If Democracy Dies, It's on the Democratic Party
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont speaking for a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa in 2019. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr
Donald Trump pulled off the politically impossible.
After a presidency marred with impeachments, a pandemic and mass civil unrest that culminated in a rejection of the electoral process and an insurrection, it appeared that Trump wouldn’t step foot in the White House ever again.
Trump’s path back to the White House became increasingly insurmountable at every turn: an FBI investigation, 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, a sexual assault conviction and numerous other controversies cast doubt on his ability to get re-elected. The presidential campaign only presented more hurdles, including two assassination attempts, two Democratic opponents and public pushback over an innumerable amount of misleading, extreme statements.
Politically, any other candidate in modern American history wouldn’t have been able to touch a major party’s nomination with this kind of track record. However, Trump is, essentially, built of political titanium. He is a completely indestructible force that has dominated the American political climate for over a decade and morphed the entire Republican Party around himself.
Trump has emerged from the 2024 presidential election as the most fascinating person of the century thus far. He’s a ridiculously terrifying, phenomenally lucky and ceaselessly intriguing master of none — the perfect representation of the fallacy of the American dream, practically stumbling upward to the Oval Office. He’s cemented his legacy as a two-term president, all the while deeming it acceptable to be an openly awful, authoritarian, self-obsessed and anti-democratic leader.
Trump’s victory isn’t the product of a fantastic campaign, it is the product of an utterly functionless, braindead, embarrassing party. The Democratic Party has just faced one of the most embarrassing defeats in American history. They failed to make their case even remotely to the American people, especially working-class Americans. This wasn’t a close election; they failed to capture a single swing state and essentially failed to improve anywhere in the country from 2020.
The Democratic Party needs a complete top-to-bottom overhaul and restart. If the Democrats were confident in their assessment of Trump as a literal fascist and authoritarian, it is now clear that their efforts were resoundingly ineffective.
Trump gained the presidency again due to the Democrats’ failure, his campaign was shotty and his policy was undefined, moronic and extreme. Trump’s biggest advantage in the campaign was his promises of building a better economy. Yet the truth is that his policies will hurt the economy. His mass deportation plan will cost an estimated 88 to 315 billion dollars annually. This will deeply affect all sectors of the economy; for example, the deportation of migrant workers will cause the construction industry to lose over 13% of its total workforce – 1.5 million workers.
Furthermore, as NPR describes, Trump's fiscal policies “…would add an extra $7.75 trillion in government debt over the next decade.” However, Democrats failed to adequately pass this message along to the public; Trump will benefit from Biden’s economy and gradually destroy it, as he did with Obama’s economy.
The Democrats failed not only to make their case, but also acted as if they were infallible. Vice President Kamala Harris is not the one to blame for the election; she couldn’t distance herself from Biden’s administration while facing an incredibly short campaign timeline.
President Joe Biden’s legacy will be historically maligned. Akin to Herbert Hoover, he wrecked his party’s reputation for election cycles to come. Biden will be remembered as the man who prevented any contest in the primary, despite his increasing unpopularity and mental ineptitude.
Since former President Barack Obama left office, the Democrats have gradually proven they are out of touch by focusing on the elite corporate class, while lacking a backbone for crucial issues. They purposely shut out candidates who will legitimately make a change — most notably Sen. Bernie Sanders, who practically had the nomination in 2016 — and pander to the idiocy of modern mass media.
In a statement on Nov. 6, Sanders summarized, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…while the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
While the American people flock to the Republican Party that will perpetuate the failures of capitalism and make American society more oligarchical, authoritarian and reactionary, the Democrats need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and change. If they don’t, then Harris’ slogan of “We’re Not Going Back,” will be unquestionably true. The American people are not going back to the Democratic Party.