US elections: How liberals react to Kamala Harris’ defeat - blame the voters

If celebrity endorsement won elections, the Democrats would never lose. Kamala Harris had Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Charlie XCX, and Beyonce. But, alas, elections are determined by ordinary voters, inasmuch as voters can choose when the choice is between two versions of bad.

In the wake of Harris’s spectacular defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, the teeth-gnashing and lack of self-reflection of liberal commentators is something to behold. To be a true card-carrying liberal, you must know nothing and learn nothing, except how to blame others for your self-defeating politics.

The Democrats had nothing to offer millions of ordinary Americans living paycheque to paycheque who were hit by inflation in an economy that only serves the rich. To say this, apparently, is to excuse the appalling behaviour of white American voters. But I hate to break it to the liberal Instagram bubble: Kamala Harris’s base was the capitalist donor class, not the working class.

For many liberals, it’s too much to try and understand how life looks from the point of view of ordinary Americans, be they white, black, Arab or Latino. Nope, lets stick with blaming voters, it’s more cathartic - they did it, again, the fools!

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle - a long-time member of the liberal commentariat - believes that the Trump victory will mark the end of the USA as “the free world’s essential and reliable nation”. This is not how America is seen in a world that mostly views it as a bloodthirsty superpower.

Kettle then does a whistle-stop tour of America’s recent global noblesse oblige.

“Barack Obama and Joe Biden were each reluctant to wield America’s big stick, most recently and tragically in the Middle East. Now, though, there is no hiding from the realities,” he writes, channelling some kind of demented anti-reality drug to describe US foreign policy as if recent American wars never happened.

Obama and Biden's wars

In reality, during the Obama presidency we saw a “surge” in Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya and killing of Muammar Gaddafi (“We came, we saw, he died," to quote Hilary Clinton), and the drone programme in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, while also supporting the Saudi war in Yemen. 

The lack of self-reflection of liberal commentators in the wake of Harris’s spectacular defeat at the hands of Donald Trump is something to behold

In Syria, Obama swerved direct intervention in the civil war after the disaster of Libya. Instead the US engaged pro-western Arab regimes and Turkey to pick up the job of harassing the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with militant forces. The end result was the bloodiest war this century, at least until recently. 

Then, just to top off this alleged non big-stickness, there was the war against the Islamic State group, itself fermented in US-run prisons in post-invasion Iraq, a war Trump intensified.

As Stop the War said in its post-election comment, Trump is no peacemaker when it comes to Israel and the Middle East: “Trump’s support for Netanyahu's policy is clear. And for all his talk of wanting to stop wars, his record when he last held office shows that far from delivering peace, he doubled down on US war and proxy wars, in Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen.” 

Following the Trump interval, Obama’s always pro-war vice president Joe Biden, once elected, pulled out of Afghanistan (picking up a Trump policy), bringing an end to a 20-year war, while imposing swingeing sanctions on an already poverty-stricken populace.

Better, for whom?

Without a pause Biden then dived straight into a well-planned trap operation in Ukraine, with the false promise of liberation from Russia dangled in front of the Ukrainians - a war that has so far cost $174bn. The real price has been paid by hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fighting better-armed Russians. Trump has promised to end the war, which American voters have tired of funding (their government cannot even find the money for paid parental leave for its citizens).

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Biden's second war came along on 7 October 2023: a limitless supply of 2000lb bombs were delivered to Benjamin Netanyahu to flatten Gaza following the Hamas attacks - not so much "big stick" as apocalyptic war waged against a densely populated prison camp, then expanded into Lebanon in 2024.  

All this ended, not so surprisingly, with Harris’s defeat. Kettle cannot hold back on his bitterness toward US voters - a very liberal take on the Democrats’ shocking failure. “American voters have done a terrible and unforgivable thing this week. We should not flinch from saying they have turned away from the shared ethos and rules that have shaped the world, generally for the better, since 1945.”

Generally for the better, for whom? That’s not a question any self respecting liberal imperialist ever asks, because the answer is too obvious to mention in polite company: white Americans and Europeans, of course. Can we really claim that the world experienced by the vast majority of the planet was hugely improved under US leadership, especially in recent decades? 

The chaos unleashed by wars on drugs and wars on terror from the 1990s onwards in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East unleashed the migration crisis that Trump now says he will fix by deporting millions of migrants.

Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism

To be fair to Kettle, he is right on one thing: Trump’s election, and US policies dating back before him, should finally mark the end of the dangerous myth that Britain and the US are filial nations. “With Trump’s re-election, claims to commonality are dangerous self-delusion. We need to lose those infatuated stars from our eyes.”

What he doesn’t say is that what united the US and UK since the 9/11 attacks has been imperial adventurism, a willingness to smash up nation states and fight forever wars in the name of fighting terrorism, while actually giving terrorists the very reason they need to fight. Beneath this is Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, built on our common history of settler colonialism and militarism. In Lebanon and Gaza, the results of that policy are clear to see: devastating war, and genocide, with no end game. 

There is no sign Starmer has the courage to break with America’s ghastly wars in Gaza, Lebanon and the wider Middle East

Kettle rediscovers sanity in his concluding historical analysis: “All waning imperial powers struggle with their own inheritances, as 19th-century powers such as Britain, France and even Russia are all doing in different ways. The US, a much later imperial power, has barely begun the process.”

We must, then, not be dragged into the abyss by a flailing US empire, which has allowed Britain to continue the fantasy of being a major military player on the world stage. 

But in the person of 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 rather like his predecessor Tony Blair, who rode into Baghdad on George W Bush’s coattails, there is no sign Starmer has the courage to break with America’s ghastly wars in Gaza, Lebanon and the wider Middle East.

These are wars that America fights in defence of western hegemony and wealth, built on the legacy of the British empire’s carve-up of the region.

If the UK is lucky, Trump will do as promised and wind down all these wars. Otherwise the UK will be dragged on toward more bloody chaos and ignominy, paid in the blood of countless Arab and perhaps Iranian lives.