Ours is a surreal moment in US politics. In a matter of weeks, the Democratic Party has engineered a near-seamless transfer of political power from President Biden to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, thereby reviving the party’s prospects in all seven of the swing states that will determine the 2024 presidential election. Anxious but hopeful Democrats now believe the contest with Donald Trump is Harris’s to lose. Barring an unforeseen economic shock or a new foreign-policy crisis, she is now poised to ride what all political insurgents covet: the sheer momentum that comes with swiftly defying low expectations.
This is a remarkable feat, regardless of one’s partisan leanings. Harris has turned her apparent weakness—being perpetually discounted since her humbling 2020 primary flop—into an asset. Indeed, fresh off the awards-show theatrics of the Democratic National Convention—an overwhelming display of how much progressive politics has fused with popular culture in the last 20 years—the Harris campaign is at once brimming with the confidence of a popular incumbent and the spiritedness of an underdog.
Harris may very well succeed in playing both of those roles. After all, as a rather unpopular vice president, she was considered an electoral liability for Biden by the commentariat a year ago. But now that the tide has turned in her favor, her ebullient optimism is seen by sympathetic media and once-despondent progressives as recalling Obama’s historic 2008 campaign.
“A campaign reinvigorated by happy warriors can’t prevail solely on a vibe-based blitz.”
Nevertheless, a campaign reinvigorated by happy warriors can’t prevail solely on a vibe-based blitz. As the convention and her nomination speech demonstrated, Harris is going to emphasize three messages: that the Democratic coalition is once again a welcoming big tent, despite its past indulgence of “woke” pieties (something that “Scranton Joe” of all people failed to strongly convey); that Democrats are the party of live-and-let-live pluralism, unlike the “weird” right; and that a Harris administration is going to foster an “opportunity economy” that empowers workers and broadens entry to the middle class.
This isn’t to say that overt appeals to identity politics are going to be curtailed across the board—far from it. But unless she recalibrates her strategy in the event of a lousy debate or similar change of fortune, Harris is going to embrace a kind of fusionist politics that may be described as pro-growth populism. A Harris administration would presumably rein in “corporate greed” on a case-by-case basis and pursue expanded household tax credits, as promised by the Democratic platform, but accommodate business investment insofar as supply-side policy and Lina Khan-style fair competition make it easier to ramp up production and lower costs for key staples and services. To date, the agenda is essentially Bidenomics 2.0, yet Harris has a chance to succeed with swing voters where Biden faltered: on the basis of a streamlined “kitchen-table” pitch.
Indeed, though she has been cautious about specifics, progressive analysts expect Harris to: expand the administration’s targeted efforts to reduce living costs, which have included new government-negotiated prices for drugs covered by Medicare; and ramp up the approach to supply-side obstacles by eliminating red tape around development and expediting local access to federal investments and tax credits contained in Biden’s industrial policies.
After this week’s show of force, some liberal pundits might expect the last remaining “persuadable” moderates and independents to set aside their doubts about Harris’s vision and mettle. Democratic unity, however, isn’t the same thing as a robust turnout operation in the counties that matter most. There is also the risk that an 11th-hour big-tent campaign ends up with an unfocused and diluted economic message. Harris is trying to reinvent herself as a broad-minded populist who can win over blue-collar workers burned by both parties. But maintaining airtight unity in a party that increasingly represents upscale voters means she will be under pressure to pacify comfortable professionals and elite donors wary of deeper economic reforms.
Harris’s uneasy balancing act, however, isn’t merely reflective of her political liabilities or close links to major corporate players. It is also indicative of the policy and philosophical frictions intrinsic to Bidenomics, which most Democrats have either ignored or papered over. As convention speakers such as venture capitalist Kenneth Chenault, billionaire Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo enthused, the Democrats stand for an agenda that is simultaneously pro-worker and pro-business.
Though a seemingly innocuous talking point—which center-left party these days doesn’t cater to some segments of industry?—it captures how the modern Democratic elite views its governing responsibilities in a country still pulsing with anti-establishment sentiment. Amid the party’s struggle to harmonize its competing impulses and define clearly what comes after neoliberalism, there are reasons to believe that Democrats are headed in a quasi-corporatist direction—of deeper collaboration and negotiation between government and industry, with perhaps greater input from labor on a few discrete policy matters.
The most important thing to recognize in terms of political economy is that the party of government is increasingly trusted by capital to support both its advanced and nascent sectors. Accordingly, today’s Democrats have stealthily adapted a Hamiltonian tradition that can no longer find adequate expression in a dysfunctional GOP. Upholding this tradition is essential if the country is to recover a diversified and innovative industrial base capable of advancing the energy transition.
At the same time, the Democratic Party has proposed a spate of ways to raise overall purchasing power and worker security. These seemingly divergent goals aren’t necessarily irreconcilable: To some extent, the package is the latest iteration of a system of interest-group management dating back to the Cold War liberalism of Harry Truman and JFK and their pragmatic Republican counterparts.
But the party’s new focus on reducing everyday living costs, while encouraging, is a limited way to ameliorate the social tensions underlying our fissured economy. In some cases, the Democrats’ pocketbook relief is aimed at the most exploited wage-earners, particularly when it comes to curbing junk fees and other financial chicanery. Ditto Harris’s attacks on Trump’s proposal for much higher tariffs, which could indeed prove regressive for poor households that can barely pay for toys, school supplies, and clothes as it is.
Yet most Democrats aren’t terribly keen to test their relationship with Wall Street and Silicon Valley; cracking down too much on rentier financial practices, after all, opens the door to questioning the societal value of a host of “bullshit jobs” that glue together the actually existing knowledge economy. Meanwhile, the party leadership is careful to frame an industrial strategy targeting Rust Belt communities and ex-supporters in ways that appease their credentialed base.
This goes beyond soothing the sensibilities of those pro-free-trade voices who have a blinkered view of what it will take politically to forge the clean-energy transition. Reading between the lines, one could see how the new anti-tariff rhetoric is geared more toward affluent professionals—not least, suburban “Romney Democrats”—who don’t want a new import tax on, say, their monthly Amazon consumption. Multiply the instances in which the party is at pains to avoid raising any costs for the wealthiest segments of the Brahmin left, and the unwieldy politics of Bidenomics 2.0 starts to unravel, no matter how determined Harris is to mesh different priorities.
Indeed, under the most auspicious conditions, bridging the interests of financial capital, fledgling industries, urban wage-earners, and the socially liberal upper middle classes is a tall order. Even in our two-party system, where cross-class coalitions are inevitable, there are few instances in which a balancing act of this magnitude has lasted more than a few election cycles. By the same token, when an electoral coalition of competing economic interests motivated by a common adversary or goal calcifies, it becomes very difficult for a party elite to subordinate its most powerful constituencies in favor of ones critical to structural reform and political renewal. (Consider, for instance, the post-Confederacy Democrats, Theodore Roosevelt’s GOP, and the dashed promise of the 2008 Obama coalition.) This is why some left populists, particularly those intellectuals in the budding anti-monopoly movement, harbor doubts that Harris will gamble on a bolder vision when her immediate task is to merely restore Biden’s frayed coalition.
Of course, the same lesson about building party coalitions applies equally, if not more so, to the flagging Trump-Vance ticket. Briefly indomitable, the GOP campaign is oscillating between desperation and disengagement. And so, by force of trends irrespective of the Democrats’ talents and vulnerabilities, Harris’s high-wire act may prove less arduous in the race’s final weeks. That would give her room to prove she is more than the latest figurehead of a party whose convention subliminally telegraphed the cohesion and interchangeability of its “deep bench” of up-and-coming leaders.
Should Harris and Walz lead their party to victory, we will surely be inundated with stories heralding a new era of Democratic hegemony—and announcing that a decisive blow to backwater populism has at last been delivered. Many Americans will heartily bid good riddance. But what are we to make of the political economy of this Democratic coalition whose pivot to economic nationalism was spurred on by the threats it promises to vanquish? What about the countless communities still left behind both in rural regions and taken-for-granted urban bastions of Democratic support? If few core economic players in tech and finance are to be subdued in Harris’s party, where does this leave the future of American capitalism?
“The Democratic Party is trying to be a majority party absent a grassroots movement led by labor.”
These are the questions that will dog a Democratic Party which has long put a premium on executive power over building a competitive party responsive to workers in every state and region. While many progressives heard notes this week that lifted their hopes that Democrats have the resolve to build housing, fight monopolies, and strengthen unions, there are myriad reasons to be less bullish. Voices like those of United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Sen. Bernie Sanders may be granted their jeremiads against the oligarchs. But the reality is that the Democratic Party is trying to be a majority party absent a grassroots movement led by labor. Under a President Harris, time will soon tell whether this vision of democratic capitalism has any hope of success.