Like tens of millions of Americans, I voted to end the miserable reign of Donald J. Trump, but we cannot perpetuate the election-year fiction that the deep and bewildering problems facing millions of people in this country will simply end with the Trump Administration. They are embedded in “the system,” in systemic racism, and the other social inequities that are the focus of continued activism and budding social movements. Viewing the solution to these problems as simply electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both underestimates the depth of the problems and trivializes the remedies necessary to undo the damage. That view may also confuse popular support for fundamental change, as evidenced by Trump’s one-term Presidency, with what the Democratic Party is willing or even able to deliver.
Today, in Philadelphia, where I live, there is not a single aspect of life that the pandemic has not upended, from work and school to housing and health care, pulling poor and working-class African-Americans, in particular, deeper into debt and despair. The uncertainty of the moment, let alone the future, feeds fear, frustration, hopelessness, and dread. In Philadelphia, shootings are on the rise, and the murder rate is growing. With two months left in the year, there have been four hundred and sixteen homicides in the city, compared with just over three hundred and fifty for all of 2019, which was already the highest number of killings in Philadelphia in more than a decade. African-Americans make up eighty-five per cent of the city’s shooting victims. Even before the pandemic, drug overdoses in Black Philadelphia were on the rise. In the first three months of shelter-in-place orders, a hundred and forty-seven Black residents died by accidental drug overdose, forty-seven per cent of drug deaths in the city. When, last month, police killed a twenty-seven-year-old Black man named Walter Wallace, Jr., in the streets of West Philadelphia, while he was in the midst of a mental-health crisis, the frustration of many Black Philadelphians spilled into the streets, just as it did last summer. And now, like then, Pennsylvania’s governor mobilized the National Guard to corral demonstrators, to restore one kind of order while leaving palpable social disorder intact. Trump stumbled on some truth when he said, “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”
The dark side of the pandemic in Philadelphia exists in cities across the country, as we cross the threshold of more than a hundred thousand daily diagnoses of coronavirus cases. It is not a Trumpian slur to observe that many of the cities where Black suffering takes place are also governed by proud members of the Democratic Party. Instead, it illuminates the depth of the bipartisan failure to address the tangled roots of racism, poverty, and inequality. It can also help us understand why Trump captured more votes from Black men and women in this year’s election than he did in 2016. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Black voters backed Biden, but the fact is that millions of African-Americans experience the daily failures of Democratic officials to respond to the poor conditions of their public schools, the lack of affordable housing, rampant police harassment and brutality, and usurious loans. The answer to these legitimate grievances can’t simply be to say that they are Republican talking points.
During this pandemic, the toll of disease and death has been greatest on those who can least afford it. Job losses have overwhelmingly affected low-wage, minority workers. Since May, as many as eight million people have been pushed into poverty, with Black families overrepresented among them. Whereas white workers have recovered more than half the jobs they lost to the downturn, Black workers have recovered just over a third of them, leaving Black unemployment at more than twelve percent. But the most provocative measure of the failure of our response to the pandemic can be found in the growth of hunger. In June, around twenty-nine per cent of American households with children were experiencing “food insecurity,” meaning that they were either unable to get enough food to meet their nutritional needs or they were uncertain of where their next meal would come from. They were hungry.
Where there is hunger, housing insecurity is not far behind. Thousands of people have already been evicted during this crisis, and nearly one out of six renters have fallen behind on their rent. Nearly one in four renters who live with children report that they are not up-to-date with the rent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s unprecedented moratorium on evictions was too good to be true: the Trump Administration recently signalled to landlords that it would allow them to challenge the eligibility of tenants. This leaves the viability of the C.D.C. moratorium up to the discretion of individual judges, who may or may not honor it. Local organizers and activists have tried to fill the gap created by federal neglect with relentless mutual-aid organizing, but it is hardly sufficient.
In Philadelphia, which, ignobly, has among the highest proportion of poor residents of any big city in the country, thousands stand on the cusp of eviction. Twenty-two per cent of households in the city are severely cost-burdened, meaning that they are spending half or more of their income on housing costs, which is well above the national average. Before this downturn, sixty-one per cent of households headed by Black women in Philadelphia were spending at least thirty per cent of their income on rent, compared with fifty-three per cent of households headed by white women and forty-four per cent of households headed by white men. Black mothers and their children “are most likely to be evicted,” according to a 2020 report produced by researchers at PolicyLink, and Black residents in general are “most likely to become homeless.” Philadelphia’s moratorium on evictions has not been extended beyond its November deadline because landlord advocates and the Philadelphia City Council could not reach an agreement. Instead, the courts have agreed to “pause” evictions until the new year, while still making exceptions for landlords who ask for an exemption. Even this concession roused the ire of the landlord class, which is poised and ready to evict. As Paul Cohen, a lawyer for the Homeowners Association of Philadelphia said, “As a society, we recognize you can’t steal food from the grocery store or clothes from a department store, so why is it O.K. to steal the rent?” An estimated fifteen per cent of Pennsylvania renters will face eviction in January, when the C.D.C. moratorium expires. The disaster is being forestalled, but winter is coming.
Philadelphia served as an outpost for Joe Biden’s campaign, in part because of its proximity to his home in Delaware, but also because the Democratic Party loved the backdrop of the “cradle of American Democracy,” in contrast to the affront to it that pulses at the heart of the Trump Administration. Barack Obama delivered his speech for the Democratic National Convention, this past summer, at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution; more recently, he returned to Philadelphia to stump for Biden in the final weeks of the campaign. Biden made repeated trips to the city for town-hall meetings and to make public addresses. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell were not only pointed backdrops to political attacks on Donald Trump; they were also poignant symbols of the country’s founding contradiction: freedom and democracy bound to racism and inequality.
The pressing question for the new President-elect is, what will he do in this fragile moment of popular radicalization and despair? It is true that Biden’s plans became more ambitious after the Democratic Party primaries, when he was to the right of most of his opponents, including Kamala Harris. His campaign melded together a fractious coalition of Democrats, folding in those to his left in order to quiet his critics. This was largely done through a “unity task force,” which brought together Bernie Sanders’s supporters with Biden’s campaign, and created a more than one-hundred-page document that was used to revise the Democratic Party platform. Much of the platform now reads like a wish list for the liberal left, hardly reflecting the centrism that has defined Biden’s career. It proposes “a new social and economic contract with the American people—a contract that invests in the people and promotes shared prosperity, not one that benefits only big corporations and the wealthiest few.” That contract describes housing as “a right and not a privilege,” and promises “good-paying jobs,” cash infusions to cities and states, and “fundamental reforms” to address “structural and systemic racism” and “entrenched” income inequality.
Winning the White House may have been the ultimate prize, but the uncertainty over control of the Senate and the Democrats’ losses in the House have already imperiled the lofty plans of the unity caucus. The pressure among Democrats to close ranks in order to defeat Trump and win the Senate had dissolved even before the final tally of votes was taken. On a conference call for members of the Democratic House caucus last Thursday, moderate Democrats blamed the Democratic left for the loss of House seats. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ again,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, of Virginia, said, according to the Washington Post. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success . . . we will get fucking torn apart in 2022.” This is a conflict that cannot so easily be muted, because the liberal left and moderate factions of the party represent different demands and different constituencies. The Sanders faction—organized around Medicare for All, police reform, and the Green New Deal, among other progressive causes—cannot be quietly stuffed in a box until the Party leadership calls on the left again to gin up the base and get out the vote. They are fighting to transform the direction of the Party.
It is also no small thing that, during his campaign, Biden insisted on unity with Republicans regardless of the composition of Congress, underlining his intentions to work just as hard for those who voted against him as for those who voted for him. In his victory speech on Saturday night, he said, “To those who voted for President Trump, I understand your disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance.” Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Senator John McCain, prominently defected from the Republican camp to endorse Biden. According to McCain, Biden will not merely reach out to Republicans as a gesture toward unity. She said, “I’ve had this very discussion with him and he’s absolutely going to not only work with Republicans but bring them into the Administration.”
Undoubtedly, no legislation will move through Congress next year without Republican input. But that is hardly a cause for celebration; instead it is a recipe for gridlock and small-scale proposals that make a mockery of the enormous suffering across the United States. The insistence on unity between the two parties almost always comes at the expense of those whose needs are greatest. How would a Biden Administration incorporate the views of a Republican Party that has supported a white-supremacist President, voted for Trump’s plutocratic tax cuts, advocated for the separation of families at the border, and facilitated the heist of a Supreme Court seat in hopes of fulfilling the right’s fantasy of ending access to abortion and destroying any hint of government-backed health insurance? We were told that this Presidential race was the most consequential of our lifetimes, that it was a contest between democracy and budding fascism. Why would Biden welcome the foot soldiers of Trump’s authoritarian politics into his coalition? As the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently, “We very rarely see the results of bipartisanship yielding in racial justice, yielding in economic justice for working families, yielding in improvements to health care . . . Just because something is bipartisan doesn’t mean it’s good, or good for you.” The biggest danger now is that the Democrats’s failure to decisively capture Congress will validate Biden’s strategy to emphasize moderate reforms and prioritize compromise.
That conclusion may seem to be supported by the shocking fact that upward of seventy million people voted to reëlect the most corrupt, venal, and brazenly racist President in modern American history. The reality is more complicated. The outsized power and influence of the Republican Party has fuelled the illusion that the country is more conservative than it actually is. This summer, polls found historic shifts in attitudes regarding the acknowledgement of racism in our society; more recent polling has also found widespread desire for big government spending on public programs. In a New York Times-Siena College poll released in October, seventy-two per cent of respondents support a two-trillion-dollar stimulus—far more than the five-hundred-billion-dollar plan that Republicans halfheartedly support. Another sixty-seven per cent of people support a government-backed public option in health care. Sixty-six per cent support Biden’s two-trillion-dollar plan to combat climate change. Around eighty-five per cent of the public believes that making “safe, decent, affordable” housing available to all should be a top national priority. In this election, six states and Washington, D.C., passed drug-policy reforms, and Florida, which voted for Trump, became the eighth state to vote for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage. These successes were offset by the failure of other progressive referenda, like the “fair tax” initiative in Illinois, which would have replaced the state’s flat income tax with a graduated one, resulting in an additional tax hike for those making more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. In California, a referendum supporting affirmative action in public employment and college admissions failed, with only forty-four percent voting for it. And in a huge blow for the “gig workers” of Uber and Lyft, voters passed a measure that exempts both companies from classifying these drivers as employees instead of independent contractors.
When seen alongside the popular outpouring for Black Lives Matter protests and the support for progressive policies, these electoral successes for the right point to increasing polarization, rather than singular growth on either side. But though the right has effectively used the Republican Party to express its ideas, molding public opinion and transforming public policy, the left has had no such vehicle. Instead, the Democratic Party remains hobbled by cautious and careful messaging intended to hold its fractious factions together in an effort to capture an imagined political center. Not wanting to offend the millions of people who went to the streets to rise up against police brutality, and likewise seduced by the idea that there were Republican suburban women voters repelled by Trump, Biden focused on civility, restoring the “soul of the nation,” and other vague and canned political promises. When Party leaders talk of winning portions of the Republican base, they intend to do so by reflecting their conservative politics, rather than challenging them. In the end, an airtight ninety-three percent of those who usually think of themselves as Republicans voted for Trump, with white women increasing their support for Trump from 2016.
More pointedly, the radical demands that emerged from the protests of the summer and the breakthrough of the slogan “Black Lives Matter” brought the simmering tensions within the Party to the surface. Whereas few elected officials supported the activist slogan to “defund the police,” rising support for Medicare for All as well as calls to cancel the rent and student-loan debt have put the cautious Democratic Party leadership on the defensive. Government-backed health care is a radical idea, as is canceling debt and other popular causes supported by tens of millions of people. There is no more radical idea in the United States than seeking to eliminate institutional racism, but although the Democratic Party is willing to wield it as a talking point, it has produced not a single substantive policy or initiative to actually do so. These divisions within the Party muddle its messaging, making it an ineffective tool for influencing public debates, not to mention actually convincing those outside of the Party’s milieu to see the world differently than they currently do. How else will the Democrats stop the bleeding of white workers from their ranks into the Republican Party? As Ocasio-Cortez said in a recent interview, assessing the Democrats’ performance in the election, “We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. Because if we keep losing white shares and just allowing Facebook to radicalize more and more elements of white voters and the white electorate, there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.”
Racial inequality means that the worst consequences of the pandemic will continue to have an outsized impact in the lives of Black families. COVID-19 is now the third-leading cause of death for African-Americans. But even the relative advantages that white workers have so far retained in the recovery will not be enough to overcome the material disadvantages imposed by American capitalism. You may keep your job, but it doesn’t pay enough to keep up with the bills that continue to come due. White workers may be better off, on the whole, than Black workers, but that is pyrrhic victory in a race to absolutely nowhere. Our economy is built on jobs that lead to nothing for some and to otherworldly riches for others. And they are usually connected. Those who toil in the low-wage world create the wealth enjoyed in the world of the elite and powerful. To be sure, this is an argument that can be won or lost, but it is not one that Nancy Pelosi will ever entertain.
The most effective tool the left has had in shifting public opinion and debate has been protest, along with interjecting provocative slogans and analysis into stale debates. The most enduring phenomenon during the Trump Administration has been public protest and demonstrations: the four million people who gathered across the country to protest after Trump’s Inauguration, the airport protests of his racist Muslim ban, the public-school teachers’ strikes of 2019, the high-school students who have marched since Parkland against gun violence and for climate justice. Then there is the awesome size of this past summer’s Black Lives Matters protests. Between fifteen and twenty-six million people participated in the summer uprisings against police brutality and murder sparked by the death, under a policeman’s knee, of George Floyd. Despite claims to the contrary by Republicans, the overwhelming character of those demonstrations was nonviolent.
The outpouring of the public into the streets in response to the failures of the American state began during the Trump Administration. But the pressures of the pandemic and the absence of any federal unemployment aid since July are not going away. The pandemic is as bad in the United States today as it has ever been, if measured by the daily count of new cases. The pressures created by the absence of federal assistance since July are peaking. After this election, tens of millions of Black voters once again will be praised for saving the Party, even as they continue to die by the thousands; they will expect more than congratulations. This past summer, the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement tasted its power and its ability to interrupt the usual political conversations, which have so often left the needs of Black communities behind. The movement that changed the political fortunes of the Democratic Party through fevered efforts to get out the vote is here to stay. Changing a corrupt administration for an inept one will be hard to accept when there is so much at stake. Indeed, one of the surprises of this election was the gains made by Trump among Black and Latino voters, especially in South Texas. If ordinary Democrats begin to believe that it is the Republican Party that can guarantee employment and a booming economy, even when the spoils are unfairly shared, then the Democrats’s homey bromides about unity and healing will alienate more than attract.
After the uprising, elected officials across the country claimed to have heard the grievances, describing newfound epiphanies about systemic racism and promising to confront the layers of injustice that inhibit Black social mobility. Fulfilling these promises has been impossible. The problem is in part the cruel refusal of the Republican Party to negotiate a new stimulus package, which would include hundreds of millions of dollars in support for local governments. But it’s more than just partisan gridlock and an inability to cut a deal. To reduce American racism and inequality to politics, partisan or otherwise, is to ignore the fact that our economy is organized around human suffering. Whether it is the refusal of the federal government to increase the minimum wage, or a skewed tax code that allows the richest Americans to use loopholes to avoid payments while extracting the maximum amount from the ranks of the working class, or the unrestrained rise in the costs of food, shelter, health care, and education because of the valorization of market principles as the ultimate expression of freedom, systemic inequity is not an error but an emblem of American capitalism. The two parties have worked to create a condition under which the spoils of economic exploitation are increasingly concentrated at the very top, and practically everyone else struggles to make ends meet.
The deprivation created by this grotesque imbalance does not self-correct with a redistribution of wealth and resources, so ordinary people have been forced to demand those changes. Police brutality was the precipitating event of this past summer’s uprising, but those events were also protests against this economic reality. That is why the demand to “defund the police” resonated so widely with demonstrators and those sympathetic to the movement. Communities of poor Black people in the United States are, by nature, suspect. They warrant particular and excessive surveillance by police, who understand the conditions that create those communities’s social disposability as an invitation to abuse them. Political demands to redistribute public money from the police to programs that can address economic inequality and racial injustice are the only way to overcome these disadvantages. That was certainly the case this past summer. It is also what ignited the streets in West Philadelphia in the waning days of October.
The likely gridlock in Congress next year will lead to more stagnation in local government, as communities become hamstrung by a lack of federal funding. But the failures of electoral politics create fertile ground for organizing. Last June, around the time that the National Guard left Philadelphia, activists from Occupy Philadelphia Housing Authority (P.H.A.), the Workers Revolutionary Collective, Black and Brown Workers Cooperative, ACT UP Philadelphia, and other groups organized an encampment of homeless people alongside the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. On a baseball field set between high-rise condominiums and Philadelphia’s cultural epicenter, multicolored tents became a symbol of the city’s summerlong struggle against racism and inequality. The field was just steps from where, two weeks earlier, thousands of Philadelphians had gathered to honor George Floyd and protest police brutality.
Within a few days, fifty people had arrived to stay in the camp, where residents and activist organizers quickly assembled a list of six demands, among them the provision of permanent low-income housing and the firing of police officers who treat the homeless poorly. Shortly thereafter, two other camps were established: one behind the Philadelphia Art Museum, near the main encampment, and another near the headquarters of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, in Sharswood, a Black working-class neighborhood. Sterling Johnson, an attorney and one of the organizers of the direct action, made the connection between the broader Black Lives Matter movement and the many different assaults on Black life in Philadelphia, including the dearth of affordable housing. The housing encampments were safe havens for those who are particularly vulnerable to assault when living on the streets. “Talk about Black Lives Matter, Johnson said, “We’re talking about Black disabled people, we’re talking about Black drug users, we’re talking about Black sex workers, and we’re talking about Black women.”
For a hundred and twenty-six days, the encampments provided space for people to live safely outdoors during the summer months and, at the same time, dramatized the crisis of affordable housing in the city. On August 25th, the city received the legal go-ahead to commence evictions, but officials were reluctant to follow through with the removal of the residents. After the events of the summer, Mayor Jim Kenney seemed wary of sparking a new confrontation with the homeless and their allies, and instead negotiated unprecedented concessions to clear the encampments. As part of a settlement, the city agreed to provide social services for many of the people who had been living in the encampments and to transfer ownership of fifty viable properties to former encampment residents, who will, in turn, create a community land trust insuring that the properties remain low-income housing. The settlement also allows about fifty people, mainly mothers and their children, to remain in twelve Philadelphia Housing Authority properties that they have taken over since the pandemic struck.
The activists in Philadelphia will tell you that the housing that they have secured is a drop in the bucket, but the fact that overwhelming housing need still exists should not detract from their achievement. These local activists have provided tangible tactical options in the ongoing struggle to secure safe, sound, and decent housing for the poor and working class in Philadelphia and beyond. And they have brought attention to the ways in which the local public housing authority fails to do its most basic task: provide housing to those in need. The terms of the Philadelphia agreement are not only a jolt to a burgeoning local movement for housing justice. The activists occupied green spaces and abandoned homes—and the imagination of those wondering what housing justice could look like amid the glacial response of local and federal governments. As millions face eviction and other forms of dispossession and displacement, the question of what to do hangs in the air. Philadelphia activism is only one node in the web of what ordinary people may be willing to do to defend themselves as public officials waste precious time.
Of course, the tumult across the country has had some effect on the composition of Congress. Over the past several years, young candidates of color have been motored into political office by the desire for our elected officials to reflect our greatest ambitions. The so-called Squad, whose members are congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, has two newcomers on the way: Cori Bush, from Missouri, and Jamaal Bowman, from New York. They represent the best in electoral politics today. There are now democratic socialists on city councils across the country; in Chicago, they are numerous enough to have organized a socialist caucus.
These are important developments and will be crucial in pushing for reforms at the local and national level. But the limits of electoral politics are what have brought us to this moment. The left never leads in the Democratic Party, no matter how much it preaches “accountability” and pledges to hold the feet of Party leaders to the fire. The reality is that as long as we have a two-party system, where the winner takes all, the reactionary politics of the Republican Party will always create the right amount of pressure to discipline activists to go with the old guard, as we have all done with Biden. The stakes will always be too high. The real levers to hold liberal leadership accountable can’t exist within the Party but must exist outside of it—or the left needs its own party reflecting its actual politics and priorities.
The need in this country dwarfs the best of what Biden has put on the table for changing our current condition. But the demonstrations of the summer, the ongoing campaigns for mutual aid, and the growing movement against evictions are demonstrable proof that power is not only generated in mainstream politics but can be garnered through collective organizing and acts of solidarity. They also foretell a future in which the country does not return to a long-forgotten normal but is animated by protests, strikes, occupations, and the ongoing struggle for food, medicine, care, housing, justice, and democracy.
Read More About the 2020 Election
- Joe Biden has won, and American democracy survives Donald Trump, David Remnick writes.
- Trump has survived impeachment, twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations, and thousands of lawsuits. His luck may well end now that Joe Biden will be the next President.
- What happens if Trump fights the election results?
- Here is what you can do if Trump stages a coup.
- For the G.O.P., the future may look like Florida, which is becoming less white but not much less conservative. Can Republicans become a multiracial working-class party?
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