The fox and the wolf in the presidential debate
Malcolm X once said that the most astute capitalists and imperialists know that to get people to run towards a fox, you have to show them a wolf.
Kamala Harris laid a few traps to draw out the wolf in Donald Trump during the US presidential election debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night (US time). He duly obliged, rambling about “illegal aliens” eating American cats and dogs, about everyone loving what he’s done on abortion and about how Viktor Orban, the far-right ruler of Hungary, really respects him.
More notable, however, was Harris herself parading as the wolf. She repeated a promise to maintain the US military as “the most lethal fighting force in the world”, described Trump as weak on foreign policy and scolded him for being insufficiently deferential to members of the armed forces.
Malcolm X understood that the president of the United States is but the figurehead of a violent system that rules much of the world. So lord knows what he would have made of the Democratic National Convention’s Nebraska delegation donning T-shirts with his likeness as they pledged allegiance to Harris last month.
In this debate, however—and in the entire period since Hillary Clinton ran similar attack lines in 2016—he probably would have recognised that the fox and the wolf are one in the Democratic Party.
Harris proudly touted Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent endorsement of her campaign. The architect of the invasion of Iraq ought to have been dragged to The Hague and locked in a box for the term of his natural life. Instead, along with “the late great” John McCain, another warmonger, Cheney’s name was uttered as though the ground on which he walked is now hallowed.
The last person to generate liberal excitement on the scale of Harris was Barack Obama, whose gift to the ruling class in 2008 was his ability to provide US imperialism with a mask of reason with which to cover its eight years of catastrophe under George W. Bush and Cheney. Obama’s speeches—delivered in a measured, reverie-inducing baritone—attracted crowds not seen since in US electoral contests.
“A good performer, with an ear for how to make white liberals like him”, Adolph Reed caustically remarked at the time. Obama overwhelmed first Hillary Clinton, and then Republican candidate McCain, before delivering eight years of image rehabilitation for the empire.
Harris promises much more than this. The Democrats under Joe Biden are in imperial expansion mode: building alliances, not just mending them; preparing for confrontation, not coexistence, with China.
Yet Trump is so odious that the enthralled Democratic base seems to view these as minor details. With a prosecutor’s training, Harris can’t deliver Obama’s oratory. That didn’t prevent the Democratic campaign from smashing fundraising records in August. Young women, in particular, appear to be preparing to storm heaven, or at least ballot booths, for Harris.
Voter registration surged in the week after she became the presumptive nominee in July. According to data analytics firm TargetSmart, new registrations were up more than 175 percent among young Black women, 150 percent among young Latinas and more than 80 percent among young women in general compared with the same period in 2020. One analyst described the numbers as “astonishing” and without precedent in the last 30 years.
In the debate’s wash-up, the liberal media is triumphant—a stark contrast to the mood after Biden’s performance in July. Yet Harris’s polling is underperforming Hillary Clinton’s at the same stage of her 2016 campaign against Trump. The partisan polarisation has put a high floor and low ceiling on each candidate’s potential vote in November.
At any rate, the most unfortunate political outcome of 2024 may well be that a new generation of young people runs headlong into the arms of the Democratic fox-wolf just a few cycles after the disappointments and disaster of Obama, and just as the Palestine solidarity movement portended a break from liberal imperialism’s status quo.
