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
• George H Morgan is Associate Professor Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

He happens to be Catholic.

So why did Abbott put razor wire and a floating barrier in the Rio Grande? Do migrant children not have heartbeats?

There is an angry selectivity when it comes to life issues.

Abortion is certainly a tragic reality in too many places in the world.

Without denying the ability of the polity to allow or disallow abortion legally, the better course is to make it unnecessary.

To respect life means just that: the unborn, yes, and the elderly and the stranger, the migrant, and the homeless individual. Respect life includes the "other," no matter how defined — by gender, skin colour, language, ethnicity — the list is endless.

Yet too many so-called pro-life advocates demonstrate an abject denial of others' right to life.

The task of religion is to expand the conversation, model good behaviour and call out the frauds.

On abortion, for example, the leading candidates in the United States' presidential race exhibit distinct approaches to the question. One has said women who suffer abortion should be legally charged; the other supports legalized abortion.

We could call the first a "pro-lifer," but does he in fact respect life?

He has bragged about molesting a woman and has been found guilty of sexual assault. He currently faces 91 felony counts in four different jurisdictions.

He does not pay his own legal bills, including those from one of his lawyers, Rudy Giuliani. (He complained that Giuliani lost. Recall his comments about the former Vietnam POW, Sen. John McCain.)

Since the federal right to abortion was overturned by a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the other candidate has worked to circumvent the resulting patchwork of state laws.

The complicating factor is his Catholicism, and it is hard to reconcile his position.

Still, he seems to be a decent man. While in the U.S. Congress, he took the train home each night to Delaware. He is said to call his children every day.

So, what to do? The U.S. bishops say not to vote on any candidate because of one position on one issue.

Abortion is important, and Catholic opposition is well known. But what happens when you expand the conversation? What happens when you look at other life issues, and how they fare inside the Catholic Church?

The church has stepped up to house immigrants, and there are some places for unwanted children. But here and there is not everywhere.

Too many questions linger.

Does the pastor pay women employees on the same scale as the men? Or are women workers part-timers without benefits or vacation pay? Does he snicker at the thought of ordaining women deacons? Is he capable of informed discussion? Is he an autocrat, a dictator?

Did the bishop move the pederasts, and cover up his — and their — tracks?

Has he drained diocesan bank accounts to fight rather than settle with the victims? Does he tweet against Pope Francis? Has he paid lip service to the Synod on Synodality? Does he answer letters of complaint?

These are real questions for the Catholic Church, as it continues to bleed money and adherents while it seems to focus only on abortion.

If clerics preach against abortion, they must also preach against the razor wire. If they preach about the value of life, they must respect the people of the church.

Immigration? The death penalty? Workers' rights?

Too many clerics have replaced the Gospel with their personal politics. Until they demonstrate respect for all life, they will continue to be ignored.

• Phyllis Zagano is an American author and academic. She has written and spoken on the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church and is an advocate for the ordination of women as deacons.
• First published in Religion News Service. Republished with permission.

As the Christian right has evidently vacated all pretense of seeking a candidate who embodies Christian values, Clinton can step into the space that they have vacated. She can pledge to be the candidate who will be guided by her faith.

She is a Methodist and has deep religious roots that she can draw on.

Coming of age in the 1960s, Clinton turned to theology to make sense of the political and social turmoil unfolding around her.

She read theologians Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr as she wrestled with how Christians ought to engage the world, pursue justice and reform society.

In recent weeks and months, Clinton has returned to those roots on the campaign trail. In February, as she celebrated her victory in the South Carolina primary and began to pivot to the general election, she countered Donald Trump's politics of division by turning to Scripture.

In contrast with Trump, who had fumbled an effort to quote "two Corinthians," she centered her call for unity in 1 Corinthians 13: "Love never fails. … Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

Clinton acknowledged that it might sound odd for a presidential candidate to be calling for "more lovingkindness in America," but she insisted that these were "words to live by, not only for ourselves, but also for our country."

And earlier this month, in the aftermath of the killing of five police officers in Dallas, Clinton spoke to the African Methodist Episcopal Church's general conference in Philadelphia. Borrowing from the book of Proverbs, she implored her audience to listen to one another, to seek common ground, to "incline our ears to wisdom and apply our hearts to understanding." Continue reading

Sources

• The Washington Post — article by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, chair of the history department at Calvin College.
• Image: Fortune

In an essay published by the National Review said Trump is "manifestly unfit to be president of the United States."

The essay, "An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics," was co-written by Princeton professor Robert P. George and St. John Paul II biographer George Weigel.

The call has been supported by about three dozen lay Catholics, many of whom are active in conservative academic and nonprofit circles.

The group called on Catholics "to reject [Trump's] candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate."

The article criticized Trump's "appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice" that are "offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility" and his promise to kill the families of terrorism suspects.

"There is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us ground for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government," read the article.

After a visit to the US-Mexico border last month, Pope Francis said politicians who advocate building border walls aren't Christian. Trump then lashed out at the pope, saying it was offensive for the pontiff to question anyone's religious beliefs.

Several US bishops have condemned Trump's rhetoric on immigration, suggesting the candidate is engaging in modern-day nativism, resurrecting the kind of bigotry once directed at Catholics.

Sources

• National Review
• Christian Today
• The Washington Times
• Breitbart.Com
• Crux
• Image: AP/The Washington Times

"We're Catholics before we're Democrats. We're Catholics before we're Republicans. We're even Catholics before we're Americans because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us," Chaput was quoted as saying.

"And this has been the story of the martyrs through the centuries," he added.

He said Church teaching against abortion "requires absolute adherence" on the part of Catholic voters, who must "stand united" in opposition to the practice regardless of party affiliation.

"(Abortion) really is a big issue today, and I think what it requires of Catholics is a loyalty to the church prior to their political party," Chaput told Catholic News Service Oct. 20 in Rome.

"If we don't stand united on this issue, we're bound to failure, not only in the area of protecting unborn human life but in maintaining our religious freedom," he said.

Archbishop Chaput echoed the calls of other American bishops to have their flocks consider their faith in the voting booth.

"We do believe in the separation of church and state, but we don't believe in the separation of faith from our political life," he said.

"It's very important for Catholics to make distinctions when voting that they never support intrinsic evils like abortion, which is evil in all circumstances. That's a lot different from different economic policies" that people can reasonably disagree on, the archbishop said in another interview with the Catholic News Agency.

His remarks come as an Oct. 22 Gallup poll shows the "economy in general" is the issue rated most important by Americans as the election nears.

"But people who are practicing Catholics cannot have alternate views on abortion," he said. "Such foundational issues have a huge impact and it's important that Catholics make those distinctions."

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• Catholic News Agency
• The Washington Post
• Image: Catholic Vote

The National Catholic Reporter said the US Conference of Catholic Bishops did not name Biden, but said the "inaccurate" statement "made during the vice presidential debate" was "not a fact."

During the debate last Thursday, Biden said "No religious institution — Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital — none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact."

Biden was also quoted as saying that there is no "assault on the Catholic church."

The bishops, however, said in a statement that Biden's statement "is not a fact." The bishops said the contraception mandate contains a "narrow, four-part exemption for certain 'religious employers.'"

"That exemption was made final in February and does not extend to 'Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital,' or any other religious charity that offers its services to all, regardless of the faith of those served," the US bishops' statement said.

The Los Angeles Times said the statement from the US bishops was the latest volley in a heated fight between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration over a mandate published early this year by the Department of Health and Human Services — a battle that the church has framed as a struggle for religious freedom.

The administration has characterized it as being about women's reproductive rights.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Houston Chronicle
• Los Angeles Times
• Image: Business Recorder