The Canary Dies

The darkest moment of the Democratic defeat on November 5 must have been the concession speech of outgoing Ohio senator Sherrod Brown. A loyal union supporter, he was one of the few members of his party to have resisted Bill Clinton’s neoliberal onslaught, the one that eventually caused all of us to be swallowed up by a popular victory for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Brown’s speech borrowed the language of his political ancestors: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson. On the evening of Kamala Harris’s defeat, his rhetoric echoed the legacy of FDR’s New Deal: “We believe that all work has dignity…we believe in the power of people over corporate special interests…we believe that if you love this country, you fight for the people who make it work.” Instead of wearing an American-flag lapel pin, favored by more conformist politicians, Brown’s lapel pin depicted a canary in a cage, reminiscent of the miners who used to bring real canaries into coal mines to detect toxic gases.

But Brown did not detect the toxins in the political air early enough to save his seat—he was ousted by Bernie Moreno, a former Mercedes-Benz car salesman. Like Trump, Moreno sometimes neglected to pay his employees their full salaries, and, like Trump and his penchant for exaggeration, Moreno claimed to have earned a master’s degree in business, despite having only a bachelor’s degree.

Sherrod Brown was strangely circumspect in his fight to amplify the voices of ordinary people. His tactical course since 2021 reflects how far the Democratic Party has distanced itself from the American working class (Brown didn’t attend the Chicago convention or appear with Kamala Harris during her campaign.) The Rust Belt, which was devastated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is lined with former union factory workers who have vowed to never vote for a Democrat again.  So Robert Teeple, who worked for a spark plug factory in Fostoria, Ohio, before it relocated to Mexico; he told me this a year ago during the national strike of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Although Teeple was able to find a comparable job at a Jeep plant, he said that Trump was their only hope.

Kamala Harris’s rushed campaign did not allow her to win over Teeple and his peers, all victims of policies normally associated with the Republican Party. Given her association with the Biden Administration’s programs, the vice president did not contradict or challenge her boss. When asked what she would have done differently over the past four years, she replied, “Not a thing comes to mind.” Later, wanting to distinguish herself from Biden, she added, “You asked me what’s the difference between Joe Biden and me…I’m gonna have a Republican in my cabinet.”

During her doomed campaign, Harris made at least three appearances with anti-Trump republican Liz Cheney, but none with Bernie Sanders, the darling of the left. This is not surprising given that Harris was bound hand and foot by liberal politics. According to the New York Times, before reviewing drafts of her speeches or talking points, she would often ask, “Has Tony seen this?” Tony West, her brother-in-law, is chief legal officer for Uber, a company that is emblematic of the new deregulated economy popular among Democrats devoted to the policies of Clinton and Obama. Add to this Harris’s relative silence over the violence in Gaza and the senseless war between Russia and Ukraine, her solicitude toward Big Tech, and her muted response to reducing the growing wealth gap, and it becomes clear why her words were seen as weak in the face of Trump’s incoherent but grandiose statements.

Some commentators blamed Trump’s win on sexism, including that of Latino voters, accusing it of sinking the Democrats. Really? Let us look at Mexico, the cradle of machismo. Supported by the social policies of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who doubled the minimum wage, thus lifting millions of citizens out of poverty), Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish woman, won the presidency in a Catholic country with nearly 60% percent of the vote.

In the summer of 2022, the Democratic Party defied Bernie Sanders and refused to renew the child tax credit, which had made it possible to halve the child poverty rate at the start of the Biden Administration. Following Sanders’s raucous Senate speech, working-class champion Sherrod Brown expressed frustration with his presumed ally: “Come on, Bernie!” Not a single Democratic senator voted for Sanders’s child-tax-credit amendment to the Inflation Reduction Act.

What happened to the more than seven million voters who supported Biden in 2020, who apparently didn’t vote for Harris? Canaries suffocated by the toxic gases of neoliberal lies.