Thinking and Acting Strategically

Why It Is Essential for Unions and Union Activists

While the outcome of the UFT elections was welcome, there was little to celebrate in the campaign itself, which often seemed to bring out the worst in us. One bright spot for me were the Substack posts of Nick Bacon; they demonstrated a thoughtfulness and non-sectarian outlook I had not seen before in New Action.

But no good deed goes unpunished, Nick. {-; In his most recent Substack, Nick provides an analysis of the state of the UFT opposition in the wake of the fissures that opened up between ABC and ARISE in the elections. Among other things, Nick finds fault with ABC’s criticism of the stance taken by ARISE Presidential candidate Olivia Swisher on strikes and her advocacy of a ‘general strike’ in 2028:

During the campaign, ABC Red-baited ARISE, mocking our presidential candidate for being pro-strike—one of the most basic, bedrock principles of unionism.

Today, I will argue that it is a significant error to treat the strike as a question of principle – and “a basic, bedrock principle” at that – for the UFT and other unions. In a subsequent post, I will take up Nick’s use of the term “red-baiting” in this context, which I think is misguided and reflects a frequent abuse of the term inside the UFT.

A Well-Rounded Understanding of Strikes

A strike is a tactic, a form of direct action. It is undertaken to create leverage necessary to achieve an objective – most often, but not always, a better collective bargaining agreement. Among the tactics available to unions, strikes stand out, because when they are successful, they have the capacity to generate considerably more leverage than most other tactics, and in so doing, can bring gains that could not otherwise be achieved.

But that is only one part of what must be considered in calling a strike. Strikes require real sacrifices by members (under NYS Taylor Law, members lose two days pay for every day on strike), and strong member support is indispensable for a successful strike. Strikes are complicated operations, with many different components that a union must successfully organize and maintain. A number of conditions must be met for strikes to be successful. Most importantly, precisely because they have the potential to be high leverage, strikes are also high risk.

Here is what history tells us: The victorious 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike led to the organization of the auto industry, established the UAW as a major union, and was an important breakthrough for the entire CIO. But the disastrous 1981 PATCO strike led to the destruction of the union and ushered in a period when U.S. strikes were increasingly defeated and less and less employed; it is seen as a significant turning point in the decline of the American labor movement. Similarly, the successful 1960 UFT strike brought collective bargaining to New York City public school educators. But the failed 1975 UFT strike was the wrong tactic for a moment in which New York City was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and it proved ineffectual in reversing massive cuts to the public schools and the layoffs of tens of thousands of UFT members. When UFTers had to pay substantial financial penalties for a strike that achieved nothing, a generation of our members became extremely leery of all strikes.

In my book The Teacher Insurgency, I looked at the history of strikes by teacher unions, analyzed when and why they were successful and unsuccessful, and examined the factors that should go into a decision on whether or not to strike. I won’t repeat it here, because Dissent Magazine excerpted the chapter on strikes, and those interested can read it there. Bottom line: if you focus only on the potential up-sides of a strike, while ignoring its possible down-sides, and if you don’t pay attention to the all of the conditions necessary for strike success, you have a very one-sided understanding of strikes, and are not going to be well-situated to make sound strategic decisions about when – and when not – to call a strike. That is not, I am afraid, very good union leadership.

Principles, Objectives, Strategies, and Objectives

One way to short-circuit much needed strategic thinking about strikes is to make the strike into a question of principle, as Nick does. Principles are ethical and political imperatives – the reasons why we act in the world, and our guides on how to act. The core principles of the UFT include:

• solidarity and collective action (fighting together for the common good of all members, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’);

• member empowerment and voice (creating the means for members to make positive change in their workplace, their professional lives, and their communities);

• democracy (both inside the union and as our lifeblood in the larger society); and

• fundamental rights without which unions and all of civil society could not openly and freely function (freedom of expression, of conscience, of publication, of association, and of protest; due process of law.)

A union principle such as solidarity is unchanging and invariable. But the ways in which a union acts in the world to advance solidarity can and does change, responding to the exigencies of the moment. When striking is seen as a principle, rather than as a means of acting in the world to promote our principles, it is no longer a tactical choice, which a union can opt to use or not depending upon the circumstances. It has become an obligation, much like solidarity. A union that understands striking in this way, as an a priori injunction, is always looking to strike. And with this outlook, sooner or later it will enter into a strike that does not end well.

There are parts of the UFT opposition – mostly in MORE – which have viewed strikes in this way, as an objective always to be sought, regardless of conditions. MORE’s roots are in parts of the US left which are heavily influenced by syndicalism, an apolitical tradition of unionism that is focused almost exclusively on strikes and direct action in the workplace (to the exclusion of political action and other forms of collective action) and that prioritizes workplace militancy above all else. American syndicalism had its origins in the Wobblies, but a group of 1960s activists espousing a ‘revolutionary socialism from below’ incorporated many syndicalist tenets in the rank-and-file strategy, which is influential today on parts of the labor left such as MORE. According to this view, the strike is the quintessential form of working class ‘self-activity’: it strengthens the bonds of solidarity and builds union power, and this is why unions should go on strike whenever possible. Indeed, successful strikes can and do build solidarity and union power. But so, too, do other forms of successful collective action which syndicalists generally ignore, and the more forms of collective action a union can call upon, the more well-rounded and effective it will be in advancing its principles. More importantly, strikes that are broken and defeated can have the opposite effect – undermining solidarity, dividing members and setting then against each other, and diminishing union power. That is why a careful, case-by-case analysis of proposed strikes and their prospects for success is essential. An approach that treats the strike as an a priori imperative is, to put it bluntly, strategically impoverished.

I published an essay in Dissent Magazine on the importance of labor and the left being able to distinguish clearly between principles, objectives, strategies, and tactics, and understanding the proper relationship among them. Among other issues, it touched upon the question of strikes, and how they fit into a larger panorama of strategic thinking and decision-making of labor and the left. It can be read here.

The General Strike

As I discussed in the Dissent essay, one of the negative consequences of elevating a particular tactic into a principle, even one with the potential of the strike, is that it preempts important considerations of strategy and tactics. In the case of the strike, these considerations include discussions of both whether the proposed strike would be effective in addressing an issue before the union and whether there were other forms of collective action that might be better suited to that issue. There is an old adage that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem you confront becomes a nail. When a union is always ready and eager to wield the strike hammer, it rarely stops and considers whether a scalpel or scissors would be the better tool for their problem.

One expression of this strike-centered tunnel vision can be found in a response to the immense challenge our union and the labor movement, public education, and American democracy now faces, in the form of the authoritarian, extreme right movement of Trump and MAGA that controls the national government. The call for a “general strike” in 2028 taken up by Olivia Swisher and others as the way to respond to Trump and MAGA reflects this “the strike hammer is our only tool, so every problem becomes a nail” thinking. Confronting a problem that by definition requires political collective action – we are, after all, talking about control of the national government – we are directed to a syndicalist solution which avoids politics: a strike of everyone. If we organize a “general strike,” Trump and MAGA can somehow be brought down, even though all of the questions on exactly how this would work, in a country which has had all of three significant general strikes, none of which were nationwide and the last one of which was nearly a century ago, remain entirely unexplained. It is a syndicalist leap of faith, distracting us from the work that needs to be done.

This week I published a piece in Convergence which takes on this question in some detail, laying out what a sound strategic approach for this moment would entail. I will end with it.

Charting Labor’s Path in Hard Times:

A Call For Grounded Strategy

https://convergencemag.com/articles/charting-labors-path-in-hard-times-a-call-for-grounded-strategy/

As we anticipated the new Trump Administration’s attacks on the multiracial working class, Convergence and Jacobin jointly published an essay by Alex Caputo-Pearl on ways the labor movement can resist these attacks and lay the foundation for a stronger working-class movement. Now, in this essay, educator and labor leader Leo Casey offers a different take on the strategic imperatives for labor in the fight against authoritarianism. We invite readers to continue the dialogue.

Unions should be in the forefront of the struggle to oppose authoritarian MAGA rule, as part of a broad anti-fascist front that aims to gain governing power and redeem the national government for democratic politics, starting with the 2026 and 2028 elections. While we must voice without equivocation our opposition to every anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian step and measure from Trump and MAGA, we will need to make well-grounded strategic choices about when and where to engage in full-pitched battles with the neo-fascist Right.

To spark conversation about the elements of a strategy for labor and its many allies on the Left that can guide us toward 2026 and 2028, I offer three points: first, take the full measure of the 2024 elections; second, map the electorate; and third, develop a progressive populist narrative. As we build this strategy, we will need to take care to avoid a few of the pitfalls embedded in the assumptions of syndicalism that influence part of our movement: downplaying electoral politics, retreating from the Democratic Party, divorcing direct action and organizing from political power-building, and embracing the romance of the general strike.

Syndicalism

Although it is rarely acknowledged as such, the apolitical worldview of syndicalism has been a significant presence in the American labor movement. Its roots go back to the turn of the 20^th century, in the revolutionary syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) and in the conservative “pure and simple” unionism of many craft unions. Its influence persists today in the “rank-and-file strategy.” Whether they are of the revolutionary or conservative variety, syndicalists view protests and direct action, especially strikes, as their primary means for acting in the world. At the same time, they look askance at politics, with a particular antipathy for election campaigns and legislative reforms.

Historically, these dispositions have meant that syndicalists have abstained from the fight for the power to govern that is the heart and soul of politics. That fight was viewed as a “dead end” that corrupted and coopted the militant fights of working people for an “end to wage slavery” (the Wobblies) or for workplace power and strong contracts (“pure and simple” unionists). In sum, syndicalism functions in the labor movement as a creed largely opposed to political action.

Contemporary labor syndicalists eschew efforts to work within the Democratic Party, even when the goal is to take on the neo-fascist MAGA control of the national government. They argue that the party is irredeemable: it is out-of-touch with the multiracial working class and its agenda is controlled by corporations and billionaires. Instead, unions should focus on workplace organizing and direct action, such as strikes. Insofar as labor engages in political action at all, it should look to build independent political vehicles outside of the Democratic Party.

But there are no independent political vehicles on the political horizon currently capable of contesting Trump and the MAGA movement for the power to govern. Moreover, there are no signs that the mass organizations which would have to be the base of a campaign on this scale, particularly unions, currently view independent political vehicles as a meaningful alternative to critical support for the Democrats in the coming fight for political power: most of the major constituencies of an anti-fascist coalition are politically engaged through the Democratic Party. Where syndicalists have a one-sided, entirely negative view of the party, most unions see it as contradictory. They point to such positive features as the Biden administration’s break with decades of neo-liberal policies of austerity and trickle-down economics, and a pro-union stance that led many observers to describe Biden as the most pro-labor president since FDR.

For all of its shortcomings, and there are many, the Democratic Party is the only political vehicle available to us with anything close to the capacity to win, under the most difficult conditions, Congressional majorities in 2026 and the Presidency in 2028. The longer an authoritarian movement like MAGA remains in power, the harder it will be to dislodge it; waiting for a future day is not an option. Reality-based political strategies for labor and the Left start from this basic understanding.

The fight for political power

A recognition of this reality should not be confused with passive acceptance of the dispirited and rudderless state of the post-election Democratic Party, most recently manifest in Majority Leader Schumer’s surrender to the Republican spending bill. When Jamelle Bouie wrote after the November election that “Now Is Not the Time for Surrender,” he was exactly on target: we need a Democratic Party that acts as a vigorous, forthright opposition to Trump and MAGA. Nor does it mean acquiescence to the messaging and organizing failures that contributed to Democratic defeat in 2024. There is a pressing need for a reconceived message, based on a progressive populism capable of winning a critical mass of working-class voters, which I will address later in this piece. However, this recognition is a clear admission that the Democratic Party is the only viable political vehicle we have to form that vigorous opposition and advance that message on the scale needed for this historical moment. Our task is to make it into a fighting party that can defeat neo-fascism in the elections of 2026 and 2028.

Acknowledging this reality does not mean that we cannot explore valuable roles for other political organizations, or deploy an “inside-outside” strategy to change the Democratic Party. The Working Families Party (WFP) has employed strategies of running progressive candidates against corporate Democrats in primaries, thereby enlarging the bench of progressive candidates running for local and state offices. In ‘fusion party’ states like New York, where the WFP can cross-endorse progressive candidates who are running on the Democratic Party line, it has had important successes. Brandon Johnson became mayor of Chicago as an “outside” challenger who won the Democratic mayoral primary.

But crucially, both the WFP and the Johnson campaign used the electoral apparatus of the Democratic Party, rather than opposing it. Their efforts garnered support from many unions and popular organizations precisely because they are seen as winnable efforts to move the Democratic Party to a more progressive stance, to bring fresh ideas and new blood to it, rather than futile attempts to replace it. Indeed, efforts like the Johnson campaign and organizations like the WFP provide ways for us to make more “road-worthy” the only vehicle currently capable of recapturing political power, the Democratic Party.

The WFP and the coalition of unions and community organizations that elected Brandon Johnson, together with similar political forces, can and will make important contributions to a fight against MAGA which is mounted through the Democratic Party. They are well-placed to be in the vanguard of efforts that congeal the Democratic Party as a vigorous opposition and that advance a progressive economic populism, and we should be supporting them in that work and seek to grow them. But the notion that they can now take on the fight for political power by themselves is an entirely different matter. It is clearly not in the cards for the foreseeable future. These forces will be part of a broad center-left, anti-fascist front, with the Democratic Party as its electoral vehicle.

For those who dismiss the Democratic Party and electoral politics more generally, the tendency is to rely on direct action, workplace organizing, and militant protest to build multiracial working-class power. Yet without a national strategy to make gains in 2026 and 2028, MAGA forces will overwhelm us and set back the project of reclaiming democracy by decades. Let’s assess each of these modes of action more closely.

Direct action, organizing, electoral politics, and political strategy

In isolation, electoral politics and legislation without direct action and organizing produce little more than defensive maneuvers and transactions within the existing power structure; alone, they cannot mount much more than a war of attrition which is ultimately lost. Similarly, cut off from politics and legislation, direct action and new organizing yield little more than moral critique and disruption; alone, they cannot exercise or consolidate power. Too often, they devolve into impotent expressions of moral purity and self-righteousness. But together, in tandem and building on each other, direct action and politics can bring transformative change.

This dialectic of direct action, new organizing, and politics has an added saliency now that Trump and MAGA are in control of all three branches of the national government. All of the signs point to a Trump presidency that will attempt to engage in real political repression, using the power of the state against political opponents. From Trump’s packing the Cabinet and the leadership of the Armed Forces with loyalists, to his alignment with repressive states abroad, such as Putin’s Russia, from his pardoning of the January 6^th insurrectionists to threats to criminally prosecute state and local officials who do not cooperate with his “mass deportations,” the litany of evidence on this front is long. We must take this danger—and the need for political action to counter it—seriously.

Democracy is the lifeblood of labor, and unions must be in the forefront of the struggle to defend and redeem it, both out of self-interest and out of our commitment to fundamental union values such as solidarity and freedom. But we cannot save democracy by ourselves: to be successful, we will need to build alliances with community and other democratic forces. And we’ll need to work with the Democratic Party to weaken MAGA’s hold on federal power in 2026 and to aim for defeat in 2028.

Existential attacks on unions are no longer beyond the pale—witness Project 2025’s call for national legislation outlawing public sector unions and the Musk-Bezos appeal to SCOTUS asking it to declare the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional. Trump’s Executive Order that would take away by edict the collective bargaining rights of hundreds of thousands of federal government workers is only the first assault on unions we will see. Such attacks are designed to consolidate authoritarian rule by undermining the capacity of labor and the left to resist MAGA neo-fascism. The only lasting way to defeat such attacks is to break the control of Trump and MAGA over the federal government. And that will require more than direct action and militancy for its own sake.

Militancy

Syndicalism sees militant direct action and organizing as the path to victory: it takes literally the words of the rally slogan, “when we fight, we win.” But that axiom is only half true. Without question, if we don’t fight, we can’t win; laying low is not an option. But it is entirely possible to engage in a militant fight and lose. When a fight lacks a sound strategy, has not identified achievable objectives, and does not employ tactics that in combination can create the leverage necessary to win those objectives, that fight will almost always lose, no matter how righteous its cause and how militant we are in its prosecution. The syndicalist propensity to treat the strike as an end in itself, to be sought under all circumstances, rather than a powerful tactic that should be employed under certain conditions, can easily lead to losing strikes, with negative consequences. Militancy is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for working-class victory.

The election of Trump and a Republican Congress has created a complex political terrain for labor and the Left, one not amenable to simple formulas of always and everywhere engaging in an all-out militant fight. In the first Trump administration, the writer Adam Serwer observed that cruelty was not an unintended consequence of Trumpian policy; it was “the point” of a white supremacist politics that finds its purest expression in acts of brutal domination.

It is already clear that the second iteration of a Trump administration will only increase the number, the intensity, and the effects of government actions in which “cruelty is the point.” An administration that in its very first days created a global crisis with wholesale cuts to USAID that denied millions of poor people the food and medicine that keeps them alive, and slashed billions of dollars in funding for medical research and experimental treatments, is going to produce moral outrage after moral outrage.

There is a political logic to the onslaught we saw from Trump and Musk in the first weeks of the new administration: if the anti-fascist forces are always on the defensive, we will be unable to successfully beat back the overall offensive.

Under these circumstances, it is important to distinguish moral clarity from strategic purpose. We need to be selective in choosing when and where we stand and fight, when and where we dedicate precious resources to a pitched battle. As often as we can, we need to identify the fights that are winnable and focus on them, so that we slow the political momentum and degrade the political strength of the neo-fascists.

Labor should prioritize fights that are central to maintaining free and fair democratic elections and an independent civil society (free unions, independent associations, mass media, and education); if they are lost, all else will follow. Most importantly, we need to “keep our eye on the prize” of taking back the power to govern in the national government in the 2026 and 2028 elections. Of every particular struggle that beckons us, of every particular proposal for action that comes before us, we must ask: will an intervention here advance our primary, essential objective of taking state power out of the hands of MAGA neo-fascists?

The romance of a general strike

The syndicalist idea of organizing a general strike has come up in left labor circles, as part of discussions of a proposal by Shawn Fain and the UAW. Fain wants unions to align contract expiration dates in 2028, with the objective of facilitating collaboration and creating synergy among different workplaces engaged in contract renewal fights. Organizing such an undertaking on the scale Fain envisions will be challenging, but to the extent that it can be accomplished, it would be a positive development that can build cross-union solidarity. But vaulting from solidarity in cross-union contract fights to a general strike is a different matter.

Historically, the idea of a general strike loomed large in the political imaginations of revolutionary syndicalists such as the Wobblies: it functioned as a trope for their vision of ending the system of “wage slavery” and removing themselves from the existing economic and political order. Georges Sorel, the preeminent theorist of syndicalism who was read among the Wobblies, described the general strike as the vehicle for achieving total, revolutionary change: it would put “the forces of production in the hands of free men, i.e., men who are capable of running the workshop created by capitalism without any need for masters.” Since the struggle for the political power to govern was not addressed by syndicalists such as Sorel, the actual mechanisms for accomplishing this radical transformation were undefined, even mysterious.

Indeed, Sorel would insist that the general strike was not just a literal action, but also a “myth” that animated a grand historical drama of working-class salvation; he compared it to the idea of the Second Coming of Christ, which he saw as the organizing myth of the early Christian church. It was a fitting analogy, because the syndicalist idea of a general strike is embedded in a millenarian approach to politics: the strike is understood as an instrument of revolutionary transcendence which allows the workers who wield it to escape their moment in history, with all of its contradictions and limitations, and usher in a completely new world. Today, advocating for a general strike as an effective way to counter Trumpian authoritarianism requires a leap of syndicalist faith.

The historical reality of general strikes in the US cannot sustain this faith. In close to 200 years of American unionism, there have only been three significant general strikes, all citywide (in Seattle, San Francisco, and Minneapolis); the last of them was in 1934. These strikes were called not to fulfill syndicalist dreams of radical transformation, but in reaction to government repression of private sector strikes; both the San Francisco and Minneapolis general strikes were called after local police attempted to violently crush a strike, firing on workers and killing a number of them.

There has never been a nationwide, political general strike in US, much less one announced four years in advance. Nothing in our history suggests that a general strike along such lines is feasible. A successful general strike that is both national and political in character would require political preparations that have not been undertaken, such as millions of people in the streets in protests, and a most serious and grave casus belli that could only be addressed through such an action: if the January 6^th insurrection had been successful in preventing the certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power, one could conceive of a necessary and efficacious general strike around the single demand of accepting the election results and installing in office the choice of the voters. Barring such groundwork and extraordinary circumstances, it is little more than a pipedream.

Embarking on such an adventure with unclear objectives and vague justifications would be a political gift to the neo-fascists, allowing them to portray unions in the most negative terms as forces of chaos that were seeking to overthrow a democratically elected government. It would be a ready-made justification for undertaking repressive measures, with unions as the primary target. It would almost certainly damage the Democratic Party candidates in the 2028 elections, and in all likelihood, ensure the re-election of a MAGA Republican ticket.

What is to be done?

In the early days of Trump II, as the full extent of what we will face over the next four years is still taking shape, we should adopt more of a strategic approach, based on general principles, than a fully worked out strategy, which would almost certainly have to change in response to developments on the ground. I conclude by proposing three starting points for the development of such an approach.

One: Taking An Evidence-Based Measure of the 2024 Elections

Avoid broad, sweeping characterizations of the 2024 elections, such as notions that they demonstrate the inability of the Democratic Party to effectively counter Trump and MAGA. Start from empirically grounded analyses of what happened, such as Michael Podhorzer’s How Trump “Won,” and focus on drawing conclusions that are actionable. Podhorzer shows that the margin of the loss in the popular vote was not a transfer of past Democratic voters to Trump, that is, not a swing to the right, but a deficit of approximately 19 million voters who voted against Trump and MAGA in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and stayed home in 2024.

By contrast, Trump simply held steady, pulling the same share of voters as in 2020. Simply put, the Democrats failed to mobilize the full anti-MAGA majority that they successfully brought out in the prior three national elections. Figuring out the reasons for this demobilization—in particular, the failures in Democratic messaging, which are both fundamental and actionable—point us in the direction of what must be done to mount more effective campaigns under the difficult conditions we will face in 2026 and 2028.

Two: Mapping the Electorate

Break down broad aggregate concepts of political actors (“the working class”) into discrete clusters of political worldviews that provide an actionable basis for interventions. (The 2024 Trump campaign’s “micro-targeting” successfully disaggregated voters for its message.) Determine which of these clusters have the most potential for political participation in an anti-fascist front, with a special focus on electoral mobilization, and prioritize interventions that would reach them.

The Working Families Party has provided an useful point of entry for this work, with its analysis Class and Worldview: A Report on the Multiracial Working Class, and with the application of that analysis to the 2024 election, Handbook to Winning the Working Class. When analyses of this type are correlated with the demographic profile of 2024 voters and non-voters, we can create a roadmap that not only tells us whom we need to reach and move, but what messages will work best with them.

Three: Develop A Compelling Message of Progressive Economic Populism

Policy is only one component of politics. To the extent that Democrats believed Biden’s pro-labor policy shifts alone were sufficient to mobilize their working-class base and win back working-class voters they had lost to abstention or to MAGA, they were proven wrong. Even with an all-in GOTV effort by unions (excepting the dishonorable abstention of the Teamsters), the Democratic campaign fell short of these objectives.

The 2024 Democratic campaign lacked a compelling narrative that linked the economic hardships of working people, such as the loss of well-compensated factory jobs, to neo-liberal policies of free trade, austerity, and deregulation, to anti-union animus, and to a reliance on markets as the primary lever of economic policy.

Instead, the 2024 Democratic message focused entirely on the peril of authoritarian rule posed by a Trump and MAGA victory. The very real danger of authoritarianism certainly had to be addressed, but in the face of a global wave of anti-incumbent sentiment fueled by anger over the COVID pandemic and the inflation that came in its wake, a message that only focused on the threat of authoritarianism left the Democrats not just as the party defending democracy and freedom against neo-fascism, but also as the party of the status quo. In an election where many voters were looking for change, that would prove fatal.

The absence of a narrative that spoke plainly and directly to the economic hardships of working people—and worse, tone-deaf talk of the ways in which the economy, especially Wall Street, was performing well—meant that the Democrats were hampered in responding to the main MAGA message. With its “America First” economic nationalism, Trump’s far right populism provided a simple explanation for the loss of factory jobs and other deprivations experienced by working people: acts of malevolence and betrayal by liberal, cosmopolitan elites—the “deep state” of government bureaucrats and civil servants, the legacy media, the educated elite of universities and colleges, the cultural elites represented by Hollywood and Broadway, and the parts of the corporate world that had adopted a “woke agenda.”

To successfully counter this populism of the far right and defeat its demagogic appeals to fear and hate, we need more than economic policies that benefit working people, as necessary and important as those policies are. Democrats must also contest the populist narrative of the Far Right with an alternative explanation for the economic adversities experienced by working people, one that names the economically powerful and wealthy—corporations, financial institutions, and high profile billionaires now allied with Trump and MAGA, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg —as the cause of those hardships. They are our foes. Pro-labor policies are then integrated into this progressive populist narrative, which gives them full meaning for voters.

Getting the Democrats to take up a class-based populism will not be easy; we will have to fight for it. There will be many who will pressure candidates to drop expressions of economic populism, as Tony West, an Uber corporate executive and brother-in-law to Kamala Harris, apparently did early on in the Harris campaign. Yet against those who would have the Democrats avoid criticism of an oligarchy and corporate elite that has now openly embraced the Trump authoritarian agenda, there is clear historical precedent for Democrats adopting an economic populism: they did so in a previous age of economic hardship for working people and rising fascist authoritarianism, with their advocacy of a “New Deal.”

In an epic Madison Square Garden speech during his 1936 re-election campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt laid out the New Deal message. He took up the cause of working people, of men who worked for “starvation wages,” women who labored “in sweatshops,” and children who toiled “at looms,” of the young “for whom opportunity had become a will-o’-the-wisp.” He named the enemy, the cause of the grim and deplorable conditions facing working people, as “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, (and) war profiteering.”

Those predatory economic activities had brought on the Great Depression, and their purveyors now attempted to stand in the way of recovery with their opposition to a strong, activist government. To the powerful economic interests who bitterly opposed the New Deal and his presidency, Roosevelt retorted, “I welcome your hatred.” His speech discussed Democratic policy initiatives such as Social Security and unemployment insurance (both had been adopted in his first term) in the context of the ongoing struggle to improve the lives of working people, and he integrated the battle for democracy and against the fascists of his day with that fight for a better life and human dignity.

With minor edits for historical context, Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign speech captures the essence of the Democratic Party message that we need today. Can its progressive economic populism become the Democratic Party message in 2026, 2028, and beyond? If labor and the Left lift up that populism and take up the fight for it within the party, it is an achievable goal. As it is, there is increasing receptiveness to a progressive economic populism among Democrats, and not just from those predisposed to such an approach, but also from mainstream party figures like Chris Murphy and Andy Beshear. Joe Biden’s Farewell Address declaration— “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead” —provides as succinct a statement of the populist case as there is. It is up to us to carry that banner forward.

The challenges ahead will be many. To persevere, we must “keep our eye on the prize” – reclaiming national political power from the MAGA neo-fascists and redeeming the national government for democratic politics.

About the Author

Leo Casey

Leo Casey is a veteran educator, teacher unionist, and left activist. He is the author of The Teacher Insurgency: A Strategic and Organizing Perspective.