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DEMOCRATS ABANDONED THE WORKING CLASS: ROBIN D.G. KELLEY ON TRUMP’S
WIN & NEED FOR CLASS SOLIDARITY  
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Amy Goodman, Robin D. G. Kelly, Nermeen Shaikh
November 7, 2024
Democracy Now!
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_ We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of
Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic
support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. _

, Democracy Now!

 

We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald
Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among
many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he
agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have
“abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program
to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the
board,” Kelley says of the Harris campaign. He says the highly
individualistic, neoliberal culture of the United States makes it
difficult to organize along class lines and reject the appeal of
authoritarians like Trump. “Solidarity is what’s missing — the
sense that we, as a class, have to protect each other.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Kamala Harris has conceded to Donald Trump after the
former president pulled off an overwhelming victory Tuesday to send
him back to the White House. On Wednesday, Harris spoke at Howard
University.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I will never give up the fight for a
future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions and
aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make
decisions about their own body and not have their government telling
them what to do. We will never give up the fight to protect our
schools and our streets from gun violence. And, America, we will never
give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal
justice and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we
are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms
that must be respected and upheld.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Kamala Harris giving her concession speech
on Wednesday.

The Democratic Party is in a state of crisis after Trump expanded his
support across the country and Republicans also regained control of
the Senate. Republicans may also keep control of the House.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, independent Senator Bernie Sanders
blasted the Democratic Party. In a statement, Sanders said, quote,
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which
has abandoned working class people would find that the working class
has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status
quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re
right,” Sanders said.

To talk more about Tuesday’s election, we’re joined by Robin D. G.
Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, who studies social movements.
He’s author of many books, including _Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination_.

Professor Kelley, it’s great to have you back with us. If you can
start off by talking about Donald Trump’s major victory, I mean,
sweeping the country, actually winning the popular vote, as well as
what looks like the Electoral College vote, Harris winning far fewer
millions of votes than President Biden did in 2020? Though some
Democrats, for example, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, polled much higher
and won, she did not get those same votes. And end by talking about
what Democratic Senator Sanders is saying, that the Democratic Party
has abandoned the working class.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. Let’s begin with Senator Sanders.
He’s absolutely right. The Democratic Party abandoned the working
class. Kamala Harris ran on a ticket of moving toward the right, you
know, shifting, pivoting toward the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is
endorsing her. And so, there was really no program to focus on the
actual suffering of working people across the board. That’s true.

Now, when we think about 2024 compared to 2020, I’m not sure that
Trump’s victory is so historic. Trump would have won in 2020 had it
not been for the uprisings that emerged out of the George Floyd
murder. The wind was behind the Democratic Party, even though the
Democratic Party didn’t earn that wind. And so, I think that’s a
factor.

The other factor is that the country is moving toward the right, and
the working class, or working classes, feel really disaffected and
abandoned. They feel abandoned, I believe, for a couple of reasons.
One, because whatever the numbers said about the shifting economy, the
fact of the matter is that people are still dealing with inflation,
with joblessness, with insecurity. But the second thing — and this
goes back to an article I published back in 2016 — we also have, you
know, a deeply racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic nation. And that runs
through. I mean, when you look at the demographics, white men
consistently vote for Trump. White women, of course, it was a slight
shift, but the shift wasn’t that radical. I mean, I don’t trust
exit polls, but it’s amazing how many white women supported Trump.
It’s amazing how much of the message of fascism actually did tap
into a deep insecurity, a deep fear, and the fact that deportation is
the dominant message that has drawn working people.

So I really want to talk about the question of class, which I think is
most important. We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t
have a class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that
thought of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We
refuse deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,”
because that’s what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing
— the sense that we, as a class, you know, have to protect each
other. Trump is seen as the person who can fix things, the person who
represents the CEO who could step in and solve problems in a culture
in which the only solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity,
is coming from the capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that
there’s such a radical shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a
failure of the Democratic Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic
Party actually pivoted a little bit toward labor, in a way that the
Harris campaign did not.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to go to former Ohio state Senator
Nina Turner, who we spoke
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last week. She served as co-chair of independent Senator Bernie
Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

NINA TURNER: I think, over time, the Democratic Party lost its way
in terms of just talking to working-class voters. And I mean from all
identities, because sometimes when we say “working class,” people
assume we’re just talking about white men. I’m talking about
working-class people from all walks of life. And my state, you
know, CAFTA, NAFTA, this happened over time. It didn’t just happen
in one fell swoop. It happened over decade after decade after decade.
But those trade deals definitely decimated Midwestern states like mine
and really hurt a lot of workers.

And then working-class people from all backgrounds do not necessarily
see themselves. They feel like elitism has taken over for both
parties, but especially in the Democratic Party. And so, when you
don’t see yourself in a party, you decide that you want to go
another way.

And then, more recently — when I say “recently,” certainly over
the almost four years — as people were suffering the effects
of COVID, trying to — we were all trying to break out of it,
inflation very high, the cost of groceries high, the cost of gas high,
all of those material condition elements. The Democratic Party denied
that, and they trotted out Bidenomics, and they turned their backs on
people and made it seem as though the pain points that the big mamas
and big papas were feeling were not necessarily real. You cannot do
that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Robin Kelley, that was Ohio state Senator Nina
Turner. If you could respond to what she said and put it in the
context of what you mentioned earlier, namely the absence of
working-class cohesion, and what that meant for this election? And
why, in fact, why do you think there is an absence of cohesion among
the working class in the U.S.?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. No, I think — I totally agree with
what Nina Turner said. This is where we are right now.

The absence of cohesion has to do with the general — two things, I
think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind
of neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own
problems, a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests
are the only ones — in other words, private interests are the ones
that can solve your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets
in the way. This is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for
at least three, four decades.

And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement
with the UAW, we see discussions and talk of solidarity — the
Boeing strike, for example — but in terms of those who are either
unorganized or at the sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no
longer based in high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening,
it’s almost impossible to organize people and to think as a class.
You know, the Amazon strike in Bessemer is a really good example of
what could have been, but how the combination of fear, insecurity and
the failure to really think of solidarity — in other words, the
care for our neighbor, the care for those who are not us but maybe we
share the same class, that sense of solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks
about at the beginning of my piece, that’s missing. And we haven’t
done the work, the political education work, to build that sense of
cohesion.

But the other thing that I think is really important is this belief
that if we — that we can one day become Trump. In other words,
wealth, entrepreneurship, the striving for success, the fact that a
lot of these Senate campaigns where seats were overturned, they were
won by billionaires and millionaires, you know? I mean, that’s
significant.

And one other thing I should add is that, you know, we could look at
this at the presidential level; we could also look at it at the local
level. I’m here in L.A. in what’s supposed to be the Left Coast,
California, where we just had propositions that failed, a proposition
to end forced prison labor, a proposition to raise the minimum wage, a
proposition for rent control, you know, a proposition that actually
— the one proposition that did win was one that will deeply
criminalize and expand sentences for petty crimes. This is in L.A.,
you see? This is California.

So we’re moving toward the right. And somehow the right, for many
people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s
attractive. And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class
with power, a class in which the state could be the lever of equality
rather than deep inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting
Trumps for the rest — for generations.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, it’s very interesting on the issue of prison
labor and a ballot initiative there. When we were out in California
interviewing prisoner firefighters who got a pittance a day, they were
pushing for earlier release, but they didn’t get it often because it
provided a prisoner labor force for the wildfires that plague
California. But I wanted to ask you about the extremism of Trump, when
he was talking about — or, you know, at the Madison Square Garden
rally, of course, that Puerto Rico is an “island of garbage.” He
would later called that whole rally a “lovefest,” you know,
referring to women as the B-word, and, of course, how he deals with
immigrants. But there’s a very interesting comment of writer Meg
Indurti, who tweeted, “if you are someone who was able to overlook
the genocide and cast a vote for kamala harris, then you already
understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism
to vote for him.” Can you comment on this? Robin Kelley, you talk a
lot about the working class and the working poor. You also have
written extensively about Gaza.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, one of the
questions that came up, my students were posing this question to me
the other day: What would have happened had the U.S. actually stopped
supporting Israel, like in November or December of last year? What
would have happened? I think the Democrats could have won. You know,
we overestimate the power of the Israeli lobby, because in some ways
Democrats are looking for dollars, not necessarily votes. And so,
imagine what would have happened had there been this refusal to send
arms to Israel. There would be no — the war would have ended. There
wouldn’t be an escalation of the war. And part of the attraction of
Trump, ironically, is this belief, this kind of — it’s kind of a
myth, but still this belief that under Trump there were no wars. And
so, here we have possibly three different wars going on at once under
the Democrats. And you could see how that would generate some fear.

But to go back to the question of the extremism and elites, you know,
toxic masculinity is a huge factor. The buildup coming from right-wing
state legislatures to attack the curriculum, to attack DEI, to attack
trans people at every single level, here we are dealing with an
extremism that is actually palpable and that I could see how elites,
some elites on the right, those who actually have drafted Project
2025, would support these policies. So, in some ways, what we keep
calling fascism, which I agree is fascism, is pretty mainstream among
the Project 2025 people, pretty mainstream among
the MAGA Republicans. And the Republican Party is a MAGA party.
Whatever the old bourgeoisie of the kind of older neoliberal order,
whatever they think, they’re either going to go with the program or
they’re going to do what they did, support Harris and Walz. And that
didn’t work out for them.

So, I mean, I’m actually terrified by a future in which the kind of
violence of the settler-colonial mentality, which was always there,
has escalated and become normalized in a way. And let’s remember
that the history of fascism is filled with supporters who themselves
are targets of fascism. We have examples of that, you know,
historically. So, you know, it’s hard — so we can’t just assume
that because there’s an uptick in, say, the Latino vote in support
for Trump, that somehow that’s an example of Trumpism’s
multiculturalism, because it’s still white supremacy and patriarchy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Robin Kelley, I just want to go back for a
second to the point that you made earlier about those ballot measures.
Why do you think those ballot measures were rejected? How did they get
on the ballot to begin with? And then, is that related at all to the
fact that, you know, the Democrats have come under massive criticism
for, after 2016, after the Clinton election, basically finding ways to
blame everybody but themselves? Is there a risk that that’s going to
happen again?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Yes, I think there is a risk.

As far as the propositions, California is a conservative state. You
know, it has been. It has produced some of the most conservative
governors. It is the home of the origins of the John Birch Society.
You know, this is a conservative state. So, it didn’t surprise me
too much, although California is also a state that has, you know, had
basically the biggest, for a long time, or at least second-largest
prison population in the country. And so, some of these initiatives
came from imprisoned people themselves, came from abolitionists. The
struggle for a minimum wage came from an organized labor movement. But
there’s still deep anti-immigrant sentiment here in California, deep
anti-labor sentiment. And keep in mind that rent control has been
consistently beat down since 1995. And why? Because some of the same
elites who gave money to the Harris campaign are also absentee or
venture capitalists who own a lot of property, and they’re trying to
profit off of them.

The Democrats, I mean, you know, I don’t have an answer to that,
except for the fact that we can’t keep relying on the Democratic
Party. I mean, it’s been — it’s so bankrupt. I think what Ralph
Nader said yesterday is absolutely true. We need something else. You
know, if not a real third party, I think Reverend William Barber has
an answer, and that is to build from the bottom up, to build from
low-wage workers, because that’s the vast majority of the people.
But we can’t do this until we actually think of ourselves as a
community, a beloved community, as a class that struggles with each
other against corporate interests.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will be speaking with Reverend Barber tomorrow,
so people should tune in. And Ralph Nader’s comments
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Now!_ just exploded yesterday, so people can check them out at
democracynow.org. Robin D. G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with
us, professor of history at UCLA who studies social movements,
author of many books, including _Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination_.

_ROBIN DAVIS GIBRAN KELLEY is an American historian and academic, who
is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of
California, Los Angeles._

_Kelley has written several books focusing on African-American history
and culture as well as race relations, including Race Rebels:
Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
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and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban
America (1997). He is also a prolific essayist, having published
dozens of articles in scholarly journals, anthologies, and in the
popular press, including the Village Voice
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_DEMOCRACY NOW! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted
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