NERMEEN SHAIKH:
Kamala Harris has conceded to Donald Trump after the former president
pulled off an overwhelming victory Tuesday to send him back to the White
House. On Wednesday, Harris spoke at Howard University.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS:
I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue
their dreams, ambitions and aspirations, where the women of America have
the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their
government telling them what to do. We will never give up the fight to
protect our schools and our streets from gun violence. And, America, we
will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for
equal justice and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter
who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and
freedoms that must be respected and upheld.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Kamala Harris giving her concession speech on Wednesday.
The Democratic Party is in a state of crisis after Trump expanded his
support across the country and Republicans also regained control of the
Senate. Republicans may also keep control of the House.
AMY GOODMAN:
On Wednesday, independent Senator Bernie Sanders blasted the Democratic
Party. In a statement, Sanders said, quote, “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. While the
Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are
angry and want change. And they’re right,” Sanders said.
To talk more about Tuesday’s election, we’re joined by Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, who studies social movements. He’s author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Professor Kelley, it’s great to have you back with us. If you can
start off by talking about Donald Trump’s major victory, I mean,
sweeping the country, actually winning the popular vote, as well as what
looks like the Electoral College vote, Harris winning far fewer
millions of votes than President Biden did in 2020? Though some
Democrats, for example, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, polled much higher
and won, she did not get those same votes. And end by talking about what
Democratic Senator Sanders is saying, that the Democratic Party has
abandoned the working class.
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY:
Right. Let’s begin with Senator Sanders. He’s absolutely right. The
Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Kamala Harris ran on a
ticket of moving toward the right, you know, shifting, pivoting toward
the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is endorsing her. And so, there was
really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people
across the board. That’s true.
Now, when we think about 2024 compared to 2020, I’m not sure that
Trump’s victory is so historic. Trump would have won in 2020 had it not
been for the uprisings that emerged out of the George Floyd murder. The
wind was behind the Democratic Party, even though the Democratic Party
didn’t earn that wind. And so, I think that’s a factor.
The other factor is that the country is moving toward the right, and
the working class, or working classes, feel really disaffected and
abandoned. They feel abandoned, I believe, for a couple of reasons. One,
because whatever the numbers said about the shifting economy, the fact
of the matter is that people are still dealing with inflation, with
joblessness, with insecurity. But the second thing — and this goes back
to an article I published back in 2016 — we also have, you know, a
deeply racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic nation. And that runs through. I
mean, when you look at the demographics, white men consistently vote
for Trump. White women, of course, it was a slight shift, but the shift
wasn’t that radical. I mean, I don’t trust exit polls, but it’s amazing
how many white women supported Trump. It’s amazing how much of the
message of fascism actually did tap into a deep insecurity, a deep fear,
and the fact that deportation is the dominant message that has drawn
working people.
So I really want to talk about the question of class, which I think
is most important. We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t have a
class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that thought
of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We refuse
deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,” because that’s
what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we,
as a class, you know, have to protect each other. Trump is seen as the
person who can fix things, the person who represents the CEO
who could step in and solve problems in a culture in which the only
solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity, is coming from the
capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that there’s such a radical
shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a failure of the Democratic
Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic Party actually pivoted a
little bit toward labor, in a way that the Harris campaign did not.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to go to former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, who we spoke to last week. She served as co-chair of independent Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
NINA TURNER:
I think, over time, the Democratic Party lost its way in terms of just
talking to working-class voters. And I mean from all identities, because
sometimes when we say “working class,” people assume we’re just talking
about white men. I’m talking about working-class people from all walks
of life. And my state, you know, CAFTA, NAFTA,
this happened over time. It didn’t just happen in one fell swoop. It
happened over decade after decade after decade. But those trade deals
definitely decimated Midwestern states like mine and really hurt a lot
of workers.
And then working-class people from all backgrounds do not necessarily
see themselves. They feel like elitism has taken over for both parties,
but especially in the Democratic Party. And so, when you don’t see
yourself in a party, you decide that you want to go another way.
And then, more recently — when I say “recently,” certainly over the almost four years — as people were suffering the effects of COVID,
trying to — we were all trying to break out of it, inflation very high,
the cost of groceries high, the cost of gas high, all of those material
condition elements. The Democratic Party denied that, and they trotted
out Bidenomics, and they turned their backs on people and made it seem
as though the pain points that the big mamas and big papas were feeling
were not necessarily real. You cannot do that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Robin Kelley, that was Ohio state Senator Nina Turner. If you could
respond to what she said and put it in the context of what you
mentioned earlier, namely the absence of working-class cohesion, and
what that meant for this election? And why, in fact, why do you think
there is an absence of cohesion among the working class in the U.S.?
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. No, I think — I totally agree with what Nina Turner said. This is where we are right now.
The absence of cohesion has to do with the general — two things, I
think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind of
neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own problems,
a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests are the only
ones — in other words, private interests are the ones that can solve
your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets in the way. This
is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for at least three, four
decades.
And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement with the UAW,
we see discussions and talk of solidarity — the Boeing strike, for
example — but in terms of those who are either unorganized or at the
sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no longer based in
high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening, it’s almost impossible
to organize people and to think as a class. You know, the Amazon strike
in Bessemer is a really good example of what could have been, but how
the combination of fear, insecurity and the failure to really think of
solidarity — in other words, the care for our neighbor, the care for
those who are not us but maybe we share the same class, that sense of
solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks about at the beginning of my piece,
that’s missing. And we haven’t done the work, the political education
work, to build that sense of cohesion.
But the other thing that I think is really important is this belief
that if we — that we can one day become Trump. In other words, wealth,
entrepreneurship, the striving for success, the fact that a lot of these
Senate campaigns where seats were overturned, they were won by
billionaires and millionaires, you know? I mean, that’s significant.
And one other thing I should add is that, you know, we could look at
this at the presidential level; we could also look at it at the local
level. I’m here in L.A. in what’s supposed to be the Left Coast,
California, where we just had propositions that failed, a proposition to
end forced prison labor, a proposition to raise the minimum wage, a
proposition for rent control, you know, a proposition that actually —
the one proposition that did win was one that will deeply criminalize
and expand sentences for petty crimes. This is in L.A., you see? This is
California.
So we’re moving toward the right. And somehow the right, for many
people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s attractive.
And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class with power, a
class in which the state could be the lever of equality rather than deep
inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting Trumps for the rest
— for generations.
AMY GOODMAN:
Yeah, it’s very interesting on the issue of prison labor and a ballot
initiative there. When we were out in California interviewing prisoner
firefighters who got a pittance a day, they were pushing for earlier
release, but they didn’t get it often because it provided a prisoner
labor force for the wildfires that plague California. But I wanted to
ask you about the extremism of Trump, when he was talking about — or,
you know, at the Madison Square Garden rally, of course, that Puerto
Rico is an “island of garbage.” He would later called that whole rally a
“lovefest,” you know, referring to women as the B-word, and, of course,
how he deals with immigrants. But there’s a very interesting comment of
writer Meg Indurti, who tweeted, “if you are someone who was able to
overlook the genocide and cast a vote for kamala harris, then you
already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s
extremism to vote for him.” Can you comment on this? Robin Kelley, you
talk a lot about the working class and the working poor. You also have
written extensively about Gaza.
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY:
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, one of the questions that came up, my
students were posing this question to me the other day: What would have
happened had the U.S. actually stopped supporting Israel, like in
November or December of last year? What would have happened? I think the
Democrats could have won. You know, we overestimate the power of the
Israeli lobby, because in some ways Democrats are looking for dollars,
not necessarily votes. And so, imagine what would have happened had
there been this refusal to send arms to Israel. There would be no — the
war would have ended. There wouldn’t be an escalation of the war. And
part of the attraction of Trump, ironically, is this belief, this kind
of — it’s kind of a myth, but still this belief that under Trump there
were no wars. And so, here we have possibly three different wars going
on at once under the Democrats. And you could see how that would
generate some fear.
But to go back to the question of the extremism and elites, you know,
toxic masculinity is a huge factor. The buildup coming from right-wing
state legislatures to attack the curriculum, to attack DEI,
to attack trans people at every single level, here we are dealing with
an extremism that is actually palpable and that I could see how elites,
some elites on the right, those who actually have drafted Project 2025,
would support these policies. So, in some ways, what we keep calling
fascism, which I agree is fascism, is pretty mainstream among the
Project 2025 people, pretty mainstream among the MAGA Republicans. And the Republican Party is a MAGA
party. Whatever the old bourgeoisie of the kind of older neoliberal
order, whatever they think, they’re either going to go with the program
or they’re going to do what they did, support Harris and Walz. And that
didn’t work out for them.
So, I mean, I’m actually terrified by a future in which the kind of
violence of the settler-colonial mentality, which was always there, has
escalated and become normalized in a way. And let’s remember that the
history of fascism is filled with supporters who themselves are targets
of fascism. We have examples of that, you know, historically. So, you
know, it’s hard — so we can’t just assume that because there’s an uptick
in, say, the Latino vote in support for Trump, that somehow that’s an
example of Trumpism’s multiculturalism, because it’s still white
supremacy and patriarchy.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Robin Kelley, I just want to go back for a second to the point that
you made earlier about those ballot measures. Why do you think those
ballot measures were rejected? How did they get on the ballot to begin
with? And then, is that related at all to the fact that, you know, the
Democrats have come under massive criticism for, after 2016, after the
Clinton election, basically finding ways to blame everybody but
themselves? Is there a risk that that’s going to happen again?
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Yes, I think there is a risk.
As far as the propositions, California is a conservative state. You
know, it has been. It has produced some of the most conservative
governors. It is the home of the origins of the John Birch Society. You
know, this is a conservative state. So, it didn’t surprise me too much,
although California is also a state that has, you know, had basically
the biggest, for a long time, or at least second-largest prison
population in the country. And so, some of these initiatives came from
imprisoned people themselves, came from abolitionists. The struggle for a
minimum wage came from an organized labor movement. But there’s still
deep anti-immigrant sentiment here in California, deep anti-labor
sentiment. And keep in mind that rent control has been consistently beat
down since 1995. And why? Because some of the same elites who gave
money to the Harris campaign are also absentee or venture capitalists
who own a lot of property, and they’re trying to profit off of them.
The Democrats, I mean, you know, I don’t have an answer to that,
except for the fact that we can’t keep relying on the Democratic Party. I
mean, it’s been — it’s so bankrupt. I think what Ralph Nader said
yesterday is absolutely true. We need something else. You know, if not a
real third party, I think Reverend William Barber has an answer, and
that is to build from the bottom up, to build from low-wage workers,
because that’s the vast majority of the people. But we can’t do this
until we actually think of ourselves as a community, a beloved
community, as a class that struggles with each other against corporate
interests.
AMY GOODMAN: And we will be speaking with Reverend Barber tomorrow, so people should tune in. And Ralph Nader’s comments on Democracy Now!
just exploded yesterday, so people can check them out at
democracynow.org. Robin D. G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with
us, professor of history at UCLA who studies social movements, author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Coming up, we go to speak with Fatima Bhutto on what Trump’s election means for the world.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Brilliant Corners” by Thelonious Monk, who was the subject of an acclaimed book by our last guest, Robin D. G. Kelley.
