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NOTES ON FIGHTING TRUMPISM  
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Robin D. G. Kelley
November 12, 2024
Boston Review
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_ To mobilize the abandoned working class, we need to revive the idea
of solidarity. _

, AP

 

Iam baffled, as I was in 2016, as to why so many liberals are still
shocked by Trump’s victory—and why, in their efforts to dissect
what happened, they can’t get beyond their incredulity that so many
people would blindly back a venal, mendacious fascist peddling racism,
misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and so forth, while cloaking his
anti-labor, anti-earth, pro-corporate agenda behind a veil of white
nationalism and authoritarian promises that “Trump will fix it.”

We don’t need to waste time trying to parse the differences between
the last three elections. In all three, he won—and lost—with
historic vote tallies. The message has been clear since 2016, when
Trump, despite losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton, still won
the electoral college with nearly sixty-three million votes, just
three million fewer than what Obama got in 2012. Trump lost in 2020,
but received seventy-four million votes, the second-largest total in
U.S. history. For an incumbent presiding disastrously over the start
of the Covid pandemic, that astounding number of votes should have
told us something. And if we were honest, we would acknowledge that
Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police
violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater
awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned
historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively
distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the
police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to
be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it.

I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election than
trying to understand how to build a movement.

Yet in all three elections, white men and women still overwhelmingly
went for Trump. (Despite the hope that this time, the issue of
abortion would drive a majority of white women to vote for Harris, 53
percent of them voted for Trump, only 2 percent down from 2020.) The
vaunted demographic shift in the 2024 electorate wasn’t all that
significant. True, Trump attracted more Black men this time, but about
77 percent of Black men voted
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Harris, so the shocking headline, “Why did Black men vote for
Trump?” is misdirected. Yes, Latino support for Trump increased, but
that demographic needs to be disaggregated; it is an extremely diverse
population with different political histories, national origins, and
the like. And we should not be shocked that many working-class men,
especially working-class men of color, did not vote for Harris.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is right to point to the condescension of the
Democrats for implying that sexism alone explains why a small portion
of Black men and Latinos flipped toward Trump, when homelessness,
hunger, rent, personal debt, and overall insecurity are on the rise.
The Democrats, she explained
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Democracy Now, failed “to capture what is actually happening on the
ground—that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment
that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates
of poverty.”

The Democratic Party lost—again—because it turned its back on
working people, choosing instead to pivot to the right: recruiting Liz
and Dick Cheney, quoting former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, and
boasting of how many Republican endorsements Harris had rather than
about her plans to lift thirty-eight million Americans out of poverty.
The campaign touted the strength of the economy under Biden, but
failed to address the fact that the benefits did not seem to trickle
down to large swaths of the working class. Instead, millions of
workers improved their situation the old-fashioned way: through
strikes and collective bargaining. The UAW, UPS, longshore and
warehouse workers, health care workers, machinists at Boeing, baristas
at Starbucks, and others won significant gains. For some, Biden’s
public support for unions secured his place as the most
pro-labor president
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F.D.R. Perhaps, but the bar isn’t that high. He campaigned on
raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00, but, once
taking office, quietly tabled the issue
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a compromise with Republicans, choosing instead to issue an executive
order
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the wage for federal contractors.

It is true that the Uncommitted movement, and the antiwar protest vote
more broadly, lacked the raw numbers to change the election’s
outcome. But it is not an exaggeration to argue that the Biden-Harris
administration’s unqualified support for Israel cost the Democrats
the election as much as did their abandonment of the working class. In
fact, the two issues are related. The administration could have used
the $18 billion in military aid
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gave to Israel for its Gaza operations during its first year alone and
redirected it toward the needs of struggling working people. $18
billion is about one quarter of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s annual budget and 16 percent of the budget for the
federal Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program. They could have cut
even more from the military budget, which for fiscal year 2024 stood
at slightly more than $824 billion. Moreover, tens of thousands of
Palestinian lives would have been spared, much of Gaza’s land and
infrastructure would have been spared irreversible damage, and the
escalation of regional war in Lebanon and Iran would not have
happened—the consequences of which remain to be seen for the federal
budget.

Workers improved their situation the old-fashioned way: through
strikes and collective bargaining.

Of course, detractors will say that the Israel lobby, especially
AIPAC, would not allow it. But the Democrats’ fealty to Israel is
not a product of fear, nor is it simply a matter of cold electoral
calculus. It is an orientation grounded in ideology. Only ideology can
explain why the Biden-Harris administration did not direct UN
representative Linda Thomas-Greenfield to stop providing cover for
Israel’s criminal slaughter and support the Security Council’s
resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. And only ideology can
explain why the administration and Congress has not abided by its own
laws—notably the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance
Act, which prohibits the use of U.S. weapons in occupied territories
and the transfer of weapons or aid to a country “which engages in a
consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized
human rights”—and stopped propping up Israel’s military. 

While candidate Trump had encouraged Netanyahu to “finish the job”
in Gaza, don’t be surprised if President Trump “negotiates” a
swift ceasefire agreement. (Reagan pulled a similar stunt when he
secured the return of U.S. hostages from Iran on the same day he was
sworn into office.) Such a deal would prove Trump’s campaign mantra
that only he can fix it, strengthen his ties with his ruling-class
friends in the Gulf countries, and permit the Likud Party and its
rabid settler supporters to annex Gaza, in whole or in part, and
continue its illegal population transfer under the guise of
“reconstruction.” After all, the Biden-Harris administration and
the Democrats have already done all the work of “finishing the
job.” Gaza is virtually uninhabitable. Once we factor in disease,
starvation, inadequate medical care for the wounded, and the numbers
under the rubble, the actual death toll will be many times higher
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext] than
the official count. And with nearly three-quarters of the casualties
women and children, the U.S.-Israel alliance will have succeeded, long
before Trump takes power, in temporarily neutralizing what Israeli
politicians call the Palestinian “demographic threat.”

The 2024 election indicates a rightward shift across the county. We
see it in the Senate races, right-wing control of state legislatures
(though here, gerrymandering played a major role), and in some of the
successful state ballot measures, with the exception of abortion. But
part of this shift can be explained by voter suppression, a general
opposition to incumbents, and working-class disaffection expressed in
low turnout. I also contend that one of the main reasons why such a
large proportion of the working class voted for Trump has to do with
what we old Marxists call class consciousness. Marx made a distinction
between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself.” The
former signals status, one’s relationship to means—of production,
of survival, of living. The latter signals solidarity—to think like
a class, to recognize that all working people, regardless of color,
gender, ability, nationality, citizenship status, religion, are your
comrades. When the idea of solidarity has been under relentless
assault for decades, it is impossible for the class to recognize its
shared interests or stand up for others with whom they may not have
identical interests.

The Democratic Party lost—again—because it turned its back on
working people.

So I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election
and tweaking the Democrats’ tactics than trying to understand how to
build a movement—not in reaction to Trump, but toward workers’
power, a just economy, reproductive justice, queer and trans
liberation, and ending racism and patriarchy and war—in Palestine,
Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and elsewhere, in our streets masquerading as a
war on crime, on our borders masquerading as security, and on the
earth driven by the five centuries of colonial and capitalist
extraction. We have to revive the idea of solidarity, and this
requires a revived class politics: not a politics that evades the
racism and misogyny that pervades American life but one that confronts
it directly. It is a mistake to think that white working-class support
for Trump is reducible to racism and misogyny or “false
consciousness” substituting for the injuries of class. As I wrote
back in 2016, we cannot afford to dismiss

the white working class’s very real economic grievances. It is not
a matter of disaffection _versus _ racism or
sexism _versus _ fear. Rather, racism, class anxieties, and
prevailing gender ideologies operate together, inseparably. . . .
White working-class men understand their plight through a racial and
gendered lens. For women and people of color to hold positions of
privilege or power _over _ them is simply unnatural and can only
be explained by an act of unfairness—for example, affirmative
action.”

There have always been efforts to build worker solidarity, in culture
and in practice. We see it in some elements of the labor movement,
such as UNITE-HERE, progressive elements in SEIU, National Nurses
United, United All Workers for Democracy, Southern Worker Power, Black
Workers for Justice, and Change to Win. Leading these efforts has been
the tenacious but much embattled Working Families Party (WFP) and its
sister organization, Working Families Power. Their most recent survey
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that growing working-class support for Trump and the MAGA Republicans
does not mean working people are more conservative than wealthier
Americans. Instead, it concluded, working people are “uniformly to
the left of the middle and upper classes” when it comes to economic
policies promoting fairness, equity, and distribution. On other issues
such as immigration, education, and crime and policing, their findings
are mixed and, not surprisingly, differentiated by race, gender, and
political orientation. Most importantly, the WFP understands that the
chief source of disaffection has been the neoliberal assault on labor
and the severe weakening of workers’ political and economic power.
Over the last five decades we’ve witnessed massive social
disinvestment: the erosion of the welfare state, living-wage jobs,
collective bargaining rights, union membership, government investment
in education, accessible and affordable housing, health care, and
food, and basic democracy. In some states, Emergency Financial
Managers have replaced elected governments, overseeing the
privatization of public assets, corporate tax abatements, and cuts in
employee pension funds in order to “balance” city budgets. At the
same time, we have seen an exponential growth in income inequality,
corporate profits, prisons, and well-funded conservative think tanks
and lobbying groups whose dominance in the legislative arena has
significantly weakened union rights, environmental and consumer
protection, occupational safety, and the social safety net.

And the neoliberal assault is also ideological; it is an attack on the
very concept of solidarity, of labor as a community with shared
interests. David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David McNally, Nancy
Fraser, Wendy Brown and many others have all compellingly articulated
this challenge. In response to the 1970s strike wave and the global
slump that opened the door for the neoliberal turn, the Thatcherite
mantra that “there is no such thing as society; there are individual
men and women” took hold. For decades unions have been disparaged as
the real enemy of progress, their opponents insisting that they take
dues from hardworking Americans, pay union bosses bloated salaries,
kill jobs with their demand for high wages, and undermine businesses
and government budgets with excessive pension packages. Remember Mitt
Romney’s presidential campaign talking points: workers are the
“takers,” capitalists are the “makers” who should decide what
to pay workers. Neoliberal ideology insists that any attempt to
promote equality, tolerance, and inclusion is a form of coercion over
the individual and undermines freedom and choice. Such regulatory or
redistributive actions, especially on the part of government, would
amount to social engineering and therefore threaten liberty,
competition, and natural market forces.

The idea of solidarity has been under relentless assault for decades.

Generations have grown up learning that the world is a market, and we
are individual entrepreneurs. Any aid or support from the state makes
us dependent and unworthy. Personal responsibility and family values
replace the very idea of the “social,” that is to say, a nation
obligated to provide for those in need. Life is governed by market
principles: the idea that if we make the right investment, become more
responsible for ourselves, and enhance our productivity—if we build
up our human capital—we can become more competitive and, possibly,
become a billionaire. Mix neoliberal logic with (white) populism and
Christian nationalism and you get what Wendy Brown calls
“authoritarian freedom”: a freedom that posits exclusion,
patriarchy, tradition, and nepotism as legitimate challenges to those
dangerous, destabilizing demands of inclusion, autonomy, equal rights,
secularism, and the very principle of equality. Such a toxic blend did
not come out of nowhere, she insists: it was born out of the
stagnation of the entire working class under neoliberal policies.

That diagnosis points toward an obvious cure. If we are going to ever
defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to
gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An
injury to one is an injury to all.” Putting that into practice means
thinking beyond nation, organizing to resist mass deportation rather
than vote for the party promoting it. It means seeing every racist,
sexist, homophobic, and transphobic act, every brutal beating and
killing of unarmed Black people by police, every denial of healthcare
for the most vulnerable, as an attack on the class. It means standing
up for struggling workers around the world, from Palestine to the
Congo to Haiti. It means fighting for the social wage, not just higher
pay and better working conditions but a reinvestment in public
institutions—hospitals, housing, education, tuition-free college,
libraries, parks. It means worker power and worker democracy. And if
history is any guide, this cannot be accomplished through the
Democratic Party. Trying to move the Democrats to the left has never
worked. We need to build up independent, class-conscious, multiracial
organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s
Campaign, and their allies, not simply to enter the electoral arena
but to effectively exercise the power to dispel ruling class lies
about how our economy and society actually work. The only way out of
this mess is learning to think like a class. It’s all of us or none.

_ROBIN D. G. KELLEY is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at
UCLA and a contributing editor at Boston Review. His many books
include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination._

_Re-posted with permission of the publisher, BOSTON REVIEW
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* elections
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* Donald Trump
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* United States
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* movements
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* unions
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* class struggle
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* class solidarity
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