US elections: how liberals react to the defeat of Kamala Harris – they blame voters

If celebrity endorsements won elections, Democrats would never lose. Kamala Harris had Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Charlie XCX and Beyoncé. But, alas, elections are determined by ordinary voters, since voters can choose when the choice is between two bad options.

In the wake of Harris’s spectacular defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, it’s worth seeing the gnashing of teeth and lack of introspection on the part of liberal commentators. To be a true card-carrying liberal, you must know and learn nothing except how to blame others for your self-defeating policies.

Democrats had nothing to offer the millions of ordinary Americans living paycheck to paycheck, hurt by inflation in an economy that caters only to the rich. To say this is obviously to justify the terrible behavior of white American voters. But I hate to break it down into the liberal Instagram bubble: Kamala Harris’s base was the capitalist donor class, not the working class.

For many liberals, it is too difficult to try to understand what life looks like from the point of view of ordinary Americans, be they white, black, Arab or Hispanic. No, let’s continue blaming the voters, it’s more cathartic – they did it, fools again!

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle, a longtime member of the liberal commentator, believes a Trump victory would mark the end of the US as “the most important and reliable nation of the free world”. This is not how America is perceived by the world, which largely views it as a murderous rogue state.

Kettle then takes a tour of America’s recent global noble cause.

“Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been reluctant to use America’s big stick, most recently, tragically, in the Middle East. But now there is no hiding from reality,” he writes, using some kind of crazy anti-reality drug to describe US foreign policy as if the recent American wars never happened.

Obama and Biden Wars

In fact, during the Obama presidency we saw a “surge” in Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi (“We came, we saw, he died,” to quote Hillary Clinton) and the drone program in Pakistan. Yemen and Somalia, and also support Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

The lack of self-reflection among liberal commentators following Harris’s spectacular defeat at the hands of Donald Trump is noteworthy.

In Syria, Obama refused to directly intervene in the civil war after the disaster in Libya. Instead, the US enlisted pro-Western Arab regimes and Turkey to take over the military pursuit of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The end result was the bloodiest war of this century, at least until recently.

Then, to top off this supposed small stick, there was the war against the Islamic State group, itself fermenting in US-run prisons in post-invasion Iraq, a war that Trump intensified.

As Stop the War said in his post-election comments, Trump is no peacemaker when it comes to Israel and the Middle East: “Trump’s support for Netanyahu’s policies is clear. And for all his talk of wanting to stop wars, his record when he last held office shows that he not only failed to secure peace, but redoubled efforts on the US war and proxy wars in Syria, Somalia , Afghanistan and Yemen.”

After taking a break from Trump, Obama’s always pro-war Vice President Joe Biden, once elected, withdrew from Afghanistan (embracing Trump’s policies), ending a 20-year war while imposing sweeping sanctions on an already poverty-stricken population. population.

Better for whom?

Then, without pausing, Biden plunged straight into a well-planned decoy operation in Ukraine while the Ukrainians were faced with the false promise of liberation from Russia – a war that has so far cost $174 billion. The real price was paid by hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fighting the better-armed Russians. Trump has promised to end a war that American voters are tired of funding (their government can’t even find money for paid parental leave for its citizens).

Biden’s Second War began on October 7, 2023: an unlimited supply of 2,000-pound bombs was delivered to Benjamin Netanyahu to level the Gaza Strip after Hamas attacks—less a “big stick” than an apocalyptic war waged against a densely populated prison camp, but then expanded to Lebanon in 2024.

It all ended, unsurprisingly, in Harris’ defeat. Kettle can’t contain his bitterness towards American voters – a very liberal view of the shocking failure of the Democrats. “American voters did a terrible and unforgivable thing this week. We must not shy away from saying that they have turned their backs on the common spirit and rules that have shaped the world, generally for the better, since 1945.”

Overall for the better, for whom? This is not a question any self-respecting liberal imperialist would ever ask, because the answer is too obvious to mention in polite company: white Americans and Europeans, of course. Can we really say that the world in which the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants live has improved significantly under US leadership, especially in recent decades?

The chaos caused by drug wars and wars on terrorism since the 1990s in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East has fueled a migrant crisis that Trump says he will fix by deporting millions of migrants.

Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism

To be fair, Kettle is right about one thing: the election of Trump and the US policies that preceded him should finally put an end to the dangerous myth that the UK and US are sister countries. “In the wake of Trump’s re-election, claims of commonality are a dangerous self-deception. We need to wipe these crazy stars out of our sight.”

What he doesn’t say is that after 9/11, the US and UK were united by imperial adventurism, a willingness to destroy nation-states and fight forever wars in the name of fighting terrorism, while giving terrorists a reason to do so. they need to fight. Behind this is Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, based on our shared history of settler colonialism and militarism. In Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, the results of this policy are clear: destructive war and genocide without end.

There is no sign that Starmer will have the courage to break away from America’s terrible wars in Gaza, Lebanon and the wider Middle East.

Kettle regains his sanity in his final historical analysis: “The declining imperial powers are all fighting for their legacies, just as 19th-century powers such as Britain, France and even Russia do so in different ways. The US, a much later imperial power, has barely begun this process.”

So we must not be dragged into the abyss by a faltering US empire that has allowed Britain to continue to dream of becoming a major military player on the world stage.

But in Keir Starmer we do not have a leader who will allow us to break with this “overbearing past”. He has hitched his wagon to the US and, like his predecessor Tony Blair, who rode to Baghdad riding George W. Bush’s shoulder straps, there is no sign that Starmer will have the courage to break away from America’s terrible wars in Gaza, Lebanon and the Middle East. generally. .

These are wars in which America is engaged in defense of Western hegemony and wealth, based on the legacy of the division of the region by the British Empire.

If Britain is lucky, Trump will fulfill his promise and end all these wars. Otherwise, the UK will be dragged into even more bloody chaos and shame, paid for in the blood of countless Arab and perhaps Iranian lives.