The 2024 US presidential elections will take place on November 5th. As in every major US election, a chorus of liberals, social democrats, Stalinists and post-Stalinists is urging a vote for the Democratic Party as the “lesser evil.” This year, the chorus is louder than ever, claiming that democracy is at stake.
We urge workers to reject this scaremongering. The logic of supporting the “lesser evil” paves the way for increasingly rightwing expressions and subordinates workers to the parties of our capitalist exploiters. We need to build our own party.
The world’s increasing social and political polarization has a clear expression in the US. Trumpism continued to develop after Donald Trump’s term in office, consolidating a reactionary social base and realigning the Republican Party further to the right.
At the other pole, a significant rise in working-class struggles is taking place, including a rise in union organizing and strikes, Black Lives Matter, defense of abortion rights, and the radicalization of a significant section of young people around Palestine solidarity. However, unlike the right, a political expression of the working class has not emerged from these struggles, and the Democratic Party maintains its dominance over unions and social movements.
That is why the elections present a deceptive choice between Trump and the Republicans and Harris and the Democrats. Both are neoliberal capitalist parties whose administrations carry out essentially the same central policies, despite the sharply different rhetoric. This false choice shifts the entire political spectrum to the right, strengthening the more reactionary sectors and leaving the more radical ones without representation.
While the Trump-led Republican Party has radicalized to the right, Democrats have remained defenders of the status quo, even moving further to the right. They call to vote for them simply because Trump is worse, but end up alienating millions of people who will decide not to turn up to the polls.
The Biden administration maintained the bulk of Trump’s measures. Government policy remained largely the same, not only regarding militarism, war and the economy, but also regarding the police, immigration and the environment. The genocide in Gaza finally shook the Democratic electoral base.
Israel’s war against Gaza, its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, its attack on Lebanon, and its escalation with Iran have shown many people not only Zionism’s settler-colonial nature but also the complicity of the US in everything Israel does. Popular opinion has shifted substantially from pro-Israeli to pro-Palestinian, ranging from empathy with the victims of the Israeli attacks to explicit support for Palestinian self-determination.
The shift has come also among formerly pro-Zionist Jews, who empathize with Palestinians and recognize that Israel’s Holocaust makes Jews less safe, not more. Fighting anti-Semitism requires solidarity with all the victims of US imperialism and its gendarmes, including Israel.
The president widely derided as “Genocide Joe” eventually withdrew from his re-election bid and was replaced by his vice president, Kamala Harris. But millions of Americans, especially young people and the Muslim and Arab-American communities, are disillusioned, and many of them will refuse to vote for Harris, no matter how much they hate Trump.
Many other workers and young people, especially women, people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people who see their rights and physical survival in danger under a new Trump administration, will vote for Harris, even if they do not agree with many of her policies. We understand this decision and will stand on the front lines of the struggles to defend the rights attacked by an eventual Republican government, which will come soner or later.
But we forewarn that the Democrats will not guarantee these rights. On the contrary, by deactivating the fighting movements and blocking the emergence of a working-class party, they facilitate the continuous advance of the reactionary right and its agenda.
Time and again, the labor movement and social struggles have diverted their energy to electing Democratic candidates, which is why the party has earned the title of “graveyard of movements.” Time and again, progressive candidates have emerged in the Democratic primaries to contain the left and then call to vote for the official candidate.
This allows the party to turn further to the right and continue to present itself as the only alternative to the Republicans. Despite his social-democratic rhetoric, Bernie Sanders also played that role. DSA, which organizes tens of thousands of radicalized youth, still refuses to break with the Democrats.
A central obstacle facing the US working class is the political hegemony of the Democratic Party over it. A central political task for workers in the US is to overcome this obstacle and build a working-class party. Revolutionaries propose that this be a socialist, antiracist, feminist, ecologist, and internationalist party.
In this election, there are two non-capitalist presidential candidates running: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Cornel West, a Black radical who is running independently. Their campaigns are petty-bourgeois, not capitalist, and their social-democratic program is to the left of any of the parties of the New Popular Front (NFP) in France.
We urge workers to break with the false choice of the “lesser evil” by not voting for Trump or Harris, either affirmatively by giving a critical vote to Stein or West or, less visibly, by abstaining.
After the elections, we will join workers and the oppressed in resisting whoever wins. In the course of this resistance, we will work to advance the construction of an independent working-class party.
October 26, 2024
Supporters of the International Trotskyist Opposition and the International Socialist League in the US