Then-President Donald Trump held up an executive order to start the Mexico border wall project at the Department of Homeland Security facility in Washington, D.C. on January 25, 2017 | Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
“We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, who is spearheading the new task force
A group of congressional Democrats on Tuesday launched a task force aimed at spotlighting and combating the threat posed by Project 2025, the sprawling far-right agenda crafted by allies of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.
Spearheaded by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the Stop Project 2025 Task Force “will serve as a central hub for pro-democracy Members of Congress, civil society, and affected communities to coordinate on examining, highlighting, preempting, and counteracting this right-wing plot to undermine democracy,” Huffman’s office said in a press release.
“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will,” said Huffman. “This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers.”
“We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late,” the congressman added.“Through this task force, leaders across the ideological spectrum and experts in every policy area that’s under attack are uniting to protect democracy as we know it. Donald Trump and those behind Project 2025 are ready to turn America into a theocratic regime if they get the chance—and we are going to be ready to stop them.”
The congressional effort was launched with the backing of several prominent Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee—and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“Project 2025 is Donald Trump’s blueprint for destroying our democracy,” said Jayapal. “It attacks the very foundations that this country was built on and seeks to limit Americans’ rights to further embolden MAGA extremists. We can and must stand up to ensure that Project 2025 never sees the light of day, and instead ensure that our Proposition Agenda, bold, progressive, and popular policies, are at the forefront.”
“This far-right roadmap for a ‘post-constitutional’ America would make January 6th extremism a governing ideology.”
Project 2025 is led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and former top Trump administration officials—including ex-Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought and former White House personnel head John McEntee—have helped craft the initiative’s 920-page agenda to dismantle environmental protections, eliminate the Department of Education, further roll back abortion rights, and deport undocumented immigrants en masse.
Right-wing groups backing Project 2025 have received tens of millions of dollars in funding from the dark money networks led by Leonard Leo—the notorious co-chair of the Federalist Society—and billionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch.
Throughout his 2024 campaign for a second White House term, Trump has openly embraced Project 2025’s objectives, vowing to gut climate regulations in exchange for Big Oil donations and launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The former president has also threatened to weaponize federal agencies against his political opponents and deploy the U.S. military against protesters.
“The aspiring felon-in-chief, his think tank allies, and all the political criminals he pardoned have previewed ‘Project 2025’ for a nightmarish second term,” Raskin, who led the effort to impeach and convict Trump in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, said in a statement Tuesday.
“This far-right roadmap for a ‘post-constitutional’ America would make January 6th extremism a governing ideology,” said Raskin. “They plan to centralize all power in the presidency, exercise political control over the Justice Department, implant Christian white nationalism throughout the government, strip tens of thousands of professional government workers of their civil service protections, create an army of political loyalists and sycophants in government, ban abortion nationwide, set up immigrant detention camps, deport millions of people, repeal all climate safety regulations, and exact criminal revenge against reporters, judges, and Democrats.”
The Stop Project 2025 Task Force represents a coordinated attempt by Democratic lawmakers and outside advocacy groups to raise public awareness of the far-right plot to rip away fundamental freedoms and mobilize against it ahead of the critical November rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.
“Project 2025 threatens to undermine American democracy by dismantling institutions, abolishing many checks and balances, and consolidating power within the executive branch to carry out radical policies that are not supported by everyday Americans,” said said Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable.US—one of more than a dozen advocacy groups that endorsed new the task force.
“Thankfully, we have progressive leaders stepping up to stop this authoritarian power grab threatening our rights and freedoms,” Ciccone added. “We’re grateful for Rep. Huffman and the other founding members of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force for their efforts to prevent Project 2025 from becoming a reality and protect democracy as we know it.”
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams
A newspaper, featuring front page coverage of the guilty verdict in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hush money trial, is read by a diner outside a cafe on May 31, 2024 in Walton-on-Thames, England | Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images
“The simple fact remains: We must beat him at the ballot box.”
In the aftermath of his conviction Thursday on 34 felony counts in the state of New York related to hush-money payments ahead of the 2016 election, former president Donald Trump predictably denounced the trial as a “rigged” process and a “sham” as he declared that ultimately the “real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people” on this year’s election day.
But is the disgraced politician—the first of any sitting or former president to be convicted of a felony by his peers in U.S. history—right about that? Despite celebrating how the infamously slippery Trump was, indeed, finally held accountable for what the facts proved was criminal conduct, many progressives think he is.
“In the end, it is the election—and the voters—that will decide if Trump is held accountable or not,” wrote Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, in a column published shortly before the Thursday’s news broke in New York.
“If voters decide to elect him, that will be the final verdict,” she argued, beating Trump to the punch. “The verdicts in the cases will be irrelevant—and probably erased by presidential pardon. If he is defeated, that verdict will do more to inform the future behavior of presidents than any of the court cases.”
“As predicted, Republicans are rushing in to tear down our institutions in defense of their cult leader.”
On Friday morning, the Trump campaign announced it had raised an eye-popping $35 million in campaign donations in just over 12 hours since the jury’s verdict. Meanwhile, the MAGA army and Trump’s Republican allies in Congress and in state houses nationwide rushed to his defense and slammed the conviction as the result of a political operation orchestrated by Democrats.
In her defense of Trump, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) lied by saying Manhattan District Alvin Bragg “campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump” which fact-checkers and journalists were quick to point out was “simply false.” Sen. Mitch McConnell, longtime Republican leader in the Senate, said the charges “should never have been brought in the first place” and that he expected exoneration on appeal. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called it a “shameful day in American history” for Trump to be convicted of crimes by a jury.
“As predicted, Republicans are rushing in to tear down our institutions in defense of their cult leader,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, which was created during Trump’s first term in office to organize against his agenda. “They rally around a convicted felon found guilty of interfering in his own election. It’s despicable. They have no shame. They must be crushed electorally.”
It wouldn’t be the first time, as Chris Hayes pointed out Thursday night:
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) May 30, 2024
Recognizing the political battle lines that are being drawn, Sulma Arias, executive director of the advocacy group People’s Action, was among those progressives who cheered how criminal accountability in New York showed that “Trump is not above the law,” but said voters must recognize 34 guilty verdicts guarantee nothing about what happens in the presidential race.
“The simple fact remains: We must beat him at the ballot box,” said Arias. “Trump is still running for president, and if he wins, he would likely try to pardon himself–and the Supreme Court, which he stacked with MAGA justices, would be the only appeal if he did so.”
The 2024 presidential election, she continued, offers a clear ” choice between two futures: a corporate takeover of the country with a would-be dictator at the head, or a future in which working class people build a true multiracial democracy and well-being for everyone. Organizing will make the difference; we won’t take our eye off the ball.”
“Trump is still running for president, and if he wins, he would likely try to pardon himself.”
According to vanden Heuvel, the “24/7 press coverage of Trump” and his numerous trial will have a major role to play in what comes next, especially as the media circus that follows Trump wherever he goes shows it has learned very few valuable lessons from the 2016 and 2020 campaigns or his first term in the White House.
What’s crucial about the election is not necessarily Trump’s well-documented crimes and misdeeds of the past (not that he shouldn’t be held to account), she argued, but what voters should understand about a possible second term in the White House. She wrote:
The press is once more collaborating with Trump to enable him to dominate the news. You don’t have to buy the old saw that any press—good or bad—is good so long as they spell your name right. Trump, a corrupt and shoddy businessman born with a silver spoon in his mouth, has invented a persona as a rebel, an outsider willing to take on a corrupt establishment. He paints himself as the victim because he champions the betrayed majority. “I am your retribution.” He rails against the prosecutions as a Biden election conspiracy. The wall-to-wall coverage only provides a constant stage for his dishonest shtick.
No doubt a former president on trial will attract the news. But the press could do far more to balance its coverage. Provide equal time for Biden’s campaign or actions as president. Report on the horrors of Trump’s agenda—what the cost and chaos of his pledge to deport 10 million undocumented workers would be for example, detail the consequence of four more years of climate denial, expose Trump’s plans to destroy the civil service, give more ink to his shamelessly corrupt offers to pass the agenda of Big Oil if they’ll ante up $1 billion to his campaigns and more. Instead of echoing Trump’s public posturing, do more to expose the corrupt little man behind the curtain.
In her estimation, former Ohio state senator Nina Turner argued Thursday night that Trump’s ability to win reelection or not in November is only part of the political equation given what the Republican Party has become under his tutelage.
“This is a tense moment in history,” Turner said. “Do not bank on conservatives abandoning Trump due to his conviction. And even if Trump loses in November, the threat of fascism is not over. The Republican Party is flush with those who want to erode our rights.”
As Arias of People’s Action put it, the progressive movement needs “everyone who cares about our families, our freedoms, and our future to join the fight” to defeat Trump and his Republican allies in November.
The outcome of the Palestine vote and the American veto at the United Nations Security Council on April 18 was predictable. Though European countries are becoming increasingly supportive of a Palestinian state, the United States is not yet ready for this commitment.
These are some of the reasons that the US deputy envoy to the UN, Robert Wood, vetoed the resolution.
One, US foreign policy in the Middle East is still governed by Israeli priorities. And since the majority of Israelis reject the idea of a Palestinian state, or any ‘concessions’ or even the most basic rights for Palestinians, the weak US president neither has the courage, nor the desire to defy the Israeli position.
Two, the fact that Israel, as per the words of its ambassador at the UN, Gilad Erdan, saw that a vote for Palestine would be equivalent to ‘rewarding terror with a Palestinian state’, created the kind of political discourse that would have made a positive American vote, or an abstention, akin to supporting this so-called terrorism.
Three, Biden, in his own Democratic Party’s calculations, cannot politically afford supporting an independent Palestine only a few months ahead of one of the most contested and decisive elections in US history.
His position remains that of supporting a strong Palestinian Authority – which only exists to ‘secure’ Israel against Palestinian Resistance – while giving the illusion that a Palestinian state is forthcoming.
“There needs to be a Palestinian Authority. There needs to be a path to a Palestinian state,” Biden said in October 2023.
The same position was, for the lack of a better word, articulated by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2024: There is a need for a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”
But what does this mean in practice?
“The problem is getting from here to there, and of course, it requires very difficult, challenging decisions. It requires a mindset that is open to that perspective,” according to Blinken. In other words, more illusions and newspeak.
On the other hand, the Republican Party leadership made it clear that their support for Israel is blind and unconditional. They are also ready to exploit any comment – let alone action – by Biden and his officials that may seem critical of Israel in any way. All of these factors combined made the American veto quite predictable.
Important Lessons
However, the vote was still important, as it, according to Palestinian political leaders and officials, showed that it is the US, not the Palestinians, who are isolated within the international community.
Indeed, the vote demonstrated that:
One, the international community remains largely united in its support of the Palestinians.
Two, the positive vote by France, an influential European country, signals a shift in the perception of the European body politic towards Palestine.
“The time has come for a comprehensive political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the two-state solution,” the French Delegation at the UN tweeted on April 19.
Three, the strong statements emanating from Ireland, Norway, Spain and others in this regard indicate that the trajectory of support of Palestine in Europe will continue in the coming months and years.
Ireland’s Foreign Minister, Michael Martin, expressed his disappointment “at the outcome of the UN Security Council vote on Palestinian UN membership,” he tweeted.
“It is past time for Palestine to take its rightful place amongst the nations of the world. (Ireland) fully supports UN membership and will vote in favor of any UNGA resolution to that end.”
The same position was also adopted by Norway.
“Norway regrets that the Security Council did not agree on admitting #Palestine as a full member of the UN,” Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide tweeted, adding:“Norway is a staunch supporter of Palestine’s right to statehood. The #TwoStateSolution is the only way to durable peace.”
Four, the outcome of the vote further isolates the United States precisely as much as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has also exposed and isolated Washington.
Despite the Israeli genocide in the Strip, Washington remains the main line of defense for Tel Aviv, allowing it to violate the rights of the Palestinian people and to deny them the very political horizon needed for a just peace.
And, finally, the vote and veto further accentuate Biden’s inability to liberate himself from the stronghold imposed on him and his party by Israel’s supporters – Israel’s backers within the Democratic Party institution and the pro-Israel lobby from without.
Despite the negative outcome of the vote, however, Palestinians, now have a renewed resolve that they will ultimately prevail, despite the numerous obstacles created by the US and Israel.
In truth, this collective feeling of hope and empowerment is not the outcome of the strong support for Palestine at the UNSC and the General Assembly, but of the growing sympathy and support for Palestine worldwide and, even more important, the continued resistance of Palestinians in Gaza.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website iswww.ramzybaroud.net
President Joe Biden speaks during an IBEW conference in Washington, DC, April 19. (Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
A new study examines the Democratic rhetorical and campaigning failures that may help Republicans entrench their position as the new party of the American working class.
Democrats are losing the working class — and if the trend continues, it’ll reshape American politics for generations. Simply, there’s no sustainable path to victory in national elections without these voters, a more affluent Democratic base means less electoral support for progressive economic policies, and losing the working class will accelerate the rise of far-right populism.
While there is growing debate about whether and how Democrats can win back the working class, recent analyses we have conducted at the Center for Working-Class Politics suggest that their best bet is to run economic populists from working-class backgrounds. Take the case of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. The freshman Democratic representative prevailed in 2022 in southwest Washington’s largely working-class third district, despite the fact that she was given just a 2% likelihood-of-victory rating by 538.
Like any campaign, this contest was determined by many factors, but the following language from Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign materials is telling:
Marie is exactly the kind of working class Washingtonian that has been left behind in this economy. . . . In Congress, Marie will be a voice for working Washingtonians, support small businesses and worker’s rights, lower the costs of healthcare, childcare and prescription drugs . . . and expand apprenticeship and skills training programs. . . . I’m running to take on politicians who are bought and paid for by large corporations who refuse to pay their fair share while working families who follow the rules fall further behind.
Gluesenkamp Perez portrays herself as an economic populist. She champions the working-class and points the finger at economic elites; focuses on economic policies that improve the well-being of everyday, working Americans; and underscores that her own class background helps her to understand the issues that are important to other working-class voters.
Gluesenkamp Perez’s messaging approach is consistent with the findings of our research on working-class voters’ preferences: they prefer candidates from working-class backgrounds to elite candidates, are attracted to candidates who explicitly call out elites and raise up the working class, and support candidates who focus on progressive, bread-and-butter economic issues.
Though Democrats were given an electoral reprieve in 2022 due to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and a particularly lackluster set of Republican candidates, the Democratic Party saw further erosion of support among working-class voters — including working-class Latinos and African Americans. This made us wonder just how common it is for Democrats to run the type of economic populist campaigns needed to appeal effectively to working-class voters.
To answer this question, we collected information on all 966 Democratic candidates who ran for Congress in 2022. With the help of a research team, we scraped information from their campaign websites to see how many use economic populist rhetoric, advocate progressive economic policies, and come from working-class backgrounds.
Our main finding is that Democrats are not running the types of economic populist candidates they need to win back workers. Only a small fraction call out economic elites in their campaigns. While many candidates talk about economic issues in general, comparatively few mention bold, popular progressive economic policies that would have an impact on working people’s lives — from large-scale programs to create high-quality jobs to policies to strengthen unions or raise the minimum wage. And lastly, almost no candidates are working-class themselves. This gap between politicians and the people they represent is stark: while nearly 50% of Americans have a working-class occupation, only 2% to 6% of Democratic candidates running for Congress do.
Democrats’ rejection of economic populism has serious consequences. It shows that the party is still not taking seriously the exodus of working-class voters. And this is despite the evidence we find that populists are actually more likely to win precisely in districts that Democrats need the most: heavily working-class districts. This relationship persists when we control for a wide range of important factors that determine electoral outcomes, such as district partisanship, incumbency, and candidate demographic characteristics.
It’s Progressive Economics, Stupid
The key to winning the working class begins with putting forward economic policies that signal commitment to improving the economic well-being of working Americans. To do this, candidates need to push for ambitious policies that will create more and better jobs for those struggling to make ends meet, strengthen protections for workers who want to unionize to improve their wages and working conditions, and revitalize American manufacturing and communities hard-hit by decades of mass corporate layoffs. These policies are popularamong working-class voters across the political spectrum.
While Joe Biden’s agenda has been more economically progressive than that of any previous Democratic administration in decades, it has not been nearly enough to show increasingly frustrated working-class Americans that Democrats are the party of working people. There has been no progress on widely popular policies like Medicare for All and even low-hanging fruit like the $15 minimum wage. The Biden administration’s signature jobs policy — the American Jobs Plan — would have led to historic investments in good-paying manufacturing and infrastructure jobs to the tune of $2 trillion, but was sacrificed at the altar of centrist inflation fears.
While the fate of progressive economic policies is often outside Democrats’ control, the party’s messaging around these issues is not. So did Democratic candidates in 2022 run on progressive economic policies? The vast majority did not. Only 31% of Democratic congressional candidates mentioned the need for high-paying, quality jobs, just over 23% mentioned Medicare for All, and 18% talked about paid family or medical leave. Even more surprisingly, virtually none mentioned a $15 minimum wage (5%) or a federal jobs guarantee (4%).
When we restrict our attention to general elections and only those candidates running in competitive districts (Cook PVI plus or minus five), we find a slightly more encouraging picture: a much larger share mention high-paying jobs (45%), indicating that when they have to be strategic to win working-class votes, Democrats do recognize the value of progressive economic policies. That said, almost none of these Democrats mentioned Medicare for All (<3%), despite its broad popularity.
This is not to say that Democratic candidates aren’t running on more generic economic issues like “jobs” (nearly 70%) and “infrastructure” (50%). But when it comes to more specific policies — particularly the expansive progressive policies described above — we see comparatively few takers. Vague generic language around jobs and infrastructure is simply not enough to send a strong signal to voters that the Democrats’ economic priorities have really changed.
The few economic progressives were highly concentrated in safe Democratic districts. This suggests that, despite evidence to the contrary, Democratic candidates seem to worry that voters in competitive races will be turned off by progressive economic appeals.
Adding Emotion to Economics
Even the best messaging around progressive economic policies will only get Democrats so far. As Donald Trump has masterfully shown, strong visceral, emotional appeals to disaffected working-class voters that highlight the legitimacy of their grievances against out-of-touch elites in Washington can be a powerful way to reach voters — even when there is little or no policy substance to go along with it. Americans across the board hold negative attitudes toward the rich and positive attitudes toward ordinary, working-class Americans. These populist attitudes have only been increasing over the last decades.
The Democratic response to this environment is uneven. We find that most candidates do raise up workers in their rhetoric. And a substantial share talk about labor, unions, and mention working-class Americans in other ways. But pro-worker rhetoric is the easy part. It’s typical for politicians across the spectrum, Republicans included, to speak positively about the American worker. It is much less typical to call out the economic elite — but this is a key component of economic populism, and one that is very popular among the public.
Our results show that a much smaller share of candidates use anti–economic elite rhetoric. Even the most generic terms, such as “special interest,” and references to money in politics and large corporations are employed by roughly 15% of candidates. Under 10% of candidates call out Wall Street, billionaires, millionaires, CEOs, etc.
Candidates who make it to competitive general elections are far more likely to use such anti-elite rhetoric (nearly twice as likely), but even here only 30% to 35% of candidates invoke the negative influence of special interests and corporate donors. One noteworthy exception was Keystone State populist Christopher Deluzio, who managed to retain Conor Lamb’s old seat in western Pennsylvania by throwing down the gauntlet against big corporations and pledging to defend working Americans.
Importantly, economic populists did run in the kinds of districts best-suited to win over working-class Americans. Economic populists were far more likely to run in competitive districts and in open seats. Even more crucially, they performed better than other candidates in general elections — particularly in highly white, non-college-educated districts, and districts with the highest share of people employed in working-class occupations. This pattern holds up after controlling for many other factors that influence electoral outcomes, such as office (House or Senate), incumbency status, candidate race and gender, and district population and partisanship (PVI).
Interestingly, however, economic populist candidates were more likely than other candidates to come from elite backgrounds; they were less likely to have had at least one working-class job in their past and more likely to have gone to an Ivy League school. Since there is evidence that working-class candidates are more appealing to working-class voters than candidates from elite backgrounds, it’s likely that economic populism would be an even more effective tool for Democrats if it had more messengers who matched the message.
What Do Democrats Focus on Instead?
As mentioned above, it is important to note that Democrats are talking about the economy and jobs on their websites — indeed, at a much higher rate than they talk about progressive cultural issues or even abortion — but they are just not talking about the specific kinds of bold, progressive economic reforms they would need to highlight to attract more working-class voters.
One limitation with campaign websites is that they don’t tell us much about which issues candidates focus on when they are forced to prioritize. The absence of length constraints means that candidates do not have to be nearly as strategic in their messaging choices online as they are in other, higher-stakes venues like TV ads. To address this, we also transcribed and analyzed over nine hundred Democratic TV ads of candidates running in competitive 2022 House races.
Here we find that fewer than 20% of TV ads mentioned jobs at all, while less than 2% talked about good, high-paying, or union jobs, and fewer still mentioned manufacturing jobs or job-training policies. Similarly, less than 5% of ads included phrases like “worker,” “working families,” or “working people.”
By contrast, abortion shot to the top of candidates’ list of priorities — dwarfing even rhetoric around jobs policies. In fact, candidates were three times more likely to mention abortion in their TV ads than any primarily economic issue.
Our analysis of the key themes of 2022 Democratic TV ads in competitive districts puts the relative lack of focus on economic issues in even starker relief. We tabulated the main issues candidates tackled in hundreds of ads and found that, while economic issues (very broadly understood, from jobs to consumer prices) were the key theme in 30% of ads, the other 70% focused primarily on issues like abortion, right-wing extremism, and the personal qualities of the candidate or their challenger.
He’ll Represent Us Because He’s One of Us
Our previous work indicated that working-class voters prefer candidates who come from working-class backgrounds. Talk is cheap, and with the growing distrust of elites and the two major parties, maybe even anti-elite rhetoric isn’t enough to persuade voters that candidates actually understand or care about the problems they face. The only types of candidates that working-class voters consistently see as understanding their interests are those with working-class backgrounds.
Yet despite making up over 60% of the population, working-class Americans are almost nowhere to be found among the 2022 Democratic candidates. Just 2.3% of the 925 candidates for which we could find occupational backgrounds were working-class (understood as having held exclusively working-class jobs before entering politics). If we expand our definition of working class to include service-sector professionals such as teachers and nurses, this number increases slightly to 5.9%. And if we further expand it to include candidates who ever had a working-class job in their adult lives, the share is roughly 20%. Democratic candidates are hardly representative of the American public.
When the 20% of candidates with at least some working-class background do run, however, they convey a level of identification with working-class voters that other candidates simply cannot. Take California congressman Jimmy Gomez, whose campaign website focuses on how his own working-class experience makes him uniquely suited to understand and champion the needs of his working-class constituents:
[Gomez] was born in Southern California and raised by his Mexican immigrant parents who worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. Right out of high school Jimmy began working at a fast-food restaurant and a local retail store stocking shelves overnight, gaining a better understanding of his parent’s struggle to make ends meet, the need for a good job with benefits, and most importantly a quality education. Jimmy recognizes that his story, although not unique, today entails an even more difficult path and is out of reach for far too many.
Gomez explicitly connects his own working-class history with that of many of his constituents, allowing him to convey that he really does know what it’s like to be in their shoes and will act accordingly in Congress. And there is good reason to believe he would: we also find that working-class candidates are systematically more likely to use rhetoric that reflects a commitment to working people than other candidates on the campaign trail — a fact that should reinforce their credibility among voters.
So why then are there so few working-class candidates? There are many possible reasons, including more limited access to rich donor networks, less capacity to take time off to run for office, limited prior experience holding office, and difficulty raising money. On the latter score, our analysis of 2022 candidates finds that working-class candidates are systematically trounced in the primaries, where they just don’t raise the same amount of money as other candidates do. When they make it to the general elections, however, we find that working-class candidates do just as well as other candidates, indicating that it is not some intrinsic quality of these candidates that is holding them back.
Bring Economic Populism to the Mainstream
There is a great deal at stake in the 2024 elections, both in terms of stopping the far right from gaining near-total control of our national political institutions and stopping the defection of working-class voters. Progressives need to take economic populism much more seriously if they hope to achieve either goal. That means putting egalitarian economics, along with anti–economic elite and pro-worker language, at the heart of their campaign messaging — and finding more working-class candidates who can deliver that messaging convincingly.
If action isn’t taken soon, Republicans will entrench their position as the new party of the American working class, and working-class dealignment will become permanent.
Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
Fred DeVeaux is a PhD student at UCLA and researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics.
Tens of thousands of protesters rally in front of the White House to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza on January 13, 2024. (Mostafa Bassim / Anadolu via Getty Images)
From street protests to the vote uncommitted movement to Aaron Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation, millions of Americans have been voicing outrage over Israel’s assault on Gaza. Government unresponsiveness threatens to worsen our epidemic of political despair.
On Sunday, February 25, a US Air Force serviceman lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, in protest of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and US support for it. Twenty-five-year-old Aaron Bushnell declared that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” before self-immolating. He succumbed to his injuries the same day.
Bushnell’s extreme act of protest followed months of elites dismissing growing antiwar opinion in the US as Israel’s assault became increasingly horrific; it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and that the US government is complicit. Bushnell, like many other young people around the United States, had been inundated for months with the brutal images, videos, and stories coming out of Gaza — of residential blocks leveled, hospital patients massacred, hungry Palestinians shot dead trying to get access to aid, a ten-year-old boy starving to death.
Two days after Bushnell’s death, some voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary engaged in a much more prosaic act of dissent. In the weeks leading up to the February 27 primary, disaffected voters organized a movement to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary, instead of for Joe Biden. The effort, dubbed Listen to Michigan, won over 100,000 votes, 13 percent of the primary vote share.
Since then, grassroots efforts in other states to vote uncommitted have followed Michigan’s lead. Efforts to vote uncommitted or leave ballots blank in protest garnered roughly 19 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Minnesota, 8 percent in Wisconsin, 12 percent in New York State, and 14.5 percent in Rhode Island.
The movement to vote uncommitted — like, in another way, Bushnell’s self-immolation — is a manifestation of widespread desperation and exhaustion. Americans who see the need to end Israel’s war on Gaza do not have a presidential candidate or political party to vote for. The normal political avenues for expressing disgust with Israel’s war and US complicity seem to be blocked. After countless emails and calls to congresspeople, mass street protests, and civil disobedience — anything, seemingly, any of us can think of — the images of wholesale starvation and slaughter keep beaming through our phones.
Though the uncommitted vote counts are impressive, the efforts are also a rather depressing reflection of the bind facing antiwar forces: as far as formal electoral politics go, we can do little more than raise a symbolic middle finger to Biden. Our most compelling option in this presidential primary is to vote, literally, for no one.
Our political institutions seem rigidly unresponsive to progressive demands in general, not just disapproval of the war in Gaza. Despite years of protest, there has been no meaningful action on climate change, economic inequality, or mass incarceration. If Democrats continue to dismiss or ignore nonviolent protest as well as attempts to register dissent at the ballot box, would it be a surprise if we see more young people tragically resorting — as Bushnell did — to drastic and violent measures?
Deepening feelings of political nihilism are a rational response to depressing political conditions — and also incredibly dangerous. Overcoming them will require a political movement that offers a compelling alternative to the status quo that actually addresses the needs and aspirations of working people, with a plausible path to victory, capable of moving millions more into grassroots activity to challenge corporate power and imperialist foreign policy.
This is far easier said than done, though. Right now, despair seems to be winning.
Bubbling Discontent
Though the most acute fissure between the Democratic Party’s base and its elected officials right now is due to Biden’s Israel policy, dissatisfaction with Biden and the Democrats began long before the current war. During the 2020 election, Biden pledged to address the climate crisis, end America’s forever wars, and oppose nativistic anti-immigrant policies. Instead, he has granted new public land and offshore drilling permits, embroiled the United States in another conflict in the Middle East, and pursued Trumpian border crackdowns.
To be sure, Biden’s tenure has not been without achievements: COVID-era welfare expansions, investments in domestic infrastructure, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a remarkably prolabor National Labor Relations Board. But for millions — particularly young people and Arab and Muslim Americans — these accomplishments pale in comparison to his failures, especially his support for the obscene war in Gaza.
Young people’s disillusionment with the Democratic Party did not begin with Biden. The recent defections represent the acceleration of a trend dating back to Barack Obama’s presidency. Despite a powerful mandate for change in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Obama mostly delivered more of the same.
Obama’s term and the intervening years also saw growing demonstrations of popular discontent — Occupy Wall Street, two Black Lives Matter uprisings, the teachers’ strike wave, and Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs. Young people have come of age in a climate of disappointed expectations but also heightened protest and political activity.
But the conditions that gave rise to these protests largely remain in place. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street popularized slogans decrying the power and wealth of the top 1 percent. Today, over ten years since Occupy, the bottom 50 percent of Americans own just 3 percent of national wealth, while the top 1 percent holds more than a third.
When Greta Thunberg led the world’s largest climate protest, with six million participants globally, in 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just warned of a quickly shrinking window of time to rapidly reduce carbon emissions and avoid a catastrophic rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC issued yet another “final warning” last year, reporting that world temperatures have already risen 1.1 degrees; US emissions have barely budged. Meanwhile, two massive protest waves have done little to change our brutal, racialized system of policing and mass incarceration.
The impotence of this popular discontent appears to be driving a general loss of legitimacy for political and economic institutions in the eyes of young people. Sixty-five percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine think the American political system is not working too well, or not working at all; 83 percent say that most elected officials don’t care what people like them think.
Most Americans seem resigned to this. Though just 4 percent of Americans believe our political system is working well, more powerful than the erosion of faith in the American government are pervasive feelings of pessimism and exhaustion. Nearly a supermajority of Americans describe politics as “exhausting.”
These are the sentiments of people with little hope that the future will get better or that their own opinions make a difference.
Even Democratic Party politicians, who claim to be the last line of defense against attacks on US democracy, seem eager to justify popular disempowerment. On ABC in early March, discussing public support for a cease-fire in Gaza, Democratic senator Chris Murphy said he hoped Biden “doesn’t make decisions about what to do in Gaza or the Middle East based upon how the votes line up. . . . These issues are too important to be dictated by the polls.” That a sitting senator can confidently reject the idea that public opinion should guide state policy, apparently without political repercussions, is a testament to how little power American voters have.
Without a break in this impasse, there’s no reason to think that political exhaustion and despair won’t also continue to spread. The authoritarian far right on the march, working people increasingly abstaining from political participation, Aaron Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation — these are all morbid symptoms. More are likely to come.
Desperate Measures
Efforts around the country to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” are an attempt to channel the outrage over Gaza that’s been expressed in street protests across the country into a formal electoral challenge. But though the number of protests has remained relatively constant over the past four months, the number of participants has fallen.
It’s worth asking, as elites continue to ignore popular opinion and protests, whether more people won’t resort to desperate measures. In his best-selling book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm suggests that activists concerned with fighting climate change ought to escalate to sabotaging fossil-fuel infrastructure. “To appeal to [elites’] reason and common sense,” Malm writes, “would be evidently futile. The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time.”
Malm recalls that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate movement had been growing into the “single most dynamic social movement in the Global North” — millions participated in 2019’s Fridays for Future school strikes, while others implemented blockades, occupations, sit-ins, and took direct action by temporarily shutting down fossil-fuel infrastructure. Despite this explosion of mass-movement activity, Malm laments, elites’ feet remain glued to the gas pedal of carbon extraction and emission.
He concludes that the movement must “escalate” by engaging in direct sabotage and destruction of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Unlike some who advocate sabotage and other forms of guerilla action, Malm doesn’t think blowing up pipelines is a substitute for mass-movement activity. He describes his theory as “the radical flank effect”: the idea that the more reform-oriented mass movement requires a more militant and violent radical wing, whose attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure incentivize elites to address the demands of reformists.
Yet Malm does not discuss escalations that can actually involve millions of people. Risky campaigns of direct sabotage are typically the province of small groups of committed activists. The poorer one is, the more personally ruinous the effects of arrest, especially for something as serious as bombing or setting fire to fossil fuel infrastructure. Workers and the less affluent will probably tend to avoid participating in Malmian sabotage.
Whether sabotage will help bring about significant climate action is far from clear, but it seems even less likely to effect a change in government policy when it comes to the war in Palestine. Military bases and defense suppliers are less accessible and far riskier targets than those in the energy-production supply chain, and attacks on them are even more prone to invite a violent response by the state rather than a substantive change in policy.
Direct sabotage would also provide the state an excuse to repress left-wing organizations broadly, and draw the attention of committed activists away from organizing that brings larger numbers of people into action. Still, it isn’t unreasonable to think that approaches like Malm’s will start attracting more politicized young people who are despairing, and for whom there is no clear path to the change they seek.
The United States and other Western countries were rocked by this kind of far-left political violence in the ’70s. Infamously, amid the implosion of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the government’s seeming immunity to widespread outrage over the Vietnam War, the Weather Underground emerged and initiated a series of bombing campaigns against government buildings, military installations, and banks.
The turn to guerilla-type violence was not effective in achieving its goals; but it did give the federal government greater cover to ramp up its persecution of leftists. The formation of the Weather Underground (aka the Weathermen) and similar groups represented the beginning of the end for the New Left, as activists gave up attempts on building a movement with a mass base in favor of extreme tactics that isolated them from the broader public.
Mark Rudd, a leader of the Weathermen who first rose to prominence in the 1968 student protests at Columbia University, told Jacobin that he and others in the group, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, had seen the need to “destroy SDS . . . and start a revolutionary guerrilla army.” According to Rudd, they abandoned what had actually been their source of power at Columbia — “organizing and coalition building” — in favor of the militancy of a few activists, detached from a mass movement. SDS at its height was home to one hundred thousand activists across four thousand campuses. The Weather Underground started with five hundred members; by the end of its life, the organization claimed only two hundred.
Perhaps as likely as the rise of Weather Underground–style bombing, and a more disturbing prospect, is that Democratic intransigence on Gaza will continue to facilitate our country’s descent into authoritarian right-wing rule. Democratic elites’ refusal to entertain either an alternative course of action in Palestine or an alternative nominee to the remarkably unpopular Biden makes a second Donald Trump presidency look increasingly probable. Trump has already promised to aggressively prosecute political opponents, use the army to suppress big protests, crack down on trans and labor rights, ban leftists from entering the country, and carry out a mass deportation campaign.
Young people, and those who care about stopping war and climate catastrophe, are not irrational for wanting better options. The campaigns around the country to vote uncommitted in the Democratic primary are a relatively polite expression of this desire; Bushnell’s was literally incendiary. If the polite expressions continue to be dismissed or ignored, shouldn’t we expect more fires?
Thousands of multi-faith and multi-racial leaders, including a large contingent of Palestinians and their allies, march on the National Mall to demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to U.S. military funding to Israel on Oct. 20, 2023 in Washington. | Larry French / AP for Center for Popular Democracy Action
A pro-Palestinian peace movement has grown in a matter of months from scattered and spontaneous demonstrations into a major factor on the U.S. political scene.
Anyone who hoped only a few months ago that it would fizzle out and go away as we got closer to the election has had those hopes dashed. What started out as a few rallies and small marches last October when Israel began its war on Gaza has turned into a solid coalition involving a broad array of groups, including unions and their allies, civil rights organizations, religious leaders, students, and other youth, the Arab American communities in key battleground states, elected officials on the local level, members of the U.S. House and Senate, and many others.
Even what the New York Times described last weekend as a “broad attack by Iran on Israel” failed to elicit a change of position by any of the major components of the coalition for peace that has emerged both inside and outside the Democratic Party. Demands for a ceasefire and even a total end to the U.S. funding of military aid to Israel have continued.
Iran’s response to Israel was, all things considered, a relatively mild reaction to a serious provocation by the U.S. backed Israeli warplanes, an airstrike against an Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed 16 people, including a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a brigadier general and other officers, plus two civilians. It is an international crime to attack another nation’s diplomatic facility, especially with fatal intent and outcome.
The attack by Iran, which killed no one, seemed almost like a choreographed event, with Iran declaring that it was planning no further retaliation even before its slow-moving drones reached an Israeli military facility. Surely, Iran knew the Iron Dome would successfully rout its drones. The incident allowed the U.S. to declare again its “ironclad” support for Israel and, at the same time, play the role of”peacemaker” by declaring it would not support any Israeli retaliation.
The Iran attack also allowed Israel to temporarily turn attention away from its continued slaughter of the people of Gaza—where nearly 34,000 Palestinians have been killed—and play the role of victim. This even though no one was killed because Israel, with the use of the U.S.-supplied “Iron Dome” and with the help of other states, intercepted what they claimed were 99% of the Iranian missiles. Iran was allowed to save face by claiming it had “retaliated” for the bombing of its embassy, but even now Israel threatens it will again strike Iran.
In a way, the attacks showed the sophistication of the peace movement in the U.S. Most activists have made clear that by protesting Biden’s “ironclad” support of Israel they are in no way supporting his Republican opponent, Donald Trump. In fact, they have said they fear Biden must change his position if he is going to win the election. They note the closeness of the race in key battleground states, where opposition to the genocide in Gaza is particularly strong because of the presence of large numbers of Arab Americans, youth, and non-white voters who are strongly opposed to the war.
Likewise, in the case of Iran, they have not fallen into the trap of launching a defense of the policies of that country, whose leaders could care less about the fate of the Palestinians and are waging a right-wing, religious fundamentalist attack on their own people.
The coalition for a ceasefire and for an end to all military aid to Israel continues to broaden, consisting of long-time peace activists, newly-politicized youth, and major individuals and sections of the Democratic Party.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind., Vt., has introduced a resolution to cut off all military funding of Israel. Reps. Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and many others are backing a ceasefire and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. Almost incredibly, in a period of less than six months, organizations focused on the fight against climate change nationwide, tenants’ rights in New York, and immigration rights in Chicago have been showing up at the demonstrations for a ceasefire.
Both rank-and-file labor activists and their unions are demanding a ceasefire. African-American religious leaders have gone to the White House itself to protest the Biden policies. Millions of messages are pouring into Congress as a result of efforts by youth using the internet to mobilize for a ceasefire and a cutoff of military support for Israel.
In Chicago, talks by a variety of the groups involved in the coalition are already discussing what their approach will be to the Democratic National Convention, which will be held there in the summer.
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, addressed the hopes some had that the movement for a ceasefire was only a temporary thing that would fizzle out. “Maybe there was an idea that, over time, the movement would lose steam or it was just like a campus thing, or that it was like a far-left sort of protest movement. The opposite is happening as the humanitarian toll becomes clear.”
The entry of the Working Families Party into the ceasefire campaign is itself an example of the expansion of the peace movement to include groups which have previously focused on domestic economic and political issues. The connection between misguided foreign policy and the inability to solve domestic problems is made clear by many of the ceasefire protests.
Another sign of the sophistication of the coalition is the ability to hold together many groups that employ a variety of different tactics. Union leaders and religious leaders issue statements, take out full-page ads in newspapers, and speak to gatherings of their members. Others have conducted civil disobedience, tying up traffic, for example. Civic groups go to meetings of town and city councils and raise signs and their voices when key politicians get up to speak. In Washington, D.C., for example, protesters show up at those types of meetings but also at informal sessions lawmakers have with their constituents at local coffee shops.
What began as a few protests by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and some actions at college campuses has become a movement that shows up anywhere and everywhere across the country.
One result is that the Biden administration is under pressure from important parts of the Democratic Party itself. In a Pew Research Center poll released last month, a slim majority of Democrats said the way Israel was conducting the war was unacceptable. After seven international aid workers were killed in targeted Israeli airstrikes last month, Biden said he would consider conditioning further weapons shipments on how Israel addresses civilian casualties. So far, however, there has been no change.
The movement for a ceasefire is growing much more rapidly than expected. On Oct. 5, Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia University posted an Instagram about a coming demonstration and it got 369 likes. Four days later, another post by them drew 33,000 likes.
A clear sign that the movement was really taking off came on Nov. 8, when a coalition of Black clergy ran a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for a ceasefire. It was signed by almost 1,000 faith leaders.
The labor movement in the U.S. is a key constituency that the Democratic Party depends on for votes, financial contributions, at phone banks, and for door-to-door voter contact. Soon after Oct. 7, though, younger union members and many Arab American labor activists in Dearborn, Mich., began to pressure their unions to take a stand for peace and to demand action from the president.
Brandon Mancilla, a regional director with the United Automobile Workers and supporter of the peace movement, said that by early November large numbers of UAW members were attending demonstrations wearing their UAW hats and jackets. Those workers openly expressed their hopes to see their union take a stand. In December, the UAW leaders listened, making the UAW the nation’s largest union to back an “immediate ceasefire.”
While this was happening, the Biden administration was faced with another major rebuke of its policies. In February, more than 100,000 voters in Michigan cast “uncommitted” votes in the primary election. It was only the first of many such ballot protests in the primary elections that followed.
Significant to the peace movement also is the fact that Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and others have played a central role in organizing many protests. Those groups continue to report large surges in membership as the protests continue. Members say there is no contradiction between grieving for those killed in the Oct. 7 raids by Hamas into Israel and fighting to stop the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. “No one can justify what Israel has done to Palestinian civilians,” said Martan-Arad Neeman, a spokesman for IfNotNow, in a statement.
Palestinian Americans have, of course, contributed much to the building of the movement. Ahmad Qurt, is an active supporter of the ceasefire movement in Chicago Ridge, Ill., a heavily Palestinian American community west of Chicago.
“It hurts so much to see our families and people killed in Gaza,” he said. “The pain is unbearable. My wife and I went to O’Hare Airport years ago to protest Trump’s Muslim ban. We know how bad he is, but how can we support Biden, who presides over the death of our people?”
Qurt said he fears that if the views of his neighbors in Chicago Ridge are any indication, Biden could lose in places like Michigan this year. “This is why we demand he change his policies,” he said.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) spoke at a rally against a potential war with Iran in Washington, D.C. on January 9, 2020| Photo: Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“We must resist the U.S. becoming embroiled in another costly conflict abroad,” said U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee.
Progressives in the U.S. Congress on Sunday urged the Biden administration to resist calls for an attack on Iran following the country’s retaliation against Israel for the deadly bombing of Tehran’s consulate in Syria earlier this month.
U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), one of Congress’ most fervent supporters of Israel’s war on Gaza, claimed Iran is “the single most destabilizing force in the Middle East” and “must be held accountable for the aggression it has long shown toward Israel not only directly but also indirectly through proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.”
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), directing her message at President Joe Biden, was more explicit in demanding an immediate military response from the U.S.
“We must move quickly and launch aggressive retaliatory strikes on Iran,” Blackburn wrote on social media.
The number two Republican in the U.S. House, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), said Saturday that the chamber would “move from its previously announced legislative schedule next week to instead consider legislation that supports our ally Israel and holds Iran and its terrorist proxies accountable.”
“The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack,” Scalise added. “More details on the legislative items to be considered will be forthcoming.”
“As leaders in Washington jump to call for war with Iran and rush additional offensive weapons to the Israeli military, we need to exercise restraint and use every diplomatic tool to de-escalate tensions.”
Iran’s launch of hundreds of drones and missiles on Saturday marked its first direct assault on Israel, which has repeatedly engaged in covert attacks inside Iranian territory. On April 1, Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in the Syrian capital, killing diplomats and a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander.
Iran said its retaliatory firing of missiles and drones—most of which were intercepted—was in line with international law. One person, a seven-year-old girl, was seriously injured in the attack.
Israeli officials immediately vowed revenge, a pledge that intensified global calls for restraint to prevent the regional war in the Middle East from spiraling further out of control.
As The Intercept‘s Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw noted Sunday, the conflict “now involves at least 16 different countries,” including the U.S., which “flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.”
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a vocal supporter of a cease-fire in Gaza, issued a statement Sunday condemning both Israel’s attack on Iran’s consulate and Tehran’s response, which she said “threaten civilian lives and regional war.”
“I also condemn the calls by members of Congress and others to initiate war with Iran; to do so without congressional authorization is blatantly unconstitutional,” Bush said. “We cannot let the warmongers win; our country and our world are calling for restraint, de-escalation, a lasting cease-fire, and diplomacy. Our government must listen. That is how we save lives.”
Bush urged the Biden administration to “take immediate steps, including at the U.N. Security Council and G7, to de-escalate and facilitate an immediate, lasting cease-fire in the region.”
U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the lone congressional no vote against the war in Afghanistan, similarly called on the Biden administration to “lead efforts toward de-escalation, diplomacy, and securing a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.”
“We must resist the U.S. becoming embroiled in another costly conflict abroad, but rather lead toward peace and security in the region,” Lee added.
Axiosreported Sunday that Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly that the U.S. would not “support any Israeli counterattack against Iran.” An unnamed official told the outlet that “when Biden told Netanyahu that the U.S. will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran and will not support such operations, Netanyahu said he understood.”
Echoing her progressive colleagues, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Sunday that “as leaders in Washington jump to call for war with Iran and rush additional offensive weapons to the Israeli military, we need to exercise restraint and use every diplomatic tool to de-escalate tensions.”
“Civilians in not only Gaza, Israel, the West Bank, and Iran but also Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are bearing the brunt of this escalation, and there must be a cease-fire on all sides,” said Omar. “I will continue to call for de-escalation, restraint, and lasting peace.”
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
Progressive advocates take part in a rally on March 31, 2017. (Photo: Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“With our support and voice, progressives may persuade and enable President Biden to achieve more progressive policy objectives during his second term and prevent a fascist takeover.”
A coalition of national progressive advocacy groups on Monday released a list of 10 policy objectives that it believes President Joe Biden should embrace to consolidate support for his high-stakes electoral rematch against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The platform—released by Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and the State Democratic Party Progressive Network—frontloads the threat that Trump and the fascist movement at his back pose to basic freedoms and democracy itself.
“The 2024 presidential election presents a challenge for progressives to preserve and amplify our voice while fighting the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy in our nation’s history,” reads the platform’s introduction. “Our best strategy to advance both goals is to become state and national Biden delegates at the state and national Democratic Party conventions, and to elect Joe Biden for a second term. Throughout this process, we must advocate for a progressive policy agenda that builds and expands upon progressive elements of President Biden’s original Build Back Better (BBB) plan.”
“With our support and voice,” the document adds, “progressives may persuade and enable President Biden to achieve more progressive policy objectives during his second term and prevent a fascist takeover.”
The first plank of the agenda urges Biden and the Democratic Party to “develop and repetitively use more aggressive messaging against and educate the public about the dangers of fascism including exposing and condemning Project 2025, the fascist blueprint for a second Trump administration.”
It also calls for more concrete policy changes such as filibuster reform, term limits for Supreme Court justices, and the passage of robust voting rights legislation in the face of l arge-scale Republican attacks on the franchise.
Other planks of the agenda include working to end the privatization of public goods such as housing and healthcare, using “all means available” to raise the long-stagnant federal minimum wage and slash poverty, raising taxes on billionaires and corporations, overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, canceling student debt and establishing tuition-free public college, expanding Medicare benefits, declaring a climate emergency, and conditioning U.S. aid to Israel.
The groups said Monday that they plan to submit the policy agenda to the Democratic Party Platform Committee ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August.
“We intend this to be a unifying effort, urge the second Biden administration to fulfill the 10 policy objectives outlined in these proposals, and invite the Democratic presidential campaign to engage in dialogue with us to achieve unity and progressive electoral support around them,” the progressive coalition said Monday.
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
Hamas will win if Israel holds elections. That’s essentially the claim made by Benjamin Netanyahu this weekend as he hit back at U.S. political leaders pressuring him to send his country to the polls.
Forced to respond to the explosive growth of a mass ceasefire movement in the U.S., many Democratic Party politicians have stepped up their expressions of “frustration” with Netanyahu’s government and its execution of the brutal war against Gaza.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the U.S., longtime supporter of the State of Israel, and staunch backer of the government there following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7—directly called for new elections in Israel.
He declared that Netanyahu had “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel” and now constitutes an “obstacle to peace” in the Middle East.
Repeating critiques commonly heard from activists in the ceasefire movement, especially those affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace, Schumer said that Netanyahu is part of a “radical right-wing” coalition that stands in the way of peace negotiations and a two-state solution. He said the Israeli leader “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza”—now over 31,000.
Schumer specifically singled out Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security chief Itamar Ben Gvir, saying there was a “nastiness” in how they use their positions and power. Smotrich has called for the total elimination of Palestinians from the West Bank, among other crimes. Ben Gvir, meanwhile, has been overseeing the distribution of guns to illegal Israeli West Bank settlers, prompting further violence.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for elections in Israel, saying Netanyahu is an ‘obstacle to peace.’ | J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Shifts in U.S. rhetoric
Schumer’s speech was the latest in a string of rhetorical shifts on the part of U.S. leaders that had previously been lockstep in their support of Israel in its war against Palestinians.
In early March, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza. President Joe Biden said he favored the same in his State of the Union address a few days later, and in the interim, Harris hosted Benny Gantz—a member of the Israeli War Cabinet but a rival to Netanyahu.
The Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben Gvir regime is feeling the heat not just from its U.S. allies, though. Recent opinion polls conducted in Israel show that 65% of people want early elections and that if a vote was held today, the prime minister and his coalition would go down to defeat.
Netanyahu, of course, is well aware of how tenuous his hold on power is, and that’s why he shot back at Schumer’s suggestion an election should be held.
In a softball interview with Fox News this weekend, Netanyahu said the U.S. is “wrong to try to replace the elected leaders of a sister democracy and a staunch American ally…during the time of war.” He said Schumer’s speech would be equivalent to an Israeli leader calling for elections in the U.S. after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to remove President George W. Bush. “It’s wrong,” he said.
He accused Schumer—and by connection Biden, since he endorsed the Schumer speech—of helping Hamas. “The only thing we should be focused on is changing the regime in Gaza…not the duly elected government of Israel.
“We have to finish the job,” Netanyahu said, repeating his intention to soon attack Rafah, the last major city in southern Gaza where over a million Palestinians have sought refuge.
More than words
If the ceasefire movement in the U.S. has its way, however, Netanyahu shouldn’t expect the critiques from Washington to end anytime soon. Nor can his allies in D.C. look forward to being free of the Gaza question.
With worldwide outrage against Israel’s genocidal war escalating by the day and a general election looming in the U.S., Democratic politicians can no longer ignore the demand for peace. The rhetorical shifts coming from the Biden administration and Senate leaders like Schumer are a direct result of grassroots pressure for a ceasefire.
In Democratic primaries in Michigan, Washington state, Minnesota, and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of “uncommitted” and other protest ballots have been cast in campaigns—propelled by Arab-American voters in many instances. These results serve as a warning signal for the president that his re-election campaign is jeopardized by his continuing backing for the Israeli military.
Across the country, over 70 cities have passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire; campaigns are underway in dozens more municipalities to do the same. In the labor movement—a key Democratic constituency—more and more unions are signing ceasefire demands, including the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor federation.
And while the changing talk coming from Biden, Harris, Schumer, and others is welcomed, ceasefire activists in the streets and peace supporters in Congress continue to point out that more than words is needed. The U.S. could strangle Netanyahu’s war machine today if it would halt the flow of weapons.
Seven U.S. senators, led by Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen, are pushing Biden to do just that, pointing to a 1961 law that requires the U.S. to stop any aid going to an ally that violates humanitarian law. As they point out, sending weapons to Netanyahu is illegal under U.S. law.
“Some people say we’re not grateful enough for Schumer/Biden’s harsh words for Netanyahu,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at the Palestinian Policy Network, wrote late last week. “Israel has killed 31,000 Palestinians; 2 million displaced; entire families wiped out; 13,000 children gone; thousands more torn apart. Anything short of intervention is too late.”
GOP-Netanyahu alliance
A worker hangs an election campaign billboard of the Likud Party showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump in Bnei Brak, Israel, Sept 8, 2019. Hebrew on the billboard reads “Netanyahu, in another league.” Republican responses to the latest developments in the war against Gaza have signaled that they are tightening their embrace of Netanyahu. | Oded Balilty / AP
While the ceasefire movement remains perpetually dissatisfied with how Biden continues to fund Israel’s genocide and the glacial pace of his movement toward supporting a ceasefire, Republican leaders give even more reason for worry, as they have responded to recent developments by tightening their embrace of Netanyahu.
On Sunday, GOP nominee Donald Trump portrayed himself as a better friend of the Israeli state. “All of a sudden, he [Biden] dumped Israel,” Trump said. “He just said essentially that Bibi Netanyahu should take a walk.” He told the Israeli leader that he should “finish it quickly,” referring to the war on the Palestinian people.
GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, said the Democratic Party “has an anti-Israel problem,” and pledged that Republicans would be the ally that “Israel deserves.”
The relationship between Netanyahu and the Republican Party is a cozy one going back years. In 2015, the GOP and the Israeli government conspired to torpedo President Barack Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran; Netanyahu spoke in Congress at Republicans’ invitation to undermine the effort.
Taken together, the responses and actions of Republicans show that if they take the White House and both houses of Congress in November, the ceasefire movement—and all other progressive and democratic movements—would have even less leverage to force changes in policy.
That’s why anti-war activists are determined to not let up in their effort to pressure Biden and the Democrats to further change course. Words without actions, they say, threaten to split the anti-MAGA coalition and throw the election to the GOP.
Layla Elabed, organizer for the “Uncommitted” Listen to Michigan campaign, summed up the danger in a recent interview: “It is our hope that Joe Biden would not risk his presidency, not risk the White House, to someone like Donald Trump.”
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.
President Joe Biden’s last State of the Union address before the 2024 elections was a speech defined by contrasts: economic populism at home and Cold War confrontation abroad. | Photo by Shawn Thew (AP) / Illustration by PW
WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden’s last State of the Union address before the 2024 elections laid out an agenda of sharp contrasts, with economic populism dominating domestic policy and Cold War confrontation and militarism defining his international strategy.
At home, Biden pledged to impose higher taxes on billionaires and price-gouging corporations, make prescriptions cheaper for Americans on Medicare, and defend democracy and abortion rights from Trump and the GOP.
Derailing this otherwise liberal-progressive program, however, was an approach to immigration that outflanks Republicans on the right, a foreign policy of Cold War confrontation with China and Russia, and a promise of further support for Israel’s war against Palestinians.
Public anger over the latter issue disrupted Biden’s speech before it even began: A large sit-in protest by ceasefire demonstrators blocked Pennsylvania Avenue, forcing Biden’s motorcade to drive an alternate route from the White House to the Capitol.
Once he was able to make it to the House chambers, though, Biden launched into a speech that was combative with Republicans at times, short on progressive substance at others, but crafted from beginning to end with the intention of ending speculation about his age and mental sharpness.
Some media outlets presented brief reports on the ceasefire protest that blocked Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of Biden’s speech, but most ignored it completely. | via CNN
President vs. predecessor on democracy
Biden continually invited comparisons between himself and Donald Trump, whom he referred to as “my predecessor” and described as a threat to democracy both in the United States and other countries.
He slammed Trump as a threat to the rights and freedoms Americans now take for granted. Analysts called the speech Biden’s formal re-election campaign kickoff. Throughout, on their side of the House chamber, glum-looking Republicans sat on their hands, often looking down.
Biden’s criticism of misogynist, 91-count-indicted, and twice-impeached Trump focused on the Republican’s instigation and encouragement of Jan. 6, 2021, invasion, insurrection, and attempted coup d’état attempt at the U.S. Capitol.
“It is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the union,” Biden declared at the outset. “And, yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either.”
He sought to warn the country about Trump’s increasingly belligerent and erratic statements. Atop them: Trump’s promise to be a dictator “on day one” if he takes office again next Jan. 20. Nobody—neither Biden nor Trump’s MAGA legions—believe Trump would stop there.
“Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy,” Biden declared. “We all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots.” Even Trump, in an offhand comment a week ago, labeled his Jan. 6 coup “an insurrection.”
“The lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War,” Biden continued, again saying “My predecessor,” Trump, was the source of the lies and plots.
“We must be honest, the threat remains, and democracy must be defended.” Biden chided “some Republicans for trying to bury the truth of Jan. 6th. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies.”
Biden’s other attack on Trump’s threat to democracy came at the speech’s end, as he made light of concerns about his age, 81. In a sly reference, Biden said that “the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are. It’s how old our ideas are.
“Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas. But you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back.” No need for Biden to say Trump, age 78, has those ideas.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain cheered some of the pro-worker components in Biden’s State of the Union Address. | Florida AFL-CIO via Twitter (X)
“To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be,” Biden said. “I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it. I see a future where we restore the right to choose and protect other freedoms—not take them away.”
That, too, was a dig at Republicans in general and Trump in particular. The GOP has busily approved legislation, especially in the states, eliminating voting rights, censoring schools, eliminating workers’ rights, and ending not just the right to abortion but other reproductive rights.
In Republican-run Florida, Trump-like Gov. Ron DeSantis and the GOP-gerrymandered legislature even tried to take away free speech with their “Stop WOKE Act.” A federal appeals court tossed it out earlier this week for violating the U.S. Constitution.
Progressive economics
On a host of domestic issues, Biden put forward progressive proposals and plans he said he had for the future. He reminded viewers that he inherited a raging pandemic and high joblessness from Trump and that the coronavirus has been curbed while joblessness is at a 50-year low.
He also cited a list of legislative accomplishments from his first two years in office to battle the virus and the ensuing depression, all enacted by a narrowly Democratic Congress. He then rattled off the pro-worker executive orders he’d issued during the last year after MAGA took control of the House and lawmaking came to a virtual halt.
A linkage to unions was among the achievements he named: The re-opening of the Stellantis (FiatChrysler) plant in Belvidere, Ill., which the United Auto Workers gained in their successful bargaining with the Detroit carmakers. Some 4,000 workers at that factory will now make electric vehicles—part of Biden’s green manufacturing plans, he noted. The plant had employed 1,200 previously. Both UAW President Shawn Fain and a third-generation Belvidere Auto Worker were among Biden’s guests at the speech.
Biden also proposed a variety of ideas for lawmakers to consider this year and for his second term, if he beats Trump this fall. Restoring and strengthening the Voting Rights Act led his list.
Others included raising the federal minimum wage from its present $7.25 an hour and passage of the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s #1 legislative priority, to make unionizing easier. Biden also wants to raise the corporate income tax rate to 28% and institute a 25% minimum tax on millionaires. He also wants to give public school teachers a raise, though he didn’t say how or how much.
Biden condemned the banks and credit card companies and vowed to lead a battle to end the “junk fees” they impose on everyone. Democrats again cheered as the Republicans looked down and sat on their hands. He also got an enthusiastic response to his call for curbs on mortgage rates and rents and called for subsidies to help people pay those rising costs.
He called for an extension of the $35 cap on monthly costs of insulin for seniors to all people and for giving Medicare the right to negotiate drug process on all drugs. He mentioned that in cities around the world, including Toronto, Berlin, and Moscow (“I mean, excuse me, well even in Moscow probably”) they pay far less for the same drugs than we do.” He did not call for the obvious solution right now to the health needs of Americans, Medicare for All, long supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
In all those cases, as well as on the right to abortion, Democrats in the House chamber jumped up and cheered, while Republicans acted uninterested. Senate Republicans had blocked the minimum wage hike, the PRO Act, and restoring voting rights from even being debated, much less voted on.
Women’s freedom
The right to abortion was just one example where Biden first looked backward and then forward, forecasting what he would do if he won a second term this fall.
“With all due respect,” Biden criticized the five-justice Supreme Court majority—fueled by three Trump nominees—who in 2022 eliminated the 49-year-old national constitutional right to abortion. Biden urged Congress to send him legislation restoring it. “If you send me a good Congress, I will make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again,” he declared as he looked straight at the Supreme Court justices sitting before him.
“I’m here tonight to show the way forward because America cannot go back,” Biden declared when speaking of abortion rights. He could have applied that statement to everything else he proposed.
“My predecessor”—Trump—“came to office determined to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned,” Biden said of that ruling in 2022. “In fact, he brags about it. Look at the chaos that resulted.”
Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush were among several lawmakers who expressed their opposition to the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and called for a lasting ceasefire. | @RepCori via Twitter (X)
The chaos will engulf the anti-abortion Republicans at the ballot box, Biden predicted. Including Trump. “Many of you in this [House] chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom.
“My God, what freedoms will you take away next?
Regressive border policy
Immigration policy and border security stood out as major weak spots in Biden’s otherwise liberal-progressive domestic agenda. He bragged about the “bipartisan deal” that his administration tried to push through Congress. Although the bill actually outflanks Republicans from the right, Trump had ordered the GOP to block the law in order to not give Biden any ability to claim he acted on border security.
Biden said the Republicans had denied him the “emergency authority to…shut down the border,” and bragged that even the right-wing Border Patrol union and the Chamber of Commerce supported the bill.
The Trump MAGA faction was represented in the House chamber by Georgia’s far-right extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others. | via Twitter (X)
Taking the bait dangled by MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Biden said words that many saw as racist when speaking about the murder of Laken Riley. “An innocent young woman…was killed by an illegal, that’s right,” Biden thundered. “But how many thousands of people are being killed by illegals?” he asked, using a derogatory word to refer to undocumented immigrants.
He earned immediate criticism from Latino members of Congress and immigrant rights organizations. “No human being is illegal,” Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez, told the press. Rep. Chuy García said he was “extremely disappointed” in Biden for using the dehumanizing term.
Immigrant rights advocates say the word is not only inaccurate, it is also racially charged and promotes violence and discrimination.
The National Immigrant Justice Center said that Biden using the “words of anti-immigrant extremists” was unacceptable and pointed out that his own administration in 2021 had forbid government agencies from using the term “illegal alien.”
Cold War and militarism abroad
On the foreign policy portfolio, Biden continued the Cold War approach of ramping up fear about other nations and their alleged threats to U.S. democracy.
“We’re standing up against China,” Biden declared. Listing the countries he’s supposedly brought on board in the alliance to contain China—“India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Pacific islands”—Biden said that his agenda of penalties and trade restrictions have put the U.S. “in a stronger position to win the conflict of the 21st century against China.”
China, for its part, continues to say it seeks peaceful co-existence and cooperation with the U.S., not confrontation or war. It opposes the militarization of East Asia.
When it comes to Europe, Biden said the U.S. needs additional billions of dollars to bolster “democracy” in Ukraine, which is fighting Russia. The $60 billion in additional money he wants for the war in Ukraine that is being held up in Congress must be approved immediately, he said.
Most of the money will not go directly to Ukraine, however. The U.S. military would send its old weapons to Ukraine and the “aid” money approved by Congress would then be used to buy new weapons. That puts funds directly into the pockets of U.S. armaments makers who have raked in huge profits thanks to the war in Ukraine, and of course, it subtracts from meeting human needs here at home.
Further invoking the Cold War rhetoric of the past, Biden praised former President Ronald Reagan for having called on then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall and lamented how Republicans of today have moved away from that Cold War stance and instead “bow down to a Russian leader,” meaning Vladimir Putin.
None of the Cold War rhetoric is conducive to building support for cuts to the military budget which are so essential to funding people’s needs.
On Gaza, Biden said he favored negotiating an “immediate ceasefire” of six weeks to allow humanitarian aid into the occupied territory. He said the U.S. would construct a “temporary pier” off the enclave’s Mediterranean coast to allow shops with aid to dock. There was no mention of how that aid would get into trucks to travel across Gaza when the infrastructure to allow such transportation has already been destroyed by Israel.
He claimed that the disaster in Gaza, which he never characterized as a genocide, “began on Oct. 7,” when Hamas attacked Israel, but he made no mention of the continued suppression of Palestinians that has been going on for 75 years. That suppression has had and continues to rely on the support of the U.S.
When the president spoke about Gaza, some members of Congress, led by Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Cori Bush of Missouri held up signs protesting U.S. policy there. This protest in the House chamber followed the street demonstration that forced the motorcade bringing Biden from the White House to take a circuitous route since Pennsylvania Ave., the city’s main artery, was blocked. Few of the major networks bothered to cover those protests.
Republicans respond
Capping off the entire night was the incredible Republican response to Biden’s speech, in which Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama laid out their position.
Incredibly, she smiled broadly through most of her speech, including the parts where she described a dark dystopian world she claimed Americans are already living through. She offered not a single solution to any of the alleged problems she said were killing the nation. Instead, she tried to spin an image of Biden as a “diminished and dithering” old man while describing an economic situation at odds with reality.
Britt, who wore a shiny cross around her neck and spoke from her kitchen table, exemplified the right-wing, theocratic, crypto-fascist nature of the modern Republican Party and its view of women. But even many GOP figures acknowledged that her speech was largely a failure.
“It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” one unnamed Republican told the media. “What the hell am I watching right now? another told Rolling Stone.
Trump’s response, a day after the speech and the Britt horror show was to entertain at Mar-a-Lago the fascistic dictator of Hungary, Viktor Orban.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.
C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.
White working-class voters who recently switched to the Republicans have not yet returned to the Democratic Party. They should do that, New York Times columnist David Brooks points out. After all, the Biden administration has “pursued an ambitious agenda to support the working class … [and] economic results have been fantastic.”
He outlines a divide between Republican voters, who mostly lack college degrees and may live in rural areas and small towns, and Democrats, whom he reports as being urban-based, college-educated, and snobby. He mentions a “seismic political realignment,” which “is more about culture and identity than it is about economics.”
Brooks suggests that, if the Biden administration matched the commitment shown by the New Deal, a Democratic Party legacy, many former Democrats voting Republican would return home. Those less attentive to working-class interests and more susceptible to demagoguery and myth-making would presumably remain where they are.
Brooks doesn’t explain why cultural phenomena and the political use of people’s identity led to voters moving to another party. These played out in a way that encouraged a kind of politics that overwhelmed political undertakings crucial to various sectors of the working class.
The object here is to examine some of these political projects and thereby identify certain causes that are off limits to working people who vote Republican. Whether they are compelling enough to persuade errant Democrats to return to the fold is uncertain. So too is the Biden Administration’s dedication to pursuing such struggles.
In any case aspirations inspiring the kinds of activism described below are not far removed from urgings toward a coherent and consistent working-people’s political movement or political party.
Culture and its variations
Brooks’s use of the term “culture” seemingly embraces religious beliefs, persisting racial prejudice, views on abortion and gender nonconformity, rural distrust of city life, and support for gun ownership.
Working-class history is about another kind of culture. The French and American Revolutions of the late 18th century left behind a culture of democracy. It involved popular elections, expanded legislative power, and guarantees of political rights. Royalty and feudal remnants mostly disappeared. Political newspapers and public debate flourished.
Some of the founders thought George Washington ought to be king. Fearful of democracy, they provided for indirect presidential and Senate elections, gave big and little states equal representation in the Senate and Electoral College, counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person, and denied women the vote.
Democratic malaise manifests now as: disappearing consensus that elections decide who becomes president, gerrymandered congressional districts, elections given over to money-power, and the Electoral College’s disregard of the idea of one person-one vote.
But democratic forces return. Even as the Constitution took effect, struggling farmers and backwoodsmen rebelled against wealthy politicians in charge of new state governments. Agitation for democracy would resurface in fights for women’s suffrage, voting for the racially excluded and propertyless, economic justice for small farmers (in the progressive era), better wages and working conditions, and civil rights – and fights also to abolish corporate monopolies, slavery, child labor, and police violence.
Working people, socialists included, have long defended democracy. Socialists have realized that the democratic rights achieved by early revolutionists enabled struggles later on for social and economic change.
Presently, working-class voters allied to the Democratic Party most certainly prioritize renewed struggle for democratic guarantees aimed at shoring up a U.S. democracy in trouble.
Hazards of identity politics
Brooks doesn’t explore exactly how misuse of people’s identity disturbs U.S. politics. He implies that working people are somehow hurt.
The identity of being a woman often leads to trouble. Their political struggles have provoked anti-women biases and stereotypes. The origins and evolution of these are so nebulous as to not provide a basis for criticism that would actually end them. They recur, as with current fight over abortion. No end is in sight.
There is another way. Many women struggle now to overcome remnants of the dependency and obligation visited upon them at the beginning of industrialization. It’s an unfinished battle.
Men, and even women and children, were working in the new factories as independent contractors. The state and employers were oblivious to their domestic circumstances. Families were on their own to raise children, find and prepare food, and seek protection. Women were the ones who were responsible.
Factory owners and other capitalists even now regard women’s work at home as a “free gift.” Although less onerous, women’s state of dependency verging on oppression remains.
The manufacturing and service industries today cannot do without women’s work; it has long served them well in quality and quantity. That factor, and women’s struggle too, have induced power-brokers reluctantly to attend to women’s collective demands for fairness and basic equality. Women’s fight continues, but on the basis of realities in their lives, not on their identity.
As women and their families gain access to the social and economic resources needed for preparing new generations, women work toward a new independence freeing them from governmental intrusions in their private affairs, notably their freedom to choose an abortion.
Racial identity
The idea of affirmative action was to open up access to higher education and jobs for previously excluded persons. Racial and gender identity has been the marker of such exclusion. That’s what admissions officers and employers pay attention to.
The process of expanding admissions to colleges and universities is unfair. Large numbers of U.S. young people eligible for affirmative action through their racial identity can’t aspire towards higher education. Their families are poor and vulnerable to social catastrophe. Their schools likely are inadequate.
The families of most students benefiting from affirmative action have economic resources. Those students usually have originated from the middle and upper strata of the various minority groupings. Most have attended good schools. They thrived from encouragement and high expectations at home.
A fix is at hand in the form of economic security for all, better schools, and universal availability of decent jobs. Capable young people of the working class would understand that they are due high-quality education from start to finish. It would be a kind of affirmative action that leads to hope and overcomes division.
David Brooks credits the Biden administration for creating new jobs, including jobs for workers without a college degree. Wondering why working-class people don’t return to the Democrats, he could have produced a more direct answer than one based on speculation about effects of culture and identity.
Working people’s needs other than jobs go unrecognized. Brooks might have mentioned good schools, healthcare for all, housing for all, and guaranteed income. He would then have been entering territory of the unspeakable, which is redistribution of wealth.
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.
The 50,000 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000 in Washington State are being advised by their union to vote “Uncommitted” when they head to the polls for the Democratic Primary on March 12.
Local 3000 is the biggest union in Washington and is the first official labor body in the country to endorse the Uncommitted effort as a means of protesting President Joe Biden’s continued support for Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.
It represents workers in the grocery, retail, health care, meatpacking, cannabis, and other industries in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.
The executive board of the union unanimously backed the Uncommitted endorsement Wednesday night, less than 24 hours after 101,000 primary voters in Michigan cast ballots expressing their lack of confidence in Biden.
UFCW 3000 issued a statement saying that while Biden had been “an ally to workers over the last four years,” it’s not clear he will be able to hold out against Donald Trump if he continues down the divisive path of supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war.
The members of the executive board of UFCW Local 3000 voted unanimously to endorse an ‘Uncommitted’ vote in the Washington State Democratic Primary on March 12. | Via UFCW 3000
Labor’s political muscle
The board pointed out that “the entire purpose” of a primary election “is for voters to cast their ballot to reflect their current wish for the party’s nomination.” And thus far, it implied that Biden is not behaving like the candidate workers need to see.
Protections for low-wage workers, the right to organize, and other gains achieved before and during Biden’s time in office cannot be lost, the union said. “To protect workers, we must give ourselves the best chance to defeat anti-worker forces in the General Election.”
The union said, “We need a nominee who can run and beat Trump to protect workers across this country and around the world.”
The declaration was worded such that it could even be interpreted as signaling that some other, unnamed, candidate might be better suited to take on Trump. The immediate concern, however, was clearly to pressure Biden to change his stance.
“Currently, many voters, and the UFCW 3000 executive board, feel that the best path to have the best nominee, and to defeat Trump, is to vote ‘uncommitted,’” the statement continued. “The hope is that this will strengthen the Democratic Party’s ultimate nominee to defeat Trump in the General Election in November.”
Unlike swing-state Michigan, Washington reliably goes Democrat in national elections, so there is essentially zero chance of Biden losing the state’s 12 Electoral College votes. However, powerful labor unions from blue states play outsize roles in fundraising and get-out-the-vote operations for Democrats in other areas—something Local 3000 reminds the president of in its statement.
The union stated unequivocally that it intends to throw everything it’s got into the effort to defeat Trump and other Republican candidates up-and-down the ballot. It vowed to send “staff, members, and resources to any swing state across the nation to support the Democratic nominee to win and defeat Trump.”
Local 3000 went on to praise the Michigan voters who voted Uncommitted and bluntly stated that to win its support, “Biden must push for a lasting ceasefire and ending U.S. funding toward this reckless war.” It said the best way to “send this message for policy change is through a vote of ‘uncommitted.’”
Biden ignored the Uncommitted campaign in Michigan, however, not even mentioning it in his morning-after remarks on the primary. Finally, a day later, his campaign co-chair, Mitch Landrieu, responded to the 101,000 protest votes. His paternalistic and condescending remarks left peace campaigners angry.
“We’re going to continue to talk to them [the Uncommitted voters],” Landrieu said, “and then ask them to think about the choices and what the consequences are of electing somebody who wants to have a Muslim ban.”
Landrieu’s was a familiar liberal tactic: Use Trump as a threat to scare critics into line while ridiculing their concerns.
Layla Elabed, manager of Listen to Michigan, the organization behind the Uncommitted campaign, slammed Landrieu and the president, saying in a statement:
“It is deeply offensive that President Biden keeps suggesting he has a messaging issue among Arab Americans and young people rather than a funding bombs issue. Biden’s re-election chances will be judged by how much of Gaza is left standing by November. It is our hope that Biden chooses the people of America over sending Netanyahu a blank check for war and occupation.”
A new National Labor Network for Ceasefire, made up of unions representing over nine million U.S. workers, was formed in mid-February.
Onus on Biden
The move by UFCW Local 3000 is warning sign for the Democratic Party. While the push for an “Uncommitted” vote might be coming from just one union local so far, it looks increasingly possible that it will turn out to be but the first in a wave of labor pullbacks from Biden.
As a core constituency of the Democratic political machine’s funding and staffing apparatus, the dissent of organized labor will not be easy to ignore if it spreads. And the recent establishment of a new “National Labor Network for Ceasefire,” consisting of unions representing over nine million workers, suggests that’s already happening.
Biden’s support for and complicity in Israel’s brutal war—which has already killed more than 30,000 Palestinians—threatens to split apart the anti-MAGA coalition that removed Trump from the White House in 2020. Whatever domestic or economic policy achievements the Democratic Party touts as reasons to support Biden, his backing for genocide could overshadow them all.
To protect and strengthen the unity needed to beat Trump and save U.S. democracy, the onus is on Biden to alter course.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 