Accuse Kamala Harris‘campaign of reflexive repetition of the errors of that of Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign — like Branko Marcetic of the Jacobins did recently – may seem like left-wing snark, carrying an unfortunate (and probably unintentional) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader anxiety felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: The polls are even dead, 10 days before what has been billed (rightly or not) as a world-historic presidential election. After the euphoria of the change from Biden to Harris and the exaltation of Democratic ConventionIt’s a difficult future to face.

Among the media and the political class, the current working hypothesis is as follows: Donald Trump – by any normative standard, a disastrously undisciplined and erratic candidate – is likely to win this election, even without resorting to shenanigans or mob violence. This “gut feeling” has no predictive value, to be clear, and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016.

But liberals’ stress and bewilderment are unlikely to improve by seeing Democrats do exactly what they always do in the final stages of a national campaign: a sharply rightward tilt to emphasize a commitment to national security and corporate profits, in the purported pursuit of “convincing” independents and wavering Republicans . (Or maybe just looking for the donor class, which isn’t technically the same thing.)

We saw Harris identify himself as a gun owner in a sit down with Oprahto kiss Economic policies favorable to Wall Street and campaign with a former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheneywho supported literally every aspect of the Trump agenda before his overt attempt to overturn the 2020 election. All of this, of course, reflects the conventional wisdom peddled by highly paid consultants, and it is not in itself illogical: eliminate could it be just a handful of conservative voters who don’t like Trump very much, but are reluctant to vote for someone they are rumored to be a radical socialist black lady who wants to make everyone trans, could make a crucial difference in several of the most important states.

The left’s response also makes sense, on its own terms: Democrats have tried this before, hamster wheel-style, without conclusively defeating the increasingly fashionable right. So maybe it’s time to stop doing the same thing that doesn’t work over and over again – an admittedly radical notion – and try something else, like relying on widely popular social democratic policies in health care, taxes, student debt and green energy transition and hope to win elections by driving high turnout among young voters, people of color, LGBTQ voters, etc. (Let’s not cancel the blank check issued to Benjamin Netanyahu – but sure, maybe too.)

I’m personally sympathetic to this path not taken argument, but to recycle another of the Democratic Party’s quadrennial hamster wheel themes, none of this matters in the face of an existential emergency. Either way, nothing about the party’s exhausting alarmist messages or its bleak self-image will change dramatically in the final week before a blockbuster national election.

There are signs that the Harris campaign intends to act tough on abortion rights in the final days – a potentially decisive issue – alongside Cheney’s pivot and strategic decision to directly label Trump with the word F. But minor tactical adjustments at the end of October are hardly relevant. The Democratic Party is what it is: a fundamentally unstable coalition of wealthy metropolitan whites and working people of color, whose interests are beginning to pull them in different directions.

Right now, the overriding question — for many people, understandably, is only The question is whether the Democrats’ campaign strategy will work this time around, or at least work a little better than it did eight years ago. Let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, but the distribution of those votes proved to be an insurmountable problem: if you subtract California, Illinois , Massachusetts and New York of the overall total, Trump won. the rest of the country by 5 million votes.

Most of us in this industry have stopped making safe predictions based on “the way things work” because these days, nothing works the way it used to, or works at all. Time passes in flat circles, scientific research has been subjected to “do your own research” and a presidential candidate can tell the nation, on live television, that immigrants eat their pets without suffering significant political harm. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else have any idea whether the Harris campaign’s race to the patriotic middle ground is going to shake up the potentially decisive electoral votes of Michigan, Arizona, or North Carolina. (It’s safe to say that whichever candidate wins two of these three states will have a good chance of being the next president.)

But here’s one thing I do know: Don’t rely on the confident pronouncements of supposedly stubborn insiders whose Realpolitik bibles have been put through the washing machine too many times. I read James Carville’s New York Times opinion piece predicting a Harris victory last week and felt a vague but distinct longing, somewhere inside him, for a vanished world of reassuring wisdom. Then I felt a much deeper desire – a desire to spend the next two weeks drinking whiskey and watching old movies, because this guy hasn’t supported a winning Democrat in this century. If it wasn’t the kiss of death, it was a pretty good simulation.

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And one other thing I’m sure of is that if the Harris campaign’s ultimate triangulation of Liz Cheney doesn’t work, and the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway elite caste are once again revealed to be fatally flawed, the consequences will be disastrous – for the Democratic Party, for the future of our so-called democracy and for the trajectory of the entire world. in this century.

Not just because Donald Trump will win the election and become president, although that’s bad enough. But because of how it happened and under what circumstances – and because the only American political party that claims to stand for constitutional democracy, rational government, and broader equality will once again blame its own voters, or the Russians, or on the ignorance and intolerance of the people he despises. , for the catastrophic consequences of his own inconsistency and uncertainty, and for the fact that he was unable to prevent the entire system he claims to cherish from collapsing into clownish anarchy.