US Elections | Stage set for class wars in the United States

The first defeat of a Kennedy in 74 years in Massachusetts on September 1 is less about the end of the United States’ most famous dynasty in the country’s electoral politics and more about looming class struggles after the November election of a new President and a new Congress.

Joe Kennedy, grandson of assassinated United States Senator Robert F Kennedy, who is yet to turn 40, was roundly defeated in his bid to be the junior Senator from his home state by Ed Markey, the 74-year-old incumbent who campaigned on his origins as the son of a milkman fending off a challenge in his Democratic Party primary from a wealthy scion of the nearest in America to royalty.

Kennedy has been a liberal member of the US House of Representatives from Massachusetts for the last seven years, but very significantly, he was not progressive enough for what US President Donald Trump repeatedly derides as the “radical Left,” which appears to be taking over the Democratic Party, especially in its strongholds in New England.

Markey defeated a Kennedy not only because he is from the working class: he constantly reminded primary voters that his first job was driving an ice cream truck. He won despite having voted for the Iraq war in 2002 — that continuing touchstone in US politics for standing up against the powerful military-industrial complex.

Markey won because he was supported by the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, who gave up her bid to be the 46th US President in favour of Joe Biden, but has vowed to push Biden to the Left if he wins in November.

Most important of all, Markey won because he was supported by the fiery Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Congresswoman from New York, who is not afraid to flaunt her Socialist leanings, something that only Senators from the ultra-liberal state of Vermont could do hitherto. Vermonters like failed presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders could do so, secure in the knowledge that they would be re-elected anyway.

Just a year before she became the youngest woman elected to Congress in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as ‘AOC’, worked as a barmaid in a taqueria off Union Square in New York City. When she went to Washington to take her place on Capitol Hill, she caught national attention by revealing that she could not afford to rent a decent apartment in the capital. The median rent for a flat in downtown Washington is about $2,500 (Rs 1,83,000) per month.

Trump made the most of the stinging defeat of a sitting legislator from the Kennedy family, which Americans from coast-to-coast sat up and noticed. “See, even a Kennedy isn’t safe in the new Radical Left Democrat Party,” the President tweeted. His objective was to exacerbate divisions in American society so that he could continue to rule: in this case by stoking fears of a class war.

What the Democrats are experiencing now is a process, which the Republican Party went through during the mid-term Congressional election season in 2010, two years after Barack Obama’s historic election as President.

The ‘Tea Party’ movement by extreme conservatives inside the Republican Party, which threatened to unseat stalwart Senators such as John McCain at that time, drew its inspiration from what came to be known as the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which launched America’s war of independence from Britain.

The Tea Party in the first half of Obama’s first term had no leaders, but it swelled into a mass conservative movement representing a groundswell of anger among grassroots Republicans. The party’s ground-level workers were opposed to decisions after the 2008 financial meltdown which, in reality, amounted to nationalisation of failing American enterprises.

The Trump phenomenon four years ago has its roots in the ideas espoused by the Tea Party movement. It pushed America’s Grand Old Party irreversibly towards the Right and Trump has skilfully exploited the movement’s essence since he came into public life.

The ongoing leftward lurch by the Democrats is an inevitable reaction to this and will pose a big challenge for Biden if he is victorious in November. Entrenched on Capitol Hill, Left-leaning legislative lobbies populated by the likes of AOC, Sanders and Warren will demand their pound of ideological flesh for having propelled Biden to the White House. Biden’s platform (manifesto) already reflects major concessions to the Sanders-Warren faction among the Democrats.

With a pre-COVID-19 figure of 40 million Americans living off food stamps for the hungry on the one hand, and the nation’s wealthiest one percent owning the bulk of America’s resources on the other, the stage is set for class wars, notwithstanding who wins in November. Race will add fuel to this fire.

Kennedy's defeat by Markey is emblematic of what lies ahead.

KP Nayar reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Views are personal.