Why The Democratic Party Failed

DEC 5, 2024 | OPINION | By Stecy Mwachia

Trump won again and women, people in poverty and people of color helped him win. Now what?

In the weeks following the election of the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, many liberal arts schools across the United States, as well as left-leaning citizens across the country, have entered a state of deep mourning or mass confusion. After the surge of pro-Palestine protests, LGBTQ+ awareness events and pro-black, Hispanic and Asian American movements in the past four years, many feel blindsided. 

Now that Republicans have taken control of all three branches of government, causing a wave of panic and fear amongst democratic voters across the country, every headline rings like a scary movie. “What will Trump do next?” “Elon Musk nominated for a cabinet position in the Department of Government Efficiency.” “How every right you have will be taken away in the next four years.” It seems as though Democrats have not only taken campaign strategy from Republican candidates but have copied their journalistic style as well, or maybe the news these days really is that shocking. I have found the last two weeks to be a deeply contemplative period. It felt almost like the first time my parents told me “Sometimes, life isn’t fair.” But I also reckoned with how I’ve contributed to the toxic political culture I find myself in, even when I intended to unite others in pursuit of good works.

This is surely a pivotal moment in the history of the nation for immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, BIPOC, the working poor, and women in particular. 

It’s been a long time since the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Elon Musk has owned Twitter (now X) for two years, Trump has dominated Fox News reporting for six and we’ve had a lot of time to process what intersectionality means in the 21st Century and how it shapes voting behavior in this country. 

When I took “Race in Politics” with Elizabeth Coggins as a sophomore, a major focus was the crucial role of the middle-class, blue-collar, white voter during the 1970s and 1980s and their impact in electing Ronald Reagan. We also heavily discussed the simultaneous use of dog-whistling to win the support of that demographic, and pandering to African Americans by the democratic party throughout the same era.

Do these patterns seem familiar?

Joe Biden’s cabinet has been no stranger to offending BIPOC communities in the United States, whether through his ardent support of the Israeli military or his many faux pas during press conferences (i.e. “Poor kids are just as bright as white kids.”) We do not have the time or space to delve into the paternalistic and entitled behavior the Democratic party has always shown POC voters, expecting them to vote blue no matter who the candidate is — even if they’re racist too — because the Democratic party will always be the lesser of two evils in this binary system. I rejected an invitation to join the Democratic Club of my high school after I had organized a school-wide protest for this exact reason. They expected my labor, and in exchange, I would have received nothing but “tolerance and gratitude,” the social equivalent of chump change. After the stunt Nancy Pelosi pulled during the #BlackLivesMatter movement, kneeling in kente cloth with fellow lawmakers before an audience of paparazzi, I could never really take the party as seriously as I did during the Obama administration.

People of color have as much right to be angry with the DNC, with Biden’s administration and Harris’s campaign as any white voter does, if not more of a right. If you believe in equality, you cannot expect people of color to remain perpetually tied and indebted to the democratic party for passing the Civil Rights Act. That doesn’t sound like having the same rights and freedoms as everyone else. Many fellow immigrants, whether Hispanic, African or Asian, also came to that realization but have produced different voting outcomes.  

I’ve often said throughout the past year that I was voting for Joe Biden and eventually Kamala Harris “at Trump-Point,” and I know many felt the same way. To not only be in a system where both parties work to exploit the disenfranchised is one thing, but for a biracial black woman to be touted as some kind of exception to this system, some type of eternal solution to bigotry because of her ethnic background and gender, was too much for my heart to take. I don’t dislike Harris as much as I sympathize and relate to her. Harris was under much pressure not only to play a part in perpetuating the toxicity of the political system but also to be flawless at it and remain innocent in the eyes of the public. To play on the desires of the moderates and to fight for the vote of the young and progressive amid an international catastrophe. After all of that, she still came up short in the eyes of white America. 

Four months before the election was never enough time. In pursuing this idealist fantasy, they ultimately set her up to fail. It feels like when a corporation is about to go bankrupt, they bring the most educated and qualified person of color or woman as the new CEO, knowing that they either fix everything or the company collapses in their name, letting them take the blame for problems they never created. It feels like when certain colleges select black women as the face of the university, they expect them and BIPOC students to clean up the racial mess they’ve been creating for generations. Then, the majority white student body slanders them for not visiting the lunch hall often enough. 

This phenomenon is so common in the West that it is now being referred to as “The Glass Cliff.” I think we can all agree that in the case of Kamala Harris, this principle is driven to its absolute extreme. 

The margins Trump won by, in the locations and populations he did, prove that not all Trump supporters can be swept under the rug as ignorant and uneducated bigots. This mindset many of us liberal arts students have adopted is exactly what has gotten us here. Many voters who chose to elect Donald Trump were a part of the same voting block that preferred Bernie Sanders as the democratic candidate in 2016. Some even voted to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. 

Whether we like to admit it or not, we do think we are superior to right-wing Americans, and specifically poor right-wing Americans. We think we are superior to them in every single way.

As POC who’ve worked hard their whole lives for everything we’ve had, as women who’ve beat the odds. As the educated, wealthy-born and raised to be tolerant by the best educators with the best connections and the bluest bloodlines. We’d like to have diverse friend groups — and we assume they do not. We care for our minorities — or at least we tell ourselves we do. We eat healthy, we look to the scientific method, statistics and Eastern religions where they look to lived experience and faith in Christ. We believe we are more rational, loving and moralistic than any Republican could ever be. They vote against their interests, and we convince ourselves we’re voting for ours. We are the future, they are the past.

While Democrats critique Republicans severely for their positions on secularism, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, health and lacking trust in expert opinions, many POC hold the exact same values. These are just not the POC that get into schools like these, so they are never interacted with or contemplated. Many immigrants, such as my family, come to the United States with conservative backgrounds, often from majority Christian-countries. The Democratic entitlement to the colored vote has made many ignore the actual feelings and thoughts of POC in the United States. If these feelings are acknowledged, they are treated with almost an “they don’t know any better” attitude, removing any agency these grown adults have in their political actions.

I’ve often heard the sentiment that “Red states get what they deserve” regarding public education, infrastructure and lack of healthcare access. It’s simply the idea that if these constituents are choosing to re-elect candidates that support defunding these projects, then these projects being inadequately funded must be what the constituents desire. The glaring issue with that is that POC (specifically native, black American, and Hispanic voters) are concentrated in the American South and Southwest, which have leaned red in recent election cycles. Every time we say that Republicans are getting what they deserve, we fail to consider the lives and decisions of the POC living in these states. The majority of them do not vote for republican candidates. Do these people get what they deserve as well?

What I think many liberals have failed to realize in these critiques is reminiscent of what a co-worker said to me during the 2020 election that I never could forget.

“A poor white man and a poor black man will always have more in common than a rich black man and a poor one, or a rich white man and a poor one.” The working class encompasses those working blue-collar jobs and those without college educations or extensive family pedigrees. That sounds like a lot of BIPOC families in the United States, doesn’t it? Except for one difference, white Americans lack the community that BIPOCs in the United States do, making the experience of poverty feel especially isolating. A friend back in Kansas told me after my graduation party how lucky I was to have that support. I asked, “What do you mean, you’re literally a white man? Of course, society wants you to succeed.” He explained to me how the white Americans in my hometown didn’t look out for each other the way the Kenyan community in my city did, that almost all of my friends, even though they were whiter and sometimes wealthier, received less graduation present money than I or any of the Kenyan kids at our schools did. I contemplated this for a long time. 

Everyone in my community lifted me up. Even as the rebellious, black panther wanna-be I was at the time, they lifted me. I hadn’t gone to church in three years, and they all showed up and told me how proud they were of me anyway. That is what true community is to me, and not many of my white American friends have ever experienced that or ever will in their lifetimes. 

Community in white America has been replaced by consumerism, shared hobbies (money), shared goals (more money), and shared lifestyles (even more money). There is no solidarity just because of this, and that’s what my lovely friend was trying to express, even if he didn’t yet have the words to do so. I’ve even heard this sentiment from BIPOC faculty that help all disenfranchised students; they notice how poor white kids at this school are disenfranchised differently and feel locked out of resources they need. Of course, I didn’t take it too seriously at the time in either conversation because I was focused on solving my oppression, but I’m taking their comments very seriously now. I think this is why many white Americans feel as though they have no culture, even though they do (POC have to be assimilated into something, after all). It’s not a culture they are lacking, but a bond through that culture that no longer exists and has been replaced by corporate approximations. I’ve always felt the word community was overused at this school, and I think that’s exactly the reason why.

In the words of the formerly loved musician Penelope Scott, “We’ve been mean, we’re elitist, we’re as flawed as any church.” I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about the poor white working class at the school without the words “redneck, bigot, hill-billy,” or even “cousin-fucker” thrown into the conversation by peers. It didn’t feel right to me then, and it doesn’t feel right to me now. There is a segment of Trump voters well aware of the implications of their actions, who are actively contemplating the weight of their rights and powers over others in society and voted to strengthen those rights and powers, and a segment of Trump supporters who lack one or the other and are voting with survival in mind more than anything else. These pejoratives only target the latter of the two, which is unfair, but ultimately fitting in our institution’s current socio-economic climate.

Dehumanizing someone is the easiest way to exploit them, and that’s exactly what they perceive educated and corporate city dwellers like us to be doing to them. Are they wrong? 

These white Americans are not the same white Americans from the Reagan era, even if they are the same people or their children. These white Americans are exhausted from being slammed by recession after recession since the 90s. These white Americans are significantly more financially insecure; they can’t afford to buy houses, and some never will own their own property ever in their lives. They are homeless veterans and mothers living on welfare for decades. They don’t have access to healthy foods despite living close to rural communities. These white Americans are indebted to their white American overlords for years to come, which is the class many people from this school will ultimately join in the next 20 years. 

How could they not love Trump and his movement? How could they not get swept up in revolutionary fervor like many of us did in 2020? When they felt they weren’t getting enough pay or resources from the federal government to support themselves and their loved ones, how could the concept of white privilege not deeply insult them? Many of the principles we learn about and practice profoundly at this institution are not ideals commonly found, and in a lot of cases, not found at all, in the public American education system, and when introduced to working adults, they are utterly incompatible or irrelevant to the personal lifestyles those Americans are living. 

We know that when people are in poverty, they can often do things they never would have if not put in that position. Would it be so crazy to think that poverty can not only alter personal morals when it comes to the rule of law but within concepts of social and political justice as well? Would it be even crazier to say that the effects of rising costs and financial insecurity are the root of the cause of the Democratic Party’s failure this year?

Trump was the perfect bandage to their long-aching wound, and the propaganda worked flawlessly because this was already an incredibly vulnerable population. The propaganda worked even better because Democrats have been in perpetual denial about how vulnerable this population is, choosing to focus on courting the votes of populations they were planning to exploit as well, feeding us false promises that will never be fulfilled. Roe v. Wade died under a Democratic presidency, even if at the hands of a majority conservative Supreme Court. What hope would we have that whatever Democratic president comes next can enshrine reproductive rights into law if it was within their presidency that they lost those same rights? Who can we trust in 2024?

Many disenfranchised Americans can see through the facade of the Democratic Party, and that’s why they prefer the Republican Party in its current form. The Democratic Party officially represents the American establishment, while the Republican Party represents a counter-movement to that establishment. They would rather ally themselves with a party that is honest about the bureaucratic dysfunction of the federal government, that doesn’t pretend everything is alright but validates their reasonable fear. 

I could never, ever support Donald Trump or join the Republican Party in any way, but the solution is not to look down on those who do. After all, how could you blame them, considering these extreme circumstances? We, as liberals or leftists, know the Democratic Party is flawed, and we spend a lot of time critiquing it ourselves. Many students at our school spent the entire year critiquing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s campaign and the last four years critiquing their ticket. I don’t know what the way forward is, but some compassion, even for those that we can’t understand, maybe the first step towards redemption, especially when we know statistically that these voters are living through challenges most of us have never experienced or will ever have to experience in our lifetimes.

Suppose you are a son or a daughter or child of a wealthy white American reading this, or even a person of color, a woman, or a queer person at this school set up to be in a powerful position someday. In that case, I urge you to fix the relationships you have with those of your race, ethnic group, or gender who are poorer than you or who think differently than you, or at least try. 

Sadly, and as always, everyone else is depending on it.

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