A speech for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the event of an election outcome

Thank you. Thank you. Thank… et cetera.

Thank you to all those good people who had hope and worked their Democratic butts off in this campaign. Democratic and, in some instances, Republican butts off.

Thank you.

We don’t deserve you. Really.

For God’s sake, we had the White House for 12 of the past 16 years! For 20 of the past 32! How are we not responsible for this shemozzle? We were up against a clown, a kleptocrat, a felon, a friend of dictators, a would-be dictator himself. And given a choice between me and the clown, half the voters of America voted for the clown. In the richest country on earth, they voted for the nearest thing to a fascist movement we’ve seen since the 1930s.

Of course, we can blame Fox News and Elon Musk. We can blame a host of bad actors, none worse than those Republicans in federal and state legislatures who for 30 years have seen it as their patriotic duty to thwart every effort to make this country fairer and saner. And we can blame the people who voted for Trump – though in a democracy it doesn’t do to fault the people, even when they are voting for a cretin or an autocrat.

But there’s no way round the fact of our own responsibility. Every doorknocker, telephoner and leaflet dropper knows what the hardest sell was – it was our story. Not just the past three and half years of it, but the 30 years before that. Selling the three and a half years was hard enough when the story of the man telling the story extended through every one of the preceding 30 years and another 20 before that.

But Joe Biden stepped aside, and the donations flooded in. Our funds were bottomless. We had joy. We had laughter. We had hope. The Democratic Party had the glow it always needs.

Even old Republicans – “Republicans of (belated) conscience” – said they would vote for us. These scrupulous ladies and gentlemen did not come our way because they liked our Infrastructure Bill, our industrial policy, our extensions to the Affordable Care Act, our investment in renewables, our commitment to the reproductive rights of women, or because we halved child poverty. No, they were adamantly against most of them, but the depravities of Donald Trump were more than self-respect, good taste or the affection of their grandchildren allowed.

And having learnt that all Joe Biden’s Rooseveltian initiatives were as nothing to a population hardened in their loathing and distrust of government, we had no choice but to hoover up the votes of every American who, if it was the only thing they shared with us, still respected their country’s institutions – or at least saw them as useful to their interests.

But when we welcomed them, it only went to show that our story was still a dog. If we’d had something better to say for ourselves, we wouldn’t be welcoming Dick Cheney’s support – speaking of felons, liars, kleptocrats and would-be dictators. Not to say draft dodgers and chickenhawks. Cheney and his little neocon cabal laid half the foundations of the present chaos. I should have told them we didn’t need their stinking votes. But we did need them.

Trump was the easy part for us. The hard thing was dodging our part in his success. The truth is we laid the other half of his foundations. We did it for three decades. It’s not to forgive the Republican congress, whose obduracy put the idea of triangulation in Bill Clinton’s head, but that idea, which began as a tactic, quickly became the first principle of progressive politics. We became the tactic. In a boom economy, it all made such perfect sense.

Taking on Republican policies worked so well at the 1996 election, who could blame the Clinton crew for wanting more of the same? It turned out that giving big business everything they wanted – deregulating, privatising, offshoring, globalising, paying about half the tax they had paid two decades earlier – was good for everyone. Trickle-down economics – why hadn’t we thought of it before? Let them eat Walmart. Neoliberalism laid waste to millions of jobs, small businesses, towns and communities. But it made Clinton a two-term president.

Following Reagan’s example, his New Democrat administration enabled ever greater concentrations of corporate wealth and power, including power over the new communications technology – monopoly power. At the same time, despite government investment in education and training for the shiny new jobs of the new economy, the policies created a reservoir of disenchantment and anger. You take more than wages when you take away jobs: did we Democrats need this explained to us, or were our lives too busy and exciting to give a damn? Now that Trump has fused all that rage into a mass cult backed by corporate power, and people speak credibly of American fascism, can we see how we provided one of its essential preconditions?

We found out where banking deregulation led in 2008. Who can ever forget the expressions of surprise in Alan Greenspan’s testimony? He was in a state of “shocked disbelief”, he said. You would have sworn he was the primary victim of the collapse.

But the old Ayn Rand devotee was not long discouraged. “This crisis will pass,” he said, “and America will re-emerge with a far sounder financial system.” And sure enough, the banks were bailed out, and the real victims were left on uncontested ground for Tea Party populists. And you know where that led, too.

We did as much as the Republicans to generate economic inequality. We’d been giving up on blue-collar workers for years. We’d been giving up on unions. We were the party of the meritocrats, the well-educated, well-informed, well-heeled, well-motivated liberal elites.

Inequality was a deforming feature of the country when Barack Obama won in 2008: now it is grotesque. Having made ourselves the party of the left Brahmins, in the Obama years we added insult to that injury by presenting too often as the party of unyielding political correctness. Sure, there were sound liberal principles involved. And identity politics, likewise, is generally a claim on justice. But both liberal principles and personal identities are most secure where the values and institutions of a pluralist democracy are firmly agreed, which requires, at a minimum, decent wages and conditions, and decent healthcare, aged care and childcare – a more perfect union in a broader sense.

Those things should be our party’s meat and drink. We should never give up on them and never stop going to the places where Bernie Sanders went with policies to make amends. Instead, we knocked Sanders out of the game, went chasing celebrity endorsements and, as a comforter for our liberal sensibilities, could not resist provoking and widening Trump’s electorate by describing the aggrieved and disaffected as racists, misogynists, xenophobes and deplorables. Why not just “morons”? It might have narrowed the field a bit.

No busload of billionaire donors, no team of genius advisers, no phalanx of lawyers could have done more for Trump’s ambitions than we did. We gave him the raw material to work with, and never wondered if our condescension was not making his work easier. We convinced ourselves that democracy could coexist with massive disparities in wealth and power, much as our liberal, egalitarian perspective coexists happily enough with our privileges.

On such grand compromises our nation is built. Then again, our history is also punctuated by days of reckoning.

It is to Joe Biden’s inextinguishable credit that he brought us to our senses in 2021. He recognised that there can be no political democracy without a substantial measure of economic democracy. He rebooted the forgotten notion of a moral economy. He declared openly and freely that we had been on the wrong path with the corporations since Reagan and Clinton: that their unregulated power not only threatens the social and economic fabric but, as Trump’s rise has shown, puts individual liberty and democracy itself at risk. And he knew you can’t triangulate with an autocrat or a madman.

Joe led the Democratic Party away from its worst indulgences, got government doing the necessary, imaginative and concrete things that improve the lives of millions, restore faith and, we continue to hope, somehow make Americans as Walt Whitman wanted them made, as “separate and complete subject[s] for freedom”. We have made the corporations in that very mould, but millions of our citizens still await their turn.

Joe tried to give us a new story. He knew he could not tell it and convert national opinion in one term, so he wanted a second one.

But the story needed one thing that Joe never gave it. At the start, to get it going, it needed contrition. Joe never confessed; he never told the nation the Democrats had got too much wrong, that there’d be no Donald Trump without us. A mea culpa as a kind of rhetorical triangulation: we breach the walls of their belligerence and grant ourselves an honourable beginning.

But it’s too late for that. Mine’s a simple owning up, on behalf of the party that made me the candidate.

I have something else to confess – I don’t know how to stop the madness. I don’t know if it’s even possible. I suspect half the population don’t want it to stop. The people are divided and the system’s broken. I feel like history is rushing over us and we are powerless. It gets me thinking of those 19th century paintings by Thomas Cole: crumbling ruins, despoiled nature, the decay of empires, our own fate foretold. I see Joe Biden in those paintings, the melancholy little figure by the Doric column.

But let us be joyful. We must be. We must renew – joyfully. We need a grand compromise. Another one.

In a perfect world we’d have a Constitutional Convention, like 1787 in Philadelphia. Nothing much would come of it, of course. That’s almost certain. We can’t agree on anything in this country. In the end, probably we’d still be stuck with what we’ve got: the Electoral College, the Second Amendment, life terms on the Supreme Court, state rights.

But, who knows, the effort might turn the engine over. And it’d be a shot in the arm for the local economy. Big boost for retail and tourism. We could get side shows in – tech shows, car shows, gun shows, why not? Reach across the aisle. Springsteen would sing for us. Even Taylor. We could put on the biggest concert since Woodstock – whenever that was.

It’s a good idea. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? Why didn’t someone else think of it and tell me? It would have gone down well in Pennsylvania.

A Constitutional Convention. George and Amal could chair some of the sessions. Quentin could make a film. No, not him... someone.

Anyone else got any bright ideas? I’m on Instagram, if you don’t know.

Don Watson
Don Watson is an award-winning author.