Lessons of election 2024

In 2014, two political scientists made what seemed like a bold claim that “if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.” In 2024, that became clearer than ever as billionaires openly flaunted their wealth and influence in the U.S. electoral circus.

It wasn’t just that one corrupt and noxious billionaire, Trump, won the U.S. presidential election, while the world’s richest man (Elon Musk) used his social media platform and his wealth to land a spot as a virtual co-president. Billionaire Democratic donors first, propped up, and then, drove President Biden from the presidential race and assured that his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, would run a business-friendly, center-right campaign.

In 2024, the American oligarchy came out from behind the curtain. Or more accurately, 2024 marked the time when oligarchic tendencies gathering force for decades, came into full bloom. Months before Trump won a narrow election, the imperial Supreme Court, whose unpopularity rivals Biden’s, granted Trump and future U.S. presidents expansive impunity even to commit crimes in office.

The liberals—the leaders of the Democratic Party and its associated non-governmental organizations (NGOs), intellectuals, media and fundraisers—said the 2024 election was a referendum on U.S. democracy. Maybe even the last ditch effort to stop “fascism” riding in on Trump’s coattails. Yet despite the heated rhetoric, they ran an uninspired campaign in defense of a status quo that most Americans had already rejected. They showed themselves (once again) to be a center-right party that was more interested in touting support from “never-Trump” Republicans than in campaigning for real change for working people.

In the process, they showed their contempt for the main source of activist energy in 2024, the movement opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As one of the two partners in the bipartisan support for Israel as a key U.S. watchdog in the Middle East, their support for Israel wasn’t a surprise. But the degree to which the liberal establishment—from university presidents to the president of the U.S.—reached to criminalize supposedly First Amendment-protected political activism should remind us of earlier periods of liberal capitulation, such as the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.

In 2025, when the Trump administration is trying to outlaw pro-Palestinian activism, or is implementing mass deportations, we need to remember that the liberals helped pave the way. When the Democratic Party hierarchy believed that supporting the most restrictive immigration bill in a generation was a clever piece of political ju-jitsu against Trump, we should tell the inconvenient truth. If you’re competing to show how “tough on the border” you are, you’ve already ceded the ground to the right. And when the voters are presented with the original (Trump) or the copy (the Democrats), they almost always choose the original.

For all their attempts to disqualify Trump and to make their stand “in the most important election of our lifetimes,” it’s revealing to see the liberals and Democrat leaders revert to “business as usual.” The hosts of the liberal MSNBC’s Morning Joe visiting Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to “kiss the ring.” Biden, who, earlier in 2024, cast his presidency as no less than a Second World War fight against totalitarianism, welcoming Trump—whose own vice president once called “America’s Hitler”—for a cordial White House photo op. Even the 2017-era liberal “resistance” is deflated.

So, what is the alternative? One path that 2024 should have closed is the electoral road to change that supporters of Bernie Sanders/AOC (for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) reformist politics represent. Since Sanders’ failed 2016 Democratic primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, we’ve heard many social democrats say that reforming the Democratic Party is the only meaningful way for the left to make an impact on U.S. politics. And yet, in 2024, with Sanders and AOC being, first, “all in” for Joe Biden, and, then “all in” for Harris, that strategy has run aground. And Sanders’ post-election chastising of the Democrats for “abandoning” the working class is much less credible after Sanders and AOC touted Biden as the most pro-working-class president in our lifetimes.

The next few years under the Trump administration will be exceedingly difficult, with many defeats to come. But there will also be unanticipated and heroic struggles that push back what is, despite the election results, an unpopular agenda of social regression. It’s in those struggles, and not in the multi-billion-dollar electoral circus we just witnessed in 2024, that working people can win the change we deserve.