Donald Trump was elected US president this week.
Despite vastly outspending her opponent and drafting a galaxy of celebrities to her cause – Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Taylor Swift – Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College, the popular vote and all the swing states.
This has bewildered and dismayed liberals – and much of the mainstream media. In the aftermath, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders excoriated the Democratic Party machine.
“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,” he said.
He continued: “Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Harris ran a campaign straight out of the centrist political playbook. Sanders observed that the 60% of Americans who live pay cheque to pay cheque weren’t convinced by it.
She sought to dampen social divisions rather than accentuate them. She spoke of harmony, kindness and future prosperity, of middle-class aspiration rather than poverty and suffering. Her speeches often repeated rhetoric like her promise to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class”.
This was unlikely to endear her to those for whom social mobility appears impossible.
Words of blood and thunder resonated
Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, refuted Sanders’ claims, saying:
“[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime – saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line.”
But did those workers feel like the Democrats were speaking to them? And did they like what they heard?
Class politics needs to not only promise to redistribute wealth, but do so in a language that chimes with people’s lived experience – more effectively than Trump’s right-wing populism.
Harris’s genial, smiling optimism failed to strike a chord with voters hurting from years of inflation and declining real wages.
And her use of celebrity advocates echoes writer Jeff Sparrow’s criticism of the left as “too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures” after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election loss.
By contrast, Trump’s words of blood and thunder hit the spot – not only in his rural and outer suburban strongholds, but among those voters in rust-belt inner cities, who had voted decisively for Biden four years earlier.
The greatest threat to America, he said, was from “the enemy from within”. He defined them as: “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”
Harris’s attempt to build her campaign around social movements of gender and race failed abjectly.
In particular, the appeal to women on reproductive rights, and to minority voters by preaching racial harmony resonated less than Trump’s emphasis on law and order and border control.
Women voted more strongly for Harris than for Trump, but not in sufficient numbers to get her into the Oval Office. Latinos flocked to Trump despite his promises to deport undocumented immigrants.
This shows it takes more than political rhetoric to bake people into voting blocs.
Those of us who fixate on politics and the news media tend to overread the ability of public debate to set political agendas, especially during election campaigns.
In fact, few voters pay much attention to politics. They rarely watch, listen to or read mainstream media and have little political content in their social media news feeds. Exit polls indicate Trump led with these kinds of voters.
Is populism the new class?
In much of the Western world, class has receded from the political vocabulary. As manufacturing industries declined, so did the old trade unions whose base was among blue-collar workers.
In 1983, 20.1 percent of Americans were union members. In 2023, membership had halved to 10%. Few of those in service jobs join unions, largely because many are precariously employed.
These days, politicians in the old social democratic parties, like the Democrats in the US and Labor here in Australia, are much more likely to have come up through law and business than the union movement.
In the US, ex-teacher Tim Walz was the first candidate on a Democratic Party presidential ticket without law school experience since Jimmy Carter.
The language of populism – the people versus the elites – is a smokescreen that obscures real structures of power and inequality. But it comes much more easily to the lips of Americans than that of class.
Trump’s political cunning rests in his ability to identify as one of the people, even to paint the left as the enemy of disenfranchised so-called patriots.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he told a Veteran’s Day rally last year.
He conjures up (an illusory) golden age of prosperity in a once-great monocultural America, where jobs were protected by tariffs and crime was low, helped by the reality of rising cost of living and falling real wages.
There is plenty of room on this nostalgic landscape for Mister Moneybags, an old-fashioned tycoon, even one with the “morals of an alley cat”, as Joe Biden said in the debate that finished his 2024 candidacy.
The elite, by contrast, are faceless: politicians, bureaucrats, the “laptop class”, as Elon Musk calls knowledge workers, and the grey cardinals of the “deep state” (a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy).
According to Trump’s narrative, they conspire in the shadows to rob decent, hardworking folk of their livelihoods. This accords with a real geographical divide: people in cities with high incomes and valuable real estate, and those in the rust-belt with neither.
Australian populism
In Australia, the language of populism has deeper roots than that of class. Students of Australian history learn that national identity was based on distinguishing ourselves from the crusty traditions of the motherland: the belief that, as historian Russel Ward wrote, all Australians should be treated equally, that “Jack is as not only as good as his master … but probably a good deal better”.
The Australian Labor Party was there when this egalitarian myth was born. But as the gap between rich and poor grows here, as elsewhere, it has become less plausible than once it was.
It remains to be seen whether Anthony Albanese – whose life journey has taken him from social housing to waterfront mansion – is prepared to bring the sharp elbows of class politics, in both policy and language, to next year’s election campaign.
The experience of Kamala Harris suggests he would be well advised to do so.
- First published in The Conversation
- Associate Professor Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University