I am 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 for 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 on 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 since 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 in a compromise with Republicans, choosing instead to issue an executive order raising 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 it 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 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 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 found 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.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: