Trump was Defeated, but We Can’t Let the Democrats Fool Us Again

The Democratic Party rout Tuesday night is a clear repudiation of the MAGA era, and a predictable and cautionary rebalancing of liberal capitalism.  Democrats regained control of the House and Senate, won high profile Senate races (El-Sayed in Michigan), and toppled the proto-authoritarian and far-right regime in Texas by electing a Democratic governor, senator, and attorney general. Statistics show young voters and Black voters especially lunging to the Democrats after trickling rightward between 2016 and 2024. 

The defeat is also a setback for the global far right. Especially on the heels of Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil, there is mounting evidence, including in the ongoing mass protests, of mass global pushback against the authoritarian era. The defeat can also be read as a form of repudiation of the U.S. state’s current war on Iran, despite the lack of a mass anti-war movement. 

For the Western bourgeoisie, the election promised a return to liberal capitalist norms and a potential slide towards restoration of the recognizable post-World War II order.  Global stock markets including the U.S. shot up at the results. Western ruling classes welcome a relief from Trump’s unreliability as a partner, and the Iran war’s escalation of oil prices gouging capitalist profits. Wide sections of US and European ruling classes would like a more stable plan for combatting China and Russia as primary imperial rivals.  

…the so-called “Blue Wave” is best understood as a mass cry for help from a U.S. working class battered by years of austerity, soaring inequality, falling living standards, the erosion of civil liberties, weakened health care, and even reduced life expectancy.

Domestically, the so-called “Blue Wave” is best understood as a mass cry for help from a U.S. working class battered by years of austerity, soaring inequality, falling living standards, the erosion of civil liberties, weakened health care, and even reduced life expectancy. It is also a significant expression of a desire among the masses of the United States for an alternative to a capitalist system that has failed them.  Elections, too, can be a “sigh of the oppressed” of working class people looking for some kind of hope and relief while living under the harsh realities of authoritarian capitalism.

But “blue waves” have never tipped the balance of power towards the working-class and the most vulnerable. We can think back to the Democratic surges that brought Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into power after long periods of Republican domination (Reagan and Bush I, and Bush II, respectively). These yielded not significant social reforms or redistribution, but carefully curated rightward shifts by the Democratic Party meant to constellate what Tariq Ali has called an “extreme center” as slavishly devoted to capitalism and empire as right-wing states that precede them.

Therefore, we can expect that the new Democratic majorities will do little to nothing to stop or dismantle ICE, end mass deportation, end the war against Iran, or put the brakes on Israel’s genocidal policies in Palestine. Indeed, all these policies have been co-signed by the Democratic Party.

Therefore, we can expect that the new Democratic majorities will do little to nothing to stop or dismantle ICE, end mass deportation, end the war against Iran, or put the brakes on Israel’s genocidal policies in Palestine. Indeed, all these policies have been co-signed by the Democratic Party.

We should also take heed of the elections as a warning about the historical tendency of the Democratic Party to become the “graveyard of social movements.” An apt metaphor for this is the number of people who placed their “I Voted” stickers at the Minneapolis memorials for Renee Goode and Alex Pretti on election day. Pretty and Goode were murdered in cold blood by ICE agents, horrific events that provoked the Minneapolis rebellion of 100,000 people on January 23rd. That mass movement has ebbed as the Democrats have risen, a sign of electoral politics’ capacity to defer and absorb the dreams of millions for a better world.

We should contrast this motion with the wave of mass protests against conditions similar to those in the U.S. that are a backdrop for Tuesday’s vote. Mass movements in Albania, France, Italy, Germany, Argentina, Kashmir, Pakistan, India, Spain, Portugal, Serbia, India, and others, have presented significant challenges to the stability and credibility of the state.  

Present there, and lacking here in the U.S., are well-organized student, worker, or left-wing movements and organizations, as well as political consciousness residing outside of the circumscribed boundaries of hegemonic two-party ideology.  

Necessary for the specter of such rebellions in the U.S. is patient and deliberate organizing by the revolutionary Left of the masses of people yearning for something beyond the “extreme center”. This includes members of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose candidates—while winning—are now being absorbed into the Democratic Party fold, and will have limited to no ability to shift the party Left once in office.

DSA or DSA supported candidates have now won a handful of state-level races including key mayoral races like in New York and Los Angeles. Yesterday they gained five new congressional seats, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib were re-elected. Yet the wide scope of the Democratic victory Tuesday will only embolden its establishment to squash any dissent from the left. We should therefore expect defections, and not growth, from the DSA as it spins its wheels into power.

There is a significant opening for the revolutionary Left, but one that demands strategy, coordination, and cooperation. Now is the time to build on the hopes of people for radical change by organizing workers, youth, and oppressed groups into class struggle movements and socialist organization. We need to build our capacity to unite and fight as a class using the methods of struggle that leverage workers’ and students’ power to strike and shut down the capitalist economy.  

There are signs of a reemerging revolutionary left in the US. The United Left Platform, a coalition of six revolutionary socialist organizations, continues to collaborate on the defense of victims of political repression–like Socialist Horizon’s Tom Alter—and to offer a coherent, non-sectarian path for those looking and moving beyond DSA’s reformist politics.

Bill V. Mullen is a member of Socialist Horizon.