Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
As with Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, his somewhat less surprising – though still jarring – win in 2024 has set off a flurry of failed explanations for how and why he pulled it off.
Let’s try to cut through the fog and get at why this happened (again).
I’m starting another round of election predictions with a bit of dread. Not because the election is a particularly uncertain one (though it is). And not because this election presents the possibility of another Trump administration (though it does).
Rather, my sense of dread comes from the fact that the left hardly has any skin in the game.
Democrats have long catered to moderate voters. But the Kamala Harris campaign really cranked this trend into overdrive. She campaigns to the right on issues like immigration. And she has wrapped her campaign around winning over so-called ‘Never Trump’ Republicans.
In other words, Harris campaigns with roughly the politics of a Bob Dole or Mitt Romney. Maybe she won’t govern that way if she wins – though she might. But the mere fact that she thinks she can get away with this shows the relative powerlessness of the political left in the U.S.
In his account of the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, Guy Laron lays out a framework we could apply to the politics of many countries.
Laron describes how Netanyahu gradually fused together a coalition between business interests, religious fundamentalists, and disaffected working class people. He did so by using state power to tie these groups together under his leadership. For instance, he used the promise of housing and resources under a settler colonialist regime to tie ultra-Orthodox religious people to his political project.
Israel thereby stands out as but one example of a politics that has degenerated into a rivalry between technocratic liberalism (e.g., the Labor Party in Israel, Labour in the UK, the Socialists in France, and so on) on one hand and a xenophobic far right that occasionally represents the interests of a segment of the working class, on the other. We find many such examples.
But that’s not how things work in at least one country – the United States.
Donald Trump has dominated news coverage in the U.S. for over 9 years. But in all that time, liberals and even leftists still haven’t learned much about how he operates. His politics remain a mystery to them, sparking widespread and ineffective reaction.
I made my first attempt at mapping Trump’s rhetoric way back in 2018. In that post, I said a few words about how Trump selects his topic and audience.
I’ll build on that post in this one. But this time our topic is how Trump uses hyperbole, unclear language, and provocative behavior to generate overreaction from his Democratic opponents.
The tide turned hard against the Biden campaign about a week after the debate, around the July 4 holiday. When it happened, my thoughts turned to an old debate at the heart of this blog.
Across many posts, I ask the question: what force drives society at its most fundamental level? At the ground, do we find a system of class relations and class conflict? Or do we find identities such as race and gender? Marxists argue for the former, while identitarians argue for the latter.
Joe Biden’s decision to step down in favor of Kamala Harris suggests, strongly, that it can’t be the latter. At the very least, it suggests the left-leaning version of identitarianism doesn’t work. And the far right version never made much sense, anyway.
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