In September 1981, 10 months after Ronald Reagan’s sweeping 44-state victory over Jimmy Carter, 100 leading elected Democratic officials privately convened to formulate a response to Reaganism. Alan Cranston of California, the Senate minority whip, began the meeting with a fundamental question: “If our party is a coalition, unlike the Republicans, who tend to represent a single group, what are the common denominators, transcending regional differences and local interests, which make us a national party?”

In the four decades since the fracturing of the New Deal order, an answer to this question has largely eluded the Democratic party. Of the United States’ 20 highest-median-income states, Kamala Harris won 18; of the 20 lowest, Harris won just three. Democrats reliably win the counties that produce the majority of American economic output; Harris’s losing base consisted of counties collectively representing 60% of the GDP. Yet the Democrats continue to depend upon some portion – smaller and smaller each election – of the less-affluent denizens of metropolitan America. The result is a deeply bifurcated coalition with little by way of a unifying “common denominator”.

Seen in this light, the Harris campaign’s noncommittal nature – some talk of a ceasefire in Gaza alongside an enthusiastic embrace of the Cheneys’ endorsement, some remarkably progressive economic messaging alongside reassurances to corporate America – reflected not just a strategic misstep by the Harris campaign, but a basic political dilemma for the party: unifying two poles of a wildly disparate coalition. Even stalwart Democratic loyalists have bemoaned the party’s failure to offer a meaningful positive program; less theorized by these loyalists, perhaps deliberately so, are the forces preventing the Democrats from doing so.

The irony is that the project of “Bidenomics”, which resembled the party’s first serious effort to develop a national governing vision since the Great Society, so thoroughly failed to offer Harris a serviceable vision for her presidential campaign. At its core, the essential project of Bidenism was the formation of a cross-class coalition for reindustrialization, investment in infrastructure and energy transition – a compromise leaving little room for the kinds of direct confrontation with capital that a proper response to “sellers’ inflation” might have demanded.

Whereas Trump’s trade policy sought rapid and often devastating confrontation with trade-dependent sectors, the Bidenites promised a gradual – and........

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