We have lived a political lifetime in the last couple of months.
From the deepest pits of despair over the pending electoral victory of Team Dystopia after Biden’s abysmal debate performance and his episodic, stumbling attempts to rectify his standing in the weeks that followed, to the pervasive bickering and moping on all forms of progressive media, the American left had hit bottom. The assassination attempt on Trump by a shooter who appears to have been yet another deeply alienated young man with a gun seeking attention seemed sure to give the former President a deified, near-martyr status, his bloody ear and raised fist immediately fit for an iconic picture in the history books.
The best lacked all conviction while the worst were full of passionate intensity as the latter sang along to Kid Rock, cheered Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off, and watched in befuddled adoration as Orange Jesus rambled on at the Republican National Convention, and his VP pick, the chosen son of the rightwing think tanks, opined on the perils of the New Woman and other serious matters. Baseball players were giving clenched fist salutes after getting big hits, and the Heritage Foundation was measuring the drapes at the White House with an abandoned President Biden still wandering the hallways in search of his last ally.
It was a tragic, surreal rollercoaster ride until, as I wrote in my Summer Chronicle from Las Vegas, history turned on a dime. After weeks of digging in and defying calls to quit the race, President Biden stepped down and handed the reigns to Vice President Harris who promptly shot out of the gate like a rocket and has not slowed down since. As many have noted, there is a deep sense of relief, collective joy, and energy that has infected not just activist circles but much of the public as people seem to be sensing an unexpected escape route from the death march that the 2024 Presidential race had become.
It just goes to show you that anything can happen at any time.
There are many reasons for the quick embrace of Kamala Harris by Democratic voters and many others but I suspect that chief among them is her refusal to take the base for granted and/or throw them under the bus in order to appeal to mythical suburban Republicans who were, according to many in the pundit class, just waiting to jump out of the bushes and vote for a Democrat if she only triangulated and moved just a little more to the right, a tad to the left of Nikki Haley. Surely, she should pick a more conservative white male for her running mate who would not scare anyone.
Instead, Harris went with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a favorite of progressives and the labor movement rather than candidates with records that flew in the face of the interests of unions and other key constituents in the Democratic Party. While the issue of Gaza still looms large, Harris has made efforts to reach out to critics of the Biden Administration’s policy, which will never be enough to satisfy everyone, but at least shows that she is open to changing course on the issue. And, at present, the polls suggest that she may be rewarded for this, but she will have to move beyond lip service and at least hold the United States accountable to its own laws with regard to arms sales if she hopes to bring home the undecided vote in significant numbers.
Importantly, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who essentially took the Bernie Sanders wing of the party for granted after a contentious primary battle and never even visited some key blue wall states when it mattered, rejecting help from important labor unions in favor of campaigning in other states which she ultimately lost, the Harris team has hit the ground hard in the battlegrounds and put labor at the center of their efforts.
As opposed to Senator Mark Kelly who refused to support the PRO Act (before his flip flop during vetting) that would have aided union organizing or Josh Shapiro who supported vouchers against the interests of unionized public-school teachers, Harris’s VP pick, Tim Walz, was a union member and has a stellar record on labor issues in Minnesota. He is also an ally of environmentalists and social justice advocates and a product of rural America who can speak the language of progressive populism in a way that no Democratic candidate has been able to for decades.
Thus, rather than listening to the sage wisdom of folks like James Carville and others who wanted her to tell the left of the party to “go fuck themselves,” Harris reached out a hand. So far, this seems like a winning strategy though it is far too early to start popping the champagne corks. But at least Harris is running on some of the core principles of egalitarianism, inclusion, and hope that embody the New Deal ethos of the Democratic Party at its best when many in the Party establishment would have taken a different path or even chosen a different candidate.
There certainly are and will continue to be plenty of contradictions and compromises that will surely disappoint, but when you are running against fascism, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is not just unwise, it is harmful to the best interests of those most in peril and dangerous to Democracy itself.
To those who dispute this, I would note that elections are not the ultimate end game but a way to help determine the ground upon which you organize. In the labor universe, where I do most of my work, there is no question what is at stake.
There has not been an election where the labor movement has had more on the line since the days of FDR and the New Deal. Joe Biden has been as strong an ally to unions as any president in recent memory. He has disappointed in some ways, as with the railroad strike, but he has also walked a picket line, passed legislation and economic policies favorable to workers, and brought the concerns of unions back into the forefront of American politics in ways not seen for decades.
As the Center for American Progress noted, the Biden Administration has bolstered unions by supporting the United Autoworkers’ picket line, investing in good union jobs, holding corporations accountable, raising the pay of contract workers, supporting organizing, upholding the rights of employees on the job, giving fast-food workers a way to speak up against unfair working conditions, and empowering federal unions.
It is an impressive list to be sure and, if not for the strong opposition of Republicans in Congress, much more could have been done to improve the lives and economic standing of ordinary folks. One should not forget that had it not been for the intransigence of two Senators, an even more thoroughgoing pro-worker agenda could have been passed with the Build Back Better legislation that would helped to increase wages, improve healthcare for working people, and create even more, good, green union jobs than the Inflation Reduction Act has done.
Yes, there are still many problems to be solved, but it is evident that it has been the priority of the Biden White House to uplift those who the economy has left behind for decades.
A return to another Trump presidency would spell disaster for working Americans and unions despite the pro-worker optics of the Republican Party that were enabled by the idiotic decision of the Teamsters leader to speak at the Republican Convention alongside a litany of politicians who have spent their careers trying to destroy the labor movement. Indeed, before Biden decided not to run for a second term, many activists inside labor were discussing how to survive the assault to come after a Trump victory.
Now, with a revivified Democratic Party and new energy in the activist grass roots and labor, it appears the Harris-Walz ticket has a real chance to defeat the threat that another Trump administration represents to both the labor movement and American Democracy. Many commentators have shined a light on Trump’s most egregious statements about punishing his opponents and rolling back a catalogue of longstanding rights, but less attention has been given to how a second Trump administration would impact American workers and the union movement.
While Republicans have talked big about bringing back U.S. manufacturing and helping save the American Dream, their track record is one of overwhelmingly favoring the rich and corporations at the expense of average citizens. They have put a lot of effort into dividing Americans across racial, gender, regional, religious, and cultural grounds by playing to fear and petty tribalism, but that has done nothing to put more food on the table or money in the pockets of working people. Fantasies of mass deportation and revanchist white male identity politics stoke anger while doing little more than afflicting the powerless while comforting the affluent. It's the same old “backlash populism” that Thomas Frank has observed replaced the economic elite with the cultural elite as the target for white working-class rage in the heartland and elsewhere.
In sum, Trump’s billionaire populism is a fool’s errand for working people. It will only do more to increase inequality and fuel the despair the right cynically weaponizes to promote the agenda of the rich and corporations.
If you think this is an exaggeration, you need look no further than their policy agenda, Project 2025, which, despite recent attempts at disavowal, is the documented work of former Trump administration officials working at the Heritage Foundation. Trump spoke at their conference and flew on fancy jets with them. They are his people.
What precisely does Project 2025 recommend be done to unions and American workers? The AFL-CIO has broken it down to the essentials. As Common Dreams reported this July, the idea is to systematically eviscerate the labor movement by banning unions for public service workers, replacing civil service workers with Trump loyalists, letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract, allowing companies to stop paying overtime and states to opt out of minimum wage laws, getting rid of child labor protections, and encouraging company unions.
In addition to this, the AFL-CIO has pointed out how Project 2025 recommends making it illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions, allowing companies to retaliate against union organizers, and adopt a wide range of other “pro-corporate policies that would drive up costs, put people out of work, endanger people’s lives and make it harder for working people to get ahead.” This agenda, the federation argues, “would be catastrophic for working people.”
In sum, the Project 2025 agenda is a kind of anti-New Deal that seeks to accomplish the decades old project of the right wing think tanks by protecting capitalism from democracy, permanently. It is not just a transient political power grab; it is a complete structural realignment of American society. As Doug Porter has outlined in his excellent series, it dismantles government at all levels and seeks to shrink it down to the size where it can, as Grover Norquist once notoriously said, be “drowned in a bathtub.”
And with this rollback of the twentieth century, all the inclusive gains that American democracy has seen in the last one hundred plus years will be put in jeopardy. This is the most serious attack on the collective good we have seen in our lifetimes.
This fall we can stop this from happening by voting and working hard for a brighter, more equitable future—a joyful, beloved community rather than a dark, dystopian nigthmare. And while we do so, it might be a good idea to remember how we got here and how we can rebuild American communities, so the revanchist appeal of the right loses its purchase. Winning the election is the short game, winning back the country by rebuilding genuine community is the long game.
Let’s get to work.