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What liberals must learn from Trump

Whoever wins the White House, this knife-edge campaign holds important lessons on policy, presentation and the new politics

Despite being a convicted criminal awaiting trial, Donald Trump is still neck and neck with Kamala Harris in the polls with a week to go until the US election. Photo: Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty

I don’t know who’s going to win on November 5, and neither do you. Last week’s New York Times/Siena poll found Kamala Harris and Donald Trump still tied, at 48% of the national vote apiece. 

Into the statistics that underlie this top-line figure, both sides are reading more or less whatever they like.

On Friday, Dan Pfeiffer, the co-host of Pod Save America, wrote: “The fact that this is so close [a] race shows just how flawed Trump is as a candidate, and is a tribute to Harris and the campaign she has run.” Uh-huh. Well, possibly.

Meanwhile, the MAGA movement – which filled Madison Square Garden on Sunday – believes its orange leader when he says that he is heading for a victory “too big to rig”. Again: we’ll see.

For now, we should reflect on the lessons of the very long, action-packed and nerve-shredding campaign and what progressives in America and elsewhere can learn from it all. 

To put it bluntly: if the core liberal message is so clearly on the money, so manifestly true, so irresistibly appealing, how come a convicted criminal awaiting trial for electoral subversion, found liable for sexual assault, and twice impeached, is in the running at all, let alone on the verge of a second presidential term?

Let me offer a few preliminary thoughts. I can’t emphasise enough that these suggestions apply whether or not Harris wins. They are a response to the campaign, not to the (unknowable) outcome. And – trigger warning – they are not intended to be consoling:

Immigration, stupid

The populist, nationalist right will continue to prosper until progressives come up with their own persuasive, unapologetic message on this question. I am, and have always been, radically pro-immigration. But it is idle to deny the extent to which liberals all over the world have failed to offer a serious alternative to the xenophobic, gestural politics of their opponents. 

Declaring that the US is now “a garbage can for the world”, Trump proposes to close the southern border on “day one” and to deport more than 11 million undocumented migrants presently living all over the US. Harris has conspicuously declined to offer a coherent alternative, resorting (like Keir Starmer) to tough prosecutorial language that lands only as a muddled attempt to offer a more humane version of MAGA’s appalling position.

Progressives have learned nothing from the Remain campaign’s disastrous decision in 2016 not to speak up for the merits of immigration. The economic, humanitarian and social case is powerful, but rarely made with any conviction. Prosperous nations need border management systems that are well-resourced, swift, humane and attuned to the needs of the labour market. 

This is radical realism for the 21st century. Instead, the field has been left clear for the right to promote its deranged and poisonous schemes: Rwanda, Trump’s wall, and now – potentially – the largest mass expulsion in the history of America.

Never demand credit

If Harris loses, much of the blame should be laid at Joe Biden’s feet. His grouchy expectation of a nationwide round of applause for his administration’s (undoubtedly successful) economic policies was a serious political error.

Claiming in the first presidential debate on June 27 that he presided over “a country with no, essentially no inflation” insulted voters still feeling the pinch. It was old age that did for Biden in the end, but his greatest mistake was infantile in character.

Don’t gaslight the electorate

Immediately after that calamitous CNN debate, Harris conceded only that viewers might quibble over “style points” and that Biden had made a “slow start”. Well, I suppose he is her boss.

The problem is that, against all public evidence, the entire Democrat establishment insisted that nothing was wrong with the president – while plotting behind the scenes to drop him from the ticket and unite behind Harris. To be fair, she has made the best of it in record time: framing the race well, raising $1bn, assembling an impressive coalition. 

But the entire operation resembled – and, frankly, was – precisely the kind of elite stitch-up about which right wing populists constantly complain. If you really want to renew trust in liberal institutions, it’s not a good idea to behave like an oligarchy operating, however benevolently, behind closed doors.

Own the future

Harris made a strong start with her promise to “turn the page” and “offer a new generation of leadership”. But when asked by the hosts of ABC’s The View to say what she might have done differently from Biden – hardly an unforeseeable question – she said: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” 

It is almost beyond belief that the nominee did not have a plausible response ready; one that made clear that the president had always valued her independence of opinion and that she now looked forward to running the show herself. As it is, she hand-delivered to the Trump campaign the video clip they needed, yoking her to the Biden past – at a time when only 28% of voters think the country is heading in the right direction.

Opposition is not enough

Harris has bet the farm on an anti-Trump closing argument. She has called him a “fascist” which, instinctively rather than intellectually, he certainly is (I seriously doubt that he has read much Friedrich Nietzsche or Carl Schmitt).

And yes: how could she do otherwise, given what it at stake in this election? The problem is that nothing about Trump’s tyrannical character, contempt for the rule of law and readiness to deploy political violence is new information. 

After nine years of poisonous rhetoric and action, almost half of US voters still support him. To begin the colossal political and cultural repair work now required – to be post-Trump, rather than simply anti-Trump, Harris needed to set out an audacious, compelling plan for 21st century America as, in Lincoln’s phrase, “the last best hope of earth”. And this, I am afraid, she has not yet done. 

Policy is not enough

In the end, what a president – or a prime minister – actually does in office is all that counts. But campaign politics and wonkery do not mix. Harris was at her best when she made retail offers that spoke to voters’ real-world needs: promising “to expand the child tax credit to $6,000 for the first year of [a] child’s life – helping to buy things like a car seat, clothes, or a crib” or to “provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 to help with the down payment on a new home”. It was astute to present her opponent’s insanely inflationary tariff plans as the “Trump sales tax”. 

But her central campaign theme of an “opportunity economy” was a nothing-burger served with word salad. Nor was it smart – as she did at the end of her Fox News interview – to direct viewers to her website to read “80 pages of policies”. 

“Joy” is a reward, not a strategy

Yes, it will be terrific if everyone, the world over, can celebrate a Harris victory on November 6 or 7, dancing like the Ewoks at the end of Return of The Jedi. But when Bill Clinton declared that Harris would be “the president of joy”, he did her no favours. 

The US and the world need first to escape from the shadow of Trump before we thank Harris (as her running mate Tim Walz did prematurely at the Democrat convention) for “bringing back the joy”. Joyful about what?

Assume volatility

The old rhythms and reliable rules of politics are dead and gone. The uncertainty principle of quantum physics is a better guide to what will happen next. Even the old calendar of presidential debates has been ditched (Biden’s encounter with Trump took place unusually early in the electoral cycle). 

The Republican nominee was completely thrown by the president’s withdrawal from the race. But Harris has also been taken off guard by Trump’s resilience and refusal to melt like Dracula in the sunshine. Watch Joe Rogan’s three-hour podcast with her opponent. The Washington Post dismissed the conversation as “meandering” – which is, of course, the whole point of the format. 

At the time of writing, it has been watched by 32 million people on YouTube alone, which does not include those who will have seen it on Spotify, Rogan’s home platform. Even if he loses, Trump is relishing the plot twist of Harris’s inability to seal the deal before polling day.

Be less scripted

For 60 years – the era of television, essentially – politicians have been told by their handlers that victory is impossible without slick presentation and iron message discipline. What Trump intuited was that the digital revolution has ended that era. 

As much as he still obsesses about TV coverage – especially Fox News – he has turned his worst character traits (impulsiveness, vindictiveness, grandiosity) into intermittent assets on social media and in his rallies. In the unpredictable monologue style that he calls “the weave” he has come up with a new and disinhibited form of political argument – if that is the word.

One moment he will be warning of “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics”; the next he will be comparing death by shark bite and by electrocution. 

Progressives have to catch up, and fast. This does not mean that they should tell lies, discuss Arnold Palmer’s genitals, or ramble on mysteriously about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”. It does mean that they have to appear less inhibited, buttoned-up and automated. 

Some of Harris’s best moments have been spontaneous – as at a rally in Wisconsin on October 17 when she told a couple of Christian hecklers: “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally. No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street”. The unscripted line made her look like the person in charge of the room, taking command with spontaneous wit.

Story, story, story

Political parties win when they address the questions of the moment and offer the public a narrative that meshes with their own experience, hope and anxiety. In her great study of the American right in the south, Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that contemporary voters expect candidates to respect the “deep story” that lies beneath their political opinions: “It’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel”.

Trump has a clear, if wicked story: They are coming to get you. Only I can stop them. In general, liberals have responded to the populist threat with dull technocracy: look at Olaf Scholz in Germany, Starmer in this country, and – most of the time – the US Democrats. Harris was right to emphasise her record as a prosecutor at the start, but, as the weeks have passed, credentialism has become her comfort zone. 

This need not be so. American progressives have often had the best narratives: think of John F Kennedy’s “New Frontier”, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, Harvey Milk’s “you have to give them hope”, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “leave the world a little better”, or Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can”. 

In this country, Nye Bevan’s vision of a free health service, Neil Kinnock’s warning that “the enemy of idealism is zealotry”, and, in its day, Tony Blair’s “New Labour, New Britain” all told powerful stories. Shell-shocked by the march of the right, progressives and liberals have mostly forgotten this talent.

This is, to say the least, a provisional list. But I shall stand by it whether or not Harris prevails, as I truly hope she does.

We are in the midst of a historic global battle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, and the bad guys have the momentum and the confidence. Worst of all, the young are being drawn to their lethal flame.

The really hard stuff lies ahead. It will require an entirely new form of progressive politics, unprecedented imagination and a hunger that is simply not visible yet. There is so much work to be done. Start today.

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