It’s now official: Joe Biden is bowing out of the presidential race. It’s also all but official: Kamala Harris will be his replacement. This is extremely good news. Now there is a chance to defeat the would-be authoritarian and fascist connected Trump. Previously, a sense of doom had spread among millions of voters, a feeling of coming defeat without even a chance. Now, many of those same voters will have their spirits lifted and will be energized. Why it took so long for him to withdraw is a question for another day. There will also be a time to assess Biden’s political career, but for now let’s consider what this whole process shows about the Democratic Party:

In April of 2023, Biden announced his candidacy for reelection. Up until that time, all other potential Democratic candidates were hanging in limbo.  After Biden’s announcement, the Democratic Party leadership discouraged all other serious candidates from running. As we showed, the Democratic Party leadership is basically passed down from one generation to the next. A New York Times article explained the role of that leadership: “party leaders were lulled into complacency or pressed to step in line at crucial moments when they might have persuaded Mr. Biden to step aside…. At key moments, those who tried to sound the alarm about Mr. Biden’s potential weaknesses — among them David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, and James Carville, who helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 — were slapped down by Democrats…. ” The Times quotes Axelrod as saying “I’m sure there were potential Democratic challengers who made the same calculation [that a challenge to Biden would fail] and didn’t want to jeopardize their futures by running and taking that risk.” 

It now seems overwhelmingly likely that the same process is in place to assure Kamala Harris of nomination. Who, then, leads the Democratic Party? Who controls this process?

Basically, the Democratic Party is composed of different “interest groups” which are in reality mainly defined by identity. There are the black and Latino caucuses. There is the Democratic Women’s caucus. There are the Stonewall Democrats, who are the LGBTQ caucus. There are also various state Democratic Party environmental caucuses. The role of these caucuses is to draw any opposition to discrimination or oppression away from linking up these issues together and linking them up with the class struggle. Then there are the union leaders, who press the interests of the unions in the most narrow sense. Also involved are the NGO’s, some of whose leaders are directly involved with the Democrats and who, overall, ensure that any protest movement in the streets never leads towards building a working class alternative to the Democrats. Sitting on top of and infiltrating all of this are the major donors to the Democratic Party. They are, in effect, the representatives of the capitalist class, and they recently exercised their power by threatening to withhold donations unless Biden withdrew. (It would have been something similar had Sanders captured the nomination in 2020, which is partly why the “progressive” wing of the Party can never gain control over the party.)

Two conclusions:

First: the Democratic Party is essentially a popular front. This is a cross-class coalition that contains working class forces and capitalists. To enter such a coalition, the working class forces – the union leadership in this case – must check its independence at the door. While they can pressure the capitalists, the working class forces must ultimately accept the fact that the capitalists will lead and essentially control the coalition. To repeat: In this case that cross class coalition is the Democratic Party.

Second: the very formlessness of the Democratic Party makes domination by the real leadership inevitable. In Europe, the social democratic parties or the British Labour Party have an actual membership which pays membership dues. At least in the past members could attend monthly branch meetings and discuss and vote on issues. They elected their branch leaders. There is nothing like that with the political parties here in the U.S.

Because of these, the U.S. working class has never instinctively seen the Democrats as an organization to which they can turn at times of class struggle. Union leaders do at times bring Democratic politicians to speak at picket lines, but that is simply grafting these politicians onto the struggle. It does not spring from any natural tendency.

None of this means that workers have no interests at stake in the outcome of this election. A “popular front” is infinitely preferable to an extreme right with authoritarian regime. The most extreme example was the Spanish Civil War. There, the fascist general Franco organized a revolt against a popular front capitalist government. Some socialists – the Trotskyists in particular – criticized the workers movement staying in the popular front. They pointed out that that meant being under the domination of the capitalist politicians. But they never said not to fight against Franco. They never said drop out of the war if the working class cannot wage it on its own terms.

The same must be said about today. We need a working class movement and a working class party, first and foremost to defeat MAGA. But in the absence of that, there is only one way to prevent Trump/Vance from entering the White House in January. That is if the Democratic candidate – evidently Kamala Harris – wins.

With all of this in mind, we turn to the perspectives for a Kamala Harris for president campaign. A Gretchen Whitmer for president campaign would have been stronger, especially if she selected somebody like New Jersey’s Corey Booker as her running mate. But the same pressures that kept Whitmer, Booker and every other potential candidate in line last year are likely to do the same now.

The Green Party’s Jill Stein has denounced the “anti-democratic forces” that forced Biden to withdraw. But the Green Party’s structure is exactly the same as the Democrats’, and this alone means they can never become a working class party. In fact, given that they are apologizing for the global leader of ethnonationalism and traditionalism – Putin – in many ways they are even worse than the Democrats. It’s the same for Cornel West and his alleged Truth and Justice Party.

Left: Kamala Harris as she frequently appears. Right: Kamala Harris as she grilled serial sexual abuser Mat Kavanaugh. Which Kamala Harris will appear on the campaign trail?

It’s impossible to know clearly what Harris’s chances are. Her biggest problem is image. Maybe she concluded that Hillary Clinton lost because as a woman Clinton didn’t appear friendly enough, or maybe it’s just her advisors telling her that. But in the U.S. image is everything for a candidate, especially at the highest levels, and Harris has created an image of one who is not to be taken seriously. This might sound really petty, but truth is truth: Harris simply smiles too broadly and laughs too frequently. For all his stupidity, Trump is pretty clever in sensing the perceptions of his crowd, and it’s not for nothing that he’s branded Harris as “Laughing Kamala”.

So, will Harris be able to rise above that image and will she be able to shake the association with a weak and out-of-it president? The coming days and weeks will tell.