MUNDIALUNITED STATES: Harris Beat Trump in the Debate, But the Real Winner Was a Right-Wing Status QuoByJimena Vergara and Sybil Davis
Left Voice
September 12, 2024
At the end of the debate, there was a clear winner: Kamala Harris successfully baited Donald Trump into showing his most rambling, most racist, and most off-message self. While right-wing media is blaming the moderators for fact checking, no one can deny that Trump’s performance was a disaster. Winning the debate does not mean winning the election though, and the electoral race is still open.
While Harris promised to be the change candidate, the debate showed that she’s more of the same. The big losers of the night were the working class and oppressed from the U.S. and abroad that are being promised increased military spending, wars, and genocide with only a few crumbs in the form of tax cuts and incentives.
It is also worth mentioning that it is anti-democratic that only Harris and Trump were allowed to take the debate stage. While Left Voice has many political and strategic differences with third-party and independent candidates like Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Claudia De la Cruz, it should be their democratic right to be allowed to get in front of the American public and advocate for their positions. That they were excluded shows, yet again, how the entire electoral system is rigged in favor of the bourgeoisie and their two major parties.
Bipartisan Attacks on Immigration
In the debate, Trump, on the defensive, deployed his usual arsenal of ultra-reactionary policies focusing on attacking migrants, portraying them as the number one enemy of the American people in phrases riddled with racism and xenophobia. He even repeated the repulsive lie that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets, doubling down on this after the debate by posting an AI picture of himself with pets after the debate. We are talking about thousands of human beings crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every day, fleeing hunger, violence, and poverty generated by bipartisan imperialist penetration, the war on drugs, and the capitalist crisis in general.
Trump’s rhetoric aims to reinforce to his social base that their problems are caused by the migrants and not by the corporations and capitalists who exploit them and condemn them to unemployment when they are no longer needed, or pollute their towns and villages with industrial waste.
Although she was the clear winner, Harris presented few concrete proposals and presented a program to the right of Biden. There was no left-wing populism in this debate, nor was there any mention of the struggles for unionization, wage increases, or many of the most pressing issues for the working class. Instead, Harris presented a program to the right of Biden on the economy and climate change and continued the rightward shift on immigration that Biden oversaw. As Guardian columnist Moustafa Bayoumi put it,
[Harris’s] policy positions were also clearly leaning to the right of the Democratic agenda. She called for many more agents patrolling the border (rather than real and comprehensive immigration reform), defended the right to abortion by extreme examples of injury (such as incest) rather than an ordinary woman’s right to choose, and offered no policy change for Palestinians beyond “working round the clock” for a ceasefire. In other words, more of the same.
Harris’s immigration discourse illustrates how right wing she and the Democratic Party now are on that issue. She repeated her promises to massively increase repression and militarization at the border, to crack down on illegal immigration, and to get the much-discussed border bill from earlier this year that many, including Harris, have praised as the “toughest border bill in history,” passed. Not to be outdone, of course, Trump doubled and tripled down on his xenophobia and nationalism, but that shouldn’t distract us from the fact that Harris also presented a significantly right-wing policy on immigration — as she and Biden have been doing throughout this entire election. She is adopting much of the right-wing’s program on immigration and is making the continuation and escalation of the bipartisan war on immigrants a major part of her campaign. Let’s not forget her own nationalist message to migrants: “Don’t Come.”
This should have been, other than Trump’s obvious racism and demagoguery, the most outrageous part of the debate: seeing Kamala Harris take ownership of Trump’s program to such an extent that the former president joked that he was going to give her a MAGA hat.
No Economic Solutions for the Working Class
Far from representing progressive hopes, Harris essentially completely abandoned the vast majority of left-wing populist promises and, instead, focused her economic message exclusively on tax cuts. Her “opportunity economy” promises seem to involve very little state investment and, at the debate, no mention of taxes on the rich (Harris has weakened Biden’s proposal to raise the capital gains tax, presumably after it didn’t play well with her donors.) Instead there will be tax cuts and tax credits meant to strengthen the family unit: a child tax credit, a tax credit for homeowners, and the ever-vague “opportunity economy.”
In this, there’s quite a lot of similarity between Trump and Harris’s economic programs as both rest almost entirely on cutting taxes in hopes that will help the economy. While she attacked Trump strongly for his tax cuts for the rich, Harris didn’t propose an alternative and offered no solution to inflation; the progressive economic populism of Biden’s early days in office (that had a brief resurgence as he bargained with Bernie Sanders to stay in the race) was gone.
Indeed, on the question of labor rights — a key profile for Biden, the much-touted “most pro-labor president” — Harris barely mentioned it at all except for some references to declining factory jobs under Trump and saying she was proud to have the UAW’s endorsement and that we needed to make sure America doesn’t “end up having the short end of the stick in terms of workers’ rights” in the competition with China. She made no promises to help make unionizing easier or strengthen labor — in fact, she never even said the words “labor” or “union.” There was no discussion of strengthening wages, improving working conditions, or implementing policies to help workers — Harris even totally walked back her position on Medicare for All (which she’s been doing essentially since she first took the position) going so far as to say “I absolutely support… private healthcare options.” The working class deserves real solutions to their problems, not insignificant tax cuts.
Cynical Defense of Democratic Rights
The area where Harris was, unsurprisingly, the strongest against Trump was on the question of abortion. She painted heartbreaking stories about women suffering miscarriages and being unable to get treatment because doctors were scared of legal repercussions, of child victims of sexual assault being forced to give birth. She labeled these bans the “Trump Abortion Bans” and laid the fault for these attacks on basic bodily autonomy on Trump’s appointment of anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. This is all true, of course, but it glosses over the fact that Harris doesn’t really offer an alternative. She makes vague promises about passing protections in Congress — why this time the Democrats hold power will be meaningfully different from the last several years where they’ve done precious little is never made clear — but, as Trump astutely pointed out, it’s very unlikely that an abortion protection law will get passed through Congress.
The only way to change that is through significant class struggle in the streets — as we saw with the victory of the right to abortion in Latin America, Ireland, and elsewhere. Harris and the Democrats, of course, aren’t going to support such a movement because it would hinder their ability to channel public rage at the attacks on abortion into votes and would threaten the stability that they are dedicated to maintaining. So, instead, Harris instills false hopes about how this time, the Democrats will protect abortion nationally.
Completely missing from the debate, except for one particularly bizarre comment from Trump, was the question of trans rights, which are under severe attack in over half the country. This is no accident as Harris and the Democrats have been trying to put distance between themselves and the defense of trans rights so as to not alienate the sectors of their base which feel like trans rights have “gone too far.” This was also illustrated at the Democratic National Convention which, for the first time in years, didn’t host a trans speaker, and trans issues were mentioned by only two speakers. This is in sharp contrast to the RNC where trans issues were a frequent attack point.
As the Republicans attack trans rights, the Democrats try to ignore them. This demonstrates how craven and cynical the Democrats’ defense of democratic rights is. They’ll defend them when they are popular and they can get votes, but on more controversial questions of basic bodily autonomy, they back away. The trans community and those who support the defense of democratic rights deserve better than this.
Democrats Love Fracking and Imperialism
One of the themes of the Harris campaign has been her walking away from progressive positions she once had. A clear example is fracking. She’s become a vocal advocate of fracking — a clear maneuver to try to win swing states — and is seemingly less concerned with “Green Capitalism” than Biden is. While she said on the debate stage that climate change is real, she didn’t put anything forward to address it. Even her promises around electric vehicles were framed not as ways to save the planet but as ways to better compete with China. The Democratic position on climate change could be pithily summed up as “it’s real, but we won’t do much about it.” As the climate crisis continues and more and more people are affected, more and more ecosystems are impacted, more and more animals face extinction, it is outrageous for the party that is in power in Washington — a party that has historically run as the party that cares about the climate crisis — is doing half-measures and backing fracking. The Green New Deal is dead and buried, now Harris is trying to explain why she didn’t support fracking sooner.
The most striking elements of the debate were around Harris’s full-throated support of imperialism. She portrayed herself, her values, and the Democratic Party as the defenders of “democracy” at home and abroad against U.S. adversaries like China and Iran. She repeated her convention line about wanting the “most lethal” military in the world and sung the praises of the late Republican senator John McCain, thanked Republican former vice president Dick Cheney for his endorsement, and laid out a vision of hyper-militarism where the U.S. continues to play a major role on the world stage of directing imperialism through its military. She proudly advocated for the war in Ukraine and attacked Trump for not being as supportive as he ought to be.
On the war in Gaza, both Trump and Harris affirmed their undying commitment to the state of Israel, with Harris condemning Hamas and perpetuating lies about sexual assault against Israelis (and ignoring the sexual assaults against Palestinians). While Harris claimed she is working “around the clock” for a ceasefire, that is clearly a lie: after all, the administration she is currently part of has just signed a $20 billion arms deal with Israel. Indeed, the American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who was murdered by the IDF in the West Bank, didn’t even get a mention in the debate (and the Biden administration has barely mentioned it either), showing yet again how the lives of Palestinains and their supporters are written off by the capitalist parties and the bourgeois media.
A key aspect of the debate was toward increasing confrontation with China. As previously mentioned, Harris tied her discussion of electric vehicles back to China, discussed the need to compete with China on technology, and generally showed what many foreign policy observers have noted for a while — the main front of the struggle for global hegemony is with China and the U.S. is trying to reposition itself. Harris put that front and center. She tied workers ‘rights to the competition with China and climate change to the competition with China. It is obvious that the specter of China continues to haunt the American ruling class.
Instead of these two candidates of capital, workers and oppressed people deserve and need representatives of the working class, candidates who intervene in Congress and elections as part of a strategy anchored on class struggle and the organization of the working class and the oppressed to actively fight against the far right and genocide and who defend our rights with our methods: strikes, pickets, street demonstrations. We need representatives and candidates — workers, women, students, the oppressed, young people who are playing a huge part in the struggle — that realize that the confrontation between the U.S. and China is a confrontation between powers running a race for the world’s hegemony where the working class has nothing to win.
The way out of the crises the capitalist system has imposed on us, the solution to the rise of the Right won’t be found in Kamala Harris. If more proof on this point was needed, the debate provided it. We deserve and need more than what these candidates offer. The solution must be to take the fight into our own hands. To organize ourselves and call on our unions and social movement organizations to join a united front fight against Trump, Harris, the Right, and the rising xenophobic and ultra-imperialist politics of both major parties.
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