If you want to see the two competing visions of the Democratic Party’s future coming out of Tuesday’s electoral catastrophe, just compare the responses to the Democrats’ thumping from Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Harris’s concession speech was part and parcel of the strategy that just saw her and her party go down in flames, full of inspirational-sounding generalities and the attempts at soaring rhetoric that no Democrat has quite managed to nail since Barack Obama. An often cheery Harris talked about how her campaign had “been intentional about building community,” vowed to keep fighting for freedom and the like through voting and the courts, but also “in how we live our lives by treating one another with kindness and respect,” and urged her supporters to light up what looked like a dark future with “the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.” She didn’t once mention bread-and-butter issues, and one of the biggest cheers came when she promised to “engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
A palpably disgusted Sanders, meanwhile, put out a short statement excoriating the party for failing to speak to the economic concerns that were by far voters’ leading motivation heading into Election Day.
“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,” he said.
First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Sanders rattled off a host of facts and statistics about the material hardship that drove voters to throw the Democrats out of power this week: record inequality, two-thirds of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, declining living standards, high prescription drug costs, and the absence of basic provisions that…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
