The Democratic shift rightward

From 2016 to 2020, acts of violence and harassment against Hispanic people were rampant. This ranged from individual, emboldened racists who came out of the woodworks of suburban United States all the way to the state who deputized Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to reach into working class neighborhoods and tear out immigrants via mass raids on cities.

 

I was moving through school at this time. I was a young, Chicano teenager who was politically undereducated but fiercely protective of my community. Across the country, Latinos were forced to organize as a community to protect and defend our parents, grandparents, friends and ourselves from police harassment and mass deportation.

 

I distinctly remember this time, when the Democratic Party claimed to be the party that would defend the rights and dignities of immigrants, illegal or otherwise. This promise is what sold me on the Democratic Party during the Trump administration—this time when acts of anti-Latino violence and deportation were being carried out with such ferocity it spread terror across my community.

 

The Democratic Party offered itself as the opposition, as a tool to fight back and as the resistance. Much of this resisting was—as it often is—the Party taking false credit for the actions of street-level activists. However, the idea of a liberal party with a progressive wing that would fight Former President Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic and at times almost genocidal policy of harassment, deportation and institutionalized violence against Hispanic people was too much to ignore. At times they even claimed that they would outright dismantle the system of migrant “detention centers” at the border.

 

This sales pitch is the reason I considered the Democrats a trustworthy ally in the fight for my community throughout high school. It is the reason that—even as I moved further to the left in my political leanings—I would turn a blind eye to many of the Party’s faults.

 

It is one of the many promises the Democrats have betrayed through President Joe Biden’s years in office. When it comes to matters of immigration policy, policing, health policy and the ever-present Palestinian Genocide carried out by Israel, this Party has marched slowly but confidently across the Overton Window in order to plant itself firmly in the center-right. Its current presidential nominee has gone from praising the mass movement to defund the police in 2020 to assisting the current administration in allocating $334 Million towards tough-on-crime policing endeavors.

 

The Party is making a bid to appeal to old Republicans and cut any progressive wing out of policy-making and decision-making. It now occupies many of the positions of the pre-Trump Republican Party while stifling left-wing dissent from those wishing to push for change within its structures—turning this election into a race between the far-right agenda of Trump and the center-right agenda of Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

Through the saccharine and glamorous Democratic National Convention (DNC), the Party brought on a veritable cavalcade of border town sheriffs and southwest governors to pump up Harris as tough on the border. Dropping her 2020 stance of repealing the criminal statute on crossing the border without permission, she instead rued the Republican resistance to a right-wing, restrictionist border bill and backed even more funding for the Trump-era border wall. This pivot in both policy and rhetoric is not just theoretical, either. The Biden-Harris administration’s record on deportation is almost identical to that of the Trump administration. 

 

“The 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of the fiscal year (FY) 2021 through February 2024 (the most recent data available) are on pace to match the 1.5 million deportations carried out during the four years President Donald Trump was in office,” according to an analysis put out by the Migration Policy Institute.

 

That article also includes a handy graph, if you’re so inclined.

 

Many of these deportations were carried out under the Trump-era “Title 42” restriction and this type of deportation was mostly used against vulnerable Haitian migrants. These migrants were fleeing violence and a near total institutional collapse in their home country. 

 

These contemporary conditions can be traced back to the abysmal state the country was left in after a 19 year occupation by the United States—carried out to extract sugar and other agricultural resources from the nation—and multiple successive interventions since.

 

This rhetoric was backed up by the aforementioned sheriffs who got speaking spots on the main stage of the DNC. Of that group, the Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar gave a rousing speech that started out by claiming that the traffickers—as he referred to them—were packing migrants into 18-wheelers to drive them across the border.

 

Also at the DNC was an ever-growing list of 80s and 90s era, B-list Republicans. This includes self-described Reaganite Ana Navarro-Cardenas, a lifelong Republican operative who served as an advisor to many influential Republicans. This includes her spot in the Jeb Bush Governorship of Florida and her time advising Senator John McCain. She also regularly spends her time on social media defending the Contras, a former death squad from her home country of Nicaragua.

 

So many old-school Republicans feel so comfortable endorsing Harris, in fact, that over a dozen former staffers for the Ronald Reagan campaign signed an open letter endorsing her run for the presidency. As the Democratic establishment rushes to gleefully accept these endorsements from the right, voters who are young or already disillusioned with all of the above are only pushed further towards the understanding that there is no meaningful difference between these two parties anymore.

 

And with the space for cops and Republicans on the main stage, surely they could also make space for one of the main Progressive and left-wing demands—to put a Palestinian speaker on that same stage.

 

Simply, no. Despite the fact that 30 delegates were elected under the “Uncommitted” umbrella, and the presence of mass pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside the DNC, any attempt to have a single Palestinian speaker was shut down. Even after the speech itself was submitted and looked over by the DNC, Representative Ruwa Romman—the first Palestinian to be elected to public office in Georgia—was not let on the stage.

 

The full text of the speech was not radical. It appealed to the civil rights legacy of people like Activist Fannie Lou Hamer of the Freedom Democratic Party. It shared a deeply personal, touching story of her grandfather who died without ever being able to go back to Palestine after moving to the US. It simply asked for an end to the genocide and massacres in Gaza and ended with a call to elect Harris as president.

 

This speech was not allowed on the main stage, but washed-up Republicans were.

 

Through all of this were chants of “USA!” and speeches to reclaim patriotism and prove that rabid nationalism is not just for the Republicans. To end off the three nights of pomp and circumstance, Harris gave her speech. She praised Biden’s record, reminisced on her career as a District Attorney and prosecutor (a time in which she both defended the death penalty and opposed marijuana legalization) and gleefully declared that she would “[…] ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” A full-throated, bold endorsement of the war machine to end off the convention.

 

If you’re curious, you can read the full transcript of the speech here.

 

This shift has mostly been defended as an appeal to moderates or to the median voter. Let the record show, I think the median voter has been dead since 1980. Beyond that, though, this push to the right might actually hurt the chances of Harris being elected in November.

 

Polls show that, nationwide, the gap between Harris and Trump is around three percent with Harris in the lead. This is more or less the same lead that Clinton had over Trump in 2016. This sounds good, until you take into account the polling specific to crucial swing states such as those in the Rust Belt—also known as the midwest.

 

According to a poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, American Muslims are tied in their support between Harris and the Green Party’s Jill Stein. This is a direct consequence of the foreign policy proposals between the two candidates. Furthermore, Muslims and Arab Americans broadly are a crucial voting block in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They make up significant minority populations in the Rust Belt, which is the exact region the Democrats seem to be spending most of their time trying to win.

 

The youth—another critical voting block for the Democratic Party—are unmotivated.

 

“Only 31% of those 2,000 young adults polled in late June and early July in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they are better off than they were four years ago,” said USNews. Furthermore, “Young people are engaged and interested in political action, but often disillusioned by democratic institutions and dissatisfied with their electoral choices.”

 

Trump on the other hand seems to have his base locked down and is pouring money into states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia.

 

When faced with this information—or any pushback at all—the traditional Democratic counter is that not voting or voting third party is a vote for Donald Trump. This dismissive, counterproductive talking point fails to address that this is a democracy. Political parties are not guaranteed their voting blocks’ votes by the divine right of kings, they have to actively pursue them.

 

The Democratic Party has dumped two important voting blocks in favor of building up a “Big Tent” with its supporting pole on the right side of the political spectrum. This leaves behind the minority and youth votes that it relied on to come to power in 2020 and leaves those groups politically homeless and searching for alternatives like those in the Green Party.

 

Instead of sincerely taking the gloves off and fighting for popular, progressive policies in order to put a halt to the slide into fascism in the United States, the Democratic Party has quietly pacified its internal progressive wing and capitulated to the reactionary, conservative right.

 

Whether or not this is a winning strategy is yet to be determined, but it calls into question if the Party had any scruples at all. I’m left astonished at how quickly the mask has come off and wondering if they ever truly wanted to fight the right or were just waiting to become them.