Having been preoccupied with the Olympics and other fun activities in August, I returned to the Presidential race this week, giving as much attention to the Democratic National Convention as I did the Republican one. At the very least, I can report that I’ll take Stevie Wonder over Lee Greenwood and Kid Rock any day of the week [YouTube links].
Still, somebody’s going to win this mind-boggling whiplash of an election, so welcome to the fourth installment of my Decision 2024 series!
If you listen to some folks who never met a Democrat they didn’t hate, the Biden Years were akin to the Soviet Union. Biden brought us cOmMuNIsm! The whole Biden administration was chock-full of “radical Marxists and leftists”—and only Donald Trump will “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” You don’t have to be a card-carrying MAGA Republican to buy into this stuff. I’ve seen some libertarians argue that the Democrats herald a new era of “Leftist totalitarianism” that will bring political victory to the global Deep State and the “cultural Marxism” that has engulfed the West!
Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and his hair-raising investment in the politics of grievance don’t even register a blip on the radar for these folks. It’s even more ironic when I read the proclamations of some Objectivists, whose founder was an immigrant herself, but who have no problem with Trump’s pledge to deport up to twenty million “illegals,” which would cost billions of dollars, upend the economy, and lead to a catastrophic policing of the American landscape. But hey, those are just the fine print details!
As for Kamala Harris, there are problems, indeed. I have no clue if her proposal for price controls to fight “corporate greed” and “price-gouging” in the food supply and grocery industries is anything other than a political gimmick. She didn’t mention it tonight in her acceptance speech, but some vague notion of it was part of her August 16 talk on the economy. If we are to insist on taking Trump at his word, the same principle applies to Harris. If she’s serious about a federal ban on corporate price-gouging—that is, some form of legally imposed price-fixing—good luck with that. Oh, we’ve heard this is not really a price control proposal. It might be reserved for “emergency situations.” Or perhaps it would give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to investigate and penalize companies that “exploit” consumers with “unfair” pricing. How do we judge what’s “unfair”? With government-created guidelines that will generate unintended, but fully predictable, consequences, including shortages and a decline in product quality. Many critics see this as a sure sign of Kamala’s cOmMuNIsm. But these kinds of controls can be found throughout the United States, on all levels of government. Of course, the most notable example of a presidential edict on price controls came in 1971 from that other communist, Republican President Richard Nixon. The swifter this proposal is thrown into the ash heap of history, the better.
Still, in the wide scheme of things, on issues such as housing, healthcare, and education, the Democrats haven’t strayed much from the typical welfare state ideology that they’ve advocated, to varying degrees, from the times of FDR and LBJ. Despite a “Democratic Socialist” Bernie here or an AOC there, the larger Democratic Party remains as committed to the state corporate capitalist status quo as their Republican rivals. They differ on aspects of economic policy and in their cultural representations, but neither party seeks to fundamentally alter the nature of the current system’s class dynamics.
That said, if this campaign cycle has clarified anything, it’s that the GOP is not the party of free markets or free minds. For what it’s worth, it never was. Even when the party gave Reaganite lip service to free markets, it did nothing to alter the institutional and regulatory biases favoring the richest and most powerful. Today, that party doesn’t even engage in capitalist apologia. They have embraced the industrial policy of “national conservatism” that harks back to their nineteenth-century roots as the party of high tariffs and protectionism. They are riding the global wave of nationalism, with all its pitfalls. Trump—whose career in real estate made him “the consummate state capitalist,” as Wayne Barrett once characterized him—joins those Republicans declaring war on the economy. They’re even threatening to use military force in Mexico, which would take the failed “war on drugs” to a new level of insanity, “the likes of which we’ve never seen before”—to steal a Trumpian phrase. Moreover, the MAGA crusade against everything “woke”—a package-deal anti-concept to signify every social cause they hate—has elevated scapegoating and fearmongering into an art form.
On the issue of reproductive freedom, despite flip-flopping on the topic for years, Trump remains a politician. He clearly knew that there was no way he could lock up the Republican Party nomination in any of his election cycles without playing to the evangelical right’s obsession with outlawing abortion. He proudly took credit for taking down Roe with his SCOTUS appointments, even as he privately lamented the impact it would have on the electorate. Now, it seems as if he’s backed off from demanding a Federal Abortion Ban, while sacrificing reproductive freedoms on the altar of states’ rights. In reference to the restrictions that these reactionaries have placed on reproductive freedom, Harris declared tonight in her acceptance speech: “Simply put, they are out of their minds.”
The Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket is the only one with a stance on reproductive freedom that is remotely libertarian. In my view, the issue of abortion should never have been thrown back to the states. Within Roe’s strictures on viability, a woman had the right to make decisions about whether to terminate a pregnancy and had the federal protections to do so. That ruling never implied that abortions could take place “after birth,” as Trump has claimed. There isn’t a single ‘pro-choice’ state that has legalized infanticide, whether “moments before” or “moments after” birth. More than 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester. Those that take place at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy represent only 1% of all abortions in the United States, typically those undertaken to save the life of the mother. Tim Walz has been shouting the correct reply to those conservative Republicans who want the government to legislate not only reproductive decisions but also the personal choices individuals make in their own bedrooms: “Mind your own damn business.” Now if only the Democrats could acknowledge the truthfulness of that phrase regarding some other key issues …
In one of my previous installments of “Decision 2024,” I called Joe Biden the Walking Dead, and said it was Trump’s election to lose. The Trump campaign spent untold amounts of money on “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Fuck Biden” posters. Trump hasn’t quite recalibrated his campaign strategy in an effective way to combat a candidate who, unlike Biden, has a pulse. He has stated that Harris will be “the most extreme radical liberal president in American history”—though for those of us who are receptive to genuinely ‘radical liberal’ ideals, we should be so lucky! Sure, it’s politically wise—and easy—to blame everything that happened over the last four years on the Biden-Harris administration. It’s also context-dropping. It would be just as incorrect to blame Trump for everything that went wrong in the country and in the world during his time in office. Both administrations were deleteriously impacted by a global pandemic, whose effects were magnified by lockdowns, disrupted supply chains, and worldwide inflation. In this country alone, that inflation was exacerbated by two monetary stimulus infusions under Trump and another under Biden. Both political parties had a hand in this mess, and nobody comes out of it unscathed. And it’s foolish to believe that any President could have changed the tide in Ukraine or the Middle East, given the history of those regions. It’s also doubtful that they’ll be any change in the ways in which current U.S. foreign policy functions (or dysfunctions), regardless of who wins the 2024 election.
So, all bets are off! As of this moment, barring some major debate meltdown by one or more of the candidates, I think it’s going to be a very close race.
I will, however, give Kamala Harris credit for her celebrated Coconut Tree comment that has become a meme. For those not in the know, here’s an explanation from Lindsay Lowe:
Back in May 2023, the vice president gave remarks for the swearing-in ceremony of commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.
During the speech, Harris stressed the importance of not only focusing on the younger generation but being “clear about the needs of their parents and their grandparents and their teachers and their communities.”
She continued to say that “none of us just live in a silo” and shared some words of wisdom from her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan.
“My mother used to … give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris said with a laugh.
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she continued.
That’s not enough for me to start going door-to-door campaigning for Team Kamala, but I applaud the dialectical sensibility! And while this isn’t a Song of the Day, at least I can tap my foot to it …
Notablog 