Everyone knows that whatever the result in the US election, the genocide in Gaza will continue. Neither presidential candidate offers a strategy to mitigate the climate crisis. Neither will dispel the growing geostrategic tensions that could, all too easily spill, over into a global conflict. Whoever wins, the tasks facing the left will remain broadly similar.

The point might sound obvious but it deserves restatement, as, in the final days of the campaign, liberals seek to corral progressives behind Kamala Harris, by painting Trump as uniquely dangerous.

Yes, Trump is an odious racist. Yet it was not Donald Trump who presided over a genocide. Any serious consideration of American politics must acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that the greatest atrocity of recent decades took place under the auspices of the Democratic administration that pledged to restore a post-Trump normality, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris extending the astonishing $22 billion in US military aid that has permitted Israel to wage its murderous campaign.

Democrat apologists like Bernie Sanders insist that, however bad the Harris record on Palestine may be, Trump would have been and will be worse. But genocide constitutes the crime of crimes. It’s an absolute, the evil of which does not permit gradations.

Perhaps that’s why Sanders skates so quickly from the past to the future. He argues:

We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing US policy [on Palestine] with Harris than with Trump, who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, rightwing extremist ally.

Yet, to date, Democratic “progressives” have demonstrated precisely zero capability to change US policy – or, indeed, even their party’s campaign rhetoric.

On daytime TV, Harris recently fielded a  query as to how her administration would differ from her predecessor’s: a perfect opportunity to draw at least a rhetorical line over Gaza.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said instead.

On another occasion, she explained that voters horrified by the genocide should think about the price of their groceries and then give her their vote.

The unwillingness of the Harris campaign to offer even verbal concessions on Gaza has allowed Trump — the erstwhile advocate of a so-called “Muslim ban” — to court the Arab-American vote in Michigan, preposterously presenting himself as a “peace” candidate.

Of course, Trump still campaigns primarily on grotesque racism. That’s been a constant ever since 2016, when he first won the Republican nomination by building a populist movement outside, and — to some extent — opposed to, the Republican mainstream.

In its original incarnation, Trumpism combined xenophobic bigotry with a weird and obviously phony anti-elitism. Trump denounced “politically correct censorship”, identifying himself with the ordinary guy sick of patronising know-it-alls. He railed against corporate greed, he demanded subsidies for local industry, and he attacked America’s participation in endless foreign wars.

It was Trump’s deployment of economic populism alongside his racist bluster that first attracted accusations of fascism. Yet, after his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump proved less a totalitarian strongman than the leader of a government noteworthy for its paralysis and incompetence. The Trump administration implemented tax cuts for the rich and imposed a range of tariffs but spent most of its time locked in legal disputes and internal squabbles. As Luke Savage puts it,

having swept to office with a supposedly insurgent project in hand, Trump became a congealed mashup of conventional Republican priorities and his own erratic personal style.

Since then, he’s successfully remade the GOP in his own image, and, by so doing, pushed the centre of American politics further to the right, even to the extent of achieving the repeal of Roe v Wade (a long-held conservative dream).

The current election illustrates that success.

That is, even as Kamala Harris labels Trump a “fascist”, she now advocates policies that, once upon a time, were taken as evidence of that fascism. For instance, nothing was more associated with Trump’s first term than the border wall he constructed to prevent immigrants crossing from Mexico. Back then, Democrats, including Kamala Harris, denounced — quite correctly — the Trump wall as a grotesque monument to bigotry.

Today, however, Harris pledges that, as President, she will complete the wall over a nearly 2000 mile stretch — and attacks Trump for leaving it unfinished.

Similarly, the Democrat campaign now boasts endorsements by a slew of Bush-era Republicans, who, in the early 2000s, were widely seen by liberals as sinister, fascistic figures.

Dick Cheney helped George W Bush shut down the Florida recount during the 2000 election, enabling the Republicans to cling to power. He championed the murderous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and, with the help of attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, he led the CIA’s program of so-called “rendition” and torture during the War on Terror. Both Gonzalez and Cheney now back Harris, who has repeatedly boasted of Cheney’s support.

Yet if Trump’s takeover of the GOP forced both parties to the right, it also blunted the populist sensibility that once made Trumpism distinctive. Trump’s racism still attracts white nationalists and conspiracists but his 2024 push leans far more on the Republican establishment than the 2016 campaign did, with the GOP “Never Trumpists” now almost entirely marginalised.

European fascism took power in the twenties and the thirties by building a militarised paramilitary movement to crush the left and then convincing a section of big business to back a violent remaking of class relations. That’s not the situation in the US today. Trumpism has, at times, flirted both with street violence (most obviously, during 6 January) and with more overtly authoritarian policies (for example, a pledge of mass deportations) but it has neither created a serious militia nor cohered significant social forces behind a program for dictatorship.

That might change, of course. But the current election seems more indicative of a ruling class adrift, with neither party offering persuasive responses to the structural problems that the empire now faces. Almost certainly, whoever wins on 5 November, American politics will remain an incoherent mess, as the losing party immediately contests the legitimacy of the results.

From the perspective of the Left, a Trump victory will be a disaster, emboldening reactionaries the world over. But a Harris victory will be a disaster, too, above all because it would legitimise those responsible for Israeli genocide.

Whatever happens, the global situation will remain dire.

Last year, concentrations of greenhouse gases reached record levels. Yet, rather than debating climate solutions, both presidential candidates are pledging to increase oil production. Which is simply to restate the obvious: there are no good outcomes to this contest, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

A world with Harris in charge would still be dealing with the same existential crises, which she has no intention of addressing, all in the name of averting an even worse catastrophe: this is how dire the state of the left is, and the task in front of us.

Image: Marcus Spiske