Grant and Joe had me back for a “sequel” appearance on their Rabble Report podcast — moving on from the failures of left-wing populism to the successes of right-wing populism.

The episode examines whether today’s populist parties reflect a broader social movement or function instead as scavengers capitalising on the political hollowing-out of the establishment, in part through a discussion of Roger Eatwell & Matthew Goodwin’s ahead-of-the-curve 2018 book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.

The conversation moves through questions of sovereignty, nationalism, fascism, socialism, and democracy, drawing on party-systems theory, empirical research on voter attitudes, and historical comparisons with interwar Europe.

Along the way, the discussion interrogates common assumptions about ideological radicalisation, voter motivation, and the capacity of populist parties to govern once in power.

We situate these questions within the broader debate about why political systems appear increasingly disconnected from the people they claim to represent.

Here’s the YouTube link:

And the Spotify link:

The post Why right-wing populism won. And what’s next appeared first on Left Flank.

By Tad Tietze

I was recently on Grant Gallagher and Joseph Sciortino’s excellent podcast The Rabble Report.

It’s a real deep dive, in which we look at the rise and fall of left populism by using the recent book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger (Verso, 2023) as a jumping off point.

The topics covered include:

• Populism in the Discourse
• Historical Populism vs. Today
• Why Study Populism?
• Left Populism + “The Populist Moment”
• Economics/Society and Populism Relationship
• Bernie Sanders + Shrinking Horizons of Left Populism
• Why Right-Wing Populism is Winning
• Immigration
• Democracy + The End of History
• Future of Populism in Power

You can watch it on YouTube here:

If you prefer to just listen, it’s also on Spotify:

Make sure to check out other episodes of The Rabble Report on their YouTube channel.

The post Can the Left Reclaim Populism? appeared first on Left Flank.

As a psychiatrist who comments on politics a lot, I have a few things to say about the connection between politics and mental disturbance in horrific mass killings like the one in the German city of Magdeburg yesterday.

While I’m not a forensic psychiatrist, I did have an invited article on the topic published in a peer-reviewed psychiatry journal (see below for more).

So as not to “bury the Lede”, it seems to me likely that this attack was related to a mix of the perpetrator’s (political) belief system and some kind of moment of personal disturbance.

This mix of politics and mental disturbance has become an increasingly common feature of lone wolf mass killings — and it leads politicos to either blame killings on their opponents or to deny a “truly” political cause, depending on their own views.

My argument is that you can’t easily separate them.

We know very little directly about the recent mental state of the alleged killer, whose Twitter handle is @DrTalebJawad, a Saudi-born psychiatric medical practitioner living in Sachsen-Anhalt and recently practicing near Magdeburg.

I’m not going to speculate on his exact mental condition until we know more, but it’s possible he is disturbed in some way, even if not necessarily “psychotic” in the traditional diagnostic sense.

However, from his Twitter we do know that he holds a somewhat atypical mix of ideas for a refugee from the Middle East — hardline atheism, anti-Saudi regime, anti-Islamist, alongside support for Elon Musk and the German anti-immigration party the AfD.

It’s also clear he’s long been an activist and community campaigner in some way for many years (he arrived in Germany in 2006).

This has already scrambled right-wing attempts to paint him in the usual way that might confirm their preoccupations — e.g. like they could the failed Tunisian asylum-seeker considered a security risk who killed 13 people at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016.

You can read more on the Berlin terror attack and Angela Merkel’s mishandling of the aftermath here.

But left-wing attempts to simply write the Magdeburg killer off as far right Islamophobe also make little sense. After all, he has for many years campaigned for migrants’ rights against what he perceives to be a dysfunctional and unresponsive German state.

But we also know something more important about him: at some stage he appears to have become radicalised against German society as a whole.

Here is part of his pinned tweet-thread from August:

I draw on two main sources of expertise for my argument here.

The first expert is the forensic psychiatrist Professor Paul Mullen, who provided a categorisation of mass killers that is, I think, the most broad-ranging and clarifying.

He did it in an article on “The autogenic (self-generated) massacre”.

In the article Mullen distinguishes between two types of what he calls “massacres” (i.e. “relatively indiscriminate killings where just killing people is the prime aim and the victims are all, or nearly all, chosen by chance, albeit from some broad social grouping”).

The first type of massacre is socio-political: “Manifestations of social conflict where antagonism between different groups or classes of people erupts into violence, which could properly be called civil massacres”. He gives Yugoslavia and Rwanda as examples.

The second type is “autogenic”, or “self-generated”: “The result of the actions of an individual, or small group, driven by highly personal agendas arising from the perpetrator’s own specific social situation and psychopathologies”.

Autogenic mass killers become so radicalised they carry out a massacre against a social group or (as they see it) an entire society. Often there is a tenuous link between the victims and the apparent aims.

Think any number of public mass shootings in the US, from Columbine and Sandy Hook to the Las Vegas shooter who killed 60 people in 2017 for motives that are not entirely clear to this day.

Or even the Germanwings pilot who deliberately flew his plane into a mountain, killing 150.

In some cases, there is a clear record of mental health problems, in others the mass killing seems to come without past contact with the mental health system or other “warning signs”.

The problem with applying Mullen’s typology too rigidly is that in today’s world of increasingly socially detached politics and political activism, the line between the two has become more and more blurred.

Luigi Mangione’s recent murder of a health insurance CEO in NYC seems to have been driven by a highly idiosyncratic political worldview — as well as a more recent individual belief in the failure of peaceful means to achieve political or social ends.

Hence, he can be considered to have been nuts or be taken up as a political folk hero or be condemned as a political folk villain!

It’s been a similar story with Western Jihadism.

At their height as terrorist movements, Al-Qaeda and ISIS could recruit cells to operate in the West on their behalf — or to get them to travel to join the Jihad. Attacks like that on 9/11 took a lot of resources, coordination and planning, and couldn’t be the actions of totally isolated individuals or small groups.

They had some kind of social backing for their projects, even if a relatively narrow one.

Notably, though, many recruits were recent converts to Islam (including people with no Islamic background or connections, which I’ll return to).

Once ISIS started to go into decline and lost the ability to effectively organise recruitment and cells in the West, they called for individuals to act on their behalf, attracting a series of radicalised people who were often “troubled” in some way.

The resultant political debates on what or who was to blame were interminable!

Here we need to move onto who exactly might be susceptible to carrying out a massacre.

My second expert source is the French sociologist Olivier Roy, who has done what I consider the best empirical work on Western Jihadists. He concludes: “We must understand that terrorism does not arise from the radicalisation of Islam, but from the Islamisation of radicalism.”

Roy argues that the pattern is that these people mostly start by radicalising against the society in which they live and only afterwards take up an extreme Jihadist ideology, one that rejects not only the decadence of the West, but the traditional Islam brought by immigrants to the West.

This insight helps to explain why a disproportionately high number of Western Jihadists are recent converts to Islam. Particular forms of Salafist Sunni Islam provide a frame for their radicalisation.

In one infamous case, the ISIS-flag-brandishing man who individually took hostages and killed people in the Lindt Café in Sydney, Australia, was a known Shiite Muslim refugee rights activist who flipped to supporting a radical Sunni cause (one which was prone to vilifying and even killing Shiites as apostates!) very soon before his terrorist act.

Roy’s is a vital insight that helps explain more than just Jihadi terrorists.

The necessary first step is to become radicalised to the point of seriously considering violent acts against a particular social group (or the whole of society), and only afterwards is it given an (often idiosyncratically mixed) ideological frame.

From what we know so far, the Magdeburg mass killer certainly had a bunch of worked out views that drove his migration to Germany and subsequent campaigning efforts, but he was (as far as we know) a non-violent actor until quite recently. Hence, he was not on the radar of authorities (possibly despite warnings being made but not followed-up).

But you can see in his pinned tweets that at some point he radicalises against German society, saying he has come to new conclusions about the need for indiscriminate violence.

In this way he is like Luigi Mangione, who also (like most everyone!) had views and beliefs but then something happened to lead him to the radical conclusion that violent means were the only way forward.

Mangione, despite some on the left or right wanting to say he was the product of widely-held ideologies, looks much more to be someone whose particular individual grievances led him to radicalise towards the need for violent action.

As Roy would say, the attraction to death and killing is key to what drives these people: “the nihilist dimension is central. What seduces and fascinates is the idea of pure revolt. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself”.

Hence Roy compares Columbine to Western Jihadism. He sees the connections rather than trying to artificially separate ideological from non-ideological massacres.

Back in 2014, The @ranzcp journal Australasian Psychiatry invited and published my article on “The Breivik controversy: politics, terrorism and psychiatry”.

Breivik was a lone actor, not psychotic or suffering from schizophrenia but likely disturbed in some way, who developed a clearly laid out but idiosyncratic far right ideology — using a variety of sources — that he used to justify murdering a mix of bystanders in Oslo and left-wing activists on Utøya Island in 2011.

Breivik’s worldview was a scramble of the political and the idiosyncratic. He had connections to far right and fascist movements yet drew his own conclusions about how to address their decline and isolation.

His act of mass murder was supposed to be an inspiration for far-right revival, but it was also a way to act out his frustrations and grievances at his situation, which he attributed to an Islamisation of the West carried out by traitorous Western political classes.

In all these cases the violent act itself becomes to the killer a way to express in a very public way their grievances. Giving it a political form then guarantees it will get more public attention and be the centre of more political debates.

In some ways, ISIS’s call to the already radicalised is a sign of the times: you want people to really pay attention? Then throw some ideology in to get people thinking of your act as having social significance because of the causes you espouse!

This then raises the truly important question: what is it about modern liberal democratic society that leads a minority of people to radicalise so extremely against it? That is a deeper question about the nature of modern society that no politico wants to deal with honestly, because that would require deep social change and not political quick fixes.

Of course, some might argue that the moment of “radicalisation” for these people is simply a moment of mental breakdown and that we should treat them all as apolitical.

This would be a mistake.

Radicalisation in today’s world of socially-detached and socially-non-responsive politics — a world in which the social institutions that mainstream and more radical politics organised themselves around have hollowed out and in many cases disappeared — is by necessity increasingly idiosyncratic.

There are no longer great social institutions to express more general social and political discontent and alienation. And, therefore, no institutions to channel or restrain the most extreme radicalisation into more socially acceptable ends (e.g. joining a far-left or far-right political sect with grand plans for world domination through revolution that never quite take off!).

Overall, the degeneration of political terrorism into something that increasingly looks like an autogenic (self-generated) massacre parallels the decline of all politics into an increasingly fragmented and ideologically unstable scene.

Sadly, until large numbers of individuals in society start to move to fight for collective shared interests — i.e. true social movements (not just narrowly based and socially-detached political movements) that can start to overcome the social and political alienation at the heart of capitalist modernity — I expect more of these horrific acts to be perpetrated.

None of these mass murders is likely to achieve more than increasingly hollow and bizarre government attempts to stop the next attack, which themselves fail. But they do make the ideological mass killing more attractive to the already radicalised, because they give the act an apparent social relevance and weight it doesn’t really have.

The post After Magdeburg: reflections on the politics of mass killing appeared first on Left Flank.

By Tad Tietze

If the “public” polls are correct, the United States presidential election this Tuesday could be the closest since the Bush-Gore dead heat of 2000. Or, given the margins of error involved we could see a Harris or Trump sweep of the seven “battleground” states. Or, the polls could be carrying errors as big as those in 2016 and 2020 and there might be a minor Trump landslide. Or, they could be wrong in some other way, producing a surprise big Harris victory. To make things more confusing, many insiders believe the quality of public polls has seriously declined, such that only much more expensive and granular “private” polls — like those commissioned by the campaigns and their allies — can be relied on. And, besides, what if there’s a late turnout surge among this or that demographic group, or an unpredictable effect of changes in early and mail-in vote mobilisation?

Simply put, predicting the outcome is a fool’s errand, even if the internal moods of both campaigns in the last few weeks have tended to treat a Trump victory as more likely.[1]

What can be foreseen, however, is that both major parties’ campaigns’ claims of being able to break the nation’s recurring cycle of rising political turmoil if they win cannot come to pass, no matter the size of any victory.

In this essay, in order to get to grips with the turmoil and its underlying causes, I’ll first outline the scale of mayhem during the present election cycle, as well as the unusual nature of Harris’s foreshortened campaign. I’ll then set these dynamics in the context of how Trump’s rise, fall, and comeback can be explained on the background of a longer run degeneration of the American party system — one that affects not only a Republican Party susceptible to being taken over by an outsider celebrity billionaire but a Democratic Party that has avoided facing a reckoning about its own, deeply entrenched problems.

A BONFIRE OF VOLATILITY

The current cycle has been a bonfire of volatility since CNN’s June 28 Biden-Trump debate, starting with Biden’s cognitively challenged performance, the media and big donors turning on him, Trump surviving a first assassination attempt, Biden withdrawing from the race, and his until-then unpopular vice-president rapidly manoeuvring to be nominated without the need for a primary-style contest.

Harris’s sudden rise reinvigorated a miserable Democratic party and put it consistently ahead in the polls for the first time in almost a year, leaving Trump and his campaign unsteady on their feet. Then there was a second assassination attempt on Trump while Harris was running a bizarrely empty “vibes” campaign in which she at first avoided almost all serious scrutiny under the pretext that everyone needed to “move on” (except, of course, when it came to attacking Trump).

While the dominant liberal media breathlessly reported these developments, once Biden pulled out of the race it mostly switched to cheerleading the “Kamalamentum” and remained incurious about the real circumstances of Biden’s decline or the wisdom of allowing him to continue serving as Commander-in-Chief. It is only in the dying days of the race that some outlets have raised worries about Harris as a candidate, and that a few (including the L.A. Times and Washington Post) have decided to stop making endorsements, fearing that obvious partisanship was undermining their credibility.

HARRIS’S PECULIAR CAMPAIGN

The vast majority of media coverage, whether filtered through a blue or red lens, has also failed to properly reflect on the peculiar nature of Harris’s campaign.

Harris got to the top of the ticket purely through back-room manoeuvres, while studiosly avoiding direct engagement with the media. Then she launched a highly stage-managed series of rallies in front of reinvigorated Democrat activists and supporters in which she implausibly ran — almost policy-free — as a fresh entrant into politics, a “joyful warrior”, and “a new generation of leadership” despite having run for the party’s nomination in 2019 and been sitting vice-president since 2021.

Similarly, her pledge to “turn the page” on a decade of divisive politics — intended to invoke how Trump had lived rent-free in many of his opponents’ minds — clashed with the fact that Democrats had controlled the White House for all but four of those years and that Harris was a senior collaborator in Biden’s apparent failure to “restore the soul of the nation” after defeating Trump in 2020.

When her potentially controversial or electorally risky past positions were raised, her campaign repeatedly backgrounded reporters that she’d changed her mind while official, on-the-record statements were mostly avoided.[2] When she eventually submitted to interviews she would give nebulous, contradictory answers about her values remaining the same, while also avoiding specifics (often by changing the subject to Trump) or devolving into her trademark “word salad”. It was the same with her relationship to the unpopular administration of which she was still a part — a mix of uncritical agreement with everything they’d done alongside cryptic assurances that she would, of course, do things quite differently.

Channelling Obama’s claim that he could “serve as the blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views”, Harris’s campaign scored initial success with the strategy.[3] This worked with her supporters, but detractors also projected what they believed were her true, nefarious beliefs even when nothing was on the public record. The Trump campaign’s initial attempts to brand her as a radical failed to land precisely because — despite years at the centre of public life — she remained little known to more than a minority of politically engaged voters. However, as the election neared it became clear that undecided voters were frustrated by a lack of information about Harris’s plans and were drifting back to the unsavoury but better-known quantity of Trump.

There was deeper, structural reason for the emptiness of her campaign: a risk-averse desire to hold together her side’s sudden but tenuous exit from the depths of dejection by avoiding offence to any of its many constituencies. Needing everyone on board meant remaining as elusive as possible for as long as possible, even while symbolically implying she was returning the party to the centre, such as by reappropriating nationalist imagery and slogans, playing up her ownership of a handgun, and using her past as a prosecutor to indicate she’d be tough on crime and border protection while providing little detail on how she’d solve those issues from the White House. Perhaps most egregiously the attempt to appeal to all sides resulted in her campaign editing video of her speeches to create a pro-Palestinian ad aimed at Michigan Muslims that was broadcast contemporaneously with an aggressively pro-Israel ad aimed at Pennsylvania Jews.[4]

Indeed, the only policy area on which Harris spoke clearly and confidently was abortion rights, in which she promised to sign Roe v Wade into law (although even here she wouldn’t specify how she would get around Congress, how this could work legally in the wake of Dobbs, or which historical version of Roe’s protections she’d endorse).

Interestingly, despite foregrounding several different, increasingly darker criticisms of Trump during the campaign — that he was “not a serious person” and only acted on self-interest, then that he was “unbalanced” and “unhinged”, and finally that he was a “fascist” — Harris also pilfered and even amplified features of the Trump playbook even as she attacked him over them. For example, while she pilloried him for proposing tariffs, labelling them a giant new sales tax, she then agreed with Biden’s decision to retain many of the Trump tariffs, yet still avoided explaining why those tariffs were ok. She also stole one of Trump’s few new policies — removing income tax on the tips of the hospitality workers — while acting like it was her idea.

And although Harris’s campaign continued the evergreen theme of Trump as pathological liar, its advertising and messaging was heavily dominated by verifiably false claims about his statements and policy positions. For example, while Trump had clearly and harshly repudiated the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the Democrats relentlessly ascribed its most reactionary proposals to him, even if he had never held them and had publicly rejected them. Ditto on cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which Trump had always railed against — much to the chagrin of traditional GOP politicians and elites. She also flipped Trump’s actual positions on abortion restrictions and IVF availability, over which he had fought the hard pro-life sections of his party. And finally, perhaps most ironically given her consistent ridicule of Trump’s border wall, she effectively committed to extending it and even used images of it in her ads.

These echoes came less from any substantive Harris embrace of Trumpism and more from the impossible contradiction she was trying to ride: presenting herself as a fresh alternative to Washington’s division and malaise while having been a consummate political insider for decades. About as far as you could get from an anti-politician, Harris was trying to float above the fray of recent political convulsions by being an empty vessel, who could hold her bruised and divided side together just long enough to squeak to victory by giving the appearance of being the opposite of what she was. Trump, long accused of being willing to say and do whatever it took to win power, no matter how contradictory and mendacious, now had an opponent willing to use the same approach, turned up to 11. The closeness of the final pre-election polls suggest, however, that her strategy had a constrained half-life.

TRUMP’S COMEBACK

These last four extraordinary months of chaos and weirdness had already occurred on the background of Trump improbably clawing his way back from the political doghouse from mid-late 2023. This was despite losing the 2020 election and further alienating himself from voters with his “stolen election” antics, despite suffering from relentless deployment of the January 6 riot against him, despite being further marginalised by his Supreme Court nominees overturning Roe v Wade, and despite being blamed for the GOP’s poor results in the mid-terms.

That he could do this was in part down to the Biden administration’s accumulating problems: widely disliked Covid mandate overreach; a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal; runaway inflation causing a cost-of-living crisis; a chaotic approach to the southern border and immigration; and an increasingly dangerous world the U.S. appeared to have ever less control over. The latter was especially manifest in Ukraine’s inability to repel its Russian invaders despite massive Western assistance and Israel’s refusal to be reined in over Gaza by its U.S. backers. This picture of American weakness, both domestically and on the global stage, was exacerbated by Biden’s own observable physical and mental decline, which was denied by the White House (it was all just “cheap fakes”) and, scandalously, covered up by most of the U.S. media.

Paradoxically, Trump also made his comeback in part thanks to the multiple legal cases arrayed against him, mostly driven by transparently partisan actors, by convincing many voters that these were “lawfare” aimed at extinguishing all opposition to a hated ruling clique and its “deep state” allies.

In the context of the growing public disapproval of the Biden administration, Trump could — perhaps ironically because his administration had achieved less in policy terms than his promises to “make America great again” suggested — portray his record as having delivered more economic prosperity, greater global stability, and tighter control of the southern border.

Yet Harris’s ability to recover much of the ground lost by Biden underscored how much electoral support for Trump — a historically polarising political figure — included a large element of negative partisanship. Indeed, the predominant zeitgeist reflected in opinion polls has been of unhappiness with both parties’ candidates and growing disenchantment with the state of American democracy.[5]

POLITICS IN DECLINE

Such survey results are merely the latest echo of longer-run tendencies towards political breakdown, themselves downstream effects of the hollowing out and disintegration of the social institutions that shaped and stabilised the two-party system that dominated 20^th Century politics, tendencies that no politician or party has found a way to halt, let alone reverse.

These trends have weakened of each party’s hold over its traditional voters, resulting in greater electoral volatility and a voting public more detached from and hostile to politicians, parties, and the political system as a whole. Whereas parties could once rely on their connections to mass social organisations (like trade unions and civic associations) to cohere broad electorates, as these decayed the parties found themselves instead trying to appeal to a morass of smaller constituencies whose interests were often at odds.

Since the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s, but especially after the end of a Cold War that had also shaped left-right distinctions, the U.S. parties have made a series of pragmatic adaptations to their growing disconnection from the public. Whether it was Bill Clinton forcing the Democrats to the right, or Bush II’s team using the international situation after 9/11 to give a weak GOP a new agenda, or Obama building his campaign largely independent of decrepit party structures, these adaptations all started from the reality that both parties’ authority was built on ever more fragile foundations.

It was in this context that Trump could subject the GOP to a hostile takeover, by running against many of its established ideologies, traditions, achievements, donors, and political elites. Crucially, he did so as an anti-politician, railing against the whole political class as failed, weak, and stupid.[6]

Then, despite a near-unanimous belief among insiders that he couldn’t possibly beat Hillary Clinton, Trump leveraged popular distrust of the Washington establishment that she epitomised alongside an unusually-centrist-for-the-GOP (except on immigration) platform to snatch an Electoral College victory that rocked the world.

THE LIMITS OF TRUMPISM

As with all of the anti-politicians and “populists” who’ve found electoral success in an era of rising public disenchantment with liberal democratic politics, while they may excite political engagement (for and against), they cannot magically conjure up new social bases through which to enact more than relatively restricted policy changes while in office. So it was with Trump, whose transformative promise was limited in practice to presiding over a booming economy, delivering a broad set of tax cuts, avoiding starting new wars, seeing off ISIS as the main global terrorist threat, and making some incomplete strides with the southern border, all before Covid-19 hit.[7]

More remarkable was the febrile opposition to his presidency, which rapidly coalesced into a “Resistance” that improbably united mutually hostile Democratic factions, a significant section of the GOP old guard, much of the federal bureaucracy, the upper echelons of the intelligence services, most of the mainstream media, the vast majority of what counts for a radical left in the U.S., and significant numbers of politically engaged middle-class white-collar professionals. In effect, the nation’s political class was partly reorganised from its old left-right oppositions towards an anti-Trump v pro-Trump axis.

Members of The Resistance overwhelmingly believed Trump’s election had been in some way illegitimate, and that extra-electoral means should be employed to hobble his agenda and, if possible, end his presidency early. Waves of anti-Trump activism kept the Democrats and media from having to properly reckon with their inability to foresee or prevent Trump’s 2016 victory, or with the deep schisms on the left that had been exposed with Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly successful challenge to Clinton. The Resistance drove the party to the left, less around Sanders’s preferred anti-corporate, pro-working-class agenda and more towards the racial (and other) identity politics and open borders policies that dominated anti-Trump activism. This dynamic was reflected in the eagerness of a wide range of Democratic contenders for the party’s nomination — among them Harris — to align themselves with positions far to the left of most Democrat voters.

Yet when Covid suddenly became the dominant issue in society in early 2020, it was Joe Biden who won the primary as Democratic voters and elites retreated to the safety of a moderate establishment candidate in the atmosphere of uncertainty, even if the price Biden paid for support from black congressional Democrats was picking a black woman as running mate. Stuck for viable choices, he chose Harris despite her deeply unimpressive performance in the race for the nomination.

Then, Trump’s border closures and support for the first national lockdown didn’t just feed the growing Covid panic. They also crushed a booming economy that was his best chance at re-election. The left quickly saw partisan advantage in attacking Trump’s ham-fisted approach and attempts to open up the economy, instead demanding longer lockdowns and harsher mandates. Then, after George Floyd’s death under a Minneapolis cop’s knee, the media, activists, and Democrat politicians positioned themselves as champions of a short-lived but massive Black Lives Matter protest movement.

Trump’s ability to get close to catching up to Biden in enough swing states by election day is testament to how the wild events of early-to-mid 2020 also provoked a backlash, allowing him to run by attacking ongoing Covid restrictions and a breakdown in law and order. Meanwhile Biden ran a “basement campaign”, largely avoiding the public spotlight (and closer examination of his mental acuity) under the pretext of Covid precautions.

While Biden won the popular vote by a larger margin than Clinton had in 2016, the historically high turnout also meant that Trump significantly expanded his electorate. More perplexingly for those who had written off Trump’s appeal as founded mainly on white racial grievances, his voter coalition was significantly more diverse than four years earlier, with a swing to the Democrats by white voters securing the presidency for Biden.

Covid produced a short-lived revival in the authority of established politicians everywhere, particularly if they were willing to decisively impose harsh emergency measures to appear to control the threat posed by the virus. Yet those same measures — almost always implemented arbitrarily, inconsistently, and with minimal transparency — soon started to eat away at this boost to their standing. Having been the champions of lockdowns and mandates, the Democrats now had to reap the inflationary and other financial consequence of staggering monetary (and, to a lesser extent, fiscal) outlays that had been made to save an economy ruthlessly suppressed in the name of public health.

Biden’s commitment to overturning as much of Trump’s agenda as possible led him to dramatically soften border controls within days of taking office. Meanwhile his belief that the U.S. remained “the indispensable nation” — with “nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together”[8] — led him to make repeated boasts about American influence over the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza that ended in embarrassing displays of impotence.

Despite the decline in his administration’s public standing and the evident decline in his cognition, the Democrat machine and its media allies not only covered for Biden but aggressively ran interference for him when he decided to run for re-election.

ANTI-TRUMPISM & ITS DISCONTENTS

It’s hard to explain this error of judgement except on the same basis as I have Harris’s odd campaign: a debilitating fear that the party couldn’t withstand an internal struggle over its direction, especially when faced with the threat of a Trump return. The 2015-6 primary season exposed deep divisions within the party’s active supporter base, between the party elites and activists, and between the activist layers and the wider public.

While Sanders was no anti-politician, his “populist” message connected with a similar dissatisfaction inside the party to that which Trump’s candidacy had revealed in the GOP. The difference was that Trump beating Clinton forced the various wings of the Democrats into an uneasy alliance that could only be sustained in constant opposition to Trump, rather than seriously comprehending their loss to such an unorthodox and unpopular candidate. It’s clear that for millions of Democrats and Democrat identifiers, including leaders like Biden and Harris, anti-Trumpism animates them as much as — if not more than — cohering the party around an agenda that might appeal to a majority of voters.

Anti-Trumpism has not only led to Harris’s recent contortions, but to a longer-term shift in the Democrats’ role to becoming the custodians of a liberal democratic political order facing existential danger from its dark “populist” other.

Their defence of the political setup has often meant using illiberal and undemocratic means to undermine enemies: including overt and covert coordination with media and tech companies, partisan prosecutors, federal bureaucrats, and intelligence agencies. It has also resulted in new alignments at the top that would’ve boggled the minds of Democrats just 10 years previously, especially in Harris’s proud collection of endorsements from traditional right-wing, pro-corporate, neoconservative Republicans, most infamously Liz and Dick Cheney.

The lack of drive to develop a positive Democrat agenda is not because of a lack of will, but because the conflicts within the party cannot easily be overcome in an era where there is no stable social base to unite disparate interest groups. Hence the leakage to Trump of white working-class, blue-collar trade unionist, Latino, black, and some younger voters — all of whom had been touted as part of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis just over a decade ago.[9] Without social institutional weight to bind them to blue politics, various demographics have started to fragment and realign in messy and unpredictable ways.[10]

Trump’s advantage in such a fluid situation has largely been as a negative force: against a failed political class in both parties and its allies in the “swamp”. It is for this reason he has never needed to articulate a detailed policy agenda; indeed, he has dramatically pared back the GOP manifesto into a more centrist document in his own image. It’s also why attempts to ascribe ideological coherence onto him make no sense, although there is no shortage of detractors and hangers-on trying to do just that.

Meanwhile his greatest asset in terms of positive achievements — his first term record — is also a source of weakness. The reality is that he failed to make a deep and durable enough impact to convince many of today’s voters that such a chaotic and abrasive president should be given another chance.

Nvertheless, it is in Trump’s success as an anti-politician that we can see the sources of Harris’s late-stage adaptation of many of his stylistic and tactical choices to the needs of her campaign. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” as they say, because where else is left to go?

NO RESOLUTION

Weighed down by these contradictions, neither side has a path to entrenching some kind of stability on its own side, let alone across the system as a whole.

If Harris wins, there will be massive pressure to continue avoiding a reckoning with her side’s problems. Entering office as an unusually weak politician relying more heavily than usual on the team around her, and with an aversion to taking risks, she’ll likely also find herself further hamstrung by a Republican-dominated Congress. The danger is that she, like Biden, then tries to assert authority by making some bold move, perhaps on the international stage where the executive branch holds most power. Here political self-interest from a frightened politician could paradoxically end in capricious foreign policy or military disasters.

Meanwhile the GOP side without Trump at its head will continue to be racked by conflicts between, for example, those who see the need for some kind of rapprochement between MAGA and the party establishment, and those who think the MAGA revolution needs to be completed.

Should Trump win, the Democrats are unlikely to stave off a working out of their long-suppressed internal conflicts. However, this will initially likely be refracted through the distorting lens of some kind a blame game centred on Biden’s failure to drop out earlier or the failures of Harris’s campaign strategy[11], again delaying dealing with the advanced stages of declining social relevance, a trajectory that leaders like Clinton and Obama had temporarily addressed when things still looked rosier.

Meanwhile, although such a win (even if decisive) might give Trump space to more aggressively pursue his agenda for office and further transformation of the GOP, the conditions he inherits are far less propitious than the ones he took from Obama. It’s far from clear that the current US economic recovery is sustainable, given the astonishing type of economic suppression that preceded it. And while Trump may be better at politically managing his nation’s relative decline in the world than Biden, mainly by retrenching to a more national-interest stance, U.S. power in the world is now even less respected, such that even his unconventional deal-making style may not be enough to produce the impression that he is arresting the downward spiral.

Any weakness on these fronts could then well revive the next round of anti-Trump mobilisation within a political class that may be down but is far from out. Modern-day “populism” remains generally fragile and unpopular despite the relative weakness of its establishment opponents, also lacking a stable social base and resting more on its negative than positive appeal.

That’s why, whoever wins on Tuesday, the safest conclusion is that in the next four years political turbulence will only get more intense.

This essay is deeply indebted to the excellent coverage of the campaign by Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine, on the 2WAY platform’s Morning Meeting.

NOTES

[2] Axios reporter Alex Thompson has catalogued a long list of past positions Harris and her campaign have declined to comment whether or not she still holds: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/03/kamala-harris-no-comment-strategy

[3] Championed by some pro-Harris journalists, like Politico’s Matthew Kaminski. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/31/kamala-harris-policy-void-00176659

[4] As reported by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/video/kfile-different-messages-harris-campaign-israel-gaza-ebof-digvid

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/american-democracy-poll.html

[6] For more detail, see my analysis from early 2016. https://left-flank.org/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/

[7] We can add to this list the Abraham Accords and the Covid vaccine program as significant but hardly earth-shattering foreign policy and domestic achievements in 2020.

[8] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/20/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-unites-states-response-to-hamass-terrorist-attacks-against-israel-and-russias-ongoing-brutal-war-against-ukraine/

[9] The authors of the thesis, John Judis and Ruy Texeira, have both since criticised its misuse by identity politics obsessed Democrats and changed their minds about its applicability.

[10] This messy realignment also makes opinion polling fraught because it undermines assumptions based on previous elections, as was seen in 2016 and 2020 or (in reverse) with the disappointing GOP mid-term performance following the Dobbs abortion decision.

[11] A sharp point made by Mark Halperin. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-have-enormous-dilemma-kamala-harris-loses

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