By Andy Yorke
THE 8 NOVEMBER US midterms proved a shock to the commentators who predicted disaster for Biden and the Democrats. In fact, the swing against the incumbent party was the lowest for many years, despite Biden’s unpopularity in the opinion polls.
The anticipated Red Wave failed to materialise; indeed, many hard-line ‘Make America Great Again’ candidates that Trump supported lost or seriously underperformed. What transpired instead was a shift in both parties towards the ‘centre’. Biden is certainly weakened in his ability to get his domestic agenda through the House of Representatives, but the midterms were a far more serious defeat for Trump and the populist right wing he backed.
The declaration of his candidacy for 2024 was consequently low-powered and vindictive. Trump threatened his fellow Republican Ron DeSantis, who emerged as his main rival for the nomination following a landslide victory in Florida, with revelations that would irreparably damage DeSantis’ chances.
A veritable civil war now looks likely in the Republican party. DeSantis opposes Trump the man but not his right-wing populism, as revealed by his speeches and his promotion of an ‘Anti-Woke’ law targeted against the teaching of ‘critical race theory’ – that is, any admission of America’s racist past and present.
On the other side, Biden and the right and centre of the Democrats emerged strengthened within the party against any serious challenge from the left. Certainly, the issue of abortion played well for the Democrats, enabling them to overcome the advantage the GOP thought it had over the worsening economic situation (8–9% inflation).
Jacobin, the website of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has praised the win of John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, attributing it to strong campaigning support from Labor’s Change to Win federation and Pennsylvania Teachers’ union activists. Jacobin’s conclusion is that this demonstrates the still active links between the unions and the Democrats.
Fetterman does, indeed, hold relatively progressive views on some issues, like cannabis legalization, abortion, and a $15 minimum wage. However, he also denounced the ‘defund the police slogan’ as ‘absurd’, said he would be ‘tough on China’, and voiced his support for fracking. He is at best a centre-left populist, and has already demonstrated his loyalty to the Democrats and their corporate paymasters.
Sanders and the left-populist/democratic socialist wing pushed for more ‘economic messages’ attractive to workers to supplement the campaign ads focusing on abortion, a covert criticism that Biden was not radical enough. But, in reality, the Democrats’ economic policies will always put the interests of big business first. They always have, even under the heavily mythologised Roosevelt New Deal ‘coalition’ with trade union bureaucrats and civil rights leaders. Only independent class struggle, the spectre of revolution, could wring radical reforms from the ruling class.
Yet the majority of the US reformist left want to keep workers, women, ethnic minorities and youth on the treadmill of electoral politics, voting for, and in many cases standing, as Democrats—the second party of US capitalism where corporate donations dwarf those of the unions, which are just another minority constituency. The Sanders experiment, run twice, in 2016 and 2020, proved that ‘political revolution against the billionaire class’ cannot take place through the Democrats, even with the most powerful, best-placed challenge to its writ in decades.
Class standpoint
Without effective political representation, American workers, particularly those continuing the wave of strikes and unionisation drives, remain trapped in the never-ending electoral cycle between the two capitalist parties, with another two-year battle ahead to keep Trump or DeSantis out of the White House and the corporate Democrats in power. They can use the excuse of a gridlocked Republican House and right-wing Democrats like Joe Manchin in the Senate to jettison all the more pro-working class promises in Biden’s 2020 manifesto.
Certain small left caucuses say they want a ‘dirty break’ from the Democrats, to eventually build a workers’ party. Election after election, however, they delay in implementing this strategy. Their latest suggestion is to call on Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to lead this break, despite the obvious fact that they are now more integrated into the Democrats than ever.
Breaking with the Democrats means uniting all those in favour of real working class independence with the ultimate aim of creating a new workers’ party. At the core of this strategy must be a fighting programme for working class power linking the party to all the ongoing struggles being waged against racism and the populist and fascistic right-wing. The aim should be either to win a 2023 DSA Convention to adopt such a programme and decide on an immediate break from the Democrats, or to summon a convention of all those willing to do so.
