In her campaign memoir, 107 Days, Kamala Harris gives us her thoughts on October 20, 2024, sixteen days before the presidential election she lost to Donald Trump: “There would be time later, I told myself, to reflect. I had to get on with the business.” In the book’s acknowledgments she writes that “I tend to be task-oriented and rarely allow myself enough space or time to reflect, and a marathon campaign run at a sprinter’s pace leaves little time for reflection.” What she seems to be acknowledging implicitly here is that the “later” time to ruminate at any depth on that disastrous defeat has not yet arrived. By structuring her book as a faux diary, a reconstructed day-by-day account of the foreshortened election, she ensures that she and the reader are always getting on with business, always rushing from event to event with no time or space for serious deliberation.
In this, Harris’s book seems more a symptom of distress than a diagnosis of the disorders that have brought American democracy into mortal danger. It is a series of flashbacks to a bad trip, the replaying in her mind of an ultimately traumatic experience. Harris describes the task of putting it together as “almost like living the campaign in reverse.” This is all too apt. Living in reverse, going back over the mechanics of one of the most consequential political failures in American history, is useless. With dissent being criminalized, troops on the streets, an enormous infrastructure of repression being built before our eyes, the Democrats do not need reruns of the disaster movie but a sharp and urgent understanding of why they failed and how they can fight back. Selling a book that is essentially an autopsy report feels at best pointless, at worst tasteless.
Every catastrophe has both short- and long-term sources. The proximate causes of Trump’s triumph are by now well established. Harris quotes the blunt and brutal warning of her campaign adviser David Plouffe: “People hate Joe Biden.” The cruelty and unfairness of this claim do not make it inaccurate. By 2024 Biden was a deeply unpopular president, partly because inflation was making life difficult for many Americans and partly because he could not turn his real achievements—especially his securing of large-scale investment in infrastructure and the transition from a carbon economy—into a coherent and inspiring story. He couldn’t do it because of the debilitating effects of aging, about which most of the Democratic leadership was in denial.
In Uncharted, the filmmaker and writer Chris Whipple’s account of the campaign, he quotes the former White House chief of staff Bill Daley on Biden’s decline:
Everyone ignored it…. And every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls.
The language may be crude, but it is hard to argue with the sentiment. In 107 Days Harris asks herself whether she “should have told Joe to consider not running.” Her answer is an evasive “Perhaps.” Of her own repetition “like a mantra” of the stock position that it was “Joe and Jill’s decision” to make, she wonders, “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high.” An admission of recklessness in the face of an imminent and explicit threat to turn democracy into dictatorship surely demands more than that shoulder-shrugging “Perhaps.”
The effect of this pusillanimity was not just that it delayed Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the race and deprived the Democrats of the stress test a primary contest would have provided. It was that it made the party as a whole look profoundly dishonest. Attacks on Trump’s habitual lying could not hit home when his opponents seemed so shifty themselves. And the Democrats’ (entirely accurate) warnings that the American republic was facing an existential crisis were obviated by their own vacillation. Voters were left to wonder why, if the threat from Trump truly loomed so large, the Democrats were so reluctant to take the only action that might avert the looming calamity: replacing Biden with a more viable candidate.
When they finally did this, Harris was left with a dilemma she could not resolve, able neither to distance herself from Biden nor to claim his legacy. She acknowledges that she spent “several weeks” of her campaign “effusively praising” Biden, and that it took “too much time” before she acknowledged that this was a lost cause.
Her answer to the soft question posed by Sunny Hostin on The View in October—“Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”—was infamously self-destructive: “There is not a thing that comes to mind…” But even worse, as we read in 107 Days, is the answer she had written in her preparatory notes for the interview: “If I’m president I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet.” This is what she did in fact say later in that interview, when she realized the scale of her mistake and was trying to salvage something from the shipwreck. She seems to believe even now that it would have been an adequate reply; trying to look more Republican-friendly than Biden would have been the winning strategy.
This is the lingering delusion: that the Democrats could douse Trump’s bonfire of norms and values with the soft foam of political congeniality. Harris confesses in 107 Days that “I yearned for a bipartisan era when senators could reach across the aisle to accomplish real improvements in people’s lives.” This yearning is a dreamier kind of political escapism—paralysis induced not by post-traumatic flashbacks but by wistful nostalgia. The Democrats placed a large bet on anti-Trump Republicans crossing the electoral aisle, to such an extent that Harris declared herself “honored” to have the support of the “well respected” architect of the Iraq War Dick Cheney.
In her memoir she plays up a sweet little vignette in which, after the election, she invited Liz Cheney and her five children to the vice-president’s residence: “I imagined her kids had the same fond feelings about the house where their grandfather lived for eight years as ours do.” It’s a moment of pure fantasy—the Little House on the Potomac where, in a better time, children played and gentle Grandpa plotted an illegal war and a disastrous occupation. A large part of the history that has led to America’s current crisis—the collapse of US authority in the failure of its forever wars—is veiled in a mist of longing for an imagined golden age of bipartisan concord.
Even in relation to its immediate tactical aim of drawing votes from Trump, Harris’s “hope that we could reach those Republicans who believe, as we do, that fundamental principles of our democracy should never be partisan issues” did not work. Exit polling suggested that Harris got the votes of 5 percent of voters who identified as Republicans—fewer than the 6 percent who voted for Biden in 2020 and the 8 percent who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in strategic terms, it was—and is—an even bigger error.
In the first place, it misses the way Trump’s disdain for the neocons’ wars was one of his electoral assets. He instinctively understood that the public had long since soured on the extended occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2019, according to Pew Research, 62 percent of American adults, including a remarkable 64 percent of veterans who served in Iraq, considered the Iraq War “not worth fighting.” Fifty-nine percent of adults and 58 percent of veterans held the same views about Afghanistan. It is quite extraordinary that the Democrats allowed Trump a virtual monopoly on the exploitation of this profound disillusionment, and that Harris never stopped to ask who, exactly, Dick Cheney remains “well respected” by.
And second, the sentimentalization of the neocons obscured the need for the Democrats to hold to those very principles of democracy they imagined themselves to share with dissident Republicans. The obvious lesson of recent American history is that democratic principles cannot be advanced at home while they are being flouted abroad. There’s a reason, for example, the Vietnam War destroyed the otherwise progressive presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Double standards create a corrosive cynicism that erodes respect for democracy itself.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the contrasting approaches of the Democrats to Ukraine and Gaza. The Biden administration rightly condemned Russia’s assaults on Ukrainian civilians and civil infrastructure as war crimes. In 107 Days Harris writes that she “pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians.”
She quotes her own public statement on Gaza near the start of her presidential campaign, in which she evoked “images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” and declared that “we cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Yet the rest was, if not quite silence, a tight-lipped caution. Harris glanced off the Gaza question in her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, a small, silent protest from delegates in the hall was hustled away, and no pro-Palestinian speaker, let alone one of Palestinian descent, was given a slot in the main program. In 107 Days Harris has little more to say about this than that it created “tension and some bitterness.”
What it also created—and more importantly continues to create—is the sense of a Democratic Party that is struggling to articulate any coherent vision of America’s place in the world after its defeat by the Taliban. The US stands, in theory, for a global order based on respect for the universality of human rights and the imperatives of international law. Apart from all moral considerations, its inability to stand up for those principles makes it look merely ineffectual. Against Trump’s rampaging amorality, the Democrats offered a bleeding-heart sympathy. (“The scale of suffering,” Harris said of Gaza in her acceptance speech at the convention, “is heartbreaking.”) Being the party that feels the world’s pain is not a good answer to a president who invites his supporters to share the unalloyed joy of being able to inflict it.
Yet it is not hard to know where to look for a better answer. It was a Democrat, Eleanor Roosevelt, who did most to shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That universalism was meant not just to anchor America in a compact with the rest of the world but to be a touchstone for its own domestic progress toward an ever fuller democracy. The Democrats need to return to it as the foundation both for a challenge to Trump’s foreign policy and for a transcendence of narrow identity politics at home. They need to get over their fear of looking weak; nothing demonstrates impotence more than claiming to have principles you are too frightened to defend consistently. Trump can afford—indeed, can revel in—contradiction and wild inconsistency. The Democrats can’t. For Trump it is enough that his supporters believe in him. His opponents must show that they have beliefs they will act on, even when it is politically awkward to do so.
Most of what Harris writes about in 107 Days can be thought of as belonging to the political weather: the sequence of contingent events—from Biden’s stubbornness to the consequences of the Hamas assault on Israelis in October 2023, from the effects of Covid and the Ukraine war on inflation to Trump’s survival of two assassination attempts—that shaped the immediate circumstances of the 2024 election. But if the Democrats are to regain power and reverse the tide of autocracy, they must think much more sharply than Harris currently seems capable of doing about the political climate: the large-scale, long-term forces that have already altered the social environment for the worse and threaten to make it uninhabitable for democracy.
In this regard, it is useful to recall the notion of a “political order” that the historian Gary Gerstle teases out in his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). It refers not to one party or another being in power but to the ability of a particular set of ideas to set the terms on which all administrations must seek to govern. “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will,” he writes. “Thus, the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower acquiesced to the core principles of the New Deal order,” just as “the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton accepted the central principles of the neoliberal order in the 1990s.”
The underlying question now is whether Trumpist Republicanism is becoming a hegemonic political order of this kind—and how the Democrats can stop that from happening. In a negative sense, Trump has already bent them to his will. He has defined the terms of American politics for the last decade. The Democrats have sought to survive by being un-Trump: the civil, reasonable, decent alternative to his crudity, cruelty, and blatant corruption. Proper as this is, it has failed because it has allowed American democracy to become Trump’s property, in which the Democrats are tenants—on increasingly short-term and arbitrary leases.
The most obvious reason for their failure is that Trump has moved the political order so far to the right that the center ground is on the far edges of what used to be regarded as conservatism. Clintonian triangulation now maps a landscape in which any kind of center-left program can have no real place. There is no halfway point between, for example, the absolute denial of human-generated climate change and the urgent action needed to address it, or between the destruction of civil institutions like free media and independent universities and the necessarily fierce defense of civil and civic liberties.
Thus in Trump’s America there is no such thing as a moderate, reasonable Democrat. All Democrats are “radical left.” Harris herself is the “Radical Left Marxist, Comrade Kamala Harris.” And there is no compromise, no concession, no capitulation that will ever make Democrats anything other than radical left lunatics in the currently dominant political discourse. This indelible branding forces Democrats into a choice. They can either persist in a futile attempt to prove their moderation, or they can lose the fear of such name-calling. If radicalism is the label that will be affixed to all resistance to Trump, why not embrace radicalism? Resistance to despotism is innately respectable—the task is to make it politically potent by connecting it to the profound discontent that Trump has been able to exploit.
One of the inherent weaknesses of being merely not-Trump is that it induces a political narcolepsy. Trump is so horrible and so anarchic that it seems sensible to stay calm, wait for him to fail, and be there with open arms when the American people come to their senses. This was the explicit advice of the former Clinton strategist James Carville, writing in The New York Times in February:
It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.
It is a weird reprise of an old Marxist attitude—Trumpism, like capitalism, will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. And it is doubly delusional. It assumes in the first place that the force that will revive the Democratic Party is nostalgia. This is the politics of a country and western song: the guy on his fifth whiskey telling the barkeep that his wife will soon realize she should never have left him for the hollow thrills of that louche seducer. Second, it grossly underestimates the speed and ruthlessness of Trump’s dismantling of the norms and institutions of American democracy. Trumpism is not withering—it is putting down firm roots in the military, in the media, in the justice system, in civil society, and in the legislative branch. A democracy that plays dead will soon be dead for real.
It is certainly possible that a Trump-induced economic crisis could create the conditions for a Democratic revival, just as the banking and property collapse of 2007 and 2008 opened the way for Obama’s victory. But it is more likely that the real economic damage being inflicted by the current administration—its insane assault on America’s scientific and research infrastructure, and its abandonment of green industry in favor of turning the US into another authoritarian petrostate—will take some years to be fully felt. And in any case, history tells us that economic chaos is at least as likely to benefit the extreme right as it is to create opportunities for progressive change. If Trump gains full control over the media, civil society, and the institutions of power, the pendulum will not swing back toward the left. His whole purpose is to ensure that there is no pendulum.
To underestimate Trump is to fail to learn from him. The most obvious lesson lies in his intuitive grasp of the way old-style political parties are in decline across the democratic world. It is now well over a decade since the political scientist Peter Mair wrote, in his all-too-accurate Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (2013):
The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.
Trump responded to this crisis by turning a party into a movement, the GOP into MAGA. The Democrats, as a whole, did not respond at all. The popular excitement generated by Barack Obama’s insurgent campaign for the presidency largely dissipated during his eight years in office.
There is now a vague understanding among established Democrats that the old concept of the party has become, if not redundant, then certainly inadequate. At the end of 107 Days Harris writes laconically that “working within the system, by itself, is not proving to be enough.” This is a remarkable admission, and not only because it comes from the woman who most recently led the now-headless Democratic Party. It is also striking because Harris herself embodied the way the generations of activists formed by the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War struggles adapted themselves precisely to the need to work within the system.
Yet she seems incapable of imagining what it might mean to seek political regeneration from outside the system. The most she has to offer is a vague intention to “be with the people, in towns and communities where I can listen to their ideas.” Listening, however, has to become hearing. It should go without saying that if renewal is to come from the outside, it must be driven by those who have been outsiders.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for the New York mayoralty provides the most obvious example of what this looks like. Yet the extreme reluctance of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to endorse their own party’s candidate in New York City points to a stubborn preference for dying in the defense of the established Democratic order over drawing new life from external energies. Trump understands that we have entered a political era in which the alternative to radicalism is redundancy. If the Democrats do not grasp the potency of his insight, that alternative awaits them.
Trump also knows that, in the words of the Public Image Ltd. song, “anger is an energy.” He has, of course, directed it at immigrants, women, people of color, universities, journalists, and anyone who opposes his totalitarian ambitions. But, as Harris found out, joy is not the antidote to rage. The Democrats must channel anger. This does not mean aping Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric or opposing the violence of masked ICE agents and armed national guardsmen with violence. It means giving constructive expression to a legitimate indignation at the system that has allowed the top 0.1 percent of Americans to hold 14 percent of the country’s wealth while families in the entire bottom half hold 2.5 percent. It means being furious about the clogging up of the intergenerational social mobility that had been the driver of American dynamism: whereas 90 percent of Americans born during World War II ended up better off than their parents, those born in 1985 are as likely to be poorer than their parents as they are to be richer.
To confront these realities, the Democrats must add to their collective vocabulary two words that Harris shies away from: equality and oligarchy. In 107 Days she uses the first term in bland claims, such as that Americans as a people have long embodied for the rest of the world “ideals of equality, generosity, enterprise”—a formula in which equality is carefully detached from domestic economic conditions. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour has attracted crowds as large as any Trump rally, not least because it gives a recognizable name to the power structure that shapes the lives of most Americans. When the billionaire governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, says he’s happy to say “oligarch” because “it’s an easy word for people to use” to describe what they saw when the tech tycoons lined up at Trump’s inauguration, he surely knows what he’s talking about.
The Democrats were long reluctant to use this language because they could dream that the new class of ultra-wealthy tech titans might be our oligarchs. These new moguls spoke a New Age language of peace and love, seemed comfortable with racial and sexual diversity, were at home with cosmopolitan culture, and were inclined to fund Democratic candidates. Obama was on their wavelength and they on his—one of the swansongs of his presidency in October 2016 was the day-long South by South Lawn “festival of ideas, art and action” on the White House grounds, attended, as The New York Times Magazine reported, by “the types of people who describe themselves in Twitter bios as ‘creator’ or ‘innovator.’” It portended a sunny future in which social media and new technologies would create a new politics of human connection and those who controlled it would always feel most at home with liberal Democrats. Less than a month later Trump won the presidency, and less than a decade after that the tech bros have pledged their troth to his extreme ethnonationalist agenda. Oligarchs, it turns out, are not after all the natural allies of democracy, let alone of Democrats.
This awakening may be very rude indeed, but it must be an awakening nonetheless. The Third Way triangulation in which the old center-left made its peace with extreme inequalities of wealth was summed up in 1998 by one of its architects, Tony Blair’s strategist Peter Mandelson (recently fired as British ambassador to the US because of the revelation of his cloying relationship with Jeffrey Epstein), as a state of being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” What happened, rather, is that the beneficiaries of this tolerance for gross economic inequality used their political influence to avoid taxation—and instead of being intensely relaxing, the consequence of the rise and rise of the filthy rich has been a political upheaval that is tearing most democracies apart.
Since the hope of rallying large numbers of Republicans around the defense of the rule of law and of established institutions has failed, and the dream of a sweetly progressive new class of tech billionaires has turned to nightmare, Democrats must go back to the basics of class politics. They have to face the reality that they have lost too many working-class Americans to Trumpism. The common explanation for this is that these voters have moved to the right on social questions and that these have in turn become the wedge issues that separate them from the Democrats. Progressives have lost the culture wars. The good news is this is not quite accurate.
An important recent meta- analysis, “Working-Class Social and Economic Attitudes” by Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, Carson Kindred, and Sean Mason, shows that in fact working-class Americans have become more progressive on most social issues. On civil rights and LGBT rights, working-class attitudes have become steadily more liberal over time since the 1990s. For example, “working-class views on abortion have been consistently moderate, with over 80 percent of working-class Americans expressing opposition to outlawing abortion.” Working-class support for permitting gay men and lesbians to adopt children has risen from less than 40 percent to more than 60 percent. On Trump’s touchstone issue of immigration, “the working class has become less conservative relative to the middle- and upper-class around fears that immigration will take jobs.” Even on undocumented migration, the authors “see minimal class differences across the periods analyzed”—working people are no more conservative than their better-off peers.
What’s happened is not in fact that working-class America has retreated into intolerance and bigotry, but that it has moved away from such attitudes at a slower pace than the middle and upper classes. There is a class gap, but it is not a process of complete polarization. There is no reason to think that the stratum of pro-Trump voters defined as “socially to the right and economically to the left” (about 8 percent of the electorate) has become unreachable for Democrats—provided that Democrats themselves are clearly and passionately on the economic left.
That requires a shift from standing up for to standing up to. Speaking on behalf of those who have lost out in the great economic upheavals of the twenty-first century now feels patronizing and elitist. The contemporary culture is one in which everyone has at least the illusion of having a voice—posting on social media provides a simulacrum of public expression. What is much more important now is whom you speak against—and whose wrath you are willing to risk in doing so. If the Democrats do not seem brave enough to take the risks involved in speaking against the overweening oligarchy, they will not prevent Trumpism from establishing itself as the American political order for the foreseeable future.
What should be bleakly consoling is that there is, in any case, no safe option. The meek will not inherit the scorched earth of post-democratic America. They will, like democracy itself, be consumed in the fire. Safety is not available, but resistance is far from futile. It is what the American republic was founded on, and if the 250th anniversary of that foundation next year is not to mark its obsequies, all obsequiousness must be banished.
English (US) · 