Kamala Harris likely replacing Biden has given the Democrats a boost, but Trump may still win without a real break in the continuity of policy, argues John Westmoreland

Progressives across the world breathed a sigh of relief when Joe Biden withdrew from the Presidential race and handed the torch to his VP Kamala Harris. Harris has a better chance than Biden of defeating Trump who has boasted that he will be a ‘dictator for a day’ during which he will expel immigrants and ‘drill, drill, drill’.

Trump’s violent anti-establishment, anti-liberal rhetoric has alarmed the elites and Harris is being touted as the saviour of American democracy. Harris’ candidacy has given a boost to a failing Democrat campaign, but it remains to be seen if she can turn it around. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign, geared up to demolish Biden, is having to reset.

Harris benefits from getting the endorsement of senior Democrats and being touted as a ‘saviour’ of the Democratic Party, and US democracy itself. For centrist Democrats, Harris got off to a good start in Milwaukee when she used her record as a state prosecutor to draw a distinction between herself and Trump: ‘I was elected attorney general of the state of California and I was a corporate prosecutor before that, and in those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds,’ she said. ‘Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, and cheaters who broke the rules for their gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.’

This plays well to liberal America, and the proof is the astonishing $231 million raised for her campaign in just one day, with $81 million from small-dollar donations. The latest poll shows Harris polling ahead of Trump by 44% to 42%. Respondents are enthusiastic that Harris might restore Roe v Wade; that she would be the first female president, and a woman of colour at that.

A Harris victory is far from a given. The appeal of Trump’s populist rhetoric owes much to the Democrat’s failures to destroy him in court on the one hand and to lead a serious campaign against the Republican and populist right. Harris also represents political continuity with Biden, whose policies have actually done little to address the ravages of neoliberal capitalism which lie behind support for Trump’s fake anti-establishment pose.   

Popular victimhood

Putting Trump in the dock was never going to be the end of him. It was far more likely to offer Trump another platform on which he could claim to be the victim of a deep-state liberal conspiracy.

It has to be remembered that Trump leads a right-wing populist movement. His supporters are never going to be put off by exposing his criminality and his boorish rhetoric. The hallmark of fascist sympathisers is that they crave strong leadership, someone who will stand up to the evils that they perceive to be looming over them. They are from alienated middle America, people for whom the American Dream has gone sour, evangelical Christians in need of a saviour of their own, and right-wing haters who feel besieged by modernity.

Putting Trump on trial just stoked their anger and confirmed their view that conspiratorial forces were at work. Their enthusiasm for Trump and his shiny white protégé JD Vance at the Republican Convention, where solidarity ear bandages were everywhere, shows a far-right movement taking shape outside the normal channels of party politics in the USA.

Trump’s often deranged pronouncements are being restrained by his team who want him to be more of a figurehead and leave the more intellectual work of the right to Vance, who seems well suited to the role. The disciples can overlook the fact that Vance is a millionaire sponsored by the Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and let him get on with speaking up for blue-collar Americans just because he was born poor.

Harris thinks her credentials as a corporate prosecutor in California will help her to nail Trump, but it will not be difficult to reveal her less liberal deeds like defending the death penalty and sticking by Biden’s war-mongering foreign policy. Trump is heading a movement that is averse to facts and logic, and strong on lies and hate. Harris is going to face a torrent of both.

Left Democrats?

It is nothing short of astonishing that Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez were, until a week ago, championing Biden as their presidential candidate. If they had won, the return of Trump as president would have been all but inevitable.

Bernie has been vocal in defending ‘my friend’ Joe Biden. And, like his liberal counterparts over here, for example, Jonathan Freedland, he separates Biden’s domestic achievements from his foreign policy. They claim that Biden has been a transformational president who has delivered more for US workers than any President since FDR. This is centre-left moonshine.

‘Bidenomics’ has been praised for ploughing billions of dollars into tech and infrastructure changes that have created fifteen million jobs. But by the same token, Biden also made the wealthiest Americans $195 billion richer in first 100 days as president!

Bidenomics was never about redistributing income to the workers, it was about addressing the challenge of the rise of China. As Dominic Alexander has said, ‘Bidenomics, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act, has cautiously brought direct and strategic state economic intervention back into permissible policy. America’s role as world financial hegemon allows this, and also motivates Biden’s military-inflected interventionism to forestall China’s economic challenge.’ War and US imperialism are the defining features of Biden’s presidency, not his solidarity with the working class.

And Trump is all too willing to call out Biden’s war spending. Ending the war in Ukraine is popular with American voters, and beyond Trump, there is massive pushback against Biden’s support for Israel. Whether Harris will be able to successfully disentangle herself from Genocide Joe’s love-in with Netanyahu is going to be a major challenge.

It seems that Harris is going to pursue a strategy of stating her independence from Biden without breaking with him. But she is not going to break with Israel. As Netanyahu arrived in Washington, amid massive protests, Kamala headed off to a pre-scheduled meeting in Indiana. However, she is set to welcome him into her office on her return.

In a Zoom call hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America and Jewish Women for Kamala, Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, said: ‘Let me just make this clear: The vice president has been and will be a strong supporter of Israel as a secure democratic and Jewish state, and she will always ensure that Israel can defend itself, period. Because that’s who Kamala Harris is.’

Left Democrats like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad are going to struggle. It will be difficult to concentrate on domestic policy and maintain a ‘don’t mention the war’ position. If they try to big up the liberal credentials of genocide-supporting Kamala Harris, they will fall prey to a grassroots movement that is looking for a complete change of direction in foreign policy.

The truth is that the best chance the world has of seeing off the fascistic mob supporting Trump, and getting a change in a foreign policy that is widely discredited, lies in the thousands that are marching for peace and justice on the streets. Building a revolutionary left in the USA and across the globe is of paramount importance.