JOURNALIST ABBY MARTIN says that Donald Trump's return to the White House did not exactly surprise her, because she had been anticipating it for some two years. However, when the bumbling and cognitive-challenged Joe Biden shuffled off the stage to be replaced by his Vice President, the host of Empire Files allowed herself to believe that maybe, just maybe, Kamala Harris might pull an unlikely victory out of the jaws of defeat.
'I think we all got tricked when Kamala was anointed that we actually thought that it wasn’t maybe an inevitability Trump would prevail, that Kamala did have a chance at winning,' she says. 'So ultimately, I’m just pissed off that the Democrats failed so abysmally and paved the road for this to happen, because it really does all fall on their shoulders.'
While the Democratic Party elite have been blaming everyone and everything else for the party's defeat, it was clear that the Harris campaign looked and sounded wrong from the off. Running a deeply conservative campaign that sought to attract disenchanted Republicans into the Democratic camp, only ensured to further distance Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party from ordinary working class Americans and their immediate concerns. As socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said: 'It was a failure of Dem leadership to build the coalition the left has been saying we need to build forever. Instead, we spent more time courting the five voters who might be swung by a Liz Cheney endorsement.'
In contrast while Donald Trump had no real interest in working-class concerns, he was shrewd enough to at least acknowledge them.
The Democratic Party campaign, says Abby, 'made no sense'.
'Why would anyone who’s remotely leaning conservative vote for Diet Coke when you can vote for the real thing? Trump was able to capture a huge swathe of the anti-status quo vote even though we’ve already had this man as president for four years and he gave nothing but whatever the ruling class wanted. But here we are again, facing down a second Trump presidency, and it’s going to be a long fight ahead and a long road ahead.'
Abby says that it will be business as usual for American capitalism is concerned because, at the end of the day, it's still all about capital accumulation. But that, she adds, doesn't lessen the very real fears that people have for the next four years.
'Trump ran on a very openly fascist platform. We cannot discount the fears, the very real trepidation, obviously, from minorities, from trans people, from leftists. Obviously, the environment is going to be completely gutted. Every last vestige of regulation and protection are going to be thrown out the window. So, it’s a very dystopian time that we’re entering into.'
In the face of the looming Trumpian nightmare, is there anything to be optimistic about or are we all just clutching at straws?
'Well, Trump is horrible, but he's lost his mojo. He is not the same Trump that ran in 2016, but he is still a narcissist and megalomaniac, and that is to his detriment. He’s a bull in a China shop, and that’s ultimately why the ruling class doesn’t want him as someone as opposed to someone who’s more manageable or someone who’s not as uncouth and belligerent to the rest of the world. But yeah, I think it’s going to be a big opening to just show how incoherent he is and how he doesn’t even have anything cogent to present at all. So, there’s a lot of space to ram the truth through. It’s just a matter of how we are going to expose that when the entire media sphere is just locked down by right wing billionaires.'
As it stands, progressives within the Democratic Party and many beyond it, are urging centrist Democrats to rethink their electoral strategy, rejecting arguments that the party has moved too far leftward and attempting to focus the dialogue around putting economic hardships like minimum wage stagnation, housing, food and fuel costs at the forefront.
Democratic Party congressman Chris Murphy recently fired at broadside at the centrist politics of the Democratic Party elite:
'The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalises the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us. And when progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.'
While the struggle within the Democratic Party will continue for some time yet, Abby has long been of the opinion that the party is a graveyard for the left's aspirations. She says that, despite a devastating election defeat, the Democratic Party establishment will resist any attempts to push the party to the left:
'I never believed in electoral politics on a federal level, especially. I’m not saying to discount city council races and local districts, obviously referendums and city council and all those things. Absolutely we need to be investing our energy into seizing power locally. However, putting all of your political energy and enthusiasm into federal electoral politics, I think is a dead end. And I think if that’s not apparent now, it sure as hell should be. Let this election galvanise and radicalise us outside of electoral politics because the Democrats have perfectly elucidated that they will not lean left. They would rather have fascism than Bernie Sanders populism, right? That’s just social democracy. They would rather have Trump than an FDR platform. So, they are going so far right, because they have no other choice. They have to maintain their capital and power no matter what’s at stake and what’s in the future.'
The alternative, says Abby, is to build a mass grassroots movement independent of a Democratic Party that has been gutted and hollowed out by decades of devotion to neoliberalism:
'It’s up to us, the tens of millions of people who have been radicalised by the Gaza genocide, who have been radicalised by Bernie Sanders, who see the climate change catastrophe on the horizon. It is up to us to build the movement we know is the only thing that has ever pushed politics left, the social movements in the street, the masses that shut down business as usual. That is the only possibility that we have moving forward because the time is urgent. We don’t have the time to wait for a super majority pie in the sky. We don’t have time to wait and the time is now.'
Watch Abby's 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom here.
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