I gave myself this long to offer an analysis of the 2024 election because like everyone else, I needed to absorb a lot, both intellectually and emotionally. To me, it’s clear: the Republicans won because a majority of voters have tied the Democratic Party to the elites on both coasts. For the first time since 1932, the Democratic Party has alienated itself from a real majority of Americans, including growing numbers of people from the Democrats’ core constituency: workers, including many Black, brown people.
Anyone who thinks this is not what we learned from the 2024 elections is, frankly, living in a bubble and is out of touch with reality.
The reality is that this country, indeed the entire capitalist world, is in a crisis. This crisis is marked by hyper-inequality, rising housing prices, declining wages (as a percent of the total economy), cuts in private sector contributions to health care and retirement, and cuts in public sector protections for workers and for low-income people. A year and half of rapid inflation only threw salt on the wounds. And even more, the trauma of the pandemic threw an untold number of Americans into a dark place from which they have not recovered. The crisis is especially felt by young people, who are rapidly giving up on the American Dream.
The cause of this crisis, I have long argued, is one thing: the financialization of the capitalist system in the 1990s, a set of policy decisions that transformed capitalism from a system of profit made from the production of things into a system that rewards investors for speculation on anything that could be made to increase in price. The policies were called ‘neo-liberal’ because they claimed to enable the free flow of capital and labor across borders (i.e. globalization).
But in reality these policies deregulated banks so they could engage in predatory activities that had been illegal since the Great Depression. For nearly four decades, a handful of big banks destroyed thousands of productive businesses, drove up housing prices, destroyed or greatly weakened labor unions, and demanded “austerity” by government, meaning disinvestment in public education, public health and social services.
Most telling, deregulation of banking was chiefly championed by Democrats (especially Bill Clinton). While claiming to be the party of social entitlement programs and regulation of big business, the Democrats actively supported policies that produced hyper inequality, even while promoting important programs like the Affordable Care Act and civil rights protections for marginalized people. It is only fitting that the policies that created a world-wide social crisis should now have left the Democrats in a political crisis.
The Democratic defenders of neo-liberal policies are, of course, having none of this, and are instead blaming progressives for the 2024 debacle. Centrists charge that the Democrats went wrong because they tied themselves to leftist “cultural issues” of college-educated elites (DEI initiatives, transgender rights).
Luckily, the Democratic Party is more diverse than the centrist apologists for neo-liberalism. God bless Elizabeth Warren for standing up to the neo-liberals and fighting to re-regulate the banks (remember the Dodd-Frank Act, now all but moribund?). And there was always Bernie Sanders, calling it what it was (however ineffectually). And in the House of Representatives, the Squad (Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Rashida Talib (MI), and later Cori Bush (MO), Jamal Bowman (NY), Summer Lee (PA), Delia Ramirez (IL) and Greg Casar (TX)) established a progressive caucus.
The Democratic Party coalition has been held together by support for women’s reproductive rights, diversity initiatives, environmental issues, and opposition to authoritarianism overseas (esp. Russia in Ukraine) and at home (Donald Trump and MAGA). But this admirable commitment to diversity and international solidarity was continually undermined by the mainstream Democrats’ steadfast support for financialization, manifest by the ever-growing and yawning gaps between the rich and everyone else. To a lesser extent, progressives too often overreached, and made political demands that they had no capacity to back up with action. Worst of all, when Americans looked at the Democratic strongholds of New York and California, what they saw were progressive politicians committed to social policies of inclusion and economic policies of exclusion. The result was a growing hostility to the progressive agenda as a way for elites to feel good about themselves and to put down everyone else.
The critique of progressive ideas gradually gained political clout. Warren and Sanders were marginalized in the Senate, and in the House the Squad reps had to fight for their political lives in 2022 and 2024 against right-wing and Zionist efforts to unseat them (Bush and Bowman lost, Lee barely survived, and the rest, all from safe districts, had a real fight on their hands.) Progressive DAs were routed, even in progressive strongholds like San Francisco and Oakland.
Ironically, Biden’s Presidency had the opposite problem as Clinton and Obama’s advocacy of progressive social policies and unabashed support for financial globalization. Biden promoted innovative economic policies that sharply broke with neo-liberalism and had the potential to restart the American Dream. But Biden was unable to explain his economic plan to the American people, let alone get any legislative traction for the most important initiatives. And worse, Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war ran directly counter to the Democrats’ progressive ideals, alienating the very people who might have supported his economic policies.
The 2024 election was clearly a disaster for Democrats (and all people of conscience). But with all such dramatic routs comes a real opportunity. In a moment of crisis, there is always the opportunity to reject the ideas that got us here, and to embrace new ones.
The first piece of good news is that many people who do not identify as progressives now understand that the Democrats have lost their way and are in danger of no longer being the party of the working class.
The problem facing progressive Democrats who want to right the ship, however, is quite daunting. To put it bluntly, progressives have very little power in the current moment. Luckily, some progressives have been quite clear-headed about this problem. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez recently stated, “we have to run from the bottom, not from the left.” She argues that progressives need to focus on bottom-up organizing of labor and minority communities. She is undoubtably right. But in 2024 we must acknowledge that labor unions are mere shadows of their former selves, and that community organizing efforts around the country (and the Western world), have been difficult and have often failed to produce political results (Stacey Abrams’ failed gubernatorial runs in Georgia, for example).
Indeed, since I believe that social justice is based on the quality of the relationships we build with one another (see this blog’s home page), this problem is a very big one. But there can be little doubt that the progressive power needed to reshape the Democratic Party depends on the revitalization of community-based and workplace-based organizations, i.e. civil society. There are many good ideas about how to do this, and some support for these efforts (such as the Center for Popular Democracy and some labor unions).
What is needed more than anything else right now is for progressive-minded people to dedicate themselves to the small and painstaking tasks that bring about long-term and strong community- and workplace-based organizations. Doing this will mean that the era of progressives talking big ideas but having no power must be replaced by one in which walking the walk will be the measure of relevance.
I believe that small steps will yield big results as political conditions change. And the conditions will change because the right-wing nuts who now have complete control of government inevitably (and I think soon) will reveal themselves as the opportunists they are, with nothing but empty promises to offer the American people. In the next few years, I firmly believe progressives will have new opportunities to take the initiative. But doing so will take two things: a new generation of activists committed to community-building must show up to take on this challenge and the old party leaders must get out of their way. Will the Democrats be able to pull this off? We will see.
The long view 