They were up against a candidate that was beyond gaffe-prone. They had a huge money advantage. They had the support of almost every sector of capital, and what’s left of the labor movement, too. It was Hillary Clinton’s election to lose, and she still blew it.

It seemed like some Democrats were finally understanding why. “If you want to appeal to the manufacturing worker in Scranton, the college student in Los Angeles and the single mom making minimum wage in Harlem, one economic message will work.” Those words were from Chuck Schumer, New York senator and savvy opportunist who’s been anything but a populist his entire political career.

It’s a far cry from what he was saying before the election when he bragged: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

We should question Schumer’s sincerity, but there is no doubt that after November commentators looked beyond Clinton’s deficiencies as a campaigner. They finally began to question the dominant Democratic party approach of offering little more to voters than a bit of inclusive rhetoric to go along with the neoliberal economics.

Even at its height the Democratic party was always less coherent than the labor and social-democratic parties that reigned throughout Europe. In time, working-class interests were sucked into its tent, but much of the party’s agenda was always set – even during the height of the 1930s New Deal and 1960s Great Society programs – by allied business interests. It meant that the US never had an expansive welfare state even during the postwar golden age. And with the onset of capitalist crisis in the early 1970s, it made the social rollback that did happen even harder to guard against.

The Democratic party had to reinvent itself: it could no longer deliver material goods to workers, so instead it presented itself as a less vicious option than Republicans and a force that would play a role offering representational gains to oppressed groups – black people, women, the LGBT community and others. Clinton’s campaign represented the height of this strategy, as she both scoffed at $15 minimum wage proposals and embraced the academic rhetoric of “intersectionality”.



Yet for a brief moment an alternative flowered even within the Democratic party. In the beginning, the Bernie Sanders campaign seemed little more than a protest candidacy – his first press conference was a sloppy affair on Capitol Hill, attended by no more than a handful of bored reporters. But the campaign quickly attracted mass support, drawing tens of thousands to rallies and winning almost 13 million votes.

Like Trump, and decidedly unlike Clinton, Sanders was able to speak to the anger simmering among many Americans, including white workers who had seen their living standards decline, without even the limited social and cultural gains other members of the Democratic coalition could point to. Though Sanders was the most left-wing major candidate the Democrats had ever had, he won over independent and self-described “moderate” voters turned off by the party.

Bernie’s rhetoric was fiery, he attacked greedy “millionaires and billionaires” and put their actions and sway over policymakers at the center of a narrative of working-class suffering. But the Sanders Democrat platform was, in truth, fairly moderate. It called for the universal provision of some basic social goods and a reevaluation of trade deals as a part of a return to the shared prosperity of the postwar period.

It was telling that for selling this modest dream Sanders was portrayed as a wild-eyed radical by Democratic elites. For almost every quarter of the party’s leadership, these reforms were unpalatable. Every segment of the Democratic nomenklatura – from the remnants of the Democratic Leader Council to even the lion’s share of the labor bureaucracy and the Congressional Black Caucus – opposed Sanders. They didn’t need direct orders from the Democratic National Committee to know not to run astray from the donor class and corporate interests that kept them in business.

The party had a strategy: it would win over moderate Republican voters in suburbs and convince most segments of capital to back them over the erratic Trump. The second party of capital wanted to once again prove itself to be the most responsible choice.

Clinton’s messaging was molded along these lines. Whereas Trump spoke confidently about his tremendous plans to “make America great again”, Clinton focused on running defensively, against Trump, not for a vision of a better deal for ordinary people. “Love trumps hate” was her confused final statement. For enough Americans who hate politicians and haven’t thought very highly of the past 30 years, voting for someone whose main pitch was that they had been in politics for 30 years was a predictably hard sell.

The Sanders Democrats, then, seem vindicated by November’s results, but their efforts to take over the Democratic party haven’t exactly gone as planned.



In the days following the election, the narrative seemed to swing in their favor. With an emphasis that perhaps overstated just how many white workers swung to Trump, the media asked how the Democrats had lost the rust belt. Others noted that even black and Latino workers turned out in far fewer numbers for Clinton than Obama. For many, Sanders’ failed campaign seemed to be a blueprint for what the party should look like in 2018 and 2020.

New scapegoats quickly emerged, however. The alleged inexorable racism and sexism of American voters was, of course, cited. But then also was the role of Russia, fake news and the FBI. These factors, even the blame put on Clinton’s personal abilities as a campaigner, distracted from the overarching need for a new direction. Some were even as hyperbolic as liberal commentator Keith Olbermann, who announced that “We are the victims of a Russian coup.”

Of course, Putin’s actions here, in Russia, and abroad are worth plenty of condemnation. But the influence of Russia in the election was likely far less than the role played by any other actor in the United States: large transnational business interests, the media, even progressive groups like labor unions.



It should never have been a close election to begin with, but still the unthinkable happened. And the longer we keep blaming the ignorance of voters or foreign machinations, the better chance we have it happening again in 2020.

The problem with our democracy isn’t the threat of foreign intervention – it’s that voters were given a choice between two candidates that didn’t represent their interests. Enough of them, rationally enough, decided to stay at home or try their chances on a buffoonish outsider.

It’s time the Democrats either decide to offer something else on the menu or go out of business.