Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism
CHICAGO—Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy.
On 1 August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the US) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used “national security” as a pretext to void union contracts in several federal government agencies. Within days, managers across the federal government—most significantly, the Veterans Administration—ripped up their union contracts.
The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a Congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic Congress members from the current thirteen to eight. That would leave the Texas Congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024.
Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court-sanctioned union-busting with a yawn, if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to battle stations.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander to net at least five and as many as nine new Democratic-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who viewed him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan.
Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about their jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump.
The liberal opposition to Trump can conceive of defeating him and Trumpism only at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede Democratic electoral gains is an existential question for them.
To return to the labour example, it’s clear that, aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labour movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labour leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionise the federal workforce.
In a labour movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organising the unorganised, days of action and the like to galvanise a real opposition to Trump. But for most labour leaders, this is not even part of their thought process. As long-time labour activist and socialist Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview with Monthly Review:
“We have slid into a period in our labour movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.”
The atrophy of social movement organisation and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-government organisation leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the US Supreme Court would overturn legalised abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. This mobilisation stayed the hand of the Supreme Court majority—then, as now, Republican-appointed.
But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest organising fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith in the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law, especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster.
American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism:
“For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the Ninth Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked”, Kelley told The Hill. “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.”
Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honour the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House.
In a Boston Review essay, “The Dead End of Checks and Balances”, political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the US Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people.
Periods of popular reform have come only when mass movements have forced the political system to break free from the straitjacket of “checks and balances”.
Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. A recent article in Convergence magazine co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions makes the case for reviving the general strike as part of labour’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that the authors view labour activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 elections. So the article notes: “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other”.
This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labour leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside-outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organise “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside”.
The long history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo rather than shift the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’ corporate-friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labour studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.)
It’s clear that the left and the labour and social movements are in a very precarious state, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out:
“The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.”
