The Democrats hoovered up the movement for abortion rights and diluted its radicalism (Picture: The Democratic Party on Flickr)
Would Kamala Harris be a more progressive president than Joe Biden? Sections of the Democrat establishment in the United States hope some people will think so.
They are trying to cast her as more radical on questions of race and gender—and as someone who will stand up to Israel when required.
After meeting Israeli prime minister and war criminal Binyamin Netanyahu last week, Harris declared she “will not be silent” about Palestinian suffering. And she told reporters, “It’s time for this war to end.”
Meanwhile, Harris’s supporters have flooded social media with posts that show her as a superwoman variously standing up for black people, women, the US constitution and the Statue of Liberty.
It is true that the election of a black woman as president would mark a major shift in how people see the United States. And it would be a blow to all those that want to keep the White House white and male.
But Harris is offering no significant change from Biden, whom she describes as her hero and inspiration. And, just like Biden, her policies in government—including on Israel—would be those of the US ruling class.
The Democratic machine’s attempt to present her as more left wing is an acknowledgement of how much damage the issue of Palestine has done to the party.
Large sections of more left wing voters vowed that they would never vote for the man they dubbed “Genocide Joe”.
One task for party managers is to win back that vote and to draw in others who in recent years have taken to the streets over jobs and pay, women’s rights and Black Lives Matter.
Yet any Democratic presidential candidate will first and foremost represent the capitalist class, with the party committed to being an efficient manager of the system.
The Democrats act as a shock absorber for capitalism, taming the demands of social movements, limiting their politics and drawing their leaders into conventional politics.
In recent years, the Palestine movement, the abortion rights movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement, to varying degrees, have shown this to be true.
The Palestine movement has shaken the United States. Activists in the US pioneered the use of station occupations, sit-ins at corporations and university encampments—all tactics that have since spread worldwide.
Much of the movement’s anger is rightly focused on Joe Biden, and his role as presidential enabler of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.
And, large swathes of the Palestine movement operate completely outside of the Democrats and are utterly hostile to it. But there are some sections which, though hostile to Biden, nevertheless feel the powerful pull of the Democratic party.
The campaign for “uncommitted” votes in Democratic primaries, which nominate the party presidential candidate, is an example of this.
It began after a loose coalition of pro-Palestine groups in Michigan called on Democrat voters not to back Biden on the ballot paper, but to instead vote “uncommitted”. The result was 101,000 people, around 13 percent, voted “uncommitted”.
The campaign then spread to other states, with around 650,000 people voting against Biden in the course of the primaries. But the nature of the campaign meant it fed back into wider Democratic politics.
Organisers deliberately presented it as a way to cast a protest vote without supporting an alternative candidate to Biden—and without backing a breakaway from his party.
The campaign ended up being largely symbolic. But this didn’t have to be the case. Many of the uncommitted voters were so angry that would have been open to a new organisation that looks beyond the Democrats.
That is because they see no chance of the Democrats being won for the left. In its internal processes, the Democratic Party is not a membership organisation—a person becomes a Democrat by registering as one in time to cast a ballot during a primary election.
There is a party platform but no accountability mechanisms or requirements for people who run as Democrats to campaign or pursue policies consistent with that platform.
There are no elected party bodies or leadership other than the presidential candidate themselves and a few congressional officials.
Campaigns that fight to change the Democrats will either be forced to conform to its centre ground politics or face insurmountable pressure.
When unelected judges on the US Supreme Court tore up abortion rights in 2022, there were protests across the country.
One peak was when the Women’s March group organised nationwide demonstrations, where on 14 May up to 200,000 campaigners marched in around 450 towns and cities. It was an outpouring of rage onto the streets in defence of the right to control one’s own body.
But organisers were largely successful in channelling that rage into the Democratic Party. They argued that the best way to reverse the Supreme Court decision was to vote Democrat in the upcoming mid-terms in November 2022.
When campaigning in those elections, Biden said, “The first bill that I will send to Congress will be to codify Roe v Wade, and when Congress passes that, I’ll sign it in January (2023)”.
Taking the movement from the streets to the polling station worked well for the Democrats. The party won a surprise victory and held onto its majority in both houses.
But after riding the wave of rage, the party did close to nothing with it and no substantial law protecting abortion rights has been passed. The Biden-Harris administration said its Republican opposition had tied its hands because in the Senate there is a 60-vote threshold for major bills to pass into law.
Biden could have carved out an exemption to pass laws to protect abortion rights, but he chose not to.
And the Democrats could have passed laws to open government‑funded abortion clinics along the borders of states which have outlawed abortion. It could have given new clinics permission to open on federal lands.
But party managers reckoned that having secured the pro-choice vote, they could now move on. Ultimately, the Democrats used abortion rights as leverage to raise party funds and win votes.
Politicians at the top of society see the lives of millions of people as objects of political machinations and manoeuvres, rather than agents of change.
Part of the issue is that the biggest abortion rights organisations, such as Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom for All, are tied to the Democrats.
When Minneapolis cops murdered George Floyd in May 2020, people fought back in one of the broadest protest movements in US history.
Under the banner of Black Lives Matter (BLM), people marched and organised against not just the police murder of George Floyd but decades of police violence—and the racist system behind them.
In total, some 26 million people across 2,500 towns and cities took part in Black Lives Matter protests in the US in 2020.
Many protesters faced exceptional levels of police and vigilante violence in response. Some were shot and killed, while many more were severely injured by military-grade weapons.
As growing numbers of people understood the police’s role as defenders of the system, the slogan “Defund the police” came to the fore.
However, street mobilisations eventually declined, and the struggle became largely subsumed by electoral campaigns to oust president Donald Trump in November 2020 election.
When Biden chose Harris, a black woman, as his vice president, many progressive activists were excited.
Yet Harris openly opposed defunding the police—a position entirely consistent with her record of being “tough on crime” while attorney general in California.
Upon their election victory, Biden and Harris called for “community engagement” and discussions in the White House. These have delivered nothing.
And while Democratic mayors in a number of US cities temporarily reduced police budgets in 2020, these cuts were since reversed.
The party used the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the cop who killed George Floyd, as a measure of progress. But a week before the conviction, they scrapped a campaign promise to create a police reform commission.
Evidence of how far the official BLM movement had become entwined with the Democrats, the main BLM organisation in the US was silent as Biden dismissed “defunding the police”.
Under Biden police funding has gone up by over 30 percent. The Democrats milked BLM for votes—then promises of change were forgotten.
The pattern here is familiar—the Democratic Party is an expert at channelling frustration at the system towards candidates that are backed by, and serve the interests of, bosses and the rich.
When social movements struggle from below, the Democrats offer a carrot and stick strategy. The carrot is their “help” to “get things done” with new laws and funding.
The stick is that unless the movement falls into line, the Republicans will benefit.
And having convinced activists that there’s nowhere else to go, the Democrats then focus on appeasing the forces to the right.
This is a cycle that ultimately benefits the right because it feeds on disillusionment and bitterness with the entire political system.
The Democrats and the Republicans are thus in a reciprocal relationship, they are two-sides of the same coin.
The Republicans represent a nastier politics, steeped in more brutal exploitation of the working class and racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
But to tag along with the Democratic Party is to accept the limitation of the choice between two parties that both represent the capitalist class.
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