Election anxiety

We at Milwaukee Beagle keep our focus on local politics, but sometimes there are political events happening on a state and national level that impact our lives in Milwaukee too much to ignore. 

That’s why we’ve been tracking the state assembly races (district 61, district 92, district 93) and like everyone, watching the presidential election with mounting anxiety. 

Before those events unfold, we want to share a quick note. This is not a prediction, but a set of observations leading to a logical conclusion. 

First: this is anxiety inducing. 

The election did not need to be this close and scary. Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular and completely ridiculous. The Harris/Biden team chose a shitty strategy that relies on all of us being so afraid of Trump that people harass and drag everyone we know to the polls to vote Democrat even though they aren’t offering much and are requiring we accept complicity in genocide. 

Back in 2014 the Institute of Precarious Consciousness took a big picture view of the history of struggle, and wrote a visionary essay called We Are All Very Anxious which proposed that, in order to succeed, radical movements must build a machine to combat anxiety. Ten years later, the 2024 election has taken political anxiety to new heights. 

It seems clear to us that the political landscape looks like it does today because the radical left has not yet built that machine to combat anxiety. Let’s all get on that project, okay?

Second: the Democratic Party establishment failed

The assignment was not to repeat 2020. The assignment was not to create an outcome close enough that we have to fear another Trump coup attempt. Yes, Trump is an apocalyptic motherfucker willing to make a play regardless. Yes, the MAGA blood gods were not satisfied by the deaths on January 6, 2021 and some of their ghouls will come for more regardless. But, if Trump loses all the swing states by wide margins, those desperate fiends would find themselves very alone. 

Instead, it looks like if Harris wins, it’ll be another squeaker, enabling Trump to rile up a seething mass of violent resentment that endangers everyone in this country. 

That is a failure. It is a failure of the Harris/Biden team, an unacceptable failure. 

Third: it is past time that Democrats be done with the establishment wing of our party.

Centrist democrats have been failing to beat Donald Trump for almost a decade now. Such a ridiculous and overtly racist candidate should have lost by a landslide in 2016, but the center dems out-maneuvered the change candidate their base was mobilizing behind during the primary. Forcing the party to get behind the most establishment of establishment candidates, someone who Republicans had been campaigning against since the literal 1990s. Then she ran a terrible, uninspiring campaign based on winning voters who hate her, and on fear of Trump, rather than mobilizing the left base with inspiration and promise.

In 2020, centrist Democrats again fought harder against the left in the primary than against Trump in the general, and only barely beat him. The Democrats’ assignment in 2020 wasn’t to beat Trump by a thin margin, the assignment was to whoop him and permanently remove him and his neo-fascist MAGA movement from electoral viability. Joe Biden failed that assignment in 2020. His failure is why we are dealing with Trump again. 

In 2024, centrist Democrats leveraged against the left so hard that we didn’t really have a primary and ended up with an extraordinarily old, extraordinarily unpopular candidate who had told us he wasn’t going to run again. Even worse, he’s been actively engaged in crimes against humanity in stubborn pursuit of a spectacularly failed foreign policy in the Middle East.

When the party finally kicked that failure off the ticket, his replacement gained huge momentum appearing to be a change candidate for a few weeks. Unfortunately, she chose to stall out by hiring Biden’s team, literally shutting Palestinians out of the convention, abandoning popular progressive policies, treating left critics with condescending accusations, and befriending incredibly unpopular, incredibly establishment, and downright monstrous figures from the withered remnants of the GOP establishment. These are bizarre and foolish strategic choices. 

Establishment Democrats, the centrist faction of the party, keeps making these bad choices every time they gain control of our party. They’ve neglected the assignment to send MAGA packing, instead adopting and normalizing Trump’s talking points, and pursuing corporate priorities. Regardless of what happens Tuesday, real Democrats need to organize to build a Democratic Party that knows the assignment. We must confront fascists with left-populism, stop catering to billionaires, corporations, and genocide freaks. We must start fighting to win, and to deliver real solutions for working people. 

Fourth: the future is what we make

If we took the Democrats left, we would push Trump and his cult out of the Overton window, perhaps defenestrating the entire Republican Party along with him. We could see a political realignment in this country (we are long overdue for one), and a political landscape that offers real hope and real change, rather than endless anxiety and fear. 

The biggest question before us is not what should we do on November 5, it is: how do we build a machine against anxiety and for working class victory in the months and years following this debacle?  

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