Bernie Sanders Is Smack on Target on Democratic Party’s Abandonment of Working-Class Americans

While I was growing up in Ghana some two generations ago, the postmortem punditry almost invariably revolved around military coup-d’etats, which was the main political dietary fare and course at the time. Here in the United States of America, however, it routinely revolves around General Elections. In the latest instance, much of the discourse, as it is naturally to be expected, revolves around the scandalous and the epic loss of the 2024 Presidential Election by Vice-President Kamala Devi Harris. I have already written about the first major problem that I found with the 2024 Electioneering Campaign with Ms. Harris and so do not intend to unnecessarily reprise the same issue or issues in the present column, except to quickly underscore the fact, on the whole, the “partially incumbent” Democratic Party Candidate, going into the November 5, 2024 Presidential Election, was parochially focused on the thrust of her targeted audience, almost in exactly in the same manner as her most formidable political opponent and the 45th Former President of the United States of America and, presently, soon-to-be 47th President of the United States of America.

And it is precisely such an unsavory and a strategically unattractive and conspicuously scandalous approach to her largely lackluster electioneering campaign battle that the 83-year-old veteran Senator from the State of Vermont pointed out, in the wake of the stunning loss of the 2024 US Presidential Election to former President Donald John Trump, the burly and tough-talking half-German and half-Scottish 78-year-old former Reality TV Host and Real Estate and Gambling Casino Mogul, when the Democratic Party-Caucusing Independent Senator expressed his complete lack of any surprise that the former Attorney-General of the State of California would so scandalously lose the 2024 Presidential Election to the New York City-born and New York State and New York City-estranged, rhetorically rambunctious Mr. Trump, who had been facing multiple criminal charges revolving around both his putatively unpolished and gruff and violent personal behavior, including charges of sexual violation of several women, and gross entrepreneurial misconduct.

According to Senator Sanders, it had been curiously and uncharacteristically clear to all politically observant and critically thinking and morally discerning American citizens that the present leadership of the outgoing Democratic Party-sponsored Biden Administration had inadvisably long-abandoned Working-Class Americans who constituted a critical mass of the Three-Distinctive Classes of Twenty-First Century America, namely, the relatively thin crust of Upper-Class Oligarchs, conspicuously and flamboyantly represented by Messrs. Trump and Elon Musk; the Middle-Class, whom Vice-President Harris proudly and unabashedly and almost exclusively claimed to represent during most of the duration of her Presidential-Election Campaign and the already-mentioned American Working and, of course, the routinely ignored and completely forgotten Lumpen-Poor Underclass whom both two major Presidential Candidates also pretended to represent (See “Bernie Sanders Rips Democrats After Kamala Harris Loss: ‘No Great Surprise’” Newsweek 11/6/24).

Indeed, in an opinion column that I wrote and published about a fortnight ago, this author expressed anxiety over the fact that Vice-President Harris rather strangely appeared to be almost completely oblivious to the fact that the overwhelming majority or, at least, a significant block of American citizens, composed largely of the Lumpen-Poor and the Working-Class, was highly likely to determine the outcome of the 2024 United States’ Presidential Election, which was probably the overriding reason why Ms. Harris, the daughter of a Tamil-Nadu Native Indian Mother and a Multiracial Jamaican Father, both of whom were Doctoral-Degree Holders and professionally Upscale Academics, kept incessantly and carelessly and, some would even say, almost recklessly harping on the fact of her proud Middle-Class Background and Heritage, as well as her avid intention to almost exclusively work on behalf of the socioeconomic comfort and wellbeing of the American Middle-Class.

In my aforementioned column, one of three or four that I have written about Vice-President Harris in the last six months, or so, this author mentioned the prompt and the imperative need for the Democratic Party’s Second Female Presidential Nominee and Second Female Vice-Presidential Candidate to ensure that whenever she highlighted the fact of her proud Middle-Class socioeconomic and cultural background and heritage, that she also highlighted the presence and the significance of the Great Community of the American Working-Class who historically constituted the foundation of the very construction or making of Modern-American Civilization, made up of a core colony of enslaved Continental Africans whose descendants are presently labeled as “African Americans,” White migrants and immigrants from Western and Central Europe, and later from Eastern Europe and the Asian Subcontinents of India and China and, presently, Latin Americans, excluding Colonial and Postcolonial Latin Americans of Mexican descent whose roots extend much deeper and farther than the rest of the Latino/a Community.

The abject and the conspicuous lack of any detailed and comprehensive socioeconomic development program and/or agenda critically and specially targeted at the American Working-Class and the Lumpen-Poor, no doubt, played a very significant role in the massive drop in electoral support for both Candidate Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole. There is also what has been perennially and routinely labeled as “Voter Disaffection for Incumbents,” made up of ruling parties or governments, local administrations and administrators and individual leaders and politicians. There are, of course, a legion of other factors as well, among them Gender, Race, Immigration and the presently turbulent economic climate in the country as a whole, a problem that may have further been accentuated and underscored by the widely reported exponential rise in the value of stocks on the global market.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
November 7, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]