What happens next, after the convention? This is an historic showdown. It’s been brewing since 1964. Maybe since 1865.
Through the Republican Party, this country’s owners—the elite who control financial power—have knowingly and deliberately allied themselves with white privilege and white racism. Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Reagan’s carefully crafted nods to the KKK. Trump’s out-and-out race baiting.
This isn’t just prejudice, or bias, or bigotry. Business leaders pursued a cynical electoral alliance with white people who want, consciously or unconsciously, institutionally or violently, to defend the free passes they get up and down the class ladder.
That alliance is finally going down to defeat, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act the following year.
Don’t decry the country’s polarization. It’s a good thing.
Opposition to Black political power existed in both parties in 1964. (Remember Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party?)
That continued all the way through the ensuing decades. Remember Jimmy Carter’s comment about “preserving ethnic purity”? Or Bill Clinton’s attack on welfare and hyping of crime? To get elected then, Democratic politicians had to give a nod to white racism.
But that opposition to Black political power became concentrated as white-flight suburbs became integrated, and turned blue, and the exurbs and rural areas, to which the angriest and most fearful whites retreated (or holed up in) turned more and more red.
Now we’re down to a handful of swing states, and victory depends mostly on turning out the base. We’re going to do it, with all this love and enthusiasm.
Then what?
The most realistic scenario for the House is that we’ll win it narrowly. Hakeem Jefferies becomes speaker. The most realistic scenario for the Senate is that it stays the same, except Justice replaces Manchin in West Virginia and Gallego beats Lake and replaces Sinema in Arizona. Casey, Tester, and Brown keep their seats. Then the Senate is 50-50, with Tim Walz presiding and breaking tie votes.
And then: Schumer moves to bust the filibuster, which he would have done successfully in 2021-2022 if it weren’t for Manchin and Sinema. And then the House and Senate move the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and an updated Freedom to Vote Act and send it to Harris to sign. And follow up, quite possibly, with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
(If the Democrats win the trifecta and leadership doesn’t do this, we should pillory them. Right wing fascism has always been part of our politics, since before Joe McCarthy, and Nixon, and Goldwater. Voting rights and enfranchisement for DC residents and Puerto Ricans means permanent marginalization of the fascists. And it means Democratic politicians will no longer need to make that nod to white racism.)
Great, right? But it sets up a bigger showdown.
While big business has continued to back the racist, right-wing Republican Party as it drifted further and further into MAGA, Democrats built their coalition based on an ever-more social-democratic economic appeal—higher taxes on the rich, consumer protections, public investment, public schools, affordable health care. That’s been the Joe Biden/Nancy Pelosi formula for victory.
So now—if Democrats win the trifecta, and bust the filibuster, and pass voting rights legislation, and add two new states—they can win and exert Federal power without a nod to white racism, and also without fealty to big business and its neoliberal ideology and vision.
So big business is freaking out. And they are trying to figure out how to strike back. That’s what’s behind their pundits’ misrepresentation and panning of Harris’ anti-price-gouging proposal. That proposal is an indication of what could come: a pro-labor Harris administration that has proved its economic chops, following up on Biden’s industrial policy (the CHIPs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and more). More pro-labor policies (card check, anyone?) and pro-consumer policies (Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB unleashed) are sure to follow.
So what’s coming? In the next 77 days, big business is going to strike back at Harris, and strike back at Democratic House and Senate candidates. They might recognize that Trump is not viable, and that the chaos he brings is ultimately bad for profits. What big business really wants is an administration brought to heel—preferably a divided government that they can influence and bend to support their profit-making.
I think they are too late, and too wrong-footed, to be effective. I think that on November 5, we’ll win that most realistic scenario and get the trifecta.
That outcome would set up 2025-2026 to be interesting times. The Democratic administration will be primed, with high expectations from the base (us), to make major changes in the US economy—even greater changes than were made during the Democratic trifectas of 1993-94, 2009-2010, and 2021-2022. This time Democratic politicians needn’t be held back by the threat that business will help juice the GOP’s midterm white backlash, as happened in 1994 and 2010 (and 2022, but less potently)—because the dam will have been broken on voting rights and statehood, and our majority will be permanent.
Big business’ remaining option will be to negotiate with a Democratic administration empowered by an enduring electoral majority that is united around a solidly center-left, social democratic economic agenda.
They are not going to like it.
