First as tragedy, then as farce: Making sense of Trump's win
Is it really that surprising?
In one of his most famous texts The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx starts it by saying:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce
It seems once again, the tragedy has become a farce, and the American people have elected Donald trump again. Now the question is once again, why and how? Already everyone is trying to give a concrete answer. The liberals both in America and Canada are already claiming the Democrats ran too far left despite campaigning with neo-cons and on iron clad support for genocide. Liberals are pissed and looking for someone to blame, which is no surprise there.
There are also dozens of tweets from liberal accounts becoming reactionary, blaming Latinos, Arabs, and African American men for the lose, despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly White men and women that voted for Trump.
So what was it? What was the thing that pushed it towards Trump? There’s no one answer, despite the fact that people are making this election more clear cut than it is. But I think there’s some things to review over that make it clear why Harris could not pull this off.
The economy mattered
As a lot of people have rightly been saying, the economy was the #1 issue for most voters. There’s a lot of different questions we can use to capture this, but it’s not merely that it was a top issue among voters.
In bourgeois democracies, people understand they have little to no power. Most citizens are forced to work all their lives and don’t have time to understand the intricacies of politics. Thus, a central question often becomes “Is my life better or worse than before?”. The economic component of this question is always an important one.
A good chunk of people thought the economy was bad, and a lot of those people were feeling that Trump captured those grievances better. This is not surprising given that Harris did not distance herself from Biden nearly enough.
These people aren’t crazy. Of course, there’ inflation metrics. It’s effecting Americans, Canadians and Europeans alike. But there’s so much more. Increases in poverty, food insecurity, cutting social spending and increasing military spending.
Biden largely moved away from focusing on the economy midway into his term, and this hurt the Democrats in the minds of Americans. It would have been a completely different world if the Democrats actually ran on anything remotely focusing on the economy.
“It wasn’t the Genocide”
The economy was the biggest issue, and I don’t doubt that. However, there are many who have played defense for the Democrats who are trying to take themselves and the party off the hook for this. Unsurprisingly, Mehdi Hasan has already stated that one of his takeaways is that the genocide wasn’t a deciding factor:
“Yes, it is tempting to say that Harris' defeat was a consequence of Gaza and her shameful refusal to budge on US support for Benjamin Netanyahu. And yes, Michigan may have swung against the Democrats because large numbers of Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans saw the genocide in Gaza as a red line (Trump even won Dearborn!).
But Trump's victory over Harris goes way, way beyond Michigan and Muslim Americans. It is something much bigger and much broader. As I write this, the former president is on course to win every single swing state, both in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt. He won Texas by a bigger margin this time around than he did in 2016. He narrowed the Democrats' margins in historically blue New York and New Jersey. He also made massive, perhaps consequential, inroads with Latino voters, who, of course, likely didn't pick Trump over Harris because of Gaza.
(On the topic of genocide, by the way, you'll never guess which world leader was the first on social media to congratulate Trump on his victory and heap praise on him.)
It’s been vile enough that Mehdi has played the tepid middle man for the Democrats, condemning their support for Israel but also playing “both sides” and perpetuating genocidal Zionist propaganda about October 7th. But now, that Harris has lost badly, for him to hand wave away her political support for genocide as not being a facture is insulting. I think there’s good reason to believe things could have been different if she was willing to be even rhetorically better than Biden on Israel.
Biden won 81,283,501 votes, the highest voter turnout since 1900 by percentage and the most nominally ever. Trump in 2024 (as of writing this with about 87% of votes counted) won 72,747,033, and Harris 68,092,002. We are talking about a difference of 13,191,499 people! It’s fair to say that since 2020, people have become demobilized by the Democrats! There’s evidence to argue that among the 10 key states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin) that how Harris actually ran may have demobilized people to come out and vote.
First, the share of ballot cast by young voters (18-29) was 14% of all ballots, lower than in 2020 (17%) and 2016 (19%). There are also estimates that youth turnout was higher in battleground states, potentially around 50%. The general trend of lowering turnout is not as important as the change in composition of the youth vote.
We know that young people have been mobilized around Gaza on the “left”. If people from social democrats to radical were going to vote for anyone, it would be Harris. Harris won young voters 52 to 46%, but Biden in 2020 won 61% versus 37%! That is a significant shift.
In 2020, there was COVID and the murder of George Floyd, two issues that the Democrats mobilized young people on against Trump. Among young people of color especially, there was a push to vote because of the issue.
Now there’s Gaza, and the Democrats did the opposite, they demobilized people around the issue. Kamala was speaking, but people did not want to hear what she had to say. She still overwhelming one the youth of color vote, and that’s not surprising. But there certainly could have been more coming on on this historic election.
For the 8% who voted for the first time, 56% went Trump. The fact that Kamala couldn’t mobilize the youth vote in a time where the youth is self-organizing is pathetic. Gaza certainly played a role in this on the Democratic side.
On the other side, young men mobilized around economic grievances really came out for Trump.
Arun Gupta captures something that Mehdi refuses to see because he is blinded by how much he thinks Trump is existentially worse than the Democrats:
There is also rage about Gaza, Palestine, and Lebanon. Millions of voters, whether out of personal ties or principles, refused to vote for the party of genocide. I have been saying for months, “The Democrats care more about genocide than democracy, freedom, abortion, trans rights, climate change, healthcare, you name it.”
Gaza mattered because she campaigned heavily on protecting Israel, more than other issues she was theoretically in support of such as abortion, healthcare, climate change and the economy.
At least a third of voters believed that support for Israel is too strong, and 67% of those voted for Harris. Trump voters are more staunch on Israel support, that is for certain. But could Harris not have mobilized people to actually come out if she would even dare to propose any change in her policy on Gaza? I certainly believe so. I don’t think she would have done it, but it could have made a difference.
The fact that Harris didn’t take Gaza seriously, campaigned with billionaires, celebrities, and Republicans, and didn’t argue we need an economic renewal are all sides of the same coin. One of the most frustrating things I see from liberals and social democrats is their treatment of far-right figures as Teflon. They aren’t Teflon, you just aren’t trying. The democrats ran a center-right campaign with nothing to offer that didn’t mobilize anyone from their own base. It’s no wonder they didn’t win. I was an idiot for thinking Americans were still gonna vote for her. I should have trusted my gut.
As Gupta stated:
Trump didn’t win simply because he is a sui generis grifter. Democrats gave him many openings to spread his poison. It was all utterly predictable.
Ending the farce
To conclude, one thing is certain. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce. However, it seems that the farce never ends. But that is our faults, not some inherent character of history. It’s only when we actually absorb the lessons of the past and decide to do something different that our perpetual farce will stop. The farce is not merely Trump and his re-election. It’s also the Democratic party which believes it can ignore ongoing social crisis and merely campaign on nothing and win.
The liberal fractions of the capitalist ruling class across the globe are in a political crisis. They are unable to deal with the prevailing social issues caused by capital because they are unable to change anything about how they operate. In the face of this, with no radical left, the far-right has taken power, and pushed forward their pseudo-visions of how to “save” Western nations.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
We are stuck in the weigh of dead generations, the weight of stale liberalism. Conservatism and Fascism, it’s regressive but inseparable sibling, is unable to break us out of this collective malaise. It can only turn the wheel back, it cannot bring us forward. The only was forward is forward. Social revolution, destruction of the ruling class, that is the only way we can end the farce.