RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 was more than just a defeat for his hapless opponent. It was a defeat for the Democrat powerbrokers who foisted Kamala Harris on the American public without the former senator from California attaining a single party delegate during this year’s primary season (or, for that matter, in 2019-20). It was, similarly, a defeat for the mass media, which reconfigured her as “the voice of a new generation” once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, despite deriding her performance as vice-president over the previous three and a half years. Finally, and most importantly, November 5 marks the day Americans rejected the despotism of Obama-style identity politics.Leading Democrats are now arguing over whether to blame Joe Biden or Harris for the Democrats’ worst result in a presidential election since 1988, including the loss of all seven battleground states. The Biden camp points out that Biden won six of those states in 2020 and could have hardly done worse than Harris this time. But that argument does not hold up in the light of Biden’s abysmal performance in his televised debate with Trump. Old Joe was on target to do as badly as Harris did, or worse. More than 75 per cent of American voters believed their country was on the wrong track—inflation, a doubling of the price of petrol, soaring mortgage rates, 10 to 20 million unvetted immigrants pouring across the southern border, foreign wars, boys in girls’ sports, and so on were affecting the national mood. Biden was not the man to turn things around. Not only was his administration responsible for many or all of these problems, but in the June 27 debate, Trump exposed Biden’s serious cognitive decline for all the world to see; not even the Democrat powerbrokers and their allies in the mainstream media could hide it any longer.

Defenders of Harris argue that Biden’s selfishness—seeking a second term though no longer up to the job—left her a mere 107 days to win over the public, an impossible task. Thus, MSNBC’s Joy Reid adjudged Harris had a “historic flawlessly run” campaign excelling in every possible way: “You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time.” Had Biden not contested the primaries, the narrative goes, Harris might have swept the field and won over the public. Two problems with this scenario: first, Harris’s previous attempt to win the Democratic nomination, in 2019, proved so disastrous that she dropped out before the official primary season commenced; and second, Harris’s popular support, if we believe the polls, declined over the three months she campaigned. Her best chance of defeating Trump was between late August and mid-September. To paraphrase Reid: “Harris could have run a better campaign if it had been a shorter period of time.” The real October Surprise was Harris’s ineptitude as a presidential candidate.

We can now say that Trump has seen off three Democratic opponents: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden and Harris in 2024. True, Biden won in 2020 but even with that we have to allow for the anomaly of the Covid era. It allowed the Democrat machine to hide Biden, already in cognitive decline, to avoid public scrutiny. So why did Trump enjoy the incredibly good fortune of contending with such unskilful rivals? The answer, I argue, is identity politics—or, as Elon Musk put it, the “woke mind virus”—that entirely captured the Democrat Party with the arrival of Barack Obama on the national political scene in 2007-08. David Axelrod, a key Democrat strategist, sold Obama to the American public as the half-black/half-white candidate whose elevation to the White House would signify a new dawn in racial relations in America. Instead of focusing on his radical past and ultra-progressive record in the Senate, voters were persuaded to believe Obama would be their healer-in-chief. In reality, Obama was a neo-racist before neo-racism became a fashion and a Black Lives Matter man before that organisation even existed.

Unsurprisingly, sixteen years on, Axelrod, now a CNN commentator, is blaming “racism” and “sexism” for Harris’s poor showing on November 5. But if America is racist, how did Obama win in 2008 and 2012 when African Americans only accounted for 12 to 13 per cent of the electorate and white Americans—more than 76 per cent of the electorate—played a key role in putting the first African American in the Oval Office? If America is sexist, why was Hillary Clinton, in 2016, able to amass almost three million more ballots than Trump in the popular vote? Omitted from the identitarian account is the possibility that Obama, whatever you think of his policies, was a highly effective political performer, while Clinton was awkward and condescending, Biden past his prime, and Harris the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. How did the Democrats let this happen?

The short answer is the politics of identity, an ideology that deceptively promised the Democrats power for ever and a day. The tyranny of identity politics has been on full display this year—if you did not support the black candidate you were a racist; if you did not back the female candidate you were a misogynist. This explains the tenor of Obama’s highly publicised stop in Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania, a month from election day. He admonished black males in the Democratic Party’s “Blue Wall” states—Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—contemplating a vote for Trump:

You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that … you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.

Here was a double dose of identity politics: black men voting Republican were both identity traitors and misogynists.

The perversity of Obama’s upbraiding is that the vast majority of African American men, more than 81 per cent, voted for Harris—despite the fact that the Biden-Harris years have not been especially good for many of them, leaving them with concerns about poverty, low pay, and health care, not to mention the 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants who have taken their jobs and suppressed wages. Trump began many of his rallies with Ronald Reagan’s line: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” It was a reasonable question to ask white voters, and so why not black voters? Trump’s popularity among African Americans has risen from 8 per cent in 2016 to 13 per cent in 2020 and now approaches 20 per cent. Are these constituents permitted to support an America First plan for economic development or must they always vote Democrat because LBJ signed off on the Civil Rights Bill in 1964? 

One of the flaws of identity politics is that it reduces the humanity of a person to the colour of their skin or their gender, and so it was when Michelle Obama entered the election fray: “I want you to think about which presidential candidate could possibly care more about our reproductive health.” “Reproductive health”, that euphemism for conception-to-birth abortion, was rated by pro-Democrat commentators as the single issue that might doom Trump’s campaign. Carter Sherman, writing for the Guardian, had to sadly report on the day after the election that women had let the team down by voting for Harris in smaller numbers than for Biden in 2020. Trump did better with younger women than in 2020; and Latino women swung decisively to the Republicans. In short, a percentage of women might be unhappy with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade yet did not cast their vote on that basis. While some argue this makes them traitors to “the cause”, others contend that voting along identitarian lines, as Barack and Michelle Obama kept urging, is against the interests of ordinary working families, be they black, white or Latino.

The arc of history in America is no longer bending in the direction of identitarianism but Trump’s (and Robert Kennedy Jr’s and Elon Musk’s) version of populism and freedom. We saw this in the hullabaloo surrounding Trump’s October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. MSNBC’s news department shamelessly labelled it “Trump’s White Nationalist Madison Square Garden Rally”. Other media outlets reminded their audience that in 1939 a pro-Hitler rally had taken place at Madison Square Garden, implying the Make America Great Again movement resembled the Nazis. Hillary Clinton agreed. So did Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz:

There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid 1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there. So, look, we said we’re all running like everything’s on the line because it is.

The paranoia of those infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome was only confirmed when Tony Hinchcliffe, a warm-up act for the warm-up acts before Trump appeared on stage, made a jibe about Puerto Rico being an “island of garbage”. All hell broke loose—at least among Trump haters: humiliated Latinos would punish the GOP in the battleground states.

It was not identity politics but populism that won on November 5, with Hispanic voters shifting to the Republicans in record numbers. In Pennsylvania, 27 per cent of Latinos—5 per cent of the electorate—came out for Trump in 2020. In 2024 that jumped to 42 per cent. Purveyors of identity politics can claim that Latino men are misogynists and Latinos in general are attracted to the archetypal “strongman”, yet isn’t this itself a case of bigotry? The more likely scenario is that Latinos, who are disproportionately but not entirely working-class, are just as concerned about their living conditions and the influx of illegal migrants as are black and white working-class families. Additionally, the “woke mind virus”—including trans-males in female toilets, locker-rooms and sport—affects their children as much as anyone else’s. Governor Walz’s policy to put tampons in boys’ toilets in schools and Harris’s advocacy for incarcerated illegal migrants to receive subsidised sex-change operations put the team on the woke side, notwithstanding early attempts by Democrats and media allies to portray Trump and J.D. Vance as “weird”.

Another flaw in identity politics is that the creed has an almost religious quality, especially its readiness to accuse any challenge to its (evolving) orthodoxies as heresy. In retrospect, Trump was destined to be vilified as a racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic fascist the moment he descended the golden escalator on June 16, 2015. The mistake made by opponents of conservative populism—which dates back to before the Tea Party in 2009—has been to scorn its devotees as ignorant or worse. Candidate Obama made that gaffe in 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” His rival that year for the Democrat nomination, Hillary Clinton, pounced on his condescension: “His remarks are elitist and out of touch.” Yet she made the same gaffe in 2016 when she disparaged (half of) Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”. President Biden—retaliating against Hinchcliffe’s boorish joke about Puerto Rico—completed the trifecta, referring to Trump’s supporters as “garbage”.

This is not to suggest that Hinchcliffe played an undue role in the final results, rather it clarified how the dominant parties view themselves and each other. For the Democrats, the Puerto Rico crack was their long-awaited October Surprise. It showed the GOP and its supporters in their true colours—as white supremacists; Puerto Ricans and Hispanics in general would vote as one for the Democrats, the only party that could be trusted to protect democracy—which is to say the rights of blacks, Latinos, Jews, Arabs, Asians, all women and the LGBT+ community. For devotees of the Democrat Party, “saving Democracy”, including women’s reproductive health, was the key issue, not the daily struggles of working families. In the aftermath of the election, Bernie Sanders, the closest thing the Democrats have to a populist, made the obvious point:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Team Trump took Biden’s “garbage” slip-up and ran with it. The Republican Party, entirely reconfigured by Trump since 2016, is proudly the party of the common man. This the billionaire businessman humorously demonstrated by climbing aboard a giant garbage truck in front of the cameras and wearing a workers’ safety vest at his next rally. GOP voters, Trump boasted, comprised “the biggest, the broadest and most united” coalition in American history. Not so long ago it was the Democrats who could claim to possess a peerless coalition—blue-collar unions, Jews, blacks, immigrants, free-speech liberals, big-city political machines and so on. Some might argue that a “coalition” and the politics of identity are one and the same thing and to some extent that is not untrue. The difference is that a coalition is mostly a loose alliance of shared economic interests while identity politics—as exemplified by the Obamas’ urgings during the 2024 campaign—insists that individuals must be aligned to one political party, the Democrats, for their whole lives on the basis of their ethnicity, gender or sexual preference. 

Paradoxically, identity politics both made and unmade the careers of Biden and Harris. Biden is unlikely to have made it to the White House on his merits. His campaigns in 1988 and 2008 were embarrassing failures, not least his gaffes, lies, and plagiarism. He had been wily enough to remain the senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, which only puts into focus his limitations as a campaigner on the national stage. It was Team Obama that rescued him from the humiliation of his 2008 campaign, which ended as early as January 3 after a poor showing in Iowa. In June 2008 Biden endorsed Obama and two months later Obama chose Biden to be his running mate to “balance the ticket”. In other words, Scranton Joe became the vice-president because he was perceived (falsely) as a blue-collar type with roots in Pennsylvania. Perhaps it was this image that helped him over the line in the Blue Wall states in 2020 but, as president, he embraced transgender rights, loosened controls on the southern border, unleashed Bidenflation and repeated the “very fine people hoax”—as did Obama on the eve of the election. In short, Biden adopted a left-wing identitarian approach to governance in the Oval Office and the mainstream media compliantly covered for his cognitive decline until very late in the day.

Harris’s story is not so different. She dropped out of the 2019-20 primaries before Christmas 2019. The highlight of her brief tilt at the White House was accusing Biden of allying himself in 1975 with politicians who pursued an anti-busing agenda: “You also worked with them to oppose busing. And you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.” Nevertheless, Biden rescued her from a failed attempt to become the presidential nominee, announcing her as his vice-presidential running mate in August 2020. Apologists for Harris fume at the suggestion she was a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pick, and yet these are the people who champion DEI. Besides, Biden intimated all along he was looking for a black woman to be his vice-president. Note again the despotism of identity politics: the Democrat machine appoints a person of colour and/or a woman as the candidate and the failure of voters to endorse them marks the voters as racists and/or misogynists.

The bottom line is that Harris was not a strong candidate irrespective of her gender and ethnicity. That she couldn’t say how she would do anything differently from Biden—“nothing comes to mind”—speaks to her lack of political savvy. Bluntly, she was promoted beyond her capabilities thanks to identity politics, which is not to say she is without political nous. Important patrons, including Will Brown, one-time mayor of San Francisco, helped launch her career in the 1990s but she could never have become the elected attorney-general of California (2011 to 2017) and later Californian senator (2017 to 2021) without genuine talent. Interestingly, commentators of all political persuasions argue about whether she was a “progressive prosecutor” or a “law-and-order hardliner” during her time in Californian state politics. The same cannot be said about her years in the Senate, where she went out of her way to establish herself as a woke fundamentalist. Thus, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, she accused Judge Kavanaugh of an unproven and unprovable four-decades-old alleged sexual crime. She traduced him in front of his family and the whole world on the say-so of an unreliable female witness: “I believe her … What has she got to gain?”

The Kavanaugh travesty might have established Harris as the epitome of progressive radicalism, but she was not to know that come 2024, when unexpected circumstances gave her a shot at the Oval Office, a majority of American voters would have tired of identity politics. Many of her answers to simple questions turned out to be vapid word salads, and she seemed to have only a casual interest in actual policies. Also haunting her performance, and making her appear inauthentic, might have been a dawning realisation that the identity politics she pursued in Congress was no longer in vogue. Perhaps this left her fearing that if she spoke her truth she would only incriminate herself. As a consequence, all the “joyfulness and hope” of the Democratic National Convention was transmuted during the final weeks of the campaign into unhinged accusations about Trump being a fascist intent on destroying American democracy: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Daryl McCann, a regular contributor, has a blog at https://darylmccann.blogspot.com. He contributed “J.D. Vance and the New Republican Party” in the September issue, and “Making America Great (and Healthy) Again” in November