The US election: Kamalamania, Trump and lesser-evilism

In a world beset by major interlocking crises, the United States, still the world’s largest economic and military power, is experiencing an unsettled election season.1 Predictions of a landslide victory for an increasingly untethered Donald Trump have dissipated with Vice President Kamala Harris replacing the enfeebled incumbent Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. Harris soon led Trump in the polls by 2 percentage points, but the electoral college result will be decided by seven swing states where they are still neck and neck.2

After a period of record disenchantment with both candidates, there is now real excitement, dubbed “Kamalamania”, among many of those looking for an alternative to the horrors of another four years of a Trump presidency.3 This article will look at Harris and Trump and consider the prospects for the left.

Who is Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is a mainstream corporate Democrat. She remained in Biden’s shadow as vice president before becoming his anointed successor.

Harris started her career in California as prosecutor and then became the state’s attorney general. She described herself as both a “top cop” and a reformer, but critics saw her approach as a variant of the “tough on crime” approach that has prevailed in the US over recent decades.4 As a district attorney in liberal San Francisco, she resisted applying the death penalty but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented racial bias training for police but also stymied investigations of police shootings, defended police officers accused of misconduct and publicly rejected calls to defund the police. When the Supreme Court found overcrowding in Californian prisons amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment, Harris’s office fought repeatedly against the federal mandate to release a few thousand non-violent offenders. Her office also fought the release and blocked payouts for wrongfully convicted inmates.5

Supporters looking for progressive credentials often refer to what a Harris campaign advert also puts up front: “She’s the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion.” However, this 2012 settlement of the “foreclosuregate” fraud, involving major banks and trillions of dollars in securitised mortgages, was a catastrophe for homeowners. Most of the $18 billion went back to the banks to cover unpayable loans.6 Seeking progressive colouring for corporate-friendly actions is typical of her political career.

Harris ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries against both Joe Biden and the left candidate, Bernie Sanders. At the time, she supported a form of Medicare for All public health insurance and a ban on fracking. As Biden’s vice president, she quietly dropped these policies and has now officially renounced them. The Biden-Harris administration outlawed a national strike by rail workers and oversaw continued deportation of migrants, record levels of fossil fuel extraction, an absence of healthcare reform, escalating conflict with China and increased support for Israel. Harris objected to none of this and raised no policies separate from Biden’s.

As vice president, Harris told Guatamalans ,“do not come, do not come” to the US. Now, as a candidate, Harris backs the Biden administration’s requests for increased border enforcement. Trump, whipping up racism, is trying to define her as soft on immigration. However, rather than making a public case against Trump’s lies about immigrants, she is trying to beat Trump at his own game, telling a rally in Georgia: “Donald Trump has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.” She emphasised her record as attorney general of a border state, saying: “I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally”.7 This may or may not win votes, but it helps to inflame an already dangerous situation.

Unlike Biden, Harris has no problem using the term “abortion”. This is a vote-winning stance. A 2024 poll showed about 70 percent of adults think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, an increase since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling providing a limited national right to abortion.8 However, the ruling was overturned during the Biden-Harris administration, and they failed to pass a nationwide law protecting abortion, a pledge of their 2020 campaign. Harris has again pledged to restore Roe v Wade but will face a recalcitrant Congress. Even against opposition, abortion could be effectively defended by the type of struggles that led to Roe v Wade, under the right-wing administration of Richard Nixon. That, however, is beyond the politics Harris will use her pulpit to call for.

For the tens of thousands who voted “uncommitted” as a protest against “Genocide Joe” Biden in the primaries, there is nothing in a Harris ticket that alleviates concerns. As president, she would be just as wedded to US imperialism, with its links to Zionism and oppression of the Palestinians. As a US Senator in 2017, the first resolution Harris co-sponsored defended Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, accusing the United Nations of “a long-standing biased approach towards Israel”. Like Biden, she has pledged to defend Israeli security. Although Harris made an empty call for ceasefire in Gaza shortly before Biden and expressed concern over the number of dead civilians, her stronger condemnation was aimed at the “despicable acts” of pro-Palestinian protesters. The Democratic convention refused the request of “uncommitted” delegates to have a Palestinian-American physician who had worked in Gaza address the audience. Harris’s national security advisor has reaffirmed that Harris “does not support an arms embargo on Israel”.9

Her pick of Minnesota governor Tim Walz—no radical but considered on the progressive side of the party—over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a hard Zionist, was seen as a concession to Palestinian protesters. Yet, Walz, like Harris, has spoken at meetings of the conservative Zionist American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group. He also voted for US military aid to Israel and for the same resolution supporting West Bank settlements that Harris co-sponsored.10 Like Biden, Harris is committed to having the US win “the competition for the 21st century” with China. She told the Democratic National Convention she would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, eliciting chants of “USA! USA!” from delegates. Shortly after, she was “proud” to receive the endorsement of Dick Cheney, Republican vice president under GW Bush and key architect of the Iraq war.11

Big business and Bidenomics

In the 24 hours after Biden withdrew from the race, Harris brought in over $81 million in new donations, and Future Forward announced a new $150 million from previously hesitant major donors.12

Big business in the US remains split. Trump’s tax cuts were popular in the capitalist class, while his protectionist measures were more divisive, as discussed below. Much of Wall Street saw Biden as a safe pair of hands. Biden retained many of the trade barriers imposed by Trump, enacting more targeted aimed at China, even as he has sought to rebuild relationships with US allies abroad and pursue a more multilateral approach. However, the Biden administration also angered many corporations by pursuing more aggressive “antitrust” measures, a stance associated with Federal Trade Commission head Linda Khan, seen as a consumer advocate clamping down on anticompetitive conduct of firms.

In June 2024, it was reported that Trump was “getting about 50 percent more in donations from securities and finance than Biden”, reversing earlier trends. Harris has now been enthusiastically backed by many of these capitalists.13 When based in California, she forged a close relationship with tech firms. Today, both big and small tech firms hope any Harris administration will be friendlier to them than Biden’s. Some of the billionaire Democratic donors in “Venture Capitalists for Harris” have publicly called on her to sack Kahn and scale back the antitrust measures—although others in the business world, who shared the sentiment, feared such lobbying was best done more discreetly.14 More generally, Wall Street Democrats who found Trump’s earlier presidency unpredictable but objected to antitrust enforcement under Biden, have seen a chance to regain influence. Some had considered switching to Trump’s side. However, they “are now reconsidering their electoral strategies”, scared of the populism of Trump’s running mate, James David Vance, and reassured by Harris’ record. Other chief executives were reported to be “exhilarated” over Harris.15

The complex ideological fractures reflect the way recent administrations have partially shifted away from the neoliberal consensus represented by Bill Clinton, George W Bush and his father, and Barack Obama. It is an open question how much Harris continues what has been called “Bidenomics”.16 Although Biden’s extensive economic stimulus and infrastructure plans were cut back considerably compared to the original proposals, they still went far beyond previous peacetime spending. The need to address the crises afflicting capitalism and to buttress US imperialism against its rivals, above all China, entailed a more explicit role for the state, which in turn has politicised economic questions.

Today, there is no chance of another big stimulus or infrastructure bill. Harris is offering to continue the second, less expensive, stage of Bidenomics. That is likely to involve supporting the development of US-led trade blocs to better compete against China and to try to bolster US tech industries. The 2022 $53 billion Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Act (better known as CHIPS Act) was much smaller than Biden’s major infrastructure bill. It can still be considered as a substantial industrial policy that brought microchip production back to the US. Biden’s use of antitrust policies in the tech sector was part of this vision, which includes guarding against tech bubbles, keeping an eye on key future tech and mitigating monopoly pricing that contributed to inflation.

In August, Harris’s first talk on the economy praised Biden’s “historic investments in infrastructure, in chips manufacturing, in clean energy”, pledging to “build on the foundation of this progress”. Her talk was framed in the Republican language of the “opportunity economy”, avoiding mention of the welfare state and appealing to a supposed “middle class”—treated as consumers, not workers.17

Harris promised to permanently expand Biden’s expired child tax credit, which temporarily reduced child poverty levels, and let Trump’s income tax cuts expire for those making over $400,000 a year. Trump had lowered the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Harris adopted Biden’s proposal of 28 percent, only restoring half the cut. However, while Biden’s budget called for raising the capital gains tax from 23.8 percent to 44.6 percent, in September, Harris tempered the raise to 33 percent, to reward “investment in America’s innovators”. This was her first public concession to Wall Street requests, but all the proposals will be subject to negotiations in Congress.18

Responding to concerns about inflation, Harris added a more populist and vague promise of a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries”. This drew criticism both from Trump, who denounced it as “Communism”, and columnists in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. It demonstrates the tightrope that Harris is seeking to walk: offering gestures to her base and potential voters without losing the support of big business and so avoiding specific measures attacking their interests.19 

Harris has not articulated fully worked-out economic plans in trade and industry. All the above suggests, though, that she “will not have much room to shift from industrial intervention and import tariffs” associated with Bidenomics, nor will she have the money or political support for the grand gestures earlier in Biden’s administration.20

The return of Trump

Meanwhile, Harris’s opponent, Trump, has the appearance of a boorish buffoon, spouting lies and playground insults. Yet, he has also been a surprisingly effective far-right figurehead who has drawn together a middle-class base with enthusiastic support from Christian nationalists and the far right, along with sections of the capitalist class. During his presidency and almost four years out of power, he and his followers have taken over the conservative Republican Party and transformed it in his own contradictory and vituperative image. He could only have done so in a period of deep crisis to which the bipartisan neoliberal consensus offered no answer.21

Trump’s presidency was the product of that crisis, paralleling a rise of the far right internationally. In contrast to many other countries, its electoral face was contained in the Republican Party.22 The extent of Trump’s reactionary rhetoric and policies, and his rabid following on the ground, has reminded many of fascism. However, labelling Trump as such lets capitalism off the hook. Yes, Trumpism is not the ordinary conservatism to which we have become accustomed, and he is perfectly capable of mobilising fascist tropes and rhetoric. So far, however, Trump’s central aspiration does not appear to be to generate a mass reactionary movement outside of the state capable of destroying democracy, atomising the working class and imposing a fascist dictatorship. Instead, he is a political adventurer, seeking to use racism and misogyny, among other forms of oppression, and anti-democratic measures to facilitate his effort to win and retain the presidency.

Nonetheless, there has been a back-and-forth relationship between Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) followers and genuine fascist organisations. Since the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstration of 2017, it has been obvious that “Trump opened a Pandora’s box from which a serious national fascist movement could emerge”.23 This was reinforced by the violent yet shambolic Capitol invasion. In the wake of this, some Republican leaders and businesses initially stepped back from Trump. Still, a majority of Republicans continued to support him, and soon the Chamber of Commerce, followed by Wall Street, re-started their donations to “election denying” congresspeople, with the Republican National Committee proclaiming the events a part of “legitimate political discourse”.24 As more of Trump’s followers were elected to Congress, others accommodated to the language of MAGA to get through the Republican primaries—and all of this has contributed to the further growth of militant far-right forces outside the electoral sphere.

Trump’s 2024 campaign

Trump’s hardened base among Republican voters makes up at most a third of the electorate. A clear majority is to the left on issues such as abortion, taxing the rich and corporations, gun control and support for unions. This creates a dilemma. On the one hand, Trump’s inarticulate and hateful bluster can energise his base. On the other hand, with the emergence of Harris as a viable alternative, it can also repel other voters. Republican opposition to abortion helped slow their advances in the 2022 midterms, and Trump now distances himself from the abortion issue.25

Pushing fears over migration has been the area in which he has been most successful. He has adopted Nazi language about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and riffed on the great replacement theory. The Republican platform states: “We must deport the millions of illegal migrants who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged to invade our Country.” This rhetoric has contributed to a sharp increase in the percentage of people who want to see immigration decreased, with a majority now expressing that opinion for the first time since 2005.26

The second big theme of Trump’s campaign is Biden’s handling of the economy. Although Trump’s advisors encourage him to focus on affordability and tie Harris to the inflation experienced under Biden, Trump tends to go off on tangents, insulting opponents instead. Trump’s speeches are no longer filled with the populist criticism of big business he used in 2016.27 Blaming inflation on “Biden’s open border”, rather than companies raising prices, is not working as well as he would like. This reflects the extent to which Trump relies on vilifying his opponents. Harris and Walz “want this country to go Communist immediately”, he argues. Biden’s recognition of Trans Day of Visibility was, Trump said, “appalling and insulting” and part of his “years-long assault on the Christian faith”.28 This appeals to the Christian right but is less attractive to the undecided voters his campaign needs to reach.

Trump has used his vice-presidential pick, Vance, to make the populist attacks on “woke corporations” and use his supposed Appalachian roots to appeal to white workers. “We’re done…catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man,” Vice told the televised Republican convention, despite being a millionaire venture capitalist.29 But even at arm’s length, this rhetoric has reinforced the impression by big business that the Trump administration will be only an erratic and unreliable ally. 

Unlike Trump’s more instinctual politics, Vance was influenced by a group of new-right anti-democratic thinkers who reject neoliberalism, advocating an elite wielding the strength of the state against their liberal enemies.30 Vance sees Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a model: tightening state control and promoting childbirth. Comments made by Vance about “childless cat ladies” reflect his reactionary gender politics, but have played badly.31 Vance has opposed abortion, gender transition, gay marriage, in vitro fertilisation and divorce, but has tempered some of his more extreme views for the sake of the campaign.

If he becomes vice president, he could emulate the disgraced Steve Bannon, senior counsel to the president in Trump’s first administration, furthering the commitment to economic nationalism and dismantling of state institutions. He might have been a savvy pick to consolidate Trumpism against a faltering Biden. Today, he has a large and growing unfavourability rating in the polls.

“Trumponomics”

If there is such a thing as “Trumponomics”, it is protectionist tariffs and deporting immigrant labour, combined with Reaganite deregulation and regressive tax cuts. He has plans to intensify all these if given a second term. The tax breaks Trump’s presidency delivered in 2017 were welcomed by large swathes of the capitalist class but expire in 2025. He has pledged to renew and expand them as well as scrapping ten existing government regulations for every new one added.

Trump’s protectionist tariffs were highly divisive as they were supported by his base but criticised by many larger and globally oriented firms. The new Republican platform calls for “universal baseline tariffs on most imported products” and to “revoke China’s Most Favored Nation trade status and adopt a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods”.32 Trump has proposed a 10 percent baseline tariff and 60 percent on Chinese goods. If enacted, this would significantly disrupt the US economy and world trade. It would also raise the cost of imported products, adding to inflation and disproportionately affecting those with lower incomes.33 The figures may be typical Trump exaggerations. However, Robert Lighthizer, a potential treasury secretary if Trump wins, has confirmed that he is in favour of a “strategic decoupling” of the US and Chinese economies.34 Trump has shifted the Republicans in a nationalist, isolationist direction. It is also notable that all mentions of a balanced budget, debt or government deficits have been dropped, with all the emphasis on the trade deficit, which Trump tends to view as a balance sheet for the US.

In his stump speeches, Trump’s other answer for the economy is a Republican campaign slogan from 2008: “Drill, Baby, Drill!” He pledged to refill the US strategic oil reserves, a huge gift to petrochemical companies but not to the planet. He will also repeal the targeted tax exemptions given to electric vehicles, solar and other green tech under Biden. And he has switched to supporting the energy-intensive cryptocurrency industry. Trump’s rhetoric has been enough of an excuse for major environmental non-governmental organisations to back Harris, despite her relative silence on climate issues.

Republican and Democratic economic policies, in different ways, are prepared to ditch elements of the pure neoliberal consensus of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but neither set of policies are likely to improve the position of the working class. 

Alternatives

For generations, people have argued: “We have to elect this Democrat because otherwise this particularly bad Republican will get in.” Yet, for generations, Democratic administrations have disappointed those who elected them, creating the space for an even worse Republican to emerge.

The reality is that the US has two straightforwardly pro-capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Since Franklin D Roosevelt’s election during the Great Depression and his New Deal policies, most trade unions have supported the Democrats. However, there is no organic connection between the working class and the party, not even to the extent that the Labour Party in Britain can be said to represent a working-class vote.35 The two US parties appeal to “constituencies”, such as union members, ethnic and regional groups, and small businesses. The allegiance of these groups shifts; each party still represents a section of US capital.

There are no “members” of either party—individuals just register to vote in their primaries—and leaders are not subject to democratic accountability. The expense of elections in the US means parties are essentially run by their donors in the same way corporations are ultimately controlled by their investors. Official spending on the 2024 presidential race is already over a billion dollars. The entire 2020 election totalled around $14 billion, with the Democrats receiving more from Wall Street than the Republicans.36

There are a few third-party formations on the left. The radical scholar Cornel West is running an independent campaign, and the Green Party is again running Jill Stein.37 Unfortunately, they are essentially irrelevant to the election. Neither is on the ballot in all the states, and both have been polling around 1 percent since Harris entered the race. It would be a step forward in the US to have a significant electoral choice outside the two-party system. However, to move now from building Palestinian solidarity protests to canvasing people to vote would be a strategic mistake, detracting from the movements with potential to bring change. The important discussion is not a moral one, about how to vote in November, but about where change comes from.

Of course, building a third party and building struggles are not mutually exclusive. The US needs a radical, class-based party, but any significant party of this type would have to be built on the back of mass movements. Within Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, climate and Palestine protests, there has been a growing radical minority rejecting the capitalist system. This potential will be undercut by every election season if radicalism is absorbed back into the Democratic Party.

The electoral left

Bernie Sanders is a long-standing independent senator from Vermont, calling himself a socialist and caucusing with the Democrats in Congress. His two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination and his criticisms of billionaires drew vast crowds and increased identification with socialism, especially among young people. However, instead of taking that enthusiasm in an independent direction, he was used to bring leftists back into the Democratic Party. Limiting his strategy to what can be done inside government has necessarily limited his ambitions. Putting aside “disagreements”, such as the Gaza genocide, he praised Biden till the end and is now part of the so-called Progressives for Harris campaign.

Similar points could be made of the squad, the group of left-wing representatives, all Democrats, and many of them members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They hoped they could parley their support for later influence. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative from the Bronx, New York, and the squad’s major figurehead, became an important backer of Biden before he stepped down. Harris has inherited their support.38 The DSA itself, which grew in conjunction with the Sanders campaigns, has not officially endorsed Harris, while still emphasising electoral work within the Democratic Party. It called for Biden to step down after his disastrous debate with Trump—not during the many months in which he stood with Netanyahu, enabling genocide and condemning student protesters.

The politics of the DSA have been discussed previously in this journal.39 The DSA has condemned Israeli actions in Gaza, and many student members of the Young DSA have been involved in college encampments in solidarity with Palestine. Yet, at a national level, the DSA has stayed away from the large Palestinian-led demonstrations and has done little to unite the opposition or insert a socialist voice into the debate, preferring to focus on applying pressure to congresspeople. These electoral priorities have consequences, seen in the DSA’s continued support for Jamall Bowman after his votes for military aid to Israel and in the DSA’s 2022 decision to dissolve its Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions working group.40

Earlier conversations about a so-called “dirty break” have faded as the organisation has tended to push new volunteers interested in socialism towards campaigns for local DSA-endorsed Democratic candidates.41 Membership has been declining from a peak of 90,000 in early 2022, and many are inactive or focus their activity outside the DSA.42

Conclusion

Long-standing American socialist Dan La Botz has made the argument that “socialists must work to defeat Trump and elect Biden” (or now Harris), despite disagreeing with their politics, “to prevent the increasingly rapid slide toward authoritarianism, the loss of our democratic institutions such as they are, and end to our civil rights”.43 The fear of what can be done by the far right is both understandable and real. However, this is exactly the argument made to vote for Biden over Trump in 2020—only to see Trump return in an even more frightening form. In an election about who is the agent of change, for the left to align itself with the status quo is a recipe for disaster. Socialists in the US will not, anyway, be numerous enough to change the presidential election result. Working to win an election for a Democrat, and all the arguments that entails, will only change the socialists involved, as we have seen time and again.44

Where socialist organisations can punch above their numerical weight is in building formations to resist Trumpism and fighting for socialism, whoever wins. We can learn from how movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter quickly transformed political discourse in the US. In the absence of ongoing organisations offering a generalised anti-capitalist politics and seeking to connect these to the wider working class, they tend to dissipate, reinforced by the repression they face and the renewed focus on the electoral realm.45 The Gaza solidarity movement has learnt from earlier struggles but is subject to the same pressures. It is harder to resist them without clear political organisation.

Whoever wins this election, it will not stop the polarisation and instability in the US.46 The policies of Trump are frightening—and opposed by the majority of Americans. If he is elected, we will need mass opposition to make them impossible to enact. If the Democrats win, there will still be attempts to implement attacks on oppressed people and the working class. This will be combined with the implementation of elements of Trump’s agenda in individual states, which the Democrats have shown themselves ineffective in opposing.

In 2017, Megan Trudell wrote in this journal: “For mass opposition to Trump to put on the agenda a serious alternative to the two-party system and the neoliberal project, it will need to address the profound economic inequality in US society and find ways of connecting the various arenas of struggle”.47 This is still true today, and out of these struggles we need to build socialist organisation that points to an alternative to capitalism.

Eric Fretz is a socialist activist living in Brooklyn, New York.