In the wake of the election, I’ve been thinking of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy The Exterminating Angel. It stars a group of socialites dining together at the mansion of an upper- class couple hosting them after a night at the opera. As wealthy guests begin to arrive for the soiree to feast on a bear and two sheep, the couple’s cook and servants desert their masters and strange happenings begin to occur, leaving the tuxedoed guests flummoxed and trapped inside. They fill the night with backbiting gossip and rituals of superstition, from masonic handshake signs to chicken’s feet in a purse. Soon enough bourgeois morality gives way to barbarism when, casting off their respectable manners, they plot to murder one of their hosts to break whatever spell prevents them from leaving.
“They’re trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac,” wrote the late film critic Roger Ebert, interpreting the dinner guests as representing “the ruling class in Franco’s Spain. Increasingly resentful at being shut off from the world outside, they grow mean and restless; their worst tendencies are revealed.”
No false equivalence: The Democrats aren’t fascists. But they are revealing their worst bourgeois tendencies as workers exit their glittery oligarchic party controlled by bosses and a coterie of highly paid consultants and donors. As the veritable fascist Donald Trump steps back into the White House, Democratic Party loyalists and hangers-on in the media circuit are apoplectic about the working-class dolts who deserted Kamala Harris in her “a $1 billion disaster” of a campaign and hitched their wagon to the MAGA movement. They would sooner employ the same divide-and-conquer tactics of their MAGA opponents in a liberal scapegoating frenzy than engage with the exhaustion of their vaunted liberalism.
“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,” said Senator Bernie Sanders in a statement after the election. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Democrats deflect disaster
The Democrats think they’re wrong. The Democratic Party’s ideologues and consultants have shifted blame in a “Racial Whodunnit where specific demographic groups are blamed for the loss, whether it be Latinos or white women, the general idea being that demographics are collectively responsible for Democrats’ failure to cross a 50 percent threshold.”
The so-called traitors range from Arabs in Michigan who demanded a pro-peace, anti-genocide candidate to trans people to Black voters whose support for Democrats dipped from 91% to 83%. Republicans gained 2.5 million votes, compared to 2020. But Democrats lost 7 million. In spite of a turnout collapse among Democrats, overall turnout is on track to being comparable to 2020 highs, even if the U.S. still lags behind many other countries.
Union households voted 54% for Kamala Harris vs. 43% for Donald Trump, with non-union households at 51% Trump, 47% Harris. Latinos went from 63% for Biden to 56% for Harris. White voters, the majority of the electorate at 75%, supported Trump by 56%. Trump won the popular vote albeit with a smaller share than Biden and Obama.
A working class that is fragmented and unorganized doesn’t speak in one voice, much less press its demands with unity of purpose. Exit polls indicate workers across racial and ethnic lines are frustrated with the economic status quo. About 60% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, especially low-wage workers earning less than $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, the working class saw grocery bills skyrocket; a dozen eggs went from $2.01 to $4.21 in 2023. While CEOs made massive profits, workers saw their weekly take-home pay sink, and struggled to cover housing and food. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60% of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.”
Even among workers ineligible to vote, the sentiment is the same. “Those with power haven’t noticed the difficulties of those without power,” an undocumented Latino day laborer who supports Trump told the Austin American-Statesman. Since the election, I’ve heard similar sentiments among older generations of immigrant workers who resent housing accommodations for asylum seekers, given their own struggles to evade the police on street corners.
One worker who helped organize anti-raid defense committees more than a decade ago told me the culture of solidarity on New York City streets has disappeared; newer workers don’t believe Trump’s threats to deport millions of undocumented workers will affect them. They believe t he’s going after the bad immigrants, the so-called criminals. The criminalization of immigrants has been a bipartisan project, from Clinton through Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. They’ve all advanced the ideological and political work of linking federal deportation to the criminal justice system.
But Trump is the culmination of that work, without the liberal paternalism of sectioning off families from an array of criminals roaming the nation. The liberal establishment didn’t only acquiesce to anti-immigrant economic nationalism, but it helped fuel it by tying immigration to rising crime and housing costs. They refused to believe Latino or Black immigrants would want to assimilate into the nation’s traditional social hierarchies. What’s more American than joining in the national pastime of rugged individualism, the ethos of “I got mine, Jack, screw you!” combined with nativist revanchism of a settler-colonial power in decline?
The liberal establishment didn’t only acquiesce to anti-immigrant economic nationalism, but it helped fuel it by tying immigration to rising crime and housing costs.
Luis Feliz Leon
Class politics vs. polarization
To overcome polarization in the working class between undocumented workers with decades of years in the country and recently arrived asylum-seekers, we need to build a broad class politics. As the historian Joel Suarez argues in N+1 magazine, “the left must not be cowed into a narrow politics of income inequality and redistribution; it must look further, toward democratic control of capital itself. But doing so means forging a broad and deep culture of solidarity, something that in turn cannot be done by waving away the problems of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and transphobia in favor of simple economic populism.”
The essence of an exhausted liberalism is to invoke racism and sexism to explain the debacle, but make them weightless ideas, obscuring the material weight of these heavy social foundations, brushing aside their historical contingency and geographical locations. Vulgar liberals view racism and sexism as merely wrong ideas and policies held by bad people, so they wield them as a cudgel not as political frameworks with far-reaching implications. They reduce systems of oppression to mere sanctimony and paternalism, offering little more than noblesse oblige (black tie gala philanthropists) and deference (the well-meaning venture activists).
Yes, racism and sexism are big social forces in US life, and people in the electorate espouse these views. There’s a hard core of Trump voters who won’t be persuaded away from nationalism underpinned by racism and misogyny—their calling cards replacement theory and bans on abortion. There’s also another soft core of millions of people who were peeled away from the Democratic coalition and found in MAGA an answer to their frustrations. As Stuart Hall reminds us, “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” Racism and sexism are real social forces with material effects, and they are imbricated in the production of economic anxiety. The disaffected workers who have flocked to Republicans should be understood as subjects whose worldviews are shaped by these forces, but they aren’t solely defined by them either.
Workers see through centrism
Workers have rejected Barack Obama’s multicultural Third Way centrism. That was foretold by lonely voices on the left from the moment Obama rose to prominence. In 2008, speaking before Harlem’s Tenants Association, Robert Fitch elucidated the ideological thrust of Third Way communitarians:
“The Left and the Right argue that different interests matter. The Third Way says they don’t. When the Third Way advocates insist that we share a common good; when they refuse to recognize that the interests of the oppressed and the interests of the oppressors don’t exist on the same moral plane; when they counsel us to stop being partisans of those interests—they’re not being non or post-partisan; they’re siding with the powers that be.”
Class is about a worker’s structural relationship to production, white collar, blue collar, or no collar. On that basis, the historian Tim Barker writes in New Left Review: “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.”
But class is also about something lived in and messy, like culture, and the Democratic Party has largely appealed to college-educated liberals who party elites consider their true base, offering them warmed over multiculturalism and New Agey platitudes. In 2008, the late Christopher Hitchens acidly opined in Slate about Obama’s campaign: “Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords: Dreams, Fear, Home, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together.”
Trump has captured Obama’s multiracial coalition, curdling Obama’s phony optimism into a Make America Great Again movement, a slogan borrowed from Ronald Reagan who should be credited for Obama. If Tony Blair and New Labour were Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievements, then Bill Clinton and Obama count as Reagan’s across the pond. The rightward realignment of economic and political power started with President Jimmy Carter, was consolidated in Reagan’s two terms as president and became bipartisan consensus politics in the Clinton administration. But Obama’s presidency paved the way for the Democratic Party to “unite all of big business behind it.”
Democrats had nothing to counter MAGA with politically and nothing to offer disaffected voters economically drawn to its dark nihilism of societal collapse–nothing, that is, beyond more vacuous pablum in the less rhetorically gifted hands of Kamala Harris. There is widespread dissatisfaction in the American people and more generally across the globe with the cascading calamities of rising inequality, climate-induced disasters, and migration, largely due to climate and social dislocations because of the US’s punitive sanctions and wars, but the liberals along with the Left failed to mobilize these expressions of social anger into working-class power and solidarity.
The right-wing media was effective not only because we lead increasingly atomized lives online but also because it tapped into a deep-seated libidinal rage against the economic status quo. The Right is adroit at plumbing the depths of despair. With these dark wells of anger combined with class disorganization, there’s no need for a perfectly crafted message to galvanize people into throwing down with reaction.
On the leadership front, Trump can be best understood as a Bonapartist figure through whom various social classes have coalesced in an uneasy multiracial coalition, including big financialized firms, a small “m” millionaire business-owner gentry, working-class people in union and nonunion households alike, and lonely young men living in echo chambers of algorithmically mediated hyperreality. They are for Trump in various uneven and contradictory ways. But they are definitionally against the Democratic Party and the status quo it props up. That largely unorganized social rejection of liberal politics has now led us to the present moment when the reactionary forces of Trumpism have recaptured the state.
With these dark wells of anger combined with class disorganization, there’s no need for a perfectly crafted message to galvanize people into throwing down with reaction.
Luis Feliz Leon
How people experience the state matters
Contradictions are the stuff of politics. The average worker takes pride in pulling their boot straps. “People want financial independence,” said Henry East, a UNITE HERE worker I interviewed in 2020, explaining why the same people who voted for Trump backed the minimum wage hike. “They don’t want to have to depend on food stamps and all these other programs. They would prefer to grind and make their own money and be able to pay their own bills. And by forcing employers to pay them a livable wage, they won’t be so dependent on the government. And they see Trump as someone who shows people to not be so dependent on the government. That’s why they can support both.”
At one level, it is clear that employers that pay poverty wages offload the social costs of their workforce onto the state. But at another level, why shouldn’t the government take care of its people? East’s insight may reveal the hidden logic that reconciles the seemingly contradictory support for Trump and pro-worker proposals like the minimum wage increase, a dynamic that also played out on paid leave and minimum wage ballot questions across the country this time around.
It raises the question of how people experience the state. “In the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives,” Stuart Hall wrote, “the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition.”
In The New Republic, Alex Pareene turned to Hall in the wake of the 2020 election to understand the possibility that “voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.”
The same question has returned in 2024 with a vengeance. But the signal Pareene sounded then should be filtered out from the noise:
“It would take making the state work for people to convince the masses that the state can work for people… The mission to build power for the left—or, much more modestly, to help an improved Democratic Party consolidate power—will not come down to simply announcing support for the right policies, while decrying or downplaying the wrong ones. It will, unfortunately, be much longer and harder work.”
Labor and the Democrats
To borrow a phrase from Mike Davis, the marriage between labor and the Democrats is barren, but no one is ready to file for divorce just yet. For the foreseeable future, all indications suggest that unions will be part of the unity of contradictory forces in the Democratic Party. If there is a schism, it’s most likely going to tack to the right. Under the right inducements from Trump, it’s easy to imagine a conservative wing of labor made up of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, President of the International Association of Fire Fighters Edward Kelly, International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett, and President of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Douglas McCarron, alongside assorted police, corrections, and border patrol unions.
But can rifts grow into large political fractures even within the dense web of corporate alliances that juice the Democratic Party’s coffers and impede even the mildest redistribution efforts? No one knows. The corporate dominance of the party is indisputable, and bosses grip on it hasn’t loosened because the Left has organized within the party. But the party also contains environmentalists, unions, and progressives of various stripes. Can they, organizing within and/or outside of it, exert meaningful influence? Addressing that question would lead outside the scope of this article. But independent candidacies, like Dan Osborn’s senatorial run in Nebraska, and municipal reform projects like the Richmond Progressive Alliance in California, offer models to attempt. We have to sow seeds of class solidarity across the nation, so many seedlings of independent political action may bloom.
“The Democrats did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Trump,” wrote Jimmy Williams, Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, after the election. “That’s not good enough anymore! Rather than offer a positive agenda on what immigrant workers bring to our country, they bought into the punitive, ‘tough,’ anti-worker messaging that is championed by Trump, even though we know it’s the bosses’ fault.”
Still, 2,000 UNITE HERE members and volunteers canvassed in battleground states, knocking on over four millions doors and had over 500,000 conversations with voters–deploying to doors as they’ve done in previous election cycles.
Members of the United Auto Workers participated in an intensive door-knocking campaign, reaching 200,000 members. Now we need a similar deployment but to organize and save the labor movement and along with it the dignity of working-class life.
UAW President Shawn Fain didn’t mince words: “UAW members around the country clocked in today under the same threat they faced yesterday: unchecked corporate greed destroying our lives, our families, and our communities…We’ve said all along that no matter who is in the White House, our fight remains the same.”
“Corporations and ultra-wealthy people are setting the agenda,” UNITE HERE President Gwen Mills. “Our mission is to put that power back in the hands of workers.”
Right now ranks of organized workers are far too few to exercise power–not to elect Democrats but to make any politician, regardless of party listen, to workers’ demands. To change the balance of power, we need more union members and unions that give a damn about fighting back. The answer to organized money is organized workers, but fewer workers are members of unions today than at any time in the country’s recent history. Union membership rates stand at 10% in the public sector and an abysmal 6% in the private sector.
Union researcher Chris Boehner has found that current organizing is one-tenth of what the labor movement had accomplished in the 1970s. “But imagine if labor put on its seventies bell-bottom jeans and started organizing one percent of eligible workers as unions did in the 1970s, not the current one-tenth of one-percent rate,” wrote Boehner. “Instead of 107,000 workers voting for a union in 2024, the number would be more like 1.1 million workers.”
At the end of Buñuel’s film, the guests attend a religious service, and yet again they are for some inexplicable reason struck with a paralyzing inertia, unable to leave. So too are Democrats, whether at the MSNBC studio or the White House, hermetically sealed in the insularity of their self-exculpating ideological delusions, ever loyal to their corporate paymasters. Let them be.
As Trump steps into office for a second term, the labor movement will have to stand up– not retreat into a defensive crouch. If the bosses don’t listen to our demands, we can walk off—just like Buñuel’s cooks and servants, with union power at our backs.
2028
Save the Date: May 2028, the date of our rendezvous with a potential to exercise our collective power, as the labor movement aligns our contracts and prepares for mass strikes. On that day, we aren’t just leaving. We are marching as one movement united behind the working class.
In Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis wrote that the Knights of Labor had “tapped the wellsprings of diverse laboring traditions…to nourish a network of solidarity association that bound together workplace and community.” One year before the May Day eight-hour-day demonstrations of 1886, Davis shared an inventory of “Knight-related organizations in Detroit in 1885, showing how their movement building went beyond bread-and-butter economics but provided an all-encompassing vision of democracy from below: ‘Unions, Knights of Labor assemblies, Working Men’s Club Rooms, cooperative stores and factories, labor newspapers, singing societies, social clubs, political organizations, and a worker’s militia.’”
These mass institutions involving hundreds of thousands achieved the “landmark reconciliation of Irish, German, and native workers.” Ultimately, Davis argued racism and nativism prevented the working class from seizing crucial turning points in class struggles of nineteen century into independent political action and realignment.
“The refusal of Irish miners in an anthracite hellhole of eastern Pennsylvania not only to sympathize with the slaves but to accept the implication… that they were in America anything less than CITIZENS’, speaks volumes about the ideological impact of American exceptionalism and the difficulties of building a class-conscious labor movement,” wrote Davis about failed efforts to build a united front linking abolition and ethno-religious Catholic discrimination.
Yes, it’s been a long-haul struggle. But that’s the trouble with a simpleminded populism, especially in a country where who is a person or who constitutes the people is heavily contested, from the Dred Scott case in 1858, guaranteeing enslavers the right to take their human property anywhere in the United States and strip African Americans of citizenship, to the present, targeting the undocumented workers for mass deportation and persecuting anyone involved in abortion or gender-affirming care.
“Give the people what they want,” say the liberals and culturally conservative leftists, inciting us to sacrifice trans people and migrants in response to social reaction. But as Stuart Hall cogently put it, “Politicians always think they know what people feel. It’s a fallacy, because there is no such thing as ‘the people.’ It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You’re constructing the people, you’re not reflecting the people.”
Today, we are faced with yet another turning point, a moment to remake the common sense in the working class. We can overcome divisions that feed racism, nativism, and misogyny. But in order to do so, we must organize institutions of our own making. As we organize for May 2028, we have a rare opportunity to fortify class institutions and create a new web of associations to contain the necessary solidarities to act as one mighty working class.
To believe deeply that the working class can self-consciously act collectively is, in the words of W.E.B. Dubois, “a hope that is not hopeful, but not hopeless.”
Let’s begin with a leap of faith, a fidelity in the primacy of class action in defense of all workers, no matter their legal status, race, or gender, so that in the years ahead, we can “fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely” to be society.