The Rupture at Hand

This moment calls for an opposition party willing to seize public anger at the elites profiting off of this miasma of crises and take dramatic action to protect working people. The Democratic Party is not hacking it.

This past summer, with the Trump administration signaling progress in diplomatic negotiations with Tehran, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer posted a video chastising the president for ​“folding” to the ​“terrorist government of Iran” while mocking him as ​“TACO Trump,” practically taunting him into war.

Leading up to the launch of the murderous rampage, Democratic Party leadership reportedly tried to blunt a key vote on a war powers resolution to restrict military action, ensuring it wouldn’t reach Congress until after Trump’s bombing campaign began, allowing members to punt on taking a position against the war at a critical juncture. With hellfire raining down in Iran and countries across the Gulf, the top brass of the party, including House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, offered complaints primarily centered around process and a lack of congressional notification rather than unyielding, wholesale denunciation of the war. 

All of this happened despite the fact that, from its start, the incursion has been broadly unpopular among the public, with nearly 90% of Democratic voters opposed. 

This timidity is consistent with a party fully out of step with its base. Whether it’s ramping up regulation of AI companies, abolishing ICE, wresting and redistributing billionaire wealth or even guaranteeing universal healthcare as a social right, the Democratic establishment refuses to get on board with the type of bold demands animating its ardent core. The result is a toxic party brand, as 62% of Democrats say the party needs new leadership.

Rather than interrogate why the party’s net favorability scores are lower than those of both ICE and AI—or why they lost the presidency to Trump a second time — officials at the Democratic National Committee instead decided to shelve an autopsy report the party itself commissioned. That autopsy reportedly showed the party’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza contributed to its loss and, according to an unnamed party official, the choice to scrap the report was made in the interest of avoiding any messy or divisive debates over what led to the stunning defeat. 

This intransigence was born out of a stubborn refusal to rework the machinery of a party that, for decades, has grown far more accustomed to addressing the demands of corporate power brokers than those of working people.

As Anton Jäger, a politics lecturer at Oxford, puts it in his revelatory new book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, the modern Democratic Party operates as ​“an inverted Peronist developmental bloc, with the industrial proletariat left out and finance capital firmly in the saddle over its manufacturing counterpart.” Where Argentina’s Peronist Party was rooted in mobilization and elevation of the working class, Democrats are prioritizing the interests of gilded donors and conglomerates. 

The base isn’t waiting for the party to shift gears. 

The uprisings against federal masked abduction forces in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles point a way toward piercing the MAGA agenda, where labor unions link arms with social movement groups. Grassroots campaigns in states like Michigan, Virginia and California are working to protect workers from the impact of job losses due to rapid AI expansion and block the construction of energy-intensive data centers. Tenant unions have been formed in cities from New Haven, Conn., to Kansas City, Mo., empowering renters to demand housing justice. And the nationwide ​“No Kings” protests have brought millions into the streets seeking an end to unjustified wars and dictatorial power grabs. 

Ahead of International Workers’ Day on May 1, networks of unions and progressive groups like Indivisible are gearing up for a day of ​“no work, no school, no shopping” to demonstrate the power of collective economic disruption. 

In the electoral realm, the vacuum left by Democratic Party fecklessness is being filled by left-wing populists running to replace the old guard who still cling to the dead letter of centrism. This year’s primary elections are showcasing an antiestablishment revolt from below. 

In Senate races, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Graham Platner in Maine, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Dan Osborn in Nebraska are all running explicitly pro-working-class campaigns that reject the discredited neoliberal playbook. In the House, the left cohort in contention includes Claire Valdez in New York, Saikat Chakrabarti in California, Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Cori Bush in Missouri, Justin Pearson in Tennessee, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and many more. Outside of Congress, movement candidates like Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., and others across the country are running for governor, mayor, city council and an array of local offices. 

In New York City, democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is carrying out an agenda set on making life more affordable and enjoyable for working-class residents. Over his first 100 days in office, he’s already made progress on pledges to expand childcare, affordable housing, and create city-run grocery stores, which has won him public buy-in. He recently announced a ​“pied-à-terre tax” on owners of homes worth $5 million or more for having secondary residences in New York City, making progress on his pledge to tax the rich. And his administration’s focus on workers rights has led to nearly $10 million in restitution to working-class New Yorkers along with sweeping consumer protections.

In his 100-day address on April 12, Mamdani touted his governing philosophy of ​“pothole politics,” delivering on both transformative policies and everyday fixes to city issues, such as filling more than 100,000 potholes and rolling out a plan to take down thousands of feet of scaffolding across New York that, as he said, ​“have darkened city streets for years.” The mayor compared this approach to the ​“sewer socialism” of the early 20^th century that centered investing in sanitation and public works. 

And the movement Mamdani comes out of is growing: the Democratic Socialists of America recently reached its high-water mark of 100,000 members, and, according to a recent Gallup poll, 66% of Democrats now say they have a positive view of socialism, versus just 42% for capitalism. 

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson is defending historic worker-centric policies — passed with the backing of a labor-left coalition — against a ​“corporate caucus” on City Council. In Seattle, new socialist Mayor Katie Wilson has built her agenda around housing, affordability and workers’ rights.

What ties these movements and campaigns together is a vision for a mass politics that clearly names working people’s enemies in oligarchs and the billionaire class — and offers a positive, redistributive alternative to the demagoguery of fear and despair that catapulted Trump to the White House. 

Moments of extreme concentration of wealth, whirlwind technological development and kinetic foreign warfare create an opening to break from a decaying political system. The emergent U.S. Left is making the case for a social democratic overhaul, Democratic Party elites be damned. 

This rupture is what In These Times was created to cover. To mark our 25^th anniversary, in 2001, founder James Weinstein wrote: ​“We need a vigorous Left to reach our full potential as a journal of news and opinion. But more importantly, a viable New Left cannot exist without principled, rigorous publications to inform it, and to help give it direction. That was what we intended to do in 1976 when we cobbled together In These Times’ initial staff in Chicago. It remains our purpose today.” 

A quarter century later, at 50, In These Times is still serving that purpose — alongside a galloping movement to kick out capital and jump in the saddle.