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Members of the United Auto Workers picket in Chicago, Illinois, on October 10, 2023. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Even In Exile, The Left Must Fight To Popularize Its Vision
After Trump’s victory, the Left must confront right-wing faux populism while facing a Democratic establishment hostile to the class politics that could actually defeat it. We can’t stop now, but we must organize on our own terms.
Members of the United Auto Workers picket in Chicago, Illinois, on October 10, 2023. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Donald Trump won the US presidential election in resounding fashion, winning the electoral college and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 consolation prize, the popular vote, by a significant margin. The Republicans have maintained control of the House and flipped the Senate. Conservatives already control the Supreme Court.
On the eve of the election, the Guardian ran an article with the headline “Is Trump actually a fascist — and why does the answer matter?” Whether Trump is a fascist is open to debate, and scholars of fascism and the far-right have weighed in on either side. But as Jan-Werner Müller has put it, not being a fascist “doesn’t make [Trump] any less dangerous,” and the threats of his return to the White House are very real: millions of undocumented immigrants will live in fear of being swept up in his mass deportation plan. Transgender people will be the subject of even greater vitriol from people occupying even higher positions of power. More Americans will be forced to give birth or denied lifesaving care while pregnant as reproductive rights come under further attack. Far-right groups will be emboldened, as they were under the last Trump presidency, and the threat of violence targeting the myriad groups Trump has declared “enemies from within” will only grow. On the global stage, the United States will go from climate laggard to lead arsonist, and Israel’s genocidal violence will continue to go unchecked.
The threats ahead are clear. But to understand this political catastrophe — and prevent the next one — we need to take a hard look at the Democratic Party’s stunning failure to prevent it. A large share of the blame for this disastrous result falls on the ineffectual and self-satisfied Democratic Party establishment. They did not put up a good fight; they put up a bad one, having stymied every effort from the Left to reform the party on terms that would avert the current disaster. Party leaders exerted considerable effort in 2016 and again in 2020 to block Bernie Sanders from securing the Democratic presidential nomination, even though polls indicated that the Vermont senator would outperform Trump in critical battleground states. Polls continue to show that a majority of Americans support progressive demands, such as a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, and raising taxes on the superrich, all of which are off the table under Trump and none of which were championed by Kamala Harris. These progressive economic policies could be an antidote to the pseudo-populism of the Trumpist right — if only they weren’t anathema to the Democratic Party leadership.
Exit polls in key states point to the importance of economic factors in explaining Trump’s victory. Trump won by a significant margin with voters who think the condition of the US economy is “not so good” or “poor” (68 percent of the electorate). Trump did equally well with voters who agreed that inflation had caused them and their family “significant” or “moderate hardship.” Among the 46 percent of voters who said their family’s financial situation is worse now than four years ago, 81 percent cast a ballot for Trump. Trump gained support among voters earning under $100,000, while wealthier voters preferred Harris. Trump has no intention of pushing policies that will actually improve the material conditions of working-class people, but they could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, considering the absence of a convincing alternative from the Democrats.
The Democrats ran an essentially running anti-Trump campaign with little political identity of its own. Harris’s refusal to distinguish herself from Joe Biden led to a kind of gaslighting about the economic hardship working-class Americans experienced during his presidency, compounded by high inflation and wage stagnation. The campaign made a grave error in running on gauzy abstractions rather than forthrightly acknowledging and centering working-class people’s economic pain and insecurity. The enormity of this error can be seen in the success of such policies in ballot propositions in red states: Trump-voting Missouri and Alaska passed ballot measures to increase the minimum wage and require employer-paid sick leave. Voters in Nebraska supported paid sick leave by a whopping margin. In Arizona, a ballot measure to decrease the minimum wage for tipped workers was easily defeated.
Despite flirtations with economic populism early in the race, Harris ended up running an aggressively bipartisan, centrist campaign — Hillary redux. The strategy demobilized key segments of the Democratic Party’s base and failed to sufficiently win over the voters it was designed to reach: registered Republicans, for example, did not move an inch in Harris’s direction. But it would be simplistic to understand the Harris campaign’s rightward tack solely as a strategic calculation to bring key demographic groups into an anti-Trump electoral coalition. Crucially, it’s also expressive of a genuine pro-corporate impulse in the Democratic Party. As Luke Savage has argued, whenever liberal centrist politicians run to the right, “many reflexively assume they’re doing so because they’re playing chess and know something the rest of us don’t. But maybe they’re just right wing and put conservative ideological purity ahead of pragmatic electoral concerns.”
It should be clear now: no matter the level of economic dissatisfaction and distress, the Democratic Party top brass has no interest in running an economically progressive campaign that can rival the Right’s faux-populism.
Labor Organizing Under Siege
With the Democratic Party leadership out of the running, the labor movement is the only organized force that can reinvigorate American politics with an economic progressivism equal to the task of combatting the Right’s hollow pro-worker appeals. The bad news is that the labor movement will now have to organize and mobilize under increasingly hostile conditions.
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s choice of a relatively pro-union Republican as labor secretary, likely a solitary bone thrown to the Teamsters for remaining neutral during the election. Under Trump, Biden’s union-friendly National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — the independent agency charged with protecting workplace rights — will most certainly be purged of Democrats and pro-union staffers, with Trump to handpick anti-union officials for the top posts who will reverse Biden-era rulings that made it easier for workers to unionize. The return to a management-friendly NLRB will sabotage organizing efforts currently underway and throw sand in the gears of those to come. Given his authoritarian instincts, we should be prepared for Trump to wield executive power to crush strikes. Meanwhile, we can expect a Republican-controlled Congress to generate any number of anti-union bills that President Trump will happily sign into law (Project 2025 calls on Congress to consider banning public sector unions altogether). As he did during his first term, Trump will most certainly issue executive orders designed to curtail the power of unions.
Given the labor-friendly NLRB and tight labor markets under “Union Joe,” the American labor movement had a very favorable opening for mass unionization. While filings for union elections have doubled since 2021, and there have been some notable organizing breakthroughs at Starbucks and Amazon, many of America’s largest and most powerful unions have been happy to stockpile assets rather than invest in new organizing and strikes, a phenomenon Chris Bohner calls “finance unionism.” Instead, risk-averse union leaders continued their quest for the Holy Grail of labor law reform, the PRO Act, which passed the House but failed to earn a Senate vote after Republicans threatened to filibuster. While labor’s net assets have risen 225 percent since 2010, membership has declined by 1.8 million workers. Unions now represent only 10 percent of the American workforce.
The Democratic Party top brass has no interest in running an economically progressive campaign that can rival the Right’s faux-populism.
In 1980, one out of four voters was from a union household; by 2020, that share was 15.8 percent. As Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol have argued, the shift of working-class voters away from the Democrats is directly related to organized labor’s decline, precipitated in part by policies championed by neoliberal Democrats, including free trade. In rust-belt states, union influence extended beyond the workplace, “touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members and their families and neighbors.” Loyalty to the Democrats was partly a product of the group identity that unions fostered. But as the social world around organized labor dissipated, “conservative institutions like gun clubs, megachurches, and other Republican-leaning groups took its place.” Left behind by Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, Barack Obama’s austerity, and the party’s pivot to suburban professionals, the election loss is, as Eric Blanc puts it, “what happens when you leave workers behind for decades.”
On the bright side, the vast majority of Americans view unions, the Left’s most organized and well-resourced defense against a Trump presidency, in a favorable light: according to a Gallup poll, seven in ten Americans say they approve of unions, just shy of the record-high approval rating for organized labor. But absent concerted efforts to organize workers in their thousands, pro-union sentiment will not reverse the decades-long decline of the labor movement. And there’s no doubt that task just got a lot tougher.
As labor faces a Trump presidency, it won’t be enough to organize the unorganized. The union movement must do what the Democratic Party won’t: engage in significant member education about the fallacies and dangers of right-wing populism, building coalitions at the local, regional, and national levels to oppose the far right. To say that the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that undeniably fuels some working-class support for Trump must be addressed through a working-class politics is not to engage in “class reductionism” or surrender questions of social justice to win working-class votes. It is to recognize that union halls and picket lines, not campus anti-oppression workshops and social media, are the spaces necessary to build class solidarity and combat the ugly appeal of right-wing populism.
The Left in Exile
The Democratic Party elite, content for the past decade with bleeding white working-class voters to the GOP, must now reckon too with Trump 2.0’s ability to pick up support among working-class Latino and black voters. As Bernie Sanders put it the day after the catastrophe, “It is no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
With the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party now disgraced by not one but two losses to Donald Trump, you would think the humiliation would lead to some introspection. But Democratic Party leaders are not prone to critical self-reflection or “learning the right lessons.” They are far more likely to blame a given loss on pro-Palestine demonstrators or Vladimir Putin than cede ground in the battle with the party’s progressives. They even seem to be increasingly aware that they’re alienating working-class voters — but this, too, they blame on the Left. Indeed, Ritchie Torres, a favorite of the pro-Israel lobby and rising star of the party’s corporate wing, has warned that the Democrats are increasingly captive to a “college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters” — as if campus Palestine solidarity protesters were behind the Harris campaign’s decision to tour swing states with Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney or keep Medicare for All and paid sick days out of the party platform.
As Mike Davis wrote in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, “the issue of the utmost immediate importance to the Left is whether or not the Sanders coalition, including the progressive unions that backed him, can be kept alive as an independent movement bridging the racial and cultural divides among American working people.” The Sanders movement showed that “heartland discontent can be brought under the canopy of a ‘democratic socialism’ that reignites New Deal hopes for fundamental economic rights and the Civil Rights Movement’s goals of equality and social justice.” Under a second Trump presidency, and with the Democrats having proven their utter intransigence on economic issues, that movement is now officially in exile. Still, its politics are our best hope for stopping the self-defeating rightward drift of the working class.
From tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy to making it harder to join a union, Trump’s economic agenda won’t deliver for America’s working-class majority. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party establishment will be no help in crafting an alternative politics that can win workers back to the progressive fold with genuine economic appeals. For the next stretch, organizing will have to happen outside the halls of power — doggedly and creatively. It is now up to the thousands of young activists, trade unionists, and community organizers that make up the best of the American left to ensure that this movement remains a movement — not just a moment in the country’s further descent into darkness.
