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EVEN IN EXILE, THE LEFT MUST FIGHT TO POPULARIZE ITS VISION  
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Simon Black
November 30, 2024
Jacobin
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_ 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
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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
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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
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people occupying even higher positions of power
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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by 1.8 million workers. Unions now represent only 10 percent
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

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Simon Black is an associate professor in the Department of Labour
Studies at Brock University.

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* United States Politics; Strategy; US Workers;
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