Peter Solenberger
In all major US elections, a chorus of liberals, social democrats, Stalinists, and post-Stalinists urges a vote for candidates of the Democratic Party. “The Democrats have their weaknesses,” they say, “but a Republican victory would be a disaster.”
This year, the chorus is louder than ever. “Democracy is at stake!” the advocates for voting for the Democrats say. But is this true? Would the election of Donald Trump destroy democracy in the US? Would the election of Kamala Harris prevent it? In fact, neither proposition is true.
Electoral politics in the US has become more polarized over the past thirty years. The Republican Party has gotten more and more strident in its rhetoric on immigration, crime, abortion, gender, “job-killing” taxes and government regulations, and “woke” liberal elites. The Democratic Party has presented itself mainly as the moderate party, the “not them” party, the party of maintaining the status quo. The Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 was merely a blip.
The Democrats are the lesser evil, compared with the Republicans, but apart from rhetoric, little changed from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Government policy remained largely the same, not only on militarism, war, and the economy, but also on policing, immigration, and the environment.
Despite the increased polarization, democracy remains the best possible shell for capitalist rule, and the two-party system works well for the bosses. The government can do only what the ruling class wants it to do, and the alternation between Democrats and Republicans traps workers into endlessly chasing the lesser evil.
Revolutionaries should use the teachable moment of the elections to educate workers about the capitalists’ lesser-evil trap, the need for a mass working-class party, our program for that party, the limitations of electoral politics, and the need for mass action to resist effectively.
We shouldn’t get into wrangles with workers over how they vote. But we should recommend that politically advanced workers who want to go beyond chasing the lesser evil cast a vote for a Green, independent, or other noncapitalist candidate, rather than passively abstain.
Democracy and fascism
Parts of the left in the US portray the 2024 elections as a battle between democracy and fascism. Both terms need to be examined. In The State and Revolution, Lenin, citing Engels, describes democracy as “the best possible shell for capitalism”:
In a democratic republic, Engels continues, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange” (France and America).
At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions…
A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell … it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.
Fascism is a reactionary mass movement with political, social, cultural, electoral, and paramilitary components. It is based on sectors of the population that feel threatened by economic crisis and social change, quintessentially, the middle class, but also sectors of the working class. It employs racist, chauvinist, xenophobic, and sexist demagoguery. It promises to make the nation and its people great again.
Historically, the capitalists have turned to fascism to crush the workers’ movement during severe crises in which the working class rises up and the capitalists’ best possible shell is unable to contain the upsurge. If timid leadership causes the workers to falter, the fascists seize the opportunity.
Turning to fascism is risky for the capitalists. The fascists have their own interests and base, making them at best a dangerous and expensive parasite. They may provoke a workers’ revolution and lose. If they win, they may lead the country into disaster. The capitalists won’t choose this path unless they fear losing all, if they don’t.
The US political system
The US political system is designed and has been refined to limit government action to only what the ruling class wants, meaning what a consensus or preponderance of the ruling class wants.
The US has three levels of government: the federal government, the fifty state governments, and thousands of local governments. Within each governmental unit, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches have separate powers. They can check and balance each other, as the schoolbooks put it. The executive branches have standing bureaucracies of various kinds, including the police and military, which can and do undermine democratic decisions.
The US President is chosen by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of members of the House of Representatives and Senate it has. In most states, the party that wins a majority of the popular vote gets all the electors. As a result, in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million, but lost the Electoral College. In 2020, Joe Biden had to win the popular vote by seven million to win the Electoral College.
The House of Representatives is supposed to be the most democratic branch of the federal government, yet it is rarely able to pass progressive legislation. The Senate is less democratic, with two senators from each state, regardless of size, and rules requiring a 60 percent supermajority to pass all but routine legislation. Yet the Senate frequently serves to moderate reactionary measures adopted by the House.
The Supreme Court is the least democratic branch of the federal government. Its nine justices, appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate, serve for life. Yet the Supreme Court has repeatedly initiated reforms that the president and Congress lacked the courage to initiate, from school desegregation in the 1950s to abortion rights in 1973 to same-sex marriage in 2015.
With Donald Trump’s appointment of three justices during his first term, the court has reverted to its earlier role of blocking reforms. Dysfunction from top to bottom, except when the ruling class wants action.
Democrats and Republicans
Overlaid on this structure is the two-party system. The Democrats and Republicans are both capitalist parties. They depend on donations from capitalists and recognition from the capitalist media. Their top politicians move back and forth between government, the military, business, and academia. If they aren’t wealthy when they enter politics, they quickly become so.
Since the Woodrow Wilson administration of 1912-20, the Democrats have positioned themselves as the liberal or center-left capitalist party, and the Republicans have positioned themselves as the conservative or center-right capitalist party. Their common ground is the agenda of the ruling class, which for more than forty years has been neoliberal imperialism.
There are differences between the two capitalist parties. The Democrats favor more government intervention to promote employment, reduce poverty, and protect the environment. They’re more supportive of civil rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. They favor multilateralism in foreign policy.
The Republicans favor lower taxes, less government regulation, and leaving economic matters to the market and political matters to the states. They have an isolationist wing that wants an “America first” foreign policy. They project a law-and-order image and assert the virtues of marriage, nuclear families, and religion.
The two-party system reduces most of the differences to rhetoric. The Democrats controlled the presidency, the House, and the Senate in 1992, 2008, and 2020, and changed nothing fundamental. The Republicans controlled the presidency, the House, and the Senate in 2000 and 2016, and changed nothing fundamental. In other years, the government was divided and could accomplish little.
The Trump and Biden administrations raised annual military spending to more than $750 billion direct and $1.5 trillion total (direct and indirect) spending. The administrations each allocated $3.5 trillion to counter the Covid pandemic and the economic disruption it caused. Trump imposed large tariffs on Chinese goods to help US manufacturing compete. Biden kept the tariffs and added $1 trillion in “buy American” subsidies.
Despite a more humanitarian rhetoric, the Biden administration has implemented the policies of the Trump administration to secure the US border with Mexico and keep asylum-seekers out. The two parties try to outbid each other on support for Israel.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
The 2020 elections had the highest turnout of voters since 1952. One-third of those eligible to vote chose not to do so. Slightly more than a third voted for Biden. Slightly less than a third voted for Trump. The 2024 presidential election looks to be even closer.
The non-voters are mostly disillusioned. They have no confidence in either party. They don’t believe that the government will act in their interests. They look to themselves, their family, and friends to get by.
The traditional Democratic base since the 1930s is unionized workers, Blacks, Latinos, and other people of color, liberal professionals, and enlightened capitalists. This base has fragmented, as the party has embraced neoliberalism and moved to the right. Some Democratic voters believe the party’s rhetoric, but most see Harris and the Democrats as the lesser evil, especially on abortion.
The traditional Republican base is big capitalists, managers, small business people, farmers, and workers from the outlying suburbs and small towns. Some Republican voters are hardcore racists, xenophobes, authoritarians, and even fascists. But most see Trump and the Republicans as the lesser evil, based on their perception of their economic interests and their views on abortion and other issues.
A second Trump administration would make US politics nastier, but the main practical effect would be on abortion rights. In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the US Supreme Court decided that the Constitution gives women a right to abortion until fetal viability. In 2022, the Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed justices, reversed itself.
The battle has now shifted to the states. A third of states ban abortion, another sixth allow it under limited circumstances, and half protect it. Women in states that ban abortion travel to other states to have abortions, if they have the resources to do so, or have medical abortions through networks that circumvent the bans. In some states where legislators have enacted bans, citizens have launched referenda to override the ban.
A second Trump administration is unlikely to be able to enact a nationwide ban on abortion, since a substantial majority of the population favors abortion rights. But the administration could interfere with the distribution of mifepristone and misoprostol, which would make circumventing the state laws more difficult.
The need for a mass working-class party
Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, its attack on Lebanon, and its escalation with Iran have shown many people not only Zionism’s settler-colonial nature but also the complicity of the US in everything Israel does. Popular opinion has shifted substantially from pro-Israeli to pro-Palestinian.
Progressive voters are in a difficult position. Should they vote for Harris to protect abortion rights, knowing that she supports Israel’s genocide? Or should they refuse to consent to the genocide and risk further restriction of abortion rights? There’s no way out of this dilemma within the framework of the two-party system.
The problem is more general. Working people want jobs, pensions, healthcare, education, time with those they love, and opportunities to pursue their interests. Most of them favor equal rights and opportunity. They want a clean environment.
They doubt that these things are possible, since they haven’t seen them, and the politicians and media say they’re impossible. They chase what they perceive as the lesser evil, since they see no path to anything better.
In the early 1990s, Labor Party Advocates (LPA) had a catchy slogan: “The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own.” This view was shared by most labor radicals and the leaders of a few unions, including the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), the United Electrical Workers (UE), the International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), the California Nurses Association (CNA), and others.
A convention in June 1996 formed the Labor Party, led by these unions. The convention adopted a social-democratic program that, inconsistently, did not include the right to abortion. A 1998 convention rectified this.
The Labor Party adopted what it called a “new organizing model for politics.” The model was to “build power” before the party ran candidates. The language masked a compromise by which the major unions allowed the LPA unions their Labor Party sandbox, so long as they didn’t actually run candidates against the Democrats. Having no real purpose, the Labor Party soon faded, dissolving in 2007.
This pattern has been repeated again and again in the unions, social movements, and social-democratic political organizations, including the revived Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). They grant the Democratic Party a monopoly on political representation. Their leaders claim that nothing else is possible. This makes the Democrats the lesser evil to the Republicans, which leads nearly all activists to vote for them. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
What kind of workers’ party?
The kernel of truth in the model of building power before running in elections is that there’s no way to win elections in the US without having extra-parliamentary power. The capitalists’ power is their wealth and the control it gives them over political life. The capitalist parties will spend $12 billion on the 2024 elections, $2 billion on the presidential election alone. Even the unions can’t match that, let alone overcome the disadvantages of not controlling the media and the government.
Mass action could break the impasse — building unions and other mass organizations, organizing demonstrations, strikes, and occupations. These could create a situation in which the capitalists had to choose between abandoning democracy and implementing electoral and other reforms that would allow a workers’ party to compete effectively.
The capitalists wouldn’t like this and might try authoritarian measures first. But in all other advanced capitalist countries, the bosses long ago learned to live with bourgeois workers’ parties, that is, parties with a working-class base and the politics of trying to reform capitalism through government regulation.
Revolutionaries should support even a reformist workers’ party as a step forward for the US working class. But we propose for the party an anticapitalist transitional program — a program for jobs, healthcare, education, abolition of police and prisons, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, drastic cuts in military spending, peace, and a just transition to clean energy, industry, transportation, construction, and agriculture — a program that only a workers’ government could implement.
We propose that the party not just run in elections, but also mobilize workers to confront the capitalists and their government, to defend the workers’ movement, to build councils and other organs of workers’ power and workers’ democracy, to establish a workers’ government.
In Britain, Canada, and many other countries, the level of class struggle at which the working class gained political representation was too low for the workers’ party to be revolutionary from birth. If that proves to be the case in the US, revolutionaries will be on the familiar ground of combatting reformism.
This is all music of the future, of course. It won’t happen in 2024. But revolutionaries should be raising our perspective and recruiting to it now.
Marxist electoral tactics
Marxists back to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels have seen elections as a time when workers are more focused on politics than usual, a time when communists should present their views. As Marx and Engels explained in the 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League:
Here the proletariat must take care: 1) that by sharp practices local authorities and government commissioners do not, under any pretext whatsoever, exclude any section of workers; 2) that workers’ candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention.
Where a revolutionary party can’t run its own candidates or decides not to for tactical reasons, critical support to the candidates of other parties may be a way to promote its views. The most famous explication of this policy is V. I. Lenin’s in the chapter “‘Left-Wing’ Communism in Great Britain” from “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
There are no revolutionary parties in the US today able to mount a nationwide electoral campaign. In the 2024 presidential election, the only non-capitalist candidates on the ballot in most states are Jill Stein of the Green Party and Cornel West, a Black radical running independently. In 2012, Stein got 0.47 million votes. In 2016, she got 1.45 million.
Stein and West have essentially the same social-democratic program. They are petty-bourgeois, that is, cross-class candidates, not candidates of a workers’ party. But they are not capitalist, and their program is to the left of any of the parties in the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) in France.
The Democratic Party honchos would prefer that radicals vote for the Democrats. But their bigger concern is to preserve their monopoly on political representation. So long as they have that, the logic of the lesser evil traps most activists into supporting them. “Do not compete” is their red line with the unions and the movements.
For revolutionaries and other anticapitalists, the tactical choice is to advocate a vote for Stein or West or to abstain. I favor advocating a vote for Stein or West, to encourage trade-unionists, movement activists, DSAers — and, at some point, their organizations — to step over the Democrats’ red line.