The Democratic Capitulation Point
Hope begins when Democratic Party leadership gives way to the Left. Unions can make it happen.
Hamilton Nolan
After one long, dark month of the second Trump administration, many non-fascists have already started asking: How long will we have to remain cowered in despair? When will we know that we have reached, if not the bottom, at least the point at which the fight seems at least closer to even again? The answer is that the turnaround point will come when the Democratic Party fully capitulates to the Left — when the most institutional of parties accepts the need for systemic change. The bad news is that we are still far from that point. The good news is that there are overwhelming reasons to believe that we will get there.
So far, Democratic leadership has acted like a bunch of teachers reading aloud the school handbook to an active school shooter. “Resistance” is hardly a fair term for what we have seen from the party’s top brass. It’s more like miffed futility, the sort of absurd, peevish objections that can only come from someone who has yet to grasp the scope of what is happening. “Put that gun away at once, or else I am going to call the principal,” the Democrats say, as the principal lies dead behind them.
When reality becomes radical, moderates become fools. We are living through a lawless, dictatorial descent into autocracy and oligarchy. For institutionalists, this is a shock — a fall from great heights. For the Left, this collapse is only the final few inches on a trajectory that has spanned many decades. America has an economic system that produces great inequality and a political system that allows money to directly buy political power. These two things operating side by side will inevitably produce an oligarchy, of the sort we are now seeing take hold. The kind of incrementalism that defines mainstream Democratic Party politics will have the same effect as building a chain link fence to hold back a tidal wave. To fight an oligarchy, you need a class war. We’ve already come too far for anything less to be useful. The Democratic leadership that got us here must accept this and give way, by necessity. The only alternative is for all of us to drown together.
This week, newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin published a memo laying out his vision for the party’s direction. It speaks about the urgent need to make the Democrats the “true party of labor and working people,” centers unions as the party’s future, and says that “union workers and labor leaders will be core to my decision-making.” This is all well and good — putting organized labor at the center of the Democratic Party would be a vast improvement on the way the party has operated for the past 30 years — but at this particular moment, it’s not sufficient.
In a vacuum, Martin’s idea makes perfect sense. Union voters are one of the only groups that stuck with Democrats in the past election. Drastically increasing union membership would not only help the Democratic Party, it would blunt the underlying trends that have got us into this crisis in the first place. (I wrote a book about this very point.) But organized labor just enjoyed four years of an extremely pro-union presidency, and union density in America continued to decline. Fewer than one in ten American workers is now a union member. Increasing union density is a vital long term goal. It should have been the Democrats’ priority decades ago. Now, however, we are in an emergency. The labor movement itself was incapable of building its army given a much friendlier political environment than we have now. It is very likely that union density will continue to fall under Trump. In order to bring about the virtuous cycle that Martin is looking for, one of rising union organizing that builds a blue political wall, we must first find our way out of the autocratic domination we are facing. Unions are too weak to break the oligarchy on their own. For that, we need a class war from below.
The core of the Democratic Party’s political project right now should be class war on behalf of the bottom 95% of America’s wealth distribution. It may give you a good chuckle to try to imagine Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and the rest of the party’s current leadership rousing themselves into an Occupy-style revolt. (Even Ken Martin, after all, could only bring himself to decry the bad, Republican billionaires, reserving the right to keep raising cash from the good billionaires.)
The fact that genuine class war politics strike the top of the Democratic Party as ridiculous is all the demonstration you need that the top of the Democratic Party is incapable of handling the present situation. They have all built their careers by being good at raising money, during a time of rising inequality, when the obvious fundraising targets have been the very people on the winning side of inequality’s mechanisms. The people who run the Democratic Party got there by being good at catering to the rich. Now, the party must fight the rich, or be crushed. Therefore, the party itself needs to radically remake its leadership. If it does not, it will not be able to become an effective opposition party, and all of us will suffer for it.
It doesn’t really matter how you feel about these facts. They are as incontrovertible as mathematics. Capitalism and inequality are the fuel of the machine that has led us into this bizarre time of Donald Trump being inaugurated as president, surrounded by tech moguls with twelve-figure net worths. All of the incentives now are for billionaires to support the whims of Trump in order to be allowed to grow richer. The full combination of state power and the economic power of the very rich is here. It is not just at the doorstep; it is inside The People’s House. It has ascended. “Fundraise from the rich in order to try to snag an electoral victory here and there” is not going to get us out of this trap. In order to break the political power of Trump, we must break the economic power of the rich. That means class war.
As with all wars, it will be difficult. But the first step is having an army willing to wage the fight. Events in the world have moved the political center — the set of policies most conducive to the flourishing of most Americans — far, far to the left. Capitalism, inequality, and money in politics are a self-powering set of conditions that have worked to pull us into the bizarre, unhealthy and dangerous state of affairs we now face. I am sorry to tell you that, absent ferocious opposition, that state of affairs is sure to get worse from here. The irony of the Democratic institutionalists is that they are already mired in the class war. They just don’t understand yet how badly they are going to lose.
There is, however, more hope than you might think. The Democrats’ better-late-than-never moves to give unions more power in the party — which began under Biden, and which the DNC appears determined to continue — hint at the path forward. The silver lining of organized labor’s (unwise!) tendency to prioritize electoral politics over worker organizing is that unions have significant clout inside the Democratic Party — especially now, when it is dawning on Democratic insiders that their list of reliable allies is shrinking. Unions can’t demand any legislative victories right now, but they can demand changes inside the party. And that is what they should buy with their influence: A clean slate. New leadership. New prominence for the Left. And a Democratic commitment to class war as an animating force in the party.
If these things sound fantastical or unlikely to you, I ask you to consider how realistic two presidential victories by a half-bright reality show star con man who tried to unsuccessfully overthrow the government once and subsequently aligned himself with the world’s richest man who is live-tweeting his incredibly ill-informed destruction of vital government services would have sounded to you not too long ago. We are living in a fantastical time. As always, the labor movement can be our salvation — but only if the labor movement can, like the Democratic Party itself, snap out of the belief that its old methods will save it. The first step towards saving America is announcing to everyone that it’s time to eat the rich. As unions are fond of saying: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
