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.
Why are the Democrats Replacing Biden with Harris?
I started this section with a question. And the question has an obvious answer. The Democrats replaced Biden with Harris because Biden’s chances of winning had become severely compromised. Too many voters thought he was too old and too far into mental decline to govern effectively. Democrats turned to Harris because, as VP, she was the obvious choice.
And that’s all there is to it, really. Case closed. Call it a day and fix a drink.
But this doesn’t work for left-leaning identitarians. They can’t agree with the obvious explanation.
Why?
Because they see the U.S., at its core, as a nation built on white supremacy. Biden’s whiteness should come out ahead of Harris, no matter the odds of winning. On their understanding of the world, the Democratic Party should hold on to Biden at all costs. And it should keep a black woman out of power. Because, according to their worldview, that’s how the world works.
Never mind the fact that Obama defeated this view back in 2008. They tried to explain that away. But it’s much harder for them to explain away Harris, a black woman.
So what’s the story here?
At the end of the day, the coalition at the heart of the Democratic Party – the PMC, college educated voters, black voters of middle income and above, progressives and liberals – prefers technocratic liberalism. They don’t particularly care about the race or gender of the person managing the technocratic liberal system. They just want to defeat Donald Trump and his coalition. Their racial politics and system allows for a candidate of any gender or race.
Harris, Race, and Society
I’m not here to dismiss the importance of race to power in the U.S. It’s important. But race doesn’t explain society at a fundamental level. That’s where identitarians go wrong. And the replacement of Biden with Harris provides us with a useful illustration about why.
I’m sure left-leaning identitarians will come up with a story to explain all this away. Just as they tried to explain away Obama. They’ll try to claim that Harris is ‘just a token.’ Or they’ll call her a representative of white supremacy because she’s a [cop, or secret racist, or some such].
They said the same things about Obama. The story didn’t make much sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now, either. Nor will it hold up to any level of critical scrutiny.
As for the far right identitarians, they’ll tell a story about how the Democrats nominated Harris to advance some kind of deep, anti-white agenda. That story is so bonkers that it doesn’t merit a response.
For readers of this blog, we can take away a key lesson. Capital wants to build a post-racial future. It historically used race as a tool to divide the working class, but now it would like to replace that tool with others. It’s nowhere close to actually doing that, but the Harris campaign looks like the next step in that process.
Eventually, capital sees the future as one where the underlying system of power remains just as it is, but that power is distributed across identities.
As socialists, obviously we can do better than that.
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