'We Don't Have The Luxury Of Giving Up'

Five movement organizers discuss the dangerous terrain of a second Trump term—and the critical task of building working-class power.

Miles Kampf-Lassin

President-elect Donald Trump has frequently castigated what he calls the enemy within” and pledged to root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” With his second term promising a campaign of cruelty, he also has a Heritage Foundation-authored playbook ready to carry out this plan.

Immigrants, trans people and communities of color are set to be targeted while the Trump administration lines the pockets of billionaires and corporate tycoons at the expense of working people.

The incoming Trump era is also expected to see a nationwide effort to disrupt and nullify groups within the U.S. Left and anyone else considered a political enemy of the far-right administration.

Amid this landscape, social movement organizations are preparing not to simply assume a defensive crouch, but to strategize, organize and grow progressive political power in the face of a very real authoritarian threat. The Democratic establishment suffered a monumental defeat this November after running a disjointed, moderate campaign that elevated venture capitalists like Mark Cuban and war hawks like Liz Cheney while dismissing the party’s base, hungry for relief from economic pain and an end to the Biden-Harris administration’s backing for the genocide in Gaza.

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Organizers must now learn from the deep failures of the Democratic Party elite while helping build a viable political alternative to the Right that can speak to — and unify — the multiracial working class. That task will largely fall to labor unions, grassroots community organizations, left electoral coalitions and movement groups that seek to wield solidarity as an antidote to demagoguery.

Three days after Election Day, In These Times convened a panel of organizers and thinkers to discuss what to make of the results, the lessons to be learned and how the Left can chart a path forward.

The group included Asha Ransby-Sporn, a community organizer who co-founded Black Youth Project 100; Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente; Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives and former co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center; Brandon Mancilla, the Region 9A director of United Auto Workers; and Reema Ahmad, a Palestinian community organizer who helped lead the Uninstructed campaign in Wisconsin.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your immediate reactions to the major defeat for Democrats we saw this election?

ASH-LEE WOODARD HENDERSON: A lot of us thought this would be a contested election, and I don’t think many folks had a plan for what would happen if Trump just outright won. A lot of our assessments — mine included — misread what the working class would do, or not do, in this moment. There’s some real talk we need to have about the status of base-building in this country. We are too often making assessments about people without talking to them, and that’s not the organizing traditions a lot of us come from. How do we get back to it?

MARISA FRANCO: The Democratic Party has largely abandoned working people. But for the Left and progressives, there is also a distance from working people — a non-acknowledgement that working-class people do not have complete alignment with the full progressive agenda. 

An almost contradictory result of the first Trump victory, I think, was that the money that came pouring into fund the resistance ended up catalyzing a bureaucratization of the grassroots movement. So, precisely when we need to be more adaptable, more willing to experiment, we’re increasingly inside of formations where so much has to be done internally that we’re too slow or disconnected to respond appropriately to crisis or opportunity. One of my favorite quotes is from [African anti-colonial leader] Amílcar Cabral: Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” Whether it’s for the Democratic Party, for the Left, for progressives — this was an unequivocal loss. There are some bright spots, and I’m grateful for long-distance runners and people who jumped in to participate for the first time. This appreciation shouldn’t come at the expense of being honest about where we are and how we got here.

We also need to reckon with the fact that when Biden dropped out, there was a rush to immediately endorse Kamala Harris. We have to grapple with what it means for our constituencies to associate us with the Democratic Party.

Also, it’s clear that we may increasingly see folks put forward who look like us to defend the status quo.

BRANDON MANCILLA: Simply put, the billionaire class and Donald Trump and the radical Right won this round by fracturing the working class and exposing the labor movement’s historic decline. [United Auto Workers] members led a massive electoral organizing push. We found out that when members talk to other members about the stakes of the election — for things that Harris wasn’t running on, like the cost of living, trade, retirement security, healthcare — we made significant strides in shifting support away from Trump. But most workers are not in a union, and most unions didn’t commit to this program the way we did. So as a labor movement, we don’t have the reach we need right now.

We’re in a moment of reflection, of course. But I don’t think we can question ourselves so much that we move away from what did work for our union, which is to talk to working-class people about their issues and all the complexity and messiness that entails. The Trump administration is going to entail a lot of chaos for working-class people.

So it’s time to really interrogate, how do you build progressive, working-class politics? We believe that a lot of the work we’ve done in the United Auto Workers — a big, multiracial, multisector union where we’ve won record contracts and finally been able to organize successfully in the South — shows a sort of blueprint for the future.

Simply put, the billionaire class and Donald Trump and the radical Right won this round by fracturing the working class and exposing the labor movement’s historic decline.

ASHA RANSBY-SPORN: What feels clear across the board is that there is a general appetite for disruption to the status quo. That is a critical thing for the Democratic Party to understand — and for those of us who do understand it to be contending for power. That’s true on the national level, but it plays out in a place like Chicago, where in 2023 we elected a mayor who comes from the labor movement. In our first-ever races for an elected school board in November, we saw the Right and the charter school industry pouring money into this election. They were able to win some narrative ground and undermine our pro-public education candidates by painting labor and the Left as the establishment. The Left needs to be able to deliver materially for people, but people also don’t wake up every day with the analytical tools to make a completely objective analysis of their conditions. I think sometimes we rest too much on feeling like we’re right about what would benefit people materially and don’t spend enough time telling a story that people can connect to, something inspiring to belong to.

Despite some optimism when she first entered the race, Kamala Harris ultimately refused to break from Biden’s disastrous support for Israel. What impact do you think this had?

REEMA AHMAD: We have been under no illusions; Trump will not do better here. But what else was invited in when our government continued to say it was OK to send our tax dollars to support a genocide? I think about not only the ways that has shown up in our elections and who is going to be governing this country, but also in what it did to our ability to see our humanity in one another, and our liberations as intertwined.

MANCILLA: I’ll add that there was no excuse for the Democratic Party to allow Trump andVance to occupy the antiwar lane in the campaign. Number one, because it’s nonsense — they’re going to give a blank check to Israel to provoke war in the Middle East. But it’s also a Democratic failure from the electoral standpoint.

There’s a lot of discussion about how important Gaza really was to the electorate. The numbers we have are clear from our own internal polling, which is that our members understood the importance of the war in Gaza and they supported our union’s cease-fire position and our call to either embargo or condition aid to Israel. I think the working class in this country remains antiwar because they know who pays the consequences.

And, of course, there’s no excuse for the support for genocide to continue under the remaining months of the Biden administration, and we have to continue to build grassroots and institutional pressure.

Trump’s second term is likely to be even more dangerous than his first. What lessons have we learned about supporting the communities most under threat?

FRANCO: Trump has pledged mass deportations. The machinery and the infrastructure in which he can carry them out was largely built by Democrats — let’s acknowledge that.

There’s no easy answer. What few pathways we had before are increasingly an obstacle course.

In order to understand how they’re going to implement the agenda, we have to get close to the ground with people who are facing the threat. Our experience teaches us that one of the key ways to do this is through individual and community deportation defense. From there, you can identify weak points in the system and generate the stories that give you the real, human face of what’s happening.

The other piece that is incumbent to grapple with is the permission structure that’s been created. Housing costs are high, people can’t pay their bills and Trump successfully blamed all of that on immigrants.

So we can and must build out support for people under threat of deportation, but we also have to have a concurrent response to these economic needs. Without that, we may win some battles, but we’re going to continue to lose the war.

What do you see as some of the immediate tasks ahead of us?

A lot of what I feel like I saw in the aftermath of 2016 was retreat. Retreat isn’t inherently bad if we’re doing it to reassess and strategize. But accepting powerlessness is not an option for me, and we should not allow it to be an option for our movements.

RANSBY-SPORN: Mobilization under Trump is inevitable. People getting upset about the things that he will do is inevitable. I just hope that we are able to translate that anger and mobilization into real organizing and other kinds of efforts that bring more people and institutions along. The most organized forces on the Left are still relatively marginal, and the goal is not to stay that way. The goal is to win majorities of people.

A lot of what I feel like I saw in the aftermath of 2016 was retreat. Retreat isn’t inherently bad if we’re doing it to reassess and strategize. But accepting powerlessness is not an option for me, and we should not allow it to be an option for our movements. And I think that it requires strong leadership from movement leaders to really wrestle with and be honest with our folks about how the odds are stacked against us, and what it will take to build the power we need anyway. We don’t have the luxury of giving up.

HENDERSON: I don’t want us to pivot too quickly to what we have to do in 2025, when there’s still work that we should be doing to put pressure on the Biden administration. We need to finish as strong as we can, including pushing for judicial appointments.

But we also have to be intentional about telling the whole truth about what is coming, so that we don’t lose the minimal trust that we still have with the working class.

Donald Trump and his loyalists have very clearly tried to put themselves on the map as economic populists, and we know that’s bullshit. What are the demands that we can raise that show working people very clearly that Donald Trump is lying to them about what he says he’s going to fix?

I think far too many of us as organizers have experienced that, in times of great crisis, people can become more conservative in the risks they’re willing to take because of the consequences involved. When the potential consequences exceed just getting a ticket for protesting, folks might stay with the devil they know, for lack of a better metaphor.

We have to build a community that makes it worth it, that folks believe will keep them safe. And even if it won’t keep them safe, we’ll care for them in their sense of insecurity, and flank them around the blowback.

I don’t think there’s a simple answer to what’s going to get us through the next four years, or what kind of institutions we need to be strengthening or building. We can’t just say that it’s going to be rooted in any one single issue or tactical intervention. The dialectic here is that folks mobilize when they feel like they have access to meaningful work. The more that we create low bars for entry, to be able to reach masses of people and plug them into meaningful work at the intersection of their skills and their desires for community, the less likely we will see demobilization and people just being frozen in despair and grief.

AHMAD: As much as I’ve been thinking about how we build power, I’ve also been thinking about how we wield it when we have it. I’m thinking of the Uncommitted Movement and the ways in which folks across our country and in key swing states were able to take our protest and our demands to the ballot box. And I’m still reflecting on the ways that we could have taken this further. There is a reason, in my mind, that the election outcomes we are seeing have come after almost 400 days of complicity in a genocide. And I want us to really interrogate that while we double down in the places where we have power and the places where we need to continue to build and support our communities.

MANCILLA: I think this election has sharpened the importance of the United Auto Workers’ call for May Day 2028, the call for a general strike. There’s a big push to align with other unions and organize new unions so that contracts line up [to expire concurrently]. That’s something that really has to happen over the next year. But there’s also the component of it that needs to be connected to grassroots organizations outside of the traditional labor movement. That is when this becomes a real political strike, a referendum on what will now be a Trump administration in an election year. It’s also a question for Democrats: Which side are you on? We are — alongside other progressive voices, like Bernie Sanders — really kind of trying to reset the agenda for the party, if it is willing and able to do that. If it’s not, we’re going to mobilize our own political program, and we need to find allies and build the institutions to do that.

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Miles Kampf-Lassin is Senior Editor at In These Times. Follow him at @MilesKLassin

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