The 2024 United States elections revealed a broad collapse of support for the Democratic Party, as millions shifted their vote away from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The electoral collapse demonstrates, to quote David North, the chairman of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, “the disastrous outcome of the long-term and very deliberate repudiation… of any programmatic orientation to the working class” most typified by “the flim-flam of identity politics.”
In the wake of the defeat, the proponents of identity politics, stung by the blow to their political project, have attacked the population for its supposed racism in not voting for Harris.
Most vicious in her vitriol on social media has been Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the New York Times’ racialist falsification of history, The 1619 Project.
The political aim of Hannah-Jones and others’ attacks is twofold. On the one hand, they aim to vilify the population for rejecting Harris. Second, they wish to do away with any notion that issues of social class had anything to do with the defeat. In doing so, they work to undermine a real struggle against the incoming Trump administration and the turn of the ruling class toward fascism and dictatorship.
“We must not delude ourselves in this moment,” wrote Hannah-Jones on Twitter/X on November 6. Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans—including white women—have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.”
She states elsewhere, “In the face of shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority, we see a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”
What filthy libels! The steepest drop off in Harris’s support came from layers of the population making under $100,000, the working class. Harris, as second in charge in the Biden White House, is wholly responsible for the Biden administration’s indifference and hostility to the social needs of millions of working people, opening the way for Trump to exploit social anger.
This, coupled with the Biden administration’s endless support in arming the genocidal Israeli government and the expansion of war with Russia in Ukraine, threatening nuclear annihilation of the planet, led to a mass desertion among voters, especially among the poor and working class.
In fact, the only demographic which increased its support for Harris was among the more privileged layers of the society, those making $100,000 and more. Hannah-Jones, utterly oblivious to the social existence of those beneath her feet, has been made a multimillionaire for her racialist interpretations of history. Her wealth places her comfortably in the most self-satisfied and insulated layers that benefited from the Biden administration’s Wall Street-friendly policies.
Refusing to see anything other than race, Hannah-Jones stumbles into an admission about the class nature of the Democratic Party. “Despite Black Americans being amongst the most economically vulnerable people in the nation, and despite them facing conditions that by some measures have worsened [under Democrats], 90 percent did not vote for Trump.”
As a matter of fact, Harris won 80 percent of the black vote in 2024, a historic drop-off in support for a Democratic Party presidential nominee. Harris won 10 percentage points less of the black vote than Biden did in 2020, and 16 percentage points less than Barack Obama in 2008.
The Obama administration was an object lesson in the reactionary character of identity politics. In 2008, tens of millions from all racial demographics voted for Obama, the first black president, in disgust with the previous Republican administration’s criminal wars in the Middle East and the criminality of Wall Street, which provoked the financial collapse that year.
However, Obama’s election quickly gave way to a ruling class onslaught against the working class. Obama did nothing to rescue underwater homeowners during the 2008 economic recession. Instead, his administration orchestrated one of the largest transfers of wealth from the bottom to the top in history, bailing out Wall Street banks that had caused the collapse.
His administration seized upon the US auto industry crisis to slash wages for all new hires, creating a two-tier system which has become ubiquitous throughout all industries and has contributed to a fall in working class living standards.
Obama carried out mass deportations, earning himself the nickname “deporter-in-chief,” expanded the wars started by Bush and extended the powers of the president as “commander-in-chief” to carry out extrajudicial assassinations, which he did in 2011 against US citizens.
This reversal of working class living standards contributed to the defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, who infamously called voters supporting Trump “a basket of deplorables.”
After declaring that the vast majority of whites in the United States voted for “autocracy,” Hannah-Jones then turns on the Hispanic population, which saw a double-digit shift in support among Latino men from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024:
Anti-Blackness cannot just be attributed to white Americans. The shock about the significant increase in Latinos choosing Trump, with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, family separation policy, and insults of Latin countries, over a Black woman tells me too many people fail to understand that anti-Blackness is deeply embedded in Latino cultures as well and that the interests of those who are part of that very large, multiracial, multi-nationality Latino category are not and not ever been necessarily aligned with those of Black people simply because many white Americans do not consider them to be white.
This statement, that the interests of the “Latino category are not and not ever… aligned with those of Black people” suggests that black workers should stand aside, and even facilitate, the assault on immigrants.
For his part, Ibram X. Kendi, author of the book How to Be an Antiracist, proposes simply to abandon the working class to its fate. “I don’t think it is wise to believe that if things get really bad for Trump voters [under Trump] they will come around in droves back to reality-and fight with us for all of our livelihoods and liberties,” he states on Twitter. “That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about what Dr. Yaba Blay tells us: ‘We all we got.’”
In their attacks, the racialists are simply reinforcing Hannah-Jones’s claims, first made in the original 1619 Project, that “black Americans fought back alone” to “make America a democracy.” They are asserting that the United States is riven by racial conflicts, implicitly accepting the claim by genuinely fascist layers that Trump represents the interests of all “white people.”
In fact, there are no social gains, from the civil rights movement, to the fight for the eight-hour day to the building of the industrial trade unions, that were achieved on an explicitly racial basis. These were class, not racial struggles.
Trump and the Republicans are assembling an administration of, by and for the corporate and financial oligarchy. The apparatus of repression and dictatorship will be used against all opposition in the working class, of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
The Democratic Party, however, is an instrument of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. No less than the Republican Party, it is absolutely committed to waging imperialist war abroad and class war at home. There is no section of the ruling class that retains any commitment to basic democratic rights.
Events in the past year have confirmed this. From attacks on anti-genocide protesters, to declaring “all out war” on third parties seeking the right to run in an election, to illegalizing the right of railroad workers to go on strike, the Democratic Party has been the chief antagonist to democratic rights. Currently, it is engaged in an effort to suppress mass opposition to the incoming Trump administration, promising a “smooth” and “peaceful transition of power” to a would-be dictator.
Finally, the allegation that whites’ have voted for an “ethnocracy” ignores reality. In fact, it is the Democratic Party administration of Biden that has spent a whopping $17.9 billion on military aid to prop up a real-life ethno-state, Israel, as it engages in an outright genocide of the Palestinian people.
The identity politics of Hannah-Jones and others, adopted fully by the Democratic Party, expresses the interests of privileged sections of the upper middle class, in the competition of positions and power within the state and corporate America. It is hostile to the interests of all workers of all races and genders.
The fight against the Trump regime requires the development of a movement in the working class in the US and internationally, based on a program that articulates its real interests. In doing so, it is an absolute prerequisite that the “flim-flam of identity politics” be rejected once and for all.