blame Kamala Harris‘ campaign to reflexively repeat mistakes Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign — here’s how Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic recently did — it might sound like a drive-by leftist diatribe with an unfortunate (and probably unintentional) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper, broader concern felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: Even 10 days before what has been billed as the first presidential election in world history (real or not), the polls are dead. The sugar rush of the transition from Biden to Harris and democratic conventionThis is a difficult future to face.

The current assumption among the media and political classes is this: Donald Trump – by any normative standards, a disastrously undisciplined and indecisive candidate is likely to win this election even without resorting to fraud or mob violence. To be clear, this “gut feeling” has zero predictive value and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016.

But liberal stress and consternation probably isn’t relieved by seeing Democrats do this exactly what they always do in the final stages of a national campaign: leaning sharply to the right to emphasize commitment to national security and corporate profits, in pursuit of so-called “persuadable” independents and undecided Republicans. (Or maybe we’re just going after the donor class, which isn’t technically the same thing.)

We’ve seen Harris firsthand as a gun owner. Sitting with Oprahembrace Wall Street-friendly economic policies and campaigning with former Republican congressman Liz CheneyHe supported literally every aspect of Trump’s agenda before his apparent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. All of this, of course, reflects conventional wisdom imparted by highly paid consultants, and is not inherently unreasonable: to wipe out even the handful of conservative voters who don’t particularly like Trump but are reluctant to vote for someone they know. It has been said that a radical socialist Black lady who wants to turn everyone into trans could make a huge difference in many key states.

The leftist response also makes sense on its own terms: Democrats have tried this before, hamster wheel style, without decisively defeating the increasingly trendy right. Maybe it’s time to stop doing the same thing over and over again that doesn’t work (admittedly a radical idea) and try something else instead, like leaning into widely popular social democratic policies on health care, taxation, student debt, and the like. the transition to green energy and young voters, people of color, LGBTQ voters, etc. I hope to win the elections by ensuring high participation among the public. (Let’s not get into the cancellation of the blank check given to Benjamin Netanyahu, but of course that could happen, too.)

I personally sympathize with this road not taken argument, but to recycle yet another of the Democratic Party’s four-year hamster wheel themes, none of this matters in the face of an existential emergency. In any case, nothing about the party’s tiresome, alarmist messaging or its dark image will change dramatically in the final week before the do-or-die national election.

There are signs that the Harris campaign is planning to take tough action in recent days on abortion rights, a potentially decisive issue, along with the Cheney axis and the strategic decision to directly label Trump with the F-word. But minor tactical adjustments at the end of October don’t matter much. The Democratic Party is a fundamentally unstable coalition of wealthy metropolitan whites and working-class people of color whose interests are starting to pull them in different directions.

The most important question right now is; For many people, understandably, this Only The question is: Will the Democrats’ campaign strategy work this time, or at least a little better than it did eight years ago? Let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump received in 2016, but the distribution of these votes turned into an insurmountable problem: If we subtract California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York from the grand total, Trump won. rest of the country 5 million votes.

Most of us in this business have gotten away with making confident predictions based on “how things work” because nothing these days works the way it used to, or at all. Time flies just as quickly, scientific research is relegated to “do your own research,” and a presidential candidate can tell the nation on live television that immigrants are eating their pets without significant political damage. Neither you nor I nor anyone else has the slightest idea whether the Harris campaign’s pursuit of a patriotic middle ground will result in the potentially decisive electoral votes of Michigan, Arizona or North Carolina. (We can safely say that the candidate who wins two of these three states will most likely be the next president.)

But there’s one thing I know: Don’t trust the confident statements of so-called opinionated insiders whose realpolitik bibles have been washed in the washing machine many times. I read James Carville’s New York Times column Last week I predicted a Harris victory, and somewhere inside me I felt a vague but distinct longing for a lost world of reassuring wisdom. Then I felt a much deeper longing — a longing to spend the next two weeks drinking whiskey and watching old movies, because this man hasn’t supported a winning Democrat this century. If this wasn’t the kiss of death, it was a damn good simulation.

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And one thing I’m sure of is that if the Harris campaign’s last resort is to triangulate Liz Cheney not If this work and the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway’s elite caste prove once again to be fatally flawed, the consequences will be ugly; For the Democratic Party, for the future of our so-called democracy, and for the direction of the entire world. in this century.

Not just because Donald Trump will win the election and become president, although that’s bad enough. But because of How under what circumstances did this happen – and the only American political party that pretends to advocate constitutional democracy, rational government, and broader equality will once again blame its own voters, or the Russians, or the ignorance and bigotry of the people it despises, for the devastating consequences of its own inconsistency and uncertainty, and the entire system it claims to value? for not being able to stop it from degenerating into clown anarchy.