The People Are Not The Problem.

The Democrats Are.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Matt Karp, board member at the Center for Working-Class Politics, has a new column in Harper’s analyzing the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign, as he observes, “the most expensive failure in American political history.”

Karp argues that the typical liberal excuses just don’t convince. The Left cannot comfort itself with blaming the people for their own ignorance. And while inflation was a major factor, the idea that there was nothing Democrats could do to avoid a thumping lets them off the hook too easily.

Moreover,

the impulse to proclaim Kamala Harris “a bad candidate” should be avoided. Who would have been better: Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro and his embarrassing Obama impersonation? Gretchen Whitmer, the victor of two low-turnout midterm elections, whose political wizardry this cycle involved a bizarre TikTok video that mocked Holy Communion with Doritos? These are interchangeable parts in a broken machine.

Ultimately, the “fault is not in the Democrats’ campaigns; it is in themselves.”

He also looks to what could be done to challenge the political dominance of the well-heeled and well-educated. Of the few populists that met with some success against the Trump headwinds, he concludes:

These populists were not progressives, at least not in the juvenile two-dimensional conception of American politics. Beginning with a political argument rather than a moral code, they avoided unpopular positions on energy, immigration, and gender policy. Yet unlike Harris, they did not campaign alongside the same plutocrats they denounced in their TV ads; they did not lament an unfair status quo while also auditioning to maintain it. When Osborn attacked the “millionaires and the billionaires” in the Senate, you had the distinct sense that he actually meant it. Until Democrats can find a way to mean it, too, they can expect more bulldozings.

You can read the entire essay here:

Expect More Bulldozings

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