By Bill Mullen
The Democratic Party rout Tuesday night is a clear repudiation of the MAGA era, and a predictable and cautionary rebalancing of liberal capitalism. Democrats regained control of the House and Senate, won high profile Senate races (El-Sayed in Michigan) and in Texas toppled a proto-authoritarian Red regime by electing a new Governor, Senator, and Attorney General. Statistics show young voters and Black voters especially lunging to the Democrats after trickling rightward between 2016 and 2024.
The defeat is also a setback for the global far right. Especially on the heels of Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil, there is mounting evidence—including in the ongoing mass protests—about which more below—of mass global pushback against the authoritarian era. The defeat can also be read as a form of repudiation of the U.S. state’s current war against Iran, despite the lack of a mass anti-war movement.
For the western bourgeoisie,, the election promised a return to liberal capitalist norms and a potential slide towards restoration of the recognizable post-world war II order. Global stock markets including the U.S. shot up at the results. Western elites welcome a relief from Trump’s unreliability as a ruling class partner and the Iran war’s escalation of oil prices gouging capitalist profits. Wide sectors of the western ruling class would like a more stable plan for combatting China and Russia as imperial rivals.
Domestically, the so-called “Blue Wave” is best understood as a mass cry for help from a U.S. citizenry battered by years of austerity, retrenchment, erosion of civil liberties, falling living conditions, weakened health care, and even reduced life expectancy. It is also a significant expression of a desire among the masses of the United States for an alternative to a capitalist system that has failed them. Elections, too, can be a ‘sigh of the oppressed.’
But Blues Waves have never tipped the balance of power towards the working-class and the most vulnerable. We can think back to the Democratic surges that brought Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into power after long periods of Republican domination (Reagan and Bush I, and Bush II, respectively). These yielded not significant social reforms or redistribution, but carefully curated rightward shifts by the Democratic Party meant to constellate what Tariq Ali has called an “extreme center” as slavishly devoted to capitalism and empire as right-wing states that precede them.
Thus we can expect that the new Democratic majorities will do little to nothing to demolish ICE, end mass deportation, end the war against Iran, or put a brake on Israel’s genocidal policies in Palestine. Indeed all of these policies have been co-signed by the Democratic Party.
We should also take heed of the elections as a warning about the historical tendency of the Democratic Party to become the “graveyard of social movements.” An apt metaphor for this is the number of people who placed their “I Voted” stickers at the Minneapolis memorials for Renee Goode and Alex Pretti on election day. Pretty and Goode were slaughtered by ICE agents bringing forward the largest single-day protest in a U.S. city in decades–the Minneapolis rebellion of 100,000 people on January 23rd. That mass movement has ebbed as the Democrats have risen, a sign of electoral politics’ capacity to defer and absorb the dreams of millions for a better world.
We should contrast this motion with the wave of mass protests against conditions similar to the U.S. that were the backdrop for Tuesday’s vote: in Albania, Paris, Buenos Aires, Kashmir, Pakistan, and in recent years, Sri Lanka, India, Serbia, where mass movements—many led by students–have toppled or presented significant challenges to the stability of the state.
Present there—and lacking in the U.S. context—are either well-organized student, worker or left-wing organizations, and political consciousness residing outside of the circumscribed boundaries of hegemonic two-party ideology.
Necessary for the spectre of such rebellions in the U.S. is a patient and careful organizing by the revolutionary Left of the masses of people yearning for something beyond the extreme center. This includes members of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose candidates—while sometimes winning—are now being absorbed indistinguishably into a “Blue Wave” and will have limited to no ability to shift the Party Left once in office. DSA or DSA supported candidates have now won a handful of state-level races including key mayoral races like in New York and Los Angeles. Yesterday they gained five new House Representatives while AOC and Tlaib were reelected. Yet the wide scope of the Democratic victory Tuesday will only embolden its establishment to squash dissent. We should therefore expect defections, not growth from the DSA as it spins its wheels in power.
This is then an opening for the revolutionary Left, but one that demands strategy, coordination, cooperation.
There are signs of this resiliency: the United Left Platform, a coalition of six revolutionary socialist organizations, continues to collaborate on the defense of victims of political repression–like Socialist Horizon’s Tom Alter—and to offer a coherent, non-sectarian path for those beyond DSA’s reformist politics.
