What the Left Needs From the Post-Biden Democrats
From demanding an end to the war on Gaza to a stronger labor movement, now is the time for the U.S. Left to make its voice heard.
Hamilton Nolan
Joe Biden is not running for reelection. It would have been helpful if he’d had the foresight to drop out a week ago (or a year ago), but all worthwhile things take time. His departure has spared Democrats two disasters. First, it gives them at least a chance to beat Donald Trump this election, something that polling said Biden was unlikely to do; and second, it frees Democrats from the excruciating task of trying to convince the country that a candidate who they could see was not fine was actually fine, a process that would have robbed the party of its credibility, on top of the likely defeat in November.
There is so much relief at Biden’s decision that he is now being flooded with grateful encomiums to his character and legacy. These are matters that we can leave to historians. He certainly rang up far more progressive accomplishments than most of us would have imagined four years ago: Historic government spending on infrastructure and climate, ending the war in Afghanistan, steps toward true debt forgiveness for borrowers, a more genuine commitment to organized labor than any president in at least the past half century. He also directly facilitated the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, something that he has had the power to stop. Trying to blend these things into a single final score, a unified tally of goodness or badness, is a game that doesn’t mean much. It is fair to say that if Biden was just as monstrous in the Middle East as his predecessors, he was much better on domestic policy than they were too.
Everyone can take one day to experience the euphoria of hope. Then, we have some serious things to think about. The Democratic National Convention is one month away. Election day is less than three months after that. The price of Biden’s departure is that every faction in the party now has to scramble to figure out how to reattach its toeholds to power. For the American Left, which — I won’t go overboard here, but — had a generally more sympathetic ear in the Biden White House than in it has had in most, these are all questions we need to answer as soon as possible.
Kamala Harris: It seems extremely likely that Vice President Kamala Harris will be the nominee. Already, the Congressional Black Caucus, leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Biden himself have endorsed her. These are the rational actions of a party that knows it needs to settle on a candidate and jumpstart a campaign as quickly as it can. As a matter of principle, it is not healthy for a party’s nominee to be someone that voters did not actually vote for. Therefore, an open convention should be encouraged, to, at least, give this whole thing a teaspoon’s worth of democratic legitimacy. Given the rules of the process, it is probable that Harris will take it whether anyone runs against her or not.
The Left is often denigrated as unrealistic dreamers. In this process, that has not been the case at all. There is widespread agreement that the threat of a second Trump presidency demands party unity. Many of the same people who despised Kamala Harris in 2020 are happily lining up behind her now, because the alternative is doom. This is wise. Bickering our way into fascism would be lunacy. But the Left still can, and must, make its voice heard during this hectic scramble to anoint a new nominee. One bargaining chip is the DNC itself: Everyone had assumed that it would be a strife-filled replica of 1968, with screaming protesters in the streets drowning out the message the party wanted to send. Now, there is the prospect of a convention characterized by a newfound optimism and unity. This possibility alone should make the party eager to keep the Left as a satisfied partner in coming weeks.
The VP: A number of white men are being suggested, in order to “balance out” the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman of color. I actually think that the smartest move would be to name a woman as VP and make the entire race about abortion. It’s a winning issue. I’m not holding my breath, though, given the conventional wisdom about a balanced ticket.
In the meantime, two red flags about leading VP contenders: Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly was one of the only Democratic senators who did not back the PRO Act, the labor reform bill that was the top priority of American unions. That should be disqualifying by itself. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro supports a bill that would pull state funding from any university that divests from Israel. Given the centrality of those issues in holding together a fragile Democratic coalition, picking either of these men as VP would be a bad sign. There are plenty of other options.
Gaza: Biden’s decision to staunchly back Israel’s horrific decimation of Gaza pissed on his own legacy and sapped a lot of enthusiasm from young voters and swing state voters who Biden would need to win. Biden’s decision not to run is an incredible opportunity for the Democrats to reset themselves on this issue. I don’t expect Harris to join any protest encampments any time soon, but the simple step of “not blindly supporting murderous right-wing lunatic Netanyahu in all of his war crimes” would be a serious improvement. A change in rhetoric and policy on Israel and Gaza — and a clear commitment to ending the assault, and U.S. support for it — would also allow Harris to carry out a normal campaign without being dogged by protesters shouting her down at every public event for aiding a genocide, and would likely lead to far fewer battles with Chicago police at the DNC. This is a gimme, Democrats!
The labor movement: Biden’s connection to unions was a central aspect of his own self-image. That is not true for Kamala Harris. Reaffirming a rock solid commitment to organized labor is therefore important — both symbolically, to counter the Republicans’ bullshit crusade to brand themselves as “the working class party,” and substantively, to reassure unions that all of the political and financial capital that they were investing in Biden will be wisely spent on Harris as well.
It was nice that Joe Biden became the first president to walk a picket line, and talked about unions a lot, but the most meaningful thing he did for labor was appointing good personnel. Right now, labor could extract promises from Harris to keep on Jennifer Abruzzo at the NLRB and Lina Khan at the FTC, the two Biden administration officials most responsible for backing labor power and fighting corporate power. Beyond that, SEIU, which is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in this campaign, should get Harris to commit to carry on the “care economy” focus that can make our economy far more humane towards workers in this aging nation.
Trump and his VP pick J.D. Vance would be awful for unions. Yet organized labor does not need this perpetual fact about the Republicans to force it back into the role of a mere ATM for Democratic candidates. Biden was a good investment. Let’s make sure that his successor will be too. After all, giving less money to the Democratic Party and spending that money instead on organizing workers is always an option.
A postgame analysis of the Biden scramble: I don’t want to dampen the atmosphere of political ecstasy that prevails today, but we need to briefly discuss what went down in the past month. Biden had his awful debate. All of America saw, as one, a man who was too old to do the job that he was running for. His attempts to rectify this mistake by giving interviews and doing more events just proved that he was, in fact, not up to the job. He couldn’t speak clearly and concisely. He forgot names and couldn’t hammer home the message he wanted to deliver. We were all faced with the ridiculously grim prospect of losing to a constantly lying conman simply because our own candidate looked frail and couldn’t say what we needed him to say.
This conclusion was reached independently by every branch of the Democratic Party. Eyes and ears do not discriminate. As a result, we saw the machinations of the party establishment, including Democratic leaders in Congress, grow more intense, week by week, until Biden was forced to step aside. Two factions of the party that appeared the most inapt during this process were — and I say this out of love — organized labor and some leaders of the Left.
As Biden was trying to protect himself politically, he ran to the AFL-CIO, which held a public event for him and gave him its full-throated endorsement and called for him to stay in the race. This was emblematic of a beaten-dog mentality in the union world. Biden was nice to them, so they felt that they should be loyal to him, despite the evidence of everyone’s lying eyes. This willingness to follow Biden off a cliff in some misguided display of gratitude could have led us all — including, first and foremost, the American working class and their unions — into disaster. The institutions at the top of the labor movement need to take this episode as an opportunity to remember that they do not work for Washington politicians. They work for workers. Misplaced loyalty is a sign that many union leaders seem to have forgotten that.
The other place Biden ran to try to save himself was to progressive national elected leaders. Specifically, he enlisted Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to vocally back his candidacy and encourage the left wing of the party to stop calling for his departure. I respect both of those politicians, and I believe that their support for Biden was a good-faith effort to get the Left’s legislative priorities — including eliminating medical debt and capping rent increases — elevated in the White House. That said: to my mind, it was a very stupid move. Legislative promises from a losing candidate are worth nothing, and it remains to be seen whether Harris or any new Democratic nominee will embrace these proposals on the campaign trail (though they should certainly be pressured to do so). And Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, whose political superpower is that they tell the truth, were setting themselves up to spend the next four months insincerely telling voters that Biden was fine for four more years, when he clearly wasn’t. This was, at best, a miscalculation that should prompt some soul-searching now that it’s over.
The prospect of wielding true political power is unfamiliar to many in the labor movement, and the Left in general. Joe Biden opened the door wide enough for that to change, at least to a small extent. That experience, it seems, was so intoxicating that it caused some unions and progressive politicians to become unmoored from reality when it mattered.
We’ve all been granted a new chance at staving off fascism. Let’s not blow it.
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Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
