In Philadelphia on Tuesday night, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump met for what may be their only debate before November’s presidential election. As thousands of Palestine-solidarity protesters clashed with riot police outside the venue, the capitalist candidates treated the nation to 90 minutes of lies, half-lies, and personal attacks.
Phony appeals to the working class
Sealed away on a pristine production stage at the National Constitution Center, both candidates aimed to dupe American workers into lining up behind them in November. “I intend to create an ‘opportunity economy,’” Harris said, “giving hard-working folks a break in bringing down the cost of living.”
Millions of workers—who have faced decades of attacks, declining living standards, chaos, and crisis under both Democratic and Republican administrations—may well wonder where this “opportunity economy” has been hiding in the nearly four years since Biden and Harris took over the executive branch.
Despite posing as a defender of the working class, Harris couldn’t help gloating over Wall Street’s support of her candidacy. She gleefully touted support for her “opportunity economy” plan from Goldman Sachs, the second largest investment bank on the planet, and the Wharton School of Business, whose distinguished alumni include billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump himself.
‘A president for all Americans’?
The absurd idea that Harris is the candidate of both workers and big capital dovetails with her main theme throughout the night: it is time for America to “turn the page” on the divisiveness of Donald Trump, which has loomed over bourgeois “democracy” in America for nearly a decade. The well-rehearsed Democrat repeated, no fewer than three times, the exact phrase, “We have so much more in common than what separates us.”
In a debate marked by a cavalcade of lies, this was the most insidious. Like all capitalist countries, America suffers from an irreconcilable class divide between the proletarian majority, which creates new value through our labor, and a tiny capitalist minority, which owns things for a living and feeds off our lifeblood. This parasitic minority rules through the agency of both parties. Harris twice promised to be a “president for all Americans” if she is elected, but this is a lie. She would be a president for the capitalists and the capitalists alone, just as she has been a loyal servant of this class as a prosecutor, senator, and vice president. You can’t serve two masters!
Unhinged rants
Trump stuck to his familiar playbook of phony anti-establishment rhetoric crafted to capture the anger of frustrated working-class Americans. Scapegoating migrants was top of the agenda, culminating in a slanderous tirade about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio: “They’re eating the dogs … They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Harris joined in on the immigrant bashing, chiding Trump for helping kill a Biden-Harris initiative that would have further cracked down on refugees fleeing economic chaos and climate catastrophe.
Between unhinged rants, Trump made some perfectly accurate points: that America is a declining nation, that its leaders are no longer able to dominate on the world stage, that the economy is in tatters, and that the Biden-Harris administration has proved incapable of fixing it.
This is all true, but Trump is equally incapable of reversing the decline of American imperialism, as he proved during his four years in office. Trump is a renegade bourgeois, aggrandizing himself by tapping into deep-seated resentment of a capitalist system in terminal decline. This is why most of his class has turned their backs on him, a fact Harris highlighted while celebrating her endorsement by none other than the imperialist mass murderer and former Republican Vice President, Dick Cheney.
Ruling-class unity
Despite trading numerous personal insults, the capitalist candidates found plenty of areas of agreement. In addition to mutual scapegoating of immigrant workers, both shamelessly scaremongered about China, Russia, and Iran in calculated attempts to stoke American chauvinism. Both went to bat for increased fossil fuel drilling, while never mentioning the fact that this year is on track to be the hottest in recorded history.
Most disgusting of all, Trump and Harris competed over who was the strongest supporter of the bloodsoaked Israeli regime. “She hates Israel,” Trump said, with Harris responding, “I have, my entire career and life, supported Israel and the Israeli people. He knows that.” Both swore to “defend” Israel, which is to say, both promised to continue underwriting the ongoing slaughter of the Palestinian people.
Workers need a party of our own!
The corporate media played the debate up as Harris’s first opportunity to “introduce herself to the nation.” Most of the superficial bourgeois commentators duly declared her the winner, after she compared favorably to the husk of Joe Biden, whose career in politics ended at the hands of Trump on a similar debate stage in June. But Harris’s polish only marks a return to the well-worn liberal pretense that it is not only possible, but desirable, for the capitalist establishment to manage its own historic decline.
Trump and Harris demonstrated once again that the capitalists are no longer fit to rule society. Whoever wins in November will be unable to contend with the crisis engulfing American and world capitalism, which has deep historical roots, and will mercilessly attack the working class in the vain hope of saving their system in the long term. American workers are rightly disgusted by the “options” presented to them, and it is up to the communist generation to point the way out. The first step along this path is to resolutely turn our backs on the rotten capitalist parties and build a party of our own.
