The first thing we should do is understand why a majority of the 65% of eligible voters who actually cast ballots elected a far-right authoritarian by a narrow 51% to 48% margin.

The American working and middle classes are angry at the economic precarity that the powers that be have given them after five decades of corporate neoliberalism. Trump presented himself as the outsider anti-establishment change candidate, while Harris ran as the moderate establishment candidate. The swing vote was the 10 million or so 2020 Biden voters who Harris lost, not to Trump but to disaffection from the Democratic establishment.

Workers' Liberty
By Howie Hawkins
November 13, 2024

The election returns show that Trump did not receive many, if any, more votes than he received in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden by 7.1 million votes. Trump’s total in 2020 was 74.2 million. At this writing three days after the election while some mail ballots are still being counted, Trump had 73.4 million votes.

Harris had received only 69.1 million, compared to Joe Biden’s 81.3 million in 2020. The difference in this election is over 10 million Biden voters who stayed home instead of voting for Harris. Harris ran to the right, trying to get moderate Republican votes, and lost enough of her progressive base to lose. Those 10 million or so 2020 Biden voters who did not vote in 2024 would have come out for Democrat who campaigned as a change candidate on a progressive populist economic agenda. Harris’ refusal to condition arms to Israel on adherence to human rights, which is U.S. law and supported by a majority of Americans, also depressed the Democratic vote for Harris.

The corporate funders and professional cadre who control the Democratic Party are intractably committed to a neoliberal and imperialist agenda. The Harris campaign reflected their politics.

So what the left must do now is build its own political party. It needs to be a movement party that is as active in the unions and social movements as in the elections. Indeed, without organized intervention in the unions by a leftwing party, we won’t have a labor movement that is more than the business unions we have now that are narrowly focused on servicing a shrinking membership base that is now down to only 10% of all workers and 6% of private sector workers. It will take leftwing party activists to organize union rank-and-file members to transform their unions into social movement unions that engage and educate their own members, organize the unorganized into unions, join forces with other progressive social movements, and take independent working-class political action.

Since the Communist Party led the U.S. left and labor movement into the Democratic Party under the Popular Front policy in 1936, the socialist left has disappeared as a distinct political force in the U.S. with its own identity, social analysis, and policy program. Most of the shrinking numbers of self-identified socialists have been supporting Democratic Party candidates in elections for nearly a century now. With no left competing for their votes, the Democrats have taken progressive voters for granted as they moved to the right over the years, from the mildly social-democratic New Deal Democrats of the 1930s to 1970s to the harshly neoliberal corporate New Democrats since the 1980s.

So it is past time for the U.S. left to undertake the long overdue and fundamental task of breaking with the Democrats and building its own party. The Democrats, who have normalized the far-right Republicans by seeking bipartisanship compromises that accommodate to their extreme rightwing policies, have proven that they don’t know how to fight the right and defeat it politically. For that we need a left party that campaigns against both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism and for a democratic socialist and ecological society that takes care of all the people and the planet.

• Howie Hawkins is a longstanding US socialist and environmental activist, and was the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2020