critical of
capitalism and wanted to constrain it. In reaction to the financial crisis of
2008, however, center-left parties let go of the even more important role of
constraining capitalism that had frozen up from within due to uncorrected
increased market volatility.
In the E.U. state of Greece,
for example, the Syriza Party campaigned against austerity measures during the state’s
legislative election in 2015 by promising to renegotiate the state’s bailout
agreements. However, just after winning the election, the party’s head, Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras, accepted the existing austerity conditions in spite of
there having recently been a referendum in which the Greek citizens overwhelmingly
rejected those very conditions. Considering that the austerity resulting from the
government’s required budget-cuts was especially harsh on the working class,
Tsipras’ betrayal in going along with the creditor-beholden E.U. state of
Germany doubtlessly cost the center-left party votes and Tsipras was ultimately
defeated (though strangely, after being reelected again).
In the U.S., Barak Obama entered
the office of federal president in 2008 at the worst of the financial crisis,
and he stocked his administration with plenty of folks from Wall Street. It is
no coincidence that Obama went along with financial bailouts for the banks
without conditions, even in terms of putting ceilings on the bonuses of the
banks’ executives. Considering that they had displayed incredibly bad judgment
in over-leveraging their respective banks by packaging and even buying bonds
based on risky sub-prime residential mortgages, the bankers not only did not
deserve bonuses, but arguably should have been fired as a condition of getting the
funds appropriated by Congress and those created by the Federal Reserve Bank. Instead,
the culpable bankers received hefty bonuses out of the TARP money provided by
the U.S. Treasury—money that was supposed to be lent out to stimulate the
economy so the working class would not suffer from traumatic unemployment. It
was not lost on the Democratic Party’s non-college working-class segment that
the incompetent but wealthy bank executives got bonuses in the political elite
and the financial elite being cozy. Ironically, it was not until the first
Trump administration that Treasury issued checks to every American.
Unfortunately, the trajectory
of the partial unraveling of the Democratic Party is not so simple, for it was
not only the growing perception that the party had joined de facto with the
Republican Party in siding with corporate America at the expense of workers
that caused the latter to gradually but steadily peel off from the center-left
party—after having asked, perhaps, what was still left about the Democratic
Party.
Firstly, structural changes in
the economy also had an impact. Economic inequality was increasing, and workers
could see that the Democratic Party had done nothing substantial to stop even
the increase. That the party had missed an opportunity to come up with its own,
alternative economic policies with which to differentiate itself from the Republican
Party was especially important because the Democratic Party had moved closer to
the center, and away from the wing associated with U.S. senators Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren.
Secondly, another structural
change, not economic in nature, also had an impact. Since 2000, a shift towards
identity/cultural grievances had been occurring in the middle class wherein a
gradually increasing number of voters have been less interested in economic
redistribution than in opposing the “woke” ideology, which is centered on legalizing
rights of certain groups of Americans based on group-identity. Historically,
religious wars in Europe had been based on the premise that group-identity is
primary in human consciousness; race riots share that assumption. The failure
of the Democratic Party to constrain the excesses of capitalism during the
financial crisis may be a factor in this shift away from economic distribution,
as increasing numbers of working-classed voters came to realize that both
major parties had become bought and paid for by the business sector through its
political campaign contributions and promises of executive jobs. Regulatory
capture of the regulator agencies by the regulated companies is but one result
of the inordinate influence of business in government.
The shift in the American working-class voting increasingly on social issues affected the Democratic as a wedge. The “woke” ideology in favor of defunding the police, transsexual rights (i.e., men in women’s bathrooms and sports), reparations for Black Americans, sanctuary cities wherein illegal immigrants are legally protected, university “cancel culture,” such as in mislabeling pro-human-rights protests as antisemitic, and diversity programs gripped the political elite of the party and its left-wing more generally even though Kamala Harris did not emphasize “woke” planks in her speeches. Meanwhile, the “anti-work” political reaction had been gaining speed since at least 2015 among the non-college-educated working folks. This reaction viewed the gay “rainbow” flag as a cult symbol that was being imposed seemingly everywhere, and was viscerally opposed to transsexual men being able to play in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms, the notion that illegal immigrants somehow had a right to be in the U.S. even though they had committed a crime in entering the country illegally, the proposal that even people living paycheck to paycheck should be taxed more to pay for reparations to Black people, and that certain words could no longer be spoken or written in college courses and even in political protests. Indeed, protests against Israel had practically been banned at many universities, including Yale, where 47 pro-human-rights students were arrested by private university police employees, and Harvard, which had turned Harvard Yard into a preemptive police presence by September, 2024. So much for academic atmosphere and academic freedom; non-academic employees with guns were in charge as scared academic administrators looked on as if proud mice. My point is that Harris didn’t have to say anything “woke” on the campaign trail; non-college educated workers in the Democratic Party had by then viewed their party’s elite as very “woke” indeed.
It can be argued that in having no internal check or self-restraint,
the party's political elite had pushed the “woke” ideology too hard and too far (and perhaps, most importantly, too fast), and thus naturally had prompted a political reaction against both the elite itself and its favored ideology. That is, the political elite
of the Democratic Party refused to constrain itself from pushing its mandatory ideology even though it was clear, or should have been clear without the
blocking self-centeredness, that non-college-educated workers, especially in
small towns, would bolt. Even with the mistaken assumption that the working class
would still vote on an economic basis, the fact that the anti-woke movement was
gaining steam should not have been missed or so easily dismissed for
being illegitimate. Presumptuousness can indeed be blinding or distortive, as
can the underlying self-centeredness and primitive desire to use power to enact
one’s own ideology. This is ultimately why Donald Trump was able to win in
spite of his own voters acknowledging that he was admittedly a flawed man.
The elite of a political party
does its party a disservice by stubbornly pushing whatever ideology that elite
loves, as if it were a fact of reason and thus should be imposed on detractors
whether they like it or not, rather than applying self-discipline and a little
humility to back off the ideology so as to retain the socially-conservative
workers for the sake of governing to constrain capitalism. The ancient
Confucian scholar, Xunzi, points to “a degree of self-restraint and even
virtue, namely trustworthiness ,” as one reason why a hegemon, a ruler who is not
as virtuous as is a sage (i.e., a wise and virtuous person) but is more
virtuous than is a vicious tyrant, can be “a strong and successful ruler.”[1]
Even though a hegemon “is not committed to moral cultivation of himself or
those he rules,” applying the virtue of self-restraint, such as channeling away
one’s instinctual urge to promote one’s own preferred ideology over others in a
political party, can make a ruler successful (and not tyrannical) anyway.[2]
The political elite of the Democratic Party could have benefited from this ancient
lesson. That an increasing number of voters in the working class were more
interested in voting against the societally interlarding “woke” ideology and
especially its demands than in voting for economic redistribution means
that the self-centered and haughty ideological stubbornness of the Democratic
political elite really costed Harris votes.
Thirdly, even given the ongoing
shift among working-class Democrats toward voting on the basis of cultural
issues, economic pressure from the price increases, especially in gas and groceries,
even after the temporary bump from supply shocks and higher transportation costs
during the pandemic, prompted a significant number of voters in the middle
class (and poor), which is especially vulnerable to price increases on necessities
such as food and transportation, to vote on the basic of their bank accounts.
Harris’s promise to reduce
grocery-store prices rung hollow because Biden had failed to do it and she said
she would not differ from Biden on policies. Even given the trend in the
working class to vote on the basis of social over economic issues, the
center-left party erred in failing to recharge its historic mission to
constrain the excesses of capitalism. Pledges to use federal anti-trust law to
break up the meat-producer and grocery-chain concentrated rather than competitive
industries would have differentiated the party from Trump’s rightward shift of
the Republican Party. Even the Democratic Party, in accepting so much corporate
money from lobbyists, was susceptible to enabling rather than lessening the
tendency of markets to consolidate—to go from competition, by which food prices
would have gone down after the supply shocks during the pandemic, to just a few
giant companies with enough market-power to hold prices high and even convince
consumers to expect even higher prices in the expectation of inflation as
inevitable. As my academic advisor at Yale, who was an Episcopalian priest,
once said, “If you must sin, then sin boldly!” Andrew Jackson and Teddy
Roosevelt would not have lost much time translating that advice into political
terms in terms of bold policy in place of political calculation and capitulation
to even the private powers behind the proverbial throne. Unfortunately, neither
Biden nor Harris was a Jackson or Roosevelt.
Fourthly, as for the shock that
many “far-left” Democrats and even some independents had after the election
that a convicted felon and narcissist had just won the popular vote (as well as
the Electoral College), the explanation for Trump’s success with labor is not only
due to the reasons I have just discussed, but also because Trump was very wealthy
and bold in a way that vote-maximizer politicians usually are not. That these personal
attributes could possibly “trump” the man’s flaws, such as admitting that he
could get away with touching women sexually without their consent, allegedly pressuring
Georgia to come up with more votes for him, and allegedly prompting a mob to
riot through Capitol Hill as electoral votes were being counted by Congress on
January 6, 2021, would shatter the ideological view held by the Democratic
Party’s elite on what matters in a presidential character. Indeed, the nature
of the alleged crimes may actually have augmented or strengthened Trump’s
stature to working-class voters, given that their paradigmatic criteria for leadership
differed so from those of the political elite (of both parties!).
Whereas America’s political
elite and the left-wing of the Democratic party believed that voters should
vote at least in part based on whichever candidate is most wise and virtuous,
Trump himself might counter that the masses vote instead on the basis of wealth
and being bold even in speech as well as action, rather unlike the typical
people-pleasing politician, such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Taking into
consideration the fact that the level of education (college versus no-college) had
been the single best indicator during the arduously long campaign “season” of
which candidate a voter favored, it is likely that the criteria valued by the
working class differed paradigmatically from the criteria valued by college-educated
voters, including the political elite. Unconsciously, the elite of the
Democratic Party projected its own paradigm of character-leadership onto how the
non-college-educated laborers of the party’s “rank and file” see things. This
can explain why even the criminal charges against Trump did not dint his base.
According to Adam Smith in his
text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the great mob of mankind are the
admirers and the worshipers . . . of wealth and greatness.”[3]
These two things are contrast to wisdom and virtue, which the masses “are perhaps
incapable of even discerning.”[4]
I don’t think Smith is being fair to the “masses” here, but his main point
concerning the different criteria is important for college-educated Americans
to grasp. Like people outside of a political (and economic) elite, Smith eschews
“the proposition that people of superior wisdom and virtue possess a title to
rule.”[5]
He maintains that birth (family) and wealth are more visible and certain to the
masses than are virtue and wisdom.[6]
Wealth and greatness, Trump doubtlessly could have said during his 2024
campaign, “are my two middle names.” By “greatness,” even as he applied the
adjective to the country itself in terms of its potential, consists not only of
wealth, but also the kind of strength that is bold rather than timid, or
limited to political calculation at home and abroad. Thinking that they too
could someday be rich and admiring bold people, working-class voters could very
well have loved him for being both. Again, the shift away from being concerned
with redistribution to wanting to push back against the presumptuously encroaching,
passive aggressive antagonistic “woke” advocates means that Trump’s “offensive”
statements were viewed by the working-class as a plus rather than a minus in
terms of character. In other words, few labor-union members would be likely to
quote from Aristotle’s Ethics to insist that a virtuous person is necessary
to put into effect Trump’s policies.
As for Trump’s pathological
lying, the heads of the Democratic Party were hardly blameless in falsely
claiming that Harris had been selected as the nominee in an “open, bottom-up”
process. With a hundred days to go before election day, the party had time for
a primary, which could have been set to take place forty days out, with the
general election following after sixty more days. In the same year, the E.U.
state of Germany set an election just sixty days after a scheduled
no-confidence vote at a time in which that vote was just a month away. To claim
that Harris’ chances were diminished by having only a hundred days fails
to recognize that the year-plus long campaign season for U.S. president was excessively
long. Lacking in boldness in terms of proposed policies was more of a
hindrance than just having a hundred days. In other words, she had more than
enough time to distinguish herself by departing from Biden’s policies, especially
given his unpopularity for not going far enough in terms of a variety of areas.
In fact, Harris’ lack of boldness took votes away even from the left-wing of
the Democratic Party!
Going on the basis of
political calculation, or “the political reality,” based on the presumed power
of AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) in U.S. politics, produced
political timidity just as cowering to corporate interests, even of the oil and
food industries, presented Harris as a politician rather than as a leader. Leadership
does not operate by calculation, but by broad principles. Whether those
principles are standing up to an aggressor ravaging through Gaza rather than
enabling him by being in favor of continuing to supply weapons to his military,
or enforcing market competition (and a windfall-profits tax) rather than
suggesting that the government give Americans money to spend in the oligarchic
grocery chains that would feel free to raise prices even more rather than cut
prices to compete for buyers, boldness of policy can be appreciated even
more when it involves standing up to entrenched political and economic
interests that have turned squalid in part because of the U.S. Government.
Management differs from
leadership in part because management is narrowly focused and incremental rather
than being oriented to formulating and promoting a vision of society in ideal,
paradigmatic terms. I submit that both Biden and Harris were managerial in
nature, whereas Ronald Reagan can be studied in terms of providing a vision (e.g.,
“Government is the problem.”). To be sure, not every vision that a political
leader espouses is ethical. Hitler, for example, provided a vision of a strong
Germany without weakness enervating the country from within. That vision can be
challenged ethically both in regard to how Hitler conceptualized strength
and weakness, and his government officials could be challenged for how
they implemented Hitler’s vision by literally exterminating what they saw as
weakness from the country and even in trying to free up living space for
Germans from the U.S.S.R.—Hitler having promised Hindenburg that Communists
would be eliminated within Germany, which in turn could mean going after the
source further east.
What to a working-class Trump
voter was boldness was viewed by some Harris voters and the Democracy Party’s
elite as fascist. The claims that democracy was in the balance may have been
fueled in part by the fact that Trump working-class voters tended to
value wealth and political boldness over wisdom and virtue. To people who value
or follow political calculation to minimize political risk, a candidate not
speaking as a politician and advocating bold policies would of course be viewed
with fear.
It is possible, even ironic in
this case, that representative democracy can be put at risk by a cleft or
division existing between a party’s elite and a significant part of its “rank-and-file”
base. To be effective electorally and in sync with democracy itself, the elite
of a party needs to remember that its perspective is not necessarily that of the
whole of the party, and if the respective perspectives do indeed differ, the
elite needs to exercise some self-constraint in place of self-centeredness and
a self-assumed mandate to impose, ideologically, even on the party’s
membership. In short, a party’s elite needs to put that membership first if
electoral success is desired as a means to being in power. The refusal to exercise self-restraint
deserves to be voted against. Trump’s lack of self-restraint in his use of
vitriol against his “enemies,” which included anyone who criticized him publicly,
and even in his use of lying habitually to get out of trouble was in line with
the boldness atypical of politicians that the working-class valued in a leader,
whereas Harris’ lack of self-restraint regarding highlighting aspects of “wokeness”
and in not standing up to big business and Israel worked against her. Not that
Trump would stand up to big business, for he himself was a part of it, and not
that he would stand up to Netanyahu (or Putin), but all that Trump too may have
appealed to greatness-as-strength as construed and valued by enough of the the non-college-educated
working-class voters.
2. Ibid.
3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I. iii.3.2.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), VI.ii.I.20, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 42.
5. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
6. Ibid., p. 45.
