Post-election Review of My Incorrect Prediction

Perhaps I should have expected the Harris campaign to turn itself into the attack of the unlikable status quo zombies.

Warning: I am posting this before the election has been officially called, but the tea leaves seem pretty clear. I am feeling the need to vent, so this post is a little more rhetorical and less analytical than usual. I voted for Jill Stein because I am against genocide, so I am personally somewhat indifferent to the result. Still, it is hard for me to see my over-educated friends and family get betrayed so badly by the Democrats. If Kamala Harris somehow wins, it won’t actually change the dynamic described in this post.

Back in January I made a prediction about the presidential election:

If one of Donald Trump or Joe Biden is replaced on the ticket before election day while the other stays in place, then the replacement candidate will win. I see this as the most likely scenario because of the large number of ways it could happen, although each specific scenario has a low probability.

I stuck with the prediction in June, before Biden’s catastrophic debate performance:

If one of the two factions of the legacy uniparty replaces its doddering old fool at the top of the ticket, that party will win. . . .

Although the opportunities to replace a candidate by any legitimate process have mostly passed, I don’t think either faction of the legacy uniparty gives a fig about legitimacy. Either Joe Biden or Donald Trump is probably going to disappear from the stage, whether by natural causes or otherwise. But I don’t think both factions will replace their candidates—America is just not that lucky anymore.

By the way, I do not think it matters at all who replaces Biden or Trump. Even if it is a total non-entity like Kamala Harris, I think she will win just because she is not Biden or Trump.

Shortly thereafter, when Kamala Harris stepped seamlessly into the into Joe Biden’s shoes without any muss or fuss or voting,¹ my prediction looked pretty good. Then the Harris campaign happened.

I didn’t commentate about it in real time, because a prediction isn’t much of a prediction if you start hedging and trimming whichever way the wind blows, but it became clear by late September that Harris might be on a mission to prove my original thesis wrong. When Harris’ initial momentum began slowing, she responded by lashing herself ever tighter to the corpse of the status quo, personified by Joe Biden and Dick Cheney.  That is obviously the opposite of what I expected to happen, and the opposite of what her campaign should have done if they wanted to win. I guess the lesson is that even if you correctly identify a big political dynamic, that doesn’t mean the actual candidates won’t find a way to defeat it.

Having said that, my next step is to question whether the Harris campaign’s strategy could possibly make sense under any set of conditions that a rational observer would associate with reality in 2024 America.  One of the core purposes of this blog is to figure out why our elites appear to act irrationally so much of the time. This is certainly a good example. So why did the the Harris campaign think putting on a senile Biden skin and then adding a hefty dose of senile Dick Cheney for good measure was a good idea? We know for a fact that some core Biden supporters thought everything was going great in this country for the last four years and the American people were just too stupid to realize it.  But Harris already had the Democrat Sanctimony Vote locked up, and it clearly wasn’t enough.  She needed to avoid losing voters who were leaning her way but not fully committed, and she needed more than 50% of truly undecided voters. 

The uncommitted leaners seemed to respond well to the Harris campaign’s early “what can be, unburdened by what has been” framing. It gently suggested change without hurting anybody’s feelings, especially Joe Biden’s. But then people started asking pesky questions. The Houthis defeated the U.S Navy in the Red Sea War, the Russians were decisively beating Joe Biden’s pet Nazis in Ukraine, and the obviously intentional genocide and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine kept getting worse. Inflation as experienced by ordinary people was ongoing, especially food, insurance, and residential rents.² Uncontrolled immigration was looking like more and more of a problem to the citizens who compete against immigrants for wage-labor jobs. And what exactly was Harris going to do about protecting women’s reproductive rights anyway, given the Democrats’ fifty (50) year (five decade, one-half century!) unblemished record of failure to pass national legislation on the issue?³

Harris and her campaign did not attempt to answer any of these questions, and instead tied themselves overtly and irrevocably to the two least popular and most doddering figures on the modern political scene - Joe Biden and Dick Cheney. On its face this appears to be totally irrational. In my estimation Biden and Cheney are the two best living examples of objectively evil genocide promoters. Even to norm-worshipping centrists who have no strong feelings about genocide, Biden and Cheney have a reputation for being a bit more war-mongery than the ideal. Perhaps more important for campaigning purposes, each of these guys individually is more pathetically doddering than Trump, and together they represent a galactic-sized sucking chest wound of dodderingness that would be extremely difficult to surpass even with the help of Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Drive.

Biden and Cheney together are the most nefarious and fossilized version of the status quo imaginable. Not even the most pathetically blindered Democrat operative could have believed that America was full of undecided voters who were saying to themselves “Self, the problem with this country is we don’t have enough status quo.  We need to build the most intense and suffocating status quo ever conceived in the history of the planet. So I am waiting until the last possible minute to see which presidential candidate will commit to the proposition that nothing in this country will ever be allowed to change again. Also, my preferred candidate should adopt extremely fossilized campaign proxies.” 

I can think of only two possible reasons for the Harris campaign to adopt a hyper-status quo strategy: (1) her handlers realized she did not have the rhetorical ability or the gravitas to sell any type of change-based policy position so they gave up trying; or (2) her handlers were trying to lose on purpose.  These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and could apply differently to different handlers while achieving approximately the same result.  

So then I ask myself, why would the Democrats manipulate the electoral process to nominate an obviously incapable candidate and perhaps intentionally throw the election, when  Democrats said again and again that winning this particular election was existentially important?  I think the answer has two parts, a loud part and a quiet part.  The loud part is that signaling loyalty to your in-group tends to be loud, and it tends to get louder when you’re losing.  At least among the cognoscenti, all the yapping about fascism and dictatorships was pure signaling to avoid the risk of getting canceled from the in-group. That does not mean there is any substance behind the signaling—in fact, signals that defy reality may be all the more powerful as signals.  The reality is that everybody knew this election was not existentially important because both factions of the legacy uniparty suck.

The quiet part may be even more disturbing to those who believe political parties in the United States exist to win elections and pursue their published platforms: the actual purpose of the Democratic faction of the legacy uniparty is not to win, it is to serve the billionaire oligarch class by blocking any possibility of organizing on the left.    

This is the great power of the two party system. The Republicans are in charge of promoting the interests of the corporate rulers…. The Democrats are to control the people so that no opposition ever appears. And that’s a very different task and therefore they appear as very different parties, but they serve the same monied interests and they actually work together as a team.

—Peter Camejo via Briahna Joy Gray ( I was not able to verify this quote but I want to give credit so I’ll assume it’s legit).

America is a complicated place, but this is the biggest part of what is going on in our national politics today, and this particular dynamic is not very complicated once you see it.

The Harlem Globe Trotters played many of their games against another exhibition team called the Washington Generals. Nobody kept official records, but the Generals are widely believed to have lost around 16,000 games while winning between 3 and 6 over the course of many decades. The Democrats are functionally similar to the Washington Generals, except for one thing: the Democrats win more often than the Generals because the billionaire oligarch agenda is spectacularly bad for ordinary people. Whenever Republicans go too far and the little people start to get grumpy, the job of the Democrats is to step in and run a candidate who will not actually roll back anything the Republicans have done, even if the Democrat candidate wins.  

In other words, the only purpose of the Democratic party of Clinton, Obama, Clinton, Biden, and Harris is to be the pawl in the Overton Window ratchet.  Republicans care about winning because they have goals. Most of the goals are set by the oligarchs, but occasionally the Republicans adopt a social goal such as restricting abortion laws to appease the rabble.

Democrats are different—they care about playing the game, growing the grift, and making flexibly progressive individual career moves within the party-affiliated establishment. In fact, when the Democrats win they have unpleasant problems to worry about, such as explaining why they never passed federal legislation to protect abortion rights for fifty (50!) years and they still aren’t going to pass anything even if they win this time around. Who wants that?

This process has also been labeled “lesser evilism.”

Precisely because so many of us have been voting “the lesser evil” for so long—allowing those so designated to substitute for genuine political leadership, allowing the argument altogether to substitute for adherence to democratic processes, for popular programs, for policies that put American people and American security interests ahead of corporate profit and the twisted agendas of military and Deep State careerists—we are now faced with the absurd and demented choice of a Harris or Trump presidency.

Regardless of how you label it, we have been living in a post-democratic system since 2008. In the 2008 election we appeared to have a real choice on at least a few issues, but then Barack Obama performed a complete bait-and-switch, selling out to the bankers and the neoliberal militarists who run the permanent military-intelligence complex. Since then, each election offered less choice until this year when the Harris campaign stopped pretending. We did not even have the appearance of a meaningful choice, just two versions of the status quo with different styles of name-calling. Toward the end of the campaign even the styles of name-calling seemed to be converging as both sides referred to each other as “garbage.”

There will be a lot of finger-pointing among Democrats in the coming months and years. Do not let them fool you. This is not a “mistakes were made” scenario. The Democrats showed you who they are.⁴

It is painfully obvious at this point that the leaders of the Democratic faction of the legacy uniparty are a bunch of hypocritical stooges working to prevent any change that would disadvantage their billionaire owners.  If the current leadership of the Democratic Party survives this humiliating defeat by a demented carnival barker, then the American people are too obtuse for democratic governance and they deserve to continue the on the current downward path toward moral, political, economic, and ecological collapse.

Avenues for further thought suggested in this post:

• Can the Democratic party elite persuade their twenty-first century base, the meritocracy-loving Professional Managerial Class (PMC), that intentionally losing elections to demented carnival barkers is good, actually?

• Can the Democrats find a different core constituency if the PMC starts to have doubts, given that the Democrats’ twentieth-century working-class base has been fully subsumed by MAGA Republicanism?

• Can something more plausible and less corrupt than the Democrats emerge before 2028?

1. I think that by the time Biden stepped aside it was too late for a primary process to be anything but a gimmick manipulated by party insiders, so the vice-president stepping into the shoes of the president at that point was probably the most legitimate result that could be expected. The unacceptable shenanigans came earlier, when Harris and other insiders denied and concealed Biden’s incompetence until it was too late to choose a successor by democratic means. I also think the failure to remove Biden as president was (and continues to be) a disqualifying violation of the oath of office by Harris and every member of the cabinet.

2. Whenever she was asked about the genocide in Palestine Harris responded by talking about the price of groceries, which was obviously a losing issue for her. Losing, losinger, losingest.

3. The Democrats haven’t just failed to pass federal legislation to protect women’s reproductive rights, they have for many decades repeatedly passed and voted for the Hyde Amendment restricting the use of federal funds for abortion, most recently in the March 2022 budget bill. If anyone is looking to the Democrats for protection of reproductive rights, all I can say is best of luck and would you have any interest in buying the Brooklyn Bridge? By the way, I live in Arizona where citizens wisely stopped leaving this issue up to the Democrats and passed a state constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights.

4. The Democrats also showed you they are OK with genocide. If they ever get back in power, please do not think they will hesitate to do the same to you.