RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the US presidential election, the Democrats revealed their true colours. Candidate Kamala Harris spent her campaign espousing wispy platitudes and chasing celebrity endorsements, while President Joe Biden smeared half the electorate as ‘garbage’. The Democratic Party’s transformation from the party of the people to the party of the woke elites seemed all but complete, and it delivered a humiliating electoral defeat to the populist Donald Trump.

John R MacArthur joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the Democrats’ self-immolation. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you surprised at Donald Trump’s victory?

John R MacArthur: I wasn’t surprised that he won, but I was surprised he won the popular vote. I thought it would be closer. It just shows how weak the Democratic Party now is in so many respects. Hillary Clinton, who was a terrible candidate with a lot of baggage, still won the popular vote against Trump in 2016. For Harris to lose the popular vote speaks to a degradation beyond anything even I had thought possible.

The reason the Democrats lost was articulated by critics like Bernie Sanders, who wrote recently that the Democrats have become the party of the rich, not the working class. He says they have to make up their minds whose side they’re on.

The Democrats made up their minds a long time ago. They made up their minds in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton signed free-trade deals such as NAFTA and normalised trade relations with China. These decisions sent millions of manufacturing jobs from the US to countries like Mexico and China.

This election demonstrated the complete inversion of American politics. Harris outraised Trump three-to-one, and it didn’t come in small contributions. More than half of the people with a family income under $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won a majority of the people with a family income above $100,000. There’s been a total inversion of what we used to think of as the New Deal coalition.

O’Neill: Would you say that Trump won this or that the Democrats lost it?

MacArthur: Trump’s popular vote total is almost exactly the same as it was four years ago. It’s not a MAGA landslide. Harris received 11million fewer votes than Biden in 2020. Where did those 11million voters go? Some went to Trump, but most of them presumably just didn’t vote.

We have to examine why they didn’t vote Democrat. One of the things that comes to mind is inflation, which the Democrats didn’t address, other than keeping interest rates high. One of Biden’s first acts was to expand the child tax credit, which literally cut the child poverty rate nearly in half. But they didn’t do anything else to help the poor cope with higher food prices. So the Democrats hadn’t taken care of the poor. They didn’t give them a reason to vote Democrat.

There are also a lot of working-class people who are still angry about NAFTA. I know lots of union members who say that it was nice of Biden to join the picket line, but it was too late. They will never vote for the Democratic Party again.

Then the party imposed Harris on the electorate. There was no primary and there had been no vetting. The Democratic Party told people they should be happy because she’s black and she’s a woman. Everybody resented that. Black people resented it. White people resented it. Deep down, nobody wants to vote for someone because of what colour or sex they are.

O’Neill: Can the Democrats come back from this?

MacArthur: Harris should have said something about fighting big money. She should have said something about raising the minimum wage. She should have said anything that showed she cared about the interests of the working class. The Democrats should have stopped with the celebrity endorsements and got a union president on TV, instead of Jimmy Kimmel.

I don’t think the Democratic Party is capable of reforming itself. In effect, there is no party of the working class any more. There is going to be a lot of infighting between Trump and his advisers about how to improve the lot of the working class, the out-of-work or underpaid, former factory workers. There will be people close to Trump whose businesses used to rely on these people, telling him that it’s more important to cut the deficit. Historically, this would be the time when it would make the most sense to try to start a new political party instead of trying to reform the Democratic Party, which seems to be unreformable.

Biden did two really good things as president – it would have been three if the Democrats had been able to expand the child tax credit further. He got the US out of Afghanistan. (Trump supported the withdrawal, but didn’t get it done when he was president.) Biden also reinvigorated anti-trust laws in the US. He was the first president in generations to have a Justice Department and a Federal Trade Commission sue big corporations, particularly Big Tech.

Did you hear one word from Kamala Harris about the Biden administration’s anti-trust policy? When Trump presented himself as the peace candidate, did you hear any Democrats say that they were the ones who got the US out of Afghanistan? These could have been vote-winners…

John R MacArthur was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: