Harry Targ and Paul Krehbiel
(This article discusses the historic decades-long changes that took place in the United States that laid the groundwork for the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and his defeat in 2020. It also addresses the victory of two Democratic Party Senatorial candidates in a special election in Georgia: Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. One day after their victory Trumpism raised its ugly head with thousands of Trump supporters engaging in an attempted coup at the US Capitol building. The analysis below includes discussions of life-altering changes in our capitalist economy that have negatively impacted on millions of people and made changes in politics – including in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Finally, this article discusses the critically important development and actions by progressive social justice organizations and movements.)
Our major task in 2020 was to
defeat Donald Trump. That task was completed by the mobilization and democratic
will of the voters. The victory was
reaffirmed by the election of two Georgian Democrats, Reverend Raphael Warnock,
an African-American, and Jon Ossoff, a Jew, to Senate seats in a January 5,
2021 special election. Trump tried to
hold onto power after his electoral defeat through unsubstantiated lies of
voter fraud and subterfuge until the inauguration Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (and beyond).
Yet, Trump and his followers
aren’t going away. A growing concern is
the Trump instigated rise of a violent extremist right-wing movement, that
among other violent assaults, invaded the Capitol on January 6 in an act of
insurrection that left five people dead. Out of the Oval Office, Trump
continues to promote the lies and rally his fascist base, seeking to build an
American-style fascist movement to overturn the will of the majority, and
impose a dictatorship under his authority.
Progressive and democratic
political forces must unify and intensify the fight against Trump and his
followers, through impeachment, arrests and prosecutions to the fullest extent
of the law, and other measures to isolate and defeat the right. At the same time, we must step up the fight
to build a more progressive and humane society at home, while pursuing a peace
and solidarity agenda internationally. Advances on one front will help make
advances on the others. We must also be
vigilant, and oppose all roadblocks to this agenda, even if they come from the
new administration.
Planning and action continue to revolve
around assessments of the recent elections; an analyses of voters and voting
blocs, victories and defeats; and organizing experiences. Conversations involve
economic circumstances which have shaped voting behavior; such as massive and
growing economic inequality, declining real wages, evictions, medical bills,
and the traditions of white supremacy and racism.. There have been debates about tactics, particularly
how to advance our grassroots organizing (grassroots groups in Georgia and
other states have broken new ground here), new advances in internet organizing,
conducting safe mass canvassing, doing deep canvassing, and organizing massive phone
calling and texting blitzes. And debates abound about which policies need to be
promoted: health care for all, stopping climate change, ending racism and
police violence, creating jobs, ending the pandemic, and opposing military
spending and imperial ventures. As we
move ahead a top priority must be how best to connect with and organize our
base: young people, people of color, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, the
peace movement, union members and the broad working-class into a winning
coalition.
Organizing our base must be at
the center of our work. But we must also
give attention to our opposition. We win
in society and at the ballot box by educating and organizing our supporters, and
by weakening and splitting our opposition.
And one question that needs more attention is why 74 million voters who,
after the unaddressed pandemic, economic crisis, racism, sexism, xenophobia and
spreading environmental calamity, still voted for Trump? This was eleven million more than in 2016? If we don’t expand our base, and connect with
some reachable sectors of Trump voters and peel them away from the right, that failure
will haunt us in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
And puzzling historical questions need to be answered. How did the
country move from Democratic Party majorities in national and state elections
to minority status in many states and some national elections since the 1930s? And more fundamentally, how has the
capitalist economic system affected these political changes?
The 1970s: Transformations in American Politics
The 1970’s was a pivotal decade. It began with much promise. In May,1970 the student and anti-war
movements reached new heights. Four million students went on strike at colleges
and universities across the country. The spark that lit the explosion was the
killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State, after President Nixon
invaded Cambodia expanding the war in Southeast Asia. This mass movement of young people was the
result of 10-15 years of organizing the civil rights movement and civil rights
laws, and a revolutionary Black liberation movement. Also, there was a decade’s
long organizing of anti-war and student movements which helped build Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the broader new left. The mass mobilization
of young people occurred despite the prior history of the decimation of the left
of the 1930’s and early 1940’s by the post-World War Two anti-communist
McCarthy period. The state repression of the Cold War era up to Vietnam
destroyed the largest and most influential organization on the left, the
Communist Party USA, and its influence in unions, among people of color
communities, academia, Hollywood, public institutions even the Democratic
Party, and political culture in general.
In the early 1970s, there also emerged a progressive
grass-roots movement in labor. In 1970-71 the largest number of workers strikes
occurred since the big strike wave after World War II in 1946. These strike
waves led to winning improvements in wages and benefits for millions of workers,
advancing social programs for the larger society, and strengthening the labor
movement in society and politics, especially inside the Democratic Party. The
women’s movement also exploded across the country in the 1970’s, and Marxist
and socialist organizations grew.
Around the globe, many national liberation movements in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America had won independence from former colonial
control. Numerous “new” independent nations had formed the Non-Aligned Movement
to shift the global political economy to meet the needs of their countries in
the Global South. And, the prestige of the Soviet Union and Communist Parties
everywhere was growing, especially in France and Italy where Communists were
elected to many local and regional public offices and contended for power
nationally. In addition, the United States increasingly faced competition from
other capitalist countries which had recovered from the ravages of world war.
All of this resulted in a decline in the relative economic power of the United
States in the global economy.
The rise of competing sources of political and economic
power around the world led US capitalists and their politicians to pursue
multiple strategies to reverse their setbacks, and rebuff the economic and
political threats to US hegemony. In addition, ruling elites saw the necessity
of breaking the backs of militant workers and youth in the United States. With
increasing economic competition from overseas and labor militancy at home,
capitalists moved production overseas to
low wage havens. Manufacturing facilities were shut down and massive numbers of
good paying union jobs in the US were lost. Working-class communities were
devastated. The labor movement shrunk.
Simultaneously, the globalization of production further marginalized
workers abroad who experienced lower wages, horrific working conditions, and
efforts by state apparatuses to crush labor organizing.
Politically, these policies in the United States weakened
the influence of labor and liberals in the Democratic Party, allowing the more
conservative anti-labor corporate Democrats to increase their control and
freeze out organized labor by embracing the “new” ideology of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism included the rolling back of regulations and taxes on capital and
shifting the economic shortfall to the working-class in the form of cuts in
social services. Meanwhile, the
Republican Party, historically dominated by the major capitalists, was becoming
a more right-wing party under the leadership of Richard Nixon in the 1970’s,
and Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. And the assault on labor was coupled by a
revitalization of the traditions of white supremacy which was deeply embedded
in US history.
With the liberals and labor greatly weakened in the
Democratic Party little or nothing was done to help millions of formerly
unionized industrial workers who had lost their jobs, income and identity. The
working class was particularly impacted in what became “rust belt” cities and
regions, especially in the former industrial states bordering the Great Lakes, including
Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Left leaderless, many former union industrial
workers from these states fell prey to the simple but reactionary and hollow
solutions of the right, laying the groundwork for charlatans like Ronald Reagan
and Donald Trump. All of this, including
the increasing crisis of US capital domestically and globally, expanded the
influence of the rightwing in the Republican Party.
Paradoxically, despite a massive defeat of rightwing
candidate for president Barry Goldwater in 1964, the descendants of Barry
Goldwater, led by mass marketers Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, rebounded
and pushed so-called “wedge” issues. These issues played on backward ideas,
tending to divide people over guns, god, and gays. The Republican Party moved
further to the right. Politicians such as Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and
Donald Trump in 2016 simply came along at the right times to seize control of a
huge block of hurting, confused, angry and frustrated working-class voters, and
many economically insecure small business people and white collar employees.
Many Trump voters included those who had voted for Democrat and African
American Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. The
Trump phenomena was an outcome of decades of economic insecurity, the floating
of simplistic interpretations of reality, and a resuscitation of the racist
past. Examining 2016 voter data shows that Trump voters came more solidly from
the middle class – small and mid-sized business owners and some professionals,
and upper class corporate and financial interests, as well as a significant
number of workers, a multi-class reactionary “historic bloc.”
That is not to discount the racist, sexist, homophobic,
anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-working-class ideas that have existed
from the earliest days of our country. They are a part of the fabric of our
country, promoted daily by nearly every institution of society. Marx wrote, “The ideas of the ruling class
are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
These ideas were ramped up by Trump and his GOP sycophants. These
ideas are very serious problems and must be addressed and ameliorated. They are
the central impediments to progress.
Therefore, to build a progressive future, one goal must be to connect
with and peel away sectors of Trump voters, especially working-class voters,
from his reactionary and racist program and movement, and onto a better
path.
Historic Changes in the Democratic Party
What seems missing from
discussions of election outcomes is an analysis that links changes in history
and political economy to the changes that have occurred in the Democratic Party
over a long period of time. These changes span an era from Keynesianism and the
capital/labor compromise of the late 1940s to neoliberalism, reflected in the
sector of the Democratic Party that gained dominance in the 1980s, sometimes
referred to as “The Third Way.”
Looking at the twentieth century,
Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential victory in 1932 and three subsequent
victories presaged both a transformation of the Democratic Party and public
policy from laissez faire to state-directed policies. These policies were
designed to address social needs (creating jobs, supporting unions, supporting
farmers, investing in public works and the public good, and funding the arts -
theater, murals, music, historical writing for example). It was assumed that
fiscal stimuli, putting money in workers’ hands would jump start the economy.
Fiscal stimuli were paralleled by increased government regulations of banking,
labor/management relations, and wages and hours. And it must be emphasized that
these New Deal programs would not have occurred if millions of working-class
men and women had not hit the streets and striking picket-lines to demand
them. Mass action by millions of workers
was central to achieving worker gains.
But, it must be remembered that as
much as the New Deal programs helped large sectors of the working class,
workers of color were disgracefully excluded from many of them. This exclusion
was driven by the racist Dixiecrats in the former southern slave states that
comprised a significant sector of the Democratic Party and whose votes were
needed in Congress to pass the New Deal legislation. Nevertheless, the thrust
of public policy, mostly advocated by Democrats, was for government to help
working persons, or at least a portion of them.
The Democratic Party institutionalized the New Deal, the Fair Deal in
the Truman years, and, in the 1960s, the Great Society.
Most white workers and
increasingly Black workers, after some of these benefits were extended to them,
embraced these programs and saw the Democratic Party as their home. From the
1930s until the 1980s, voter studies showed majorities of voters identified
with the Democratic Party. And even mainstream Republicans, such as Dwight
Eisenhower, accepted the partial truce that labor and capital arrived at after
the tumultuous workers strikes of the 1930’s.
He didn’t try to dismantle the social welfare programs of the New Deal,
and signed into law an extension of Social Security in the 1950s.
However, the Democratic Party
began its long decline in 1968 when candidate Richard Nixon reached out to
conservative Democratic voters with his appeal to “the silent majority” and his
embrace of the racist “southern strategy,” and the Democratic Party had no
effective counterstrategy. Nixon also
played the “law and order” card to appeal to moderate to conservative voters
who were confused about the war in Vietnam and didn’t understand nor like the
anti-war demonstrators, nor the struggle to win equal rights for Blacks and
other people of color. This political
atmosphere allowed reactionary politician George Wallace to become a popular
racist third-party candidate for president.
The last gasp of the New
Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society tradition was reflected in the overwhelming defeat
of progressive populist anti-war Democratic presidential candidate George
McGovern in 1972. Nixon shamelessly but falsely blamed McGovern during the
campaign for violence in street demonstrations, and proclaimed himself the “law
and order” candidate. Two years later,
because of an illegal break-in by Nixon operatives in the Democratic Party
offices at the Watergate Hotel, President Nixon was forced out of office and
his successor Gerald Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to moderate
Democrat Jimmy Carter.
In sum, these political eruptions occurred in
a decade, the 1970s, when the United States was experiencing declining relative
power in the world, both politically and economically. In addition, the
contours of American politics were dramatically affected by the oil crises of
the early 1970s and the rise of economic power of the OPEC countries who sought
more control over the production and profits from their oil. Threatened with
declining global hegemony, declining profit rates, and a “fiscal crisis of the
state,” federal and state governments cut back on social supports that workers
had come to expect. And both Republicans and Democrats began to support
neoliberal policies at the expense of working people. Both political parties
responded to the dramatic changes in the political economy of capitalism with
austerity policies that were increasingly defended by dividing the working
class by race.
The Democratic Party and “The Third Way”
Jimmy Carter planted the seeds for the shift in the Democratic Party from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism and the Party’s “Third Way.” Michael Jordan Smith succinctly summarizes a central point of a recent book “Reaganland,” in which the author, Rick Perlstein, documents that the Democrats abandoned “economic fairness in favor of balanced budgets, deregulation, and fiscal conservatism,” in the service of a faltering capitalism. Smith continues his description of the Perlstein analysis: “Carter led and presided over this transition, over the objections of traditional liberals including Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. But Carter joined with a revitalized business lobby, which gradually succeeded in persuading Democratic politicians that neoliberalism was the only way forward. To this day, the Democratic Party hasn’t fully recovered.” (Michael Jordan Smith, “When Conservatism Triumphed,” The Progressive, August 17, 2020)
President Reagan’s 1980 false polemic,
which resonated with a work force that was experiencing capitalist-fueled seven
percent unemployment and double-digit inflation, was that “government is not
the solution. Government is the problem.” Armed with theories from conservative
capitalist economists, Reagan expanded dramatically the policies initiated by
President Carter. These policies included deregulation of the economy, lobbying
for the privatization of public institutions, downsizing programs of welfare
and safety nets. All of this was an attempt to shore up a US capitalist system
that was besieged by growing competition from other capitalist countries, and a
growing socialist bloc of countries around the globe. To secure support for programs of austerity
at home, Reagan blamed the so-called “greedy” unions and stepped-up the process
of destroying the power of a labor movement already reeling from closures of
unionized mass production industries. Reagan, in 1981, fired 12,000 union air
traffic controllers, members of PATCO, after they went on strike over issues of
safety on the job and in the air. That mass firing destroyed their union. It also sent a signal to all capitalists that
it was open war on organized labor. While there was some resistance and
fightback by labor, it was reeling from too many attacks and loses.
This assault on labor was then
coupled with an intensified war on the Black community and other communities of
color, by criminalizing and jailing them.
The ruling elite shifted the discourse from poverty’s connection to the
economic failure of capitalism to blaming the victims of poverty for their
misfortunes. And, in the main, the Democratic Party–with the corporate
Democrats now in total control, either only weakly opposed the Reagan austerity
agenda or cautiously supported it. What would later be called the “neoliberal
agenda” became the dominant ideological framework of discourse of conventional
politics, namely unleashing capitalism, by both the Republican and Democratic
parties. (It is important to remember that both Republican and Democratic
parties have been controlled by capitalists since their founding, but in both
parties, especially the Democratic Party, there has been a class struggle
between the capitalists, on the one hand, and a large sector of the
multi-racial working class and progressive allies, on the other hand).
Along with attacks on labor and
people of color at home, the strategy of sectors of the US ruling capitalist
class was to expand US global hegemony. The main target was the Soviet Union.
The Reagan Administration organized and
carried out an intense eight-year campaign of economic sabotage, military
threats and action, and an arms race that busted the budget of the Soviet Union.
This was coupled with similar attacks on the Eastern European socialist
countries whose economies were integrated with the economy of the Soviet Union.
In addition, the Reagan Administration launched wars against revolutionary
forces in Central America. The Democratic Party not only did not oppose this
overthrow of the Soviet Union, but aided the Republican Party and together
applauded its success. When the
overthrow was completed in 1991, a major economic alternative and threat to US
capitalism was gone. Furthermore, since
the Soviet Union had been the major global supporter of socialist-oriented
national liberation movements around the world, new areas in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America were now opened up for US capitalist investments, control, and
exploitation, again supported by both the Republican and Democratic
parties. (See Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret
Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1996).
In 1985, Washington D. C.
Democrats formed the corporate-led Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The
Council articulated the view that the Democratic Party was losing its grip on
public support because it was “too liberal.” In reality, it was because the
Democratic Party was viewed by many as a “Republican lite” party. The DLC developed a “Third Way” agenda that
was less committed to working people, was more hostile to people of color,
shifted policy advocacy from providing social safety nets to expanding law
enforcement, and was less vigorously supportive of government regulation. When Democrat
Bill Clinton was elected president, he enshrined the neoliberal agenda in the
program of the Democratic Party. Third Way Democrats no longer even pretended
to represent the interests of working people in policy, but instead emphasized
mostly in words, empathy for “all” people.
One stark optic of this was reflected in a Frontline documentary on globalization which showed Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton meeting steelworkers at a plant gate during a 1992 campaign stop. He promised them that he would serve their interests, particularly by opposing the then controversial North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the next scene in the documentary Clinton is meeting with Wall Street financier Robert Rubin, getting schooled on the “realities” of the modern capitalist economy (PBS, Commanding Heights). Despite labor opposition to NAFTA in the US, joined by progressives in the labor movements of Mexico and Canada, Clinton leaned on Democrats in the House of Representatives to support it. Clinton’s aggressive support of NAFTA was seen as metaphorically analogous to President Reagan’s firing of the PATCO workers in 1981 after they endorsed his candidacy for president.
Trump’s Base of Support: From 2016
to 2020
Trump’s core constituency all along has been sectors of
finance capital, insurance, real estate, the military/industrial complex, and
drug companies whose profits have come from domestic investments or sales and
speculation overseas. It also has included portions of small and medium sized
businesses whose viabilities have been threatened, not by big government, but
by the further monopolization of the economy.
In addition, some workers displaced by the underside of
neoliberal capitalism, including plant closings, capital flight, automation,
and anti-worker trade deals, supported Trump because they saw no positive
economic future in a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016. (In 1980 many of these voters were called “Reagan
Democrats”). Finally, the Trump constituency has included a significant
percentage of voters who are ideological legatees of white supremacy, and other
reactionary and right-wing ideas.
Therefore, the Trump coalition from 2016 to today has
consisted of fractions of capital who gain from a more muscular and
economically nationalist policy agenda, marginalized portions of the so-called
“middle class,” sectors of the working class, and portions of all of these
whose political learning has centered on the history and consciousness of white
supremacy (“make America great again”), as well as those who look to
authoritarianism and even fascism as a savior.
In contradiction, Trump’s major adversaries among the elite
have come from a core sector of the ruling class that has dominated the policy
process at least since the 1980s, the neoliberal globalists, as well as the
broad but loose coalition of some liberal and progressive members of the
working-class and middle class. In short, every administration from Carter to
Trump has engaged in deregulation of economic life, reduced government programs
that once helped the poor and working classes, weakened the rights of workers
and their unions, and advocated the privatization of public institutions. The
Republicans have led the assault, advocating the privatization of Social
Security, the postal service, and other programs. Both Democratic and
Republican administrations have pursued agendas that have negatively impacted
the vast majority of workers, including new generations of service employees,
gig workers, and a growing precariat of insecure employees.
A significant portion of this qualitative change in the way
capitalism works has involved increased financial speculation (as a proportion
of the total gross domestic product), dramatic increases in domestic and global
inequality in wealth and income, and increasing economic marginalization of
workers, particularly women, people of color and immigrants. And globally,
capitalist elites from every continent began to develop common approaches to
national policy promoted by such international public institutions as the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and informal organizations such
as the Trilateral Commission, meetings of the G7 countries, and the annual
World Economic Forum.
In 2016, Candidate Donald Trump, a capitalist who has
nothing but contempt for the working-class and the general good, orchestrated a
campaign against other capitalists, the neoliberal globalists who dominated the
political process in the United States since the 1980s. Trump’s vision was for
US capitalists to be beholden to him and his reactionary program to rule
the world, shunning former partners and allies.
While Trump epitomized finance capital, albeit domestic as well as
foreign, representing less than the one percent of the elite who rule the
world, he presented himself as a spokesperson for the economically
marginalized. He attacked a portion of the capitalist class of which he is a
member and also attacked and undermined democratic rules and institutions that
have been broadly accepted by both political parties and bourgeois democratic
capitalists for years. And to further divide the working-class and broad
sectors of the population, he blamed the economic suffering and alienation of
the much of the working-class on some of their own; people of color, women, and
immigrants. All these characteristics
are the building blocks of fascism.
Resistance to Trump, 2017 to 2020
Since the November 2016 election, masses of people mobilized
in a variety of ways against the Trump agenda. The women’s marches and rallies
of January 21, 2017 and International Women’s Day on March 8 were historic in
size and global reach. Since then, there have been huge mobilizations to reduce
the use of fossil fuels and prevent climate disaster, to support immigrant
rights, to provide basic health care, protect workers’ rights, and most
recently to protest police killings with impunity, especially of young Black
men and women. Many of these manifestations of outrage were planned, but also
from the beginning of Trump’s term many were spontaneous acts of
resistance. The protests were broad and
varied, from Congressional town hall meetings to demonstrations at airports
challenging his directives to refuse Muslims entry into the United States, to
workers’ organizing and strikes.
A multiplicity of groups formed
or increased in size since January, 2017:
for example Bernie Sanders supporters; anti-racists mobilizations
particularly against police violence; those calling for sanctuary cities and
defending the human rights of immigrants; progressive Democratic organizations;
and women’s mobilizations. Traditional left organizations, such as the
Democratic Socialists of America, benefiting from the Sanders campaign,
multiplied its membership by ten times from 2016 to 2020, now totaling 80,000
members. And organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union and
Planned Parenthood reported large increases in financial contributions. Since
the 2016 election the mobilization of millions of people bolstered the spirits
of progressives everywhere. They have felt that at this point in history a new
progressivism was about to be born. But the story has been complicated by the
composition of Trumpism and the opposition to it.
Oppositions
to Trumpism: Neoliberal and Progressive
Paradoxically, while the last four years has been “a
teachable moment” as well as a movement building moment, progressive forces are
struggling to get better organized. In and around the Democratic Party there is
a conflict over the vision and the politics it ought to embrace at this time
and in the coming period. The Sanders supporters, inside and outside the
Democratic Party, and progressive Congress persons such as the “Squad” have
marshalled much support for a progressive agenda: single-payer health care, a
green jobs agenda, protecting the environment, tax reform, supporting not
destroying unions, immigrant rights, defending women’s rights, and cutting
military spending. With the brutal policies advocated and already instituted by
the Trump administration, progressive Democrats and their allies on the left
have struggled mightily to articulate a program and create some organizational
unity to challenge Trumpism. And that struggle remains relevant since the 2020
election, particularly given the fact that candidate Trump received in excess
of 74 million votes for reelection.
The dilemma for progressives is that opposition to Trumpism
and all it stands for has been and must be a key component of reigniting a
Progressive Majority in the immediate future.
But if it does not address the fundamental failures of the neoliberal
agenda, including challenging neoliberal globalization, the current phase of
capitalism, Trump’s grassroots support will continue, even after he reluctantly
left the White House. Working people who ordinarily would vote for more liberal
candidates for public office need to believe that future candidates are
prepared to address their issues, often economic, that concern them the most.
Therefore, the fundamental project for progressives today
includes mobilizing against Trumpism while articulating an alternative
political and economic analysis of the current state of capitalist development.
In concrete terms, this approach means challenging the legitimacy of the legacy
of the Trump administration and its allies in Congress while articulating the
perspective that corporate, the neoliberal globalists, are part of the problem,
not the solution. President Biden’s
recently articulated stimulus program represents many features of a progressive
agenda, particularly in its efforts to defeat the pandemic.
Moving Beyond 2020
Concretely, the solution is for the broad left, including
the labor movement, to push President-elect Joe Biden to promote a bold New
Deal type program immediately, like FDR did in 1933. A first goal should be
winning at least one big improvement for millions of workers that they strongly
need, so they are encouraged to support more.
A second project of left/progressive/labor forces should include
a conscious effort to peel away some Trump/rightwing voters. A New Deal win
would be a big help. But progressives need to couple policy victories with a
clear commitment to protect values and institutions that millions of workers
cherish, as long as these values and institutions do not harm others. These
include listening to grievances of members of working-class communities and
respecting workers’ lives, their love of their families, religious beliefs,
social clubs, sporting activities, and traditions. The left-led CIO unions
reached into communities of workers in the 1930s and 1940s and won their
support by doing all of this, not just union members, but their families and
loved ones as well. All of this helped dramatically weaken the right-wing fascist
threats that had significant appeal in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, until the
first prò-worker New Deal programs came into effect.
Finally, a national movement must emerge that unites the
left, labor and broad progressive movements, and pushes support for a program
which can help everyone; especially our multi-racial working class. A massive
infrastructure building program to put millions of people to work at good
paying union jobs for many years would be a huge step forward, coupled with a
massive jobs program producing green products – a Green New Deal. This would
employ many building trades and manufacturing workers which were a significant portion
of Trump’s working-class voters. Shifting away from oil and fracking to mass
production of solar energy products, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other
green products, could turn today’s Trump/GOP voters away from the Republican Party
and toward the Democratic Party, including toward a Bernie Sanders inspired
bold and humanitarian democratic socialist program in 2022 and 2024. If the Democrats don’t launch a comprehensive
program to help the working-class, we run a big risk of losing in 2024, to
Trump again, or someone worse.
This alternative analysis requires a bold challenge and
vision, both inside the electoral arena and in the streets. It calls for big
progressive reforms that meet the needs of the general public, and weakens the power and abuses of capitalism. The alternative could be worse than the insurrection
that occurred on January 6, 2021. The tasks are challenging, but another world
is possible.
-----------------------------------------
Harry Targ is Professor Emeritus in political science at
Purdue University in Indiana, and a member of the American Association of
University Professors. He blogs at www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com.
Paul Krehbiel is a former union
auto worker from Buffalo, a former Teamster, and retired member of Service
Employees International Union. He was
the coordinator of Los Angeles Labor for Bernie. Both Targ and Krehbiel are
co-chairs of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
