A postmortum on the legacy of neoliberalism in the 2024 election

Amid the postmortems and reckoning that will now follow the wreckage of Donald Trump’s return to “absolute” power, as authorized by the Supreme Court, there are a two notes in particular that deserve a deeper dive.

First. In Missouri, a state Trump won by 58 percent, voters also acted to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and to require employers to provide paid sick leave to workers. Proposition A was backed by unions and workers’ advocacy groups, social justice and civil rights organizations, and even over 500 state business owners despite the opposition of the Chamber of Commerce, the big corporate lobby wing.

We’ve shown the rest of the world, the rest of the country, that regardless of what’s going on outside of our state, we’re able to come together and win,” said Terrence Wise of Stand Up KC, a coalition of low wage workers. “We felt that we have the power as everyday Missourians to come together and make our lives better.”

In Nebraska, another red state won by Trump, voters also passed a paid sick leave measure, Initiative 436, by 75 percent. Paid Sick Leave for Nebraskans and other supporters noted that 250,000 Nebraskans were working full-time without paid sick days, especially in restaurants and other service jobs, construction, manufacturing, warehousing, retail, educational support and transportation.

“These are old school Democratic Party policy proposals that Republicans have actively voted against in DC, but are hugely popular. Harris barely campaigned on them….despite progressives begging her to. Voters were clearly looking for solutions to their economic angst and agreed with DEMS on these policies, even if not associating those policies with Harris and her party,” posted MaryAlice Parks, ABC correspondent, on Twitter.

Second. In the multitude of exit poll results, one particularly stands out — 94 percent of registered Republicans voted for Trump, the exact same percentage he received in 2020. The heavy campaign focus on pulling away Republican voters from Trump turned out to be a pipe dream.

The old cliché “it’s the economy stupid,” triumphed again. It was the major issue for many Joe Biden voters in 2020 who Vice President Kamala Harris lost in 2024.

Much has been written and said about Latino voters, but the Washington Post assessment seems right: Seven in 10 Latino voters nationally rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor,” and a narrow majority supported Trump. Four in 10 Latino voters termed the economy their top issue, and those chose Trump by a 2-to-1 margin.

Another demographic that should cause concern are the youngest voters. Again from the Post analysis: Though voters under 30 supported Harris by 13 points, in 2020, Biden won that age group by a 24-point margin.

Some of those were certainly disaffected by the Biden/Harris administration’s disastrous support for Israel’s horrific war and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. But there are many indications that many more were discouraged by an economy of relentless high prices the past four years and by the difficulty in finding living wage jobs.

The Biden administration passed important legislation to tackle inflation and high prices, and it made laudable efforts to reduce student and medical debt despite the unified Republican opposition and conservative courts. It also carried out significant anti-trust initiatives to tackle corporate price gouging and other corporate abuses that harm working people. Yet, the pain of struggling families, including many young people across the country, persisted.

After Biden’s calamitous debate with Trump in late June, he unveiled an expansive progressive campaign platform on multiple issues influenced by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Squad members, the Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus. It included multiple proposals to end medical debt and other dramatic reforms.

“To win the election, the president … needs to … fight for a bold agenda that speaks to the needs of the vast majority of our people — the working families of this country, the people who have been left behind for far too long,” Sanders wrote in a New York Times op ed.

Harris embraced much of that agenda, and she expanded it with innovative ideas to call for a national ban on corporate price gouging on grocery and other food costs, expanded child tax and new born credits, subsidies for new home buyers, and more.

She could have done more, such as aligning with proposed progressive reforms such as those passed by voters in Missouri, Nebraska and other states, and highlighting the vital work of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan in attacking corporate abuses. Instead, much of the critical final weeks was focused on appeals to Republican voters and the emphasis on demonizing Trump.

In large part the campaign reflected the direction the Democratic Party establishment has taken, away from working class issues since the advent of neoliberal policies in the 1970s and carried out by most Democratic Party presidents since.

The irony is that Biden, through many of his programs, though mitigated by Republican obstruction, was the first president to begin the break from Democratic embrace of neoliberalism, as historian Heather Cox Richardson notes. He was the most pro-union president in decades. Yet due to the long term damage of neoliberal policies, symbolized by massive income and wealth inequality, the failure to center that messaging and Trump’s demagogic rhetoric, cratered the potential to build on those advances.

In a Guardian column after Trump’s victory in 2016, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich made trenchant observations about the Democratic Party shift, aptly headlined “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.”

Reich wrote:

“What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

“Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.

“The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

“Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security.

“The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.”

Reich’s thoughts remain relevant today. We face a daunting challenge to confront the racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia fanned by Trump and Trumpism. And to build a broad, collective anti-fascist, multi-racial, multi-national, multi-cultural working class focused movement against an authoritarian regime that will likely seek to eliminate opposition and expand public complicity for its draconian policies.