MALAIKA MAHLATSI: Biden may be out, but Harris and genocide-supporting Democrats have a mountain to climb

On Sunday evening, president of the United States of America (USA), Joe Biden, formally announced that he would be exiting from the presidential race.

The decision, which was not unexpected, came just weeks after his disastrous performance at the presidential debate held in Atlanta, Georgia, on the 27^th of June.

Biden’s performance was marked by incoherent ramblings and struggling to respond to questions.

Former president Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee, despite his self-assurance, was not necessarily much better. Like Biden, he struggled to respond to clear questions, and went off topic on many occasions. Both candidates punctuated their arguments with falsehoods and baseless claims about issues ranging from foreign policy to the domestic economy.

And not unexpectedly, both men launched personal attacks on each other, with Trump at one point referring to Biden as “a very bad Palestinian” – a statement intended to be derogatory, and which was described by various analysts as a form of anti-Palestinian racism.

But despite Trump’s lies, racism and crude attacks, he emerged as a stronger candidate only because Biden’s weaknesses were pronounced. Since then, there has been mounting pressure on the 81-year-old Biden to exit the presidential race. Concerns over his mental acuity and advanced age had many, including fellow members and leaders of the Democratic Party, fearful that he may not be able to beat Trump in the upcoming presidential election scheduled for the 5^th of November.

It was against this backdrop that a Biden. who had been defiant in his stance that he would seek re-election, ultimately dropped out of the race. Biden has since endorsed current Vice President, Kamala Harris, and will be supporting her nomination at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August.

Four years ago, Harris made history when she became the first Black woman vice president in the history of the USA.

The 59-year-old, who is a lawyer by training, was elected into the US Senate in 2016. Shortly thereafter, she mounted a run for the White House in the 2020 election, but did not garner adequate support, and ultimately withdrew and threw her weight behind Biden, who selected her as his running mate.

While Biden had vowed to select a woman as a running mate, there were some concerns that he would not choose Harris. This was after the 2019 presidential debate in which she challenged Biden on race politics. In that debate, Harris called out Biden for his past working relationship with two segregationist lawmakers.

She also criticised what she called his opposition to integration measures, specifically the busing of Black students to schools that were resistant to de-segregation. While Biden challenged this assertion and stated that he supported civil rights, Harris’s sentiments resonated with many Black people still reeling from the effects of the US’s history of structural and institutionalised racism.

Harris has many odds stacked against her.

For one thing, she is a Black woman in a country where racism is a very serious problem. Over the past few years, Black people in general, and Black women in particular, have been on the receiving end of an anti-diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) onslaught that has seen many sent to the slaughter.

While this has been more pronounced in academia, with cases such as those of former Harvard University president Professor Claudine Gay being removed from office, the political space has not been spared.

In addition to this, traditional supporters of the Democratic Party, which include minorities, have been fiercely critical of the Biden administration’s stance on the war on Palestine by Israel. Biden’s administration has been staunchly supporting Israel, defending its right to self-defence even as the war in Gaza rages on.

The war, which has been described as genocidal in character, has claimed the lives of nearly 40,000 Palestinians, most of them children, since the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7^th of October 2023.

Harris has regularly supported this war, even as she was one of the first high-ranking members of the administration to call for a humanitarian ceasefire. But the ongoing support of the Biden administration for Israel, punctuated by its rejection of International Court of Justice rulings against Israel and continued financial backing of Netanyahu’s war-mongering government, has alienated many traditional Democratic Party voters who have historically been repelled by the racist, homophobic, misogynistic and xenophobic posture of the Republican Party, and particularly of Trump himself.

But Harris’s biggest threat is the rise of an anti-immigrant sentiment that has found root in the USA, which Trump represents.

Under his presidency and on the current campaign trail, Trump has used immigration as a weapon of mobilisation. A 2017 report by the National Intelligence Council, titled: Global Trends: Paradox of Progress, highlights trends that are transforming the global landscape.

In its analysis of the global trends and key implications through 2035, it reports rising inequalities in developed countries are posing a real danger of deepening the wave of exclusionary identity politics. According to this analysis, weak growth in these countries is increasing tensions within and between societies, giving a rise to populism on the right and left.

This prophetic assessment has materialised in Europe, where right-wing politics are on the rise. The migrant question is at the centre of these politics, and parties that promise to eradicate immigrants are increasingly growing popular among locals, whose frustrations with weakening economies, rising inequalities and government inefficiencies are being blamed on immigrants.

Trump understands these sentiments and has galvanised American society with them, and the impact is very evident in the polls and analyses predicting his victory.

Whether Harris, if she is to be nominated at the DNC, can mount a strong enough campaign against a polarising Trump, who now has in his arsenal his recent assassination attempt, is still to be seen.

But there is no question that she still has a mountain to climb. And even if she reaches the summit, as a Black woman in a USA that is increasingly racist and chauvinistic, she will have an even greater mountain to climb.