The coming Trump istration represents a great threat to the labor movement in the United States. As I previously noted here in The San Diego Union-Tribune, the new regime, stocked with folks steeped in the policy plans in Project 2025, will seek to gut the labor movement systematically, starting with the public sector, before moving on to attacking worker protections in the private sector as well.
Rather than making the American working class great again, the goal will be to go back before the New Deal era and eliminate many of the wage and workplace protections that workers now enjoy as well as eviscerating programs for the poor.
The irony here is that Donald Trump made this possible by stealing large swaths of what used to be the Democratic base. How? As one union leader observed of the Democrats’ pitch in The New York Times, “When you’re too conflicted between the interests of corporate America and average working-day people, I think this is what you end up with … a message that doesn’t resonate.”
That same Times article notes that Harris was caught between advisors from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and corporate board rooms and those from more liberal and activist realms, resulting in a vacillating vision that pleased neither workers nor the corporate class, but veered toward the latter as she “adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo.” Trump’s billionaire populism, on the other hand, offered “broad but vague promises to cut taxes and shake up the global trading system.”
What made some workers receptive to this?
It’s a long story but a key part of it starts in the nineties when the New Democrats governed with a neoliberal economic policy and cut trade deals that helped gut the industrial Midwest, leaving many voters fundamentally alienated from the system itself and the Clintonite turn of the Democratic Party in particular.
A new book by Lainey Newman and Theda Skool, “Rust Belt Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party,” addresses the deep roots of this problem and observes that as plants started to close and jobs went away across the heartland beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, unions declined and along with that loss of labor density came a hole in the social fabric of communities. Unions that used to be the center of working-class lives stopped playing that pivotal role, and, as we learn in The Harvard Gazette piece on their book, when “the union’s social role eroded, workers filled the void with other, often more conservative groups,” such as gun clubs and other rightward-leaning associations.
Thus, as the social fabric of many American communities declined, an epidemic of loneliness, desperation, addiction, and despair helped foster an environment where anger was fueled and then redirected not toward the economic elite, but, as Thomas Frank has argued, toward the “cultural elite” — the college-educated Democrats who frequently carried all the trappings of the professional management class.
Making things worse was the fact that rather than trying to shed that image and relearn how to be the party of the people, Democrats frequently stepped right into the role of scolds telling workers that they just needed to go back to school and update their skills for the new world they had had thrust upon them. It didn’t work.
And despite Joe Biden’s historically brief period of trying to bring labor back into the fold of the party, many of his efforts helped unions institutionally, which made the leadership happy, but failed to quickly impact the lives of rank-and-file workers, union or not, and the Democratic message fell on deaf ears in the states where it mattered the most.
What might change this reality? The above-mentioned Frank’s analysis in The New York Times is instructive in that it points to a long term strategy at odds with the Democratic establishment: “Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.”
Whether or not the Democratic Party will listen to such advice remains to be seen.
Miller is a professor of English and labor studies at San Diego City College, an author and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
