It’s not misogyny that defeated Kamala Harris. There is a certain stubbornness hidden behind this explanation of the Republican Party’s decisive victory, due to which Donald Trump has once again been installed in the White House.
This is the same insincerity with which the Harris-Walz campaign was conducted for months. In the face of an ‘unexpected’ defeat, Democrats in the US, along with other politicians around the world, would do well to introspect. What exactly was the problem?
It’s easy to use feminism to explain Trump’s victories over two women in less than a decade. What’s easily being forgotten here is that he was hastily recruited to replace Joe Biden, who of course lost to Trump. An afterthought. Democrats were desperate to fight the anti-incumbency wave but they addressed it in the wrong way.
a sense of guilt
Harris was used by her party as guilt-inducing bait in the 2024 presidential election and her defeat is an important lesson for everyone. First and most obviously, you can’t blame voters for supporting you unconditionally. The Harris-Walz campaign doubled down on making undecided voters feel guilty for even considering change. There was a complete lack of self-awareness on the part of campaign designers and ideological Democrat voters that their policies might have anything to do with people’s dissatisfaction. Or they knew and, armed with the weapons of collective guilt, quietly ignored it. This complacency led to a stir.
The clearest example of this is the tone-deafness of the Democrats regarding the war in West Asia. In a year filled with constant anti-war campaigns and demonstrations, the Democrats believed that Dick Cheney was their trump card. George W. Cheney’s hawkish approach as Bush’s Vice President left a legacy of violence and human rights violations in the US, and the country resorted to military intervention everywhere. Harris’s claims to peacemaking fail in the face of such raw irony. Depending on how frustrated or angry they were, anti-war Democrats walked out of the polls, cross-voted for Trump, or voted for a third option to mark their disagreement.
rough cosmopolitanism
In the domestic arena of immigration, the Democrats’ adaptation of what political scientists call the principle of ‘thick cosmopolitanism’ did not help them win a second consecutive term. The theory argues that when people realize their group’s culpability in causing harm to people living in distant countries, they adopt a cosmopolitan helping attitude. The inherent limits of the theory, as demonstrated by Nicholas Faulkner, and the revelation of the Democrats’ hypocrisy, ensured that voters rejected their anti-crime political campaign. This may partly explain why a large immigrant group leaned toward Trump.
But Democrats were counting on crushing dissent with guilt. Unfortunately for them, this strategy backfired. Scholars Gunn and Wilson propose that collective guilt, an important political tool, is often undermined by defensiveness. The Democratic Party forgot that just as attacks on personal identity put individuals on the defensive, people respond defensively when their social identity is threatened. By calling voters racist and sexist before, during, and after voting, Democrats fostered defensiveness among many demographic groups.
No one knew what Kamala was
Kamala Harris’ campaign raised and spent more money than Donald Trump’s, but what was the point? The political message barely escaped the rhetoric of ‘Save America from Trump’. Struggling with high inflation rates, American voters felt invisible when no concrete policy measures were offered for this ‘Save America’ campaign. Republicans are guilty of running the same mediocre campaign, but they had an anti-incumbency wave in their favor. Memories of Trump’s previous presidency were fading, and that helped. Trump’s campaign relied on the fickleness of public memory and placed its bets on people’s ability to forget the past when they are preoccupied with ongoing concerns.
Team Harris, on the other hand, used this election to weaponize memories of a fractured American past to correct historical wrongs. Psychologists warn that people do not necessarily respond well when confronted with their own problematic actions. Political scientist Eunbin Chung proposed in the context of East Asia that affirmation of national identity could be employed as “a way to disarm the defensiveness induced by recognizing one’s country’s guilt, allowing greater social responses to emerge.” Permission is granted”. However, the Democrats failed to give a positive twist to the American identity to counter its checkered racial history.
competitive defensiveness
Add to this the unfettered support given to Israel by the Biden administration despite growing anti-war voices even within Democratic Party activists, and we get a game of competitive defensiveness all around. The leadership and the voters stopped listening to each other.
Therefore, to judge this debacle as merely a misogynistic mistake is oversimplifying matters. This way the Democrats want to continue playing the blame game without any introspection.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based writer and academic.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
