There’s a lot of excitement about and interest in the leftward movement of the Democratic Party base. I think it is very much a real development. The election of Zohran Mamdani, the mass turnout for the No Kings protests over the last year, and the growing majority of Democrats supporting progressive economic positions and Palestine all suggest as much.

But much less attention has been given to the shifting composition of the congressional Democratic Party, and here the story actually runs in the other direction. As of 2025, a majority of House Democrats now belong to the party’s center-right caucus, the New Democrat Coalition (NDC).

New Democrats owe much of their strength to their rapid growth between 2015 and 2019, when the caucus grew from a quarter to close to half of the party’s congressional membership. The combination of the anti-Trump swing among center-right Republicans and the party’s own strenuous efforts to put down roots in suburban America (a development I wrote more about in Catalyst last year; for a short summary see here) in these years no doubt helped reconfigure the congressional party.

But until last year, New Democrats were about evenly balanced with their counterpart on the party’s center left, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). It was only after the 2024 elections that New Democrats emerged as the majority faction in the party, while the Progressives shrunk.

Digging Into the Numbers

Membership in Congress’s ideological caucuses should be taken with a grain of salt. Congressmembers often join these caucuses less out of an ideological commitment and more as a means to boost their reputation with party activists in their home districts. That’s also why a decent number of Democratic members of Congress, for example, belong both to the CPC and the NDC (based on the most recent membership lists, thirty-one House Democrats are members of both caucuses).

So, to get a better sense of the balance of power in the congressional party and how it’s changed, I pulled lists of caucus membership from 2026 and from this time eight years ago in 2018, at a similar point in a Donald Trump presidency, plus 2009. I also pulled lists of the even more conservative Blue Dogs caucus. The majority of Blue Dogs are also NDC members; to adequately capture the strength of the ideological right of the party, the Blue Dogs who are not dual members should also be included as being on the right. Finally, I pulled lists of cosponsors of Medicare for All (M4A) from 2009, 2018, and 2026.

I divided Democrats into five groups based on caucus membership and whether they support Medicare for All. The following table describes each group. The use of the “left” and “right” labels here, of course, are meaningful only in the sense of describing where Democratic congressmembers fall relative to each other.

(* Note that lean left excludes any member who is also a New Democrat or Blue Dog.)

As you can see in the following charts, Democrats shifted to the left between 2009 and 2018. Part of that is due to the defeat of a number of House Democrats in more conservative districts beginning in 2010. But that isn’t the whole story, and the change aligns with my own sense of bigger trends happening in these years too.

Between 2016 and 2018, for example, there was a real uptick in support for Medicare for All in Congress — the number of cosponsors grew from sixty-three in 2016 to an all-time high of 125 in 2018. Remember too in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election there was a brief moment when many of the party’s presidential contenders were speaking favorably about Medicare for All. The depth of that commitment was shallow, as the quick retreat beat by Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren demonstrated. But there was certainly something in the air, which helped feed a more progressive start to Joe Biden’s administration than many anticipated.

By contrast, between 2018 and 2026, the party has moved significantly away from the left. While the proportion of congressmembers on the congressional party’s left flank has shrunk only slightly, the proportion of House Democrats who lean to the left has shrunk dramatically. That has led to a significant uptick in the number of members in the center, but it has also involved a considerable rebound in the size of the more ideologically consistent right flank of the party. While the left + leans left group made up about 36 percent of the congressional party in 2009 before growing to 55 percent in 2018, it has shrunk considerably since then to around 37 percent.

The especially strong drop-off in the proportion of left-leaning House Democrats suggests that what we’re really seeing here is a collapse in the “fair weather friends” demographic in the congressional party. Interestingly, that drop-off isn’t being driven by a shift in the politics of the party’s base. The base, as I alluded to above, seems to be moving leftward. Nor can it be read as a simple reaction to Democrats’ defeat in 2024. The charts compare where things stood in March 2026 to March 2018. In both cases, that’s about fifteen months after a bruising defeat to Donald Trump and the GOP. The contrast with the leftward shift between 2009 and 2018 underscores that the momentum is headed in the opposite direction this time around.

Many caveats are in order. How many members of Congress who cosponsor Medicare for All would actually vote for it if it stood a chance of passing? I’d wager only a small fraction of the official list of supporters. A definition of being “on the left” that only considers CPC membership and support for M4A is also painfully limited — a more detailed analysis should consider members’ positions on arming Israel, regulating the finance industry, and so on. (Check out this spreadsheet by DSA comrades for a lot more detail on where members of Congress stand.)

In an ideal world, there would be more than two parties in Congress, and/or ideological caucuses would have more meaning and greater discipline. It’s one of the real scandals of American “democracy” that all politicians think that they should represent their own idiosyncratic blend of policy positions. It makes it exceedingly difficult for people outside of DC politics to get a sense of what is actually going on and to hold different political programs and their supporters accountable. (That’s one reason why having a multiparty system is an indispensable component of a more robustly democratic system.) But we work with the hand we’re dealt and the information we have available. As a first pass for trying to assess where things stand in the congressional Democratic Party, I think the exercise is still useful.

And so . . . ?

What comes next will matter a great deal for what happens in 2029, should Republicans lose the next presidential election. What kind of Democratic Party will take the reins in the future? The way things are headed now, it looks like it’ll be a party whose politics resemble those of Bill Clinton much more than they did in 2021.

For the left and the labor movement, that’s worth factoring in as we think about the years to come — though the shape of things to come is also in our hands to help mold. No one should operate under the illusion that the congressional Democratic Party is undergoing some kind of progressive realignment so far, regardless of where the party’s base is at. Democratic members of Congress are headed in the other direction.

But that could also open up a new opportunity for a much more aggressive intervention in congressional politics. To date, the left has focused primarily on state and local races. But because congressional Democrats are so out of step with their base and that appears to be increasingly the case, the time is ripe for a more concerted jump into the national arena.

Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling, and Republicans’ fortunes look increasingly bleak. The betting markets now have Democrats as the favorite for retaking the House this year and winning the presidential election in 2028. (Never mind that they continue to refuse to act as a real opposition party or meaningfully speak to working-class voters’ material interests. It’s their turn to be the lesser evil for a majority of Americans.)

A lot depends on who that president actually is. Most polling shows either Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom in the top spot for Democratic presidential nominee, with Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mark Kelly rounding out the top five. It is possible that AOC wins in 2028, which would create a somewhat distinct set of questions for the left. But it seems at least as likely that, should Democrats recapture the White House, we will have a run-of-the-mill corporate centrist in charge. (I’m making a big assumption here, of course. If Trump and the GOP try to steal the upcoming elections, my question may be moot.)

This raises an important question for socialists and the labor left: If Democrats retake control of Washington, DC, in 2028, how will things be different this time around, compared to the Biden administration?

If Harris, Newsom, and Buttigieg’s own political pasts are any guide, they will be socially liberal without rocking the boat on questions of labor law or economic redistribution. (Check out Newsom’s latest priority: defeating a tax on billionaires in California.) And recent Democratic presidents — and, in fact, the recent history of the Western center left in general — shouldn’t give us much confidence that the next Democratic administration will succeed in enacting the kind of broad reform program that might finally break the far right.

If that’s so, how should labor and the Left relate to a corporate-centrist Democratic administration? The experience of the Biden presidency may be instructive.

Joe Biden was, to many observers’ surprise, relatively ambitious in his economic policies: he championed a major (though ultimately temporary) expansion of the welfare state and significant investments in green energy; he also made the unprecedented-for-a-president move of supporting striking workers on the picket line. Yet even his policy ambitions were very modest by historical standards. He was hemmed in most importantly by what he thought would be acceptable to corporate donors and capital, and when he encountered conservative opposition from within his own party, he retreated rather than using his policy leverage or taking those forces on in primary elections. Worst of all, his decision to back Israeli war crimes to the hilt was morally monstrous and predictably alienated many supporters.

By the end of his four years, Biden was an unpopular president who oversaw both a high-inflation economy at home and a genocide abroad. Yet many on the left and in the labor movement were sympathetic to his administration and even defended it as a “break with neoliberalism.” But a half-heartedly “populist” administration — with one foot in the wonky world of progressive policy NGOs and one foot in the corporate Democratic establishment swamp, and infrequently giving a hat tip to labor — was never going to be any match for rising MAGA authoritarianism.

As I have argued in Left Notes previously, what we need to combat the pathologies that feed the far right is a society-changing reorganization of the American economy and a major revitalization of the labor movement. If Biden gave the occasional nod in that direction, there was never any real prospect that he would lead the way in that kind of project. Nor do the prospects for that seem brighter under a President Kamala Harris or a President Gavin Newsom in 2029.

It’s true that a Democratic president would bring a respite from the worst illiberal, antidemocratic, and anti-labor horrors of GOP rule, and that alone is enough reason to welcome one. But the left needs to ask itself how it will use that breathing room to actually build up the labor movement and to construct an organized political alternative free of the baggage of the national Democratic Party brand. And how to do that while opposing a president who will inevitably turn on the party’s own voters — something that the left didn’t do forcefully enough under Biden. That conversation about how to avoid repeating past mistakes needs to start now.

I have a piece on the challenges facing Zohran Mamdani and the left in New York City for the German publication ND. You can read the English original here.

The four big challenges facing Mamdani and the left as I see them:

1. Priorization: How do we pick and choose the battles to be fought, when a strong case can be made for almost every issue and a well-organized bloc of activists who want it to be a priority?

2. Finding leverage: Is the key to moving Zohran’s agenda forward persuading or compelling centrist Democrats to come along?

3. Timing: How can Zohran score some big wins in the first few months to keep up the momentum from the campaign?

4. Trump: What is to be done about the mad king?

My article is more a piece of journalism — an attempt to explain to a German audience the questions that are being discussed here in the city. I don’t say much in it about my opinion. These are my answers to those challenges though:

I think the activist left is going to have to be patient. Zohran has to pick his fights, or his administration will quickly become overwhelmed. The best example here is Zohran’s decision not to replace the controversial chief of the New York Police Department, Jessica Tisch. Tisch is beloved by the city’s elites and the media establishment but justifiably opposed by activists. A billionaire heiress like Tisch should not be in charge of any city institution, including the NYPD, but I can see why Zohran chose not to pick that fight now. By almost everyone’s account, the left’s views on policing are still unpopular. Why should Zohran pick a fight to start where he is on weak ground and almost guaranteed to lose? With more experience and some wins to shore up the public’s confidence, harder fights like police reform become easier to win.

As for leverage, my major concern is that the early friendly overtures from Gov. Kathy Hochul will be mistaken for something they’re not. Hochul is not having a spiritual awakening and finding her inner progressive. She’s afraid she’ll be sucked into a bruising primary battle against her second-in-command, Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who is challenging her from her left. She knows that her party’s base is tilting leftward and to win she needs to temporarily reduce tensions with progressive organizations and leaders, Zohran included.

In other words, what concessions she’s making now, she’s making out of fear. The minute she no longer feels threatened by the left in the state is the minute she’ll revert to form, as the governor who shields the billionaire class and big business from taxes and who vetoes expanding public services. For this reason, I think Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) state senator Jabari Brisport’s decision to endorse her challenger sends precisely the right message. It probably makes sense for Zohran to hold the threat of intervening in the election over Hochul’s head until after the New York budget negotiations and on the eve of the primary. But the main message should be clear: the left will work with centrist Democrats like Hochul on specific issues — expanding childcare for example — but we won’t back down for a minute when it comes to challenging them on all the other issues where we’re not aligned. And that includes working to defeat them in elections.

On the timing question: Zohran’s first moves have been pitch-perfect. The early steps taken to lock down childcare expansion, open up public restrooms across the city, and show up to support the massive 15,000 member strike by the New York State Nurses Association have received lots of attention. He’s delivering quickly, and he’s doing it with a great deal of publicity. The contrast with Joe Biden, who achieved very little but won credit for even less, is striking. At least the left learned something from those four lost years.

Finally, on Trump: This is the big wild card, and it’s the sort of thing that’s impossible to plan for. Despite his friendly meeting in November, Zohran hasn’t shied away from strongly condemning Trump’s intervention in Venezuela and the latest escalations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We’ll see what happens if and when ICE is deployed to the city in full force.

This is a month-by-month guide to the big fights — electoral, labor,1 international — that we can anticipate ahead of time in 2026. I hope it will be useful for Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leaders, union organizers, and movement activists thinking about how to make the most of the next twelve months.

Of course, politics is much much more than elections and union contract campaigns. We don’t know what might happen in Donald Trump’s threatened war with Venezuela or in the ongoing fight over tariffs. Israel has already violated the ceasefire in Gaza and has kept up a lower-profile terror campaign there, but that could escalate further. The battle to win the year ahead, and to put MAGA and Trump on the defensive, will be waged in countless struggles, both in those we can anticipate and in those we can’t.

Month-by-Month Guide

January

New York City’s new socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani will be inaugurated on January 1, with a major block party planned to celebrate the occasion.

When Congress resumes in January, it’ll be plunged right back into the fight about the future of health insurance and the subsidies provided to buy Obamacare plans. Republicans are on the defensive because the end of the subsidies means a major increase in premiums for millions — including a disproportionate share of residents represented by Republicans. The ongoing controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein documents shows no sign of abating either. The drip-drip stream of revelations about Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s attempts to stonewall the release of more documents won’t help tamp down on interest. Impossible to say what’s in the documents to come, but it’s conceivable this could envelop the administration in 2026. By the end of the month, we’ll know whether the federal government will shut down again as well — the government’s funding runs out once more on January 30.

Ongoing and potential labor fights:

• First contract battles continue at Starbucks and Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment center, as does the fight for a contract for 4,300 United Auto Workers (UAW) at a Volkswagen Tennessee plant.

• Twenty thousand nurses at many of NYC’s private hospitals could go out on strike — 97 percent of workers voting authorized a strike a few days ago. Meanwhile, negotiations for 50,000 Mail Handlers continue.

• The contract expires for 29,000 University of California’s UAW academic workers. In their fight with the university system’s administration, they will join about 12,000 other UC system workers already bargaining for a first contract.

February

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 30,000 Steelworkers at oil refineries across the country and 30,000 Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in New England. The first of several contracts for AT&T workers also expires in February (covering about 9,000 workers; the others cover about 7,000 workers and expire in April).

March

In March, activists from around the world will assemble in Porto Alegre in Brazil for the first International Anti-Fascist Conference.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for about 20,000 Food and Commercial Workers in Arizona and for 17,000 school bus drivers and other school workers covered by the Teamsters.

April

Hungary will hold a parliamentary election. For the last fifteen years, the right-winger Viktor Orbán has ruled over Hungary and established a semiauthoritarian regime there. It is a prototype for far-right parties all over the world, including the Republican Party here in the United States. But in 2026, Orbán faces a serious challenge, and polls suggest his party may lose to a new center-right competitor. If the far right falls in Hungary, it would be a setback for their international counterparts.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 50,000 New York state public sector workers and 34,000 building workers in New York City represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 32BJ.

May

In 2022, Gustavo Petro became the first left-wing president of Colombia in the history of the country. The next presidential elections will be held this month. Petro has been a prominent spokesperson for international solidarity and a strong critic of Israel and US imperialism, but much of his domestic agenda has been stalled by the opposition majority in Congress. Will Colombia join the wave of Latin American countries moving rightward?

Potential labor fights:

• A contract for 200,000 Letter Carriers expires, as do contracts for 20,000 grocery workers in Ohio, 16,000 National Nurses United (NNU) Veterans Affairs health care workers, thousands of members of the Writers Guild of America, and one thousand graduate students at Brown. Thousands of higher ed workers in Oregon’s public university system also have contract expiration dates in June.

June

There will be big primary fights in Maine and New York this month. In Maine, the populist oyster farmer Graham Platner is running against the state’s governor, Janet Mills, for the Democratic nomination for senator. Mills is the favorite of the national party establishment, while Platner is backed by Bernie Sanders and the UAW.

New York’s primary later in the month will pit the growing left in New York City against the conservative wing of the party, which is playing defense in a number of congressional and state legislative races. Whether or not there is a strong primary challenge to New York’s conservative Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, will be an important factor in the inevitable fight between the state government and the incoming Mamdani administration.

The UAW will meet for its national convention, and candidates for the union’s leadership will be nominated. The Teamsters will also hold their national convention. And Labor Notes will hold its biennial conference of thousands of rank-and-file workers in Chicago.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 96,000 SEIU public sector workers in California, 14,000 UFCW members in Michigan, and 12,000 Electrical Workers in Los Angeles.

July

Prediction: the 250th birthday of the United States will be a subject of much political debate.

Potential labor fights:

• A contract for thousands of hotel workers in New York City expires.

August

Major US Senate primaries between the progressive left and the conservative centrist wing of the party continue in August in two big tests. Can Medicare for All–backer, Bernie 2020 activist, and doctor Abdul El-Sayed beat the centrist wing’s candidate, Congressmember Haley Stevens? A similar fight between a left-leaning progressive and an establishment Democrat will also happen in Minnesota. If the left progressive wing of the party can capture Minnesota, Michigan, and Maine, it’ll have a strong beachhead in the Senate for the first time.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for about 25,000 NNU members at Kaiser in California, for 20,000 Verizon workers in the Northeast, and for 6,000 graduate students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

September

The midterm election campaign for Congress and state governments will go into full swing. Elections for the leadership of the UAW will also take place, with President Shawn Fain up for reelection.

Sweden will hold a parliamentary election in September; the current center-right government is backed by the far-right Swedish Democrats. Speaking of Scandinavia, Denmark will also hold an election this year, although the exact date is to be determined. Both are small countries but with potentially significant results since they represent two different ways of handling the populist far right. The Swedish election will test whether the center right’s alliance with the far right will diminish support for the latter. Current opinion polls suggest there will be a small but significant swing left but very little change in support for the far right itself. In Denmark, the Social Democrats have tried to counter the right by adopting a more restrictive attitude toward immigration. Both the parties to the left of the Social Democrats and the far right seem to have gained ground since the last elections in 2022.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 80,000 health care workers with SEIU in New York and for 25,000 Steelworkers based mostly in Midwestern states.

October

Ballots will go out for the elections for president of the Teamsters, with counting happening in November. Incumbent president Sean O’Brien is running for reelection. His term has been especially controversial since his friendly overtures to Trump in the last two years.

Brazil and Israel hold general elections this month. Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will run for reelection and is the front-runner in polling, but he’ll need to assemble a majority to win (Brazil uses a top-two runoff system if no candidate gets a majority). A win for the Workers’ Party in the presidential election and a strong showing by the parties of the left in elections to Congress would secure Brazil as a bulwark against the rising Latin American right. In Israel, most polls suggest neither the fascist coalition under Benjamin Netanyahu nor the official opposition will get enough seats to have a majority. But Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, led by his Likud party, remains very popular.

Potential labor fights:

• The contract expires for 17,000 Boeing workers in Seattle.

November

The midterm elections for Congress and for state governments will be held. The hopes of everyone opposed to MAGA will ride on a strong showing for Democrats. Expectations that such a blue wave is in the offing are growing, but there is one hard rule in American politics: never trust the Democrats to run a strong campaign. Split between its centrist and progressive left wings, Democrats habitually run vacuous election campaigns that try to be all things to all people and inspire no one as a result.

There’s no sign that 2026 will be different, but growing popular opposition to Trump might be enough to defeat the GOP anyway in the House and in state races. Democrats will have a much harder time retaking Congress’s upper house, where decades of declining support for the party in rural America has finally resulted in a Senate map where Democrats are almost completely uncompetitive in a majority of states. That ensures that Democrats’ path to retake the Senate — barring a major change — will always be very narrow.

Potential labor fights:

• The contract for 300,000 municipal employees in New York City expires. With a new socialist mayor, the negotiation of a new contract for the city’s public sector workers could be an important fight that could set the terms for the mayor’s relationship with unions going forward.

December

Probable presidential candidates for both parties will start to emerge after the midterm elections, as the presidential election, still technically two years away, really gets underway.

Potential labor fights:

• The contract covering baseball players expires.

In a widely shared post for New Left Review’s Sidecar blog last month, Dylan Riley took aim at an approach he derides as “a kind of simplified rational choice or ‘analytic’ Marxism” developed and promoted by thinkers like Erik Olin Wright and Adam Przeworski.

I’ve long found the approach Riley takes on to be the most compelling synthesis of Marxist ideas out there. Analytical Marxism covers a wide range of issues, but I take its political significance to be as follows:

Because of their structural position — their class location — workers have certain material interests in securing and maintaining a job, so that they can make a living and afford food, clothing, shelter, and so on for themselves and their families. (Capitalists by contrast do not have the same material interest, since they do the hiring. If they’re manufacturers, for example, their interest is in extracting the maximum amount of labor time and effort from their employees, minimizing their costs for inputs, and maximizing their return from sales.) Workers also have material interests in individual and collective action that helps them improve their pay and working conditions, that allows them to ameliorate the exploitation and domination they suffer on the job. They have such interests in strategies that allow them to mitigate insecurity and deprivation through other means — through securing income or goods and services through mutual aid societies, say, or through government policies (i.e., the welfare state). Finally, they have interests in the construction of a new type of society, one that does away with the class structure of capitalism that systematically subjects them to economic insecurity and dependence on an unaccountable owning class.

In this way of thinking, the core political task of socialists is to organize workers, both at the level of the workplace and across society, so that they can more effectively pursue those interests. That means building unions and political parties oriented toward the collective promotion of workers’ welfare, with the ultimate aim of building up workers’ capacities and confidence to push for a more fundamental transformation of the economic system.

It is to the credit of the US left today that, I think, much of the above is uncontroversial. The Democratic Socialists of America’s increasing, if still insufficient, focus on labor and workplace organizing and the bread-and-butter economic populist approach of rising socialists like Zohran Mamdani speak to this positive development.

Riley, however, levels two basic, related criticisms of this version of Marxism.

Materialist Metaphysics?

First, Riley charges that analytical Marxism relies on a “metaphysical” understanding of interests. He writes that it is

a fundamental error to base one’s politics on an appeal to a given status — a present state of social being — and the interests supposed to flow from that. For an anthropologically well-grounded politics entails the attempt to mobilize groups and classes around a project to realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of determinant historical circumstances.

Riley is certainly right to press “rational choice Marxists” on what they mean by material interests, which, I think, is not always clear. But I find Riley’s own argument on this point obscure.

My best attempt at reconstructing what he is saying here goes something like this: If all we know about a person or group of people is their class location, we cannot say much at all about their interests, because interests are always partly about a strategic orientation toward goals. There are many potential strategies associated with, say, the condition of being a US worker in 2025, because there are many potential ways to defend and improve the well-being of myself and those I care about.

I might try to keep my head down and work hard, winning the boss’s approval to slowly climb the ladder at my job; I might organize with my coworkers to demand better pay collectively; I might participate in party politics with the aim of winning universal childcare, or maybe even socializing the economy’s commanding heights. It is not a given which strategies workers will actually adopt.

This much is surely correct. It’s one way of getting at Marx’s distinction between a class in itself — a group of people defined by their location in an objective class structure — and a class for itself — a group of people consciously organized to pursue their interests as a collective. It is only through the process of class struggle, in various forms, that people come to think and act for the sake of more collective and emancipatory goals.

If this is what Riley is getting at, it’s an odd criticism to make of analytical Marxists, who have long been concerned with this sort of question. In his contribution to The Debate on Classes, for instance, Wright says:

To talk about the common material interests of workers is not to make a claim about which of the actual potential choices listed above are “best” for workers as individuals. . . . What is being claimed is that by virtue of being workers (that is, by occupying similar locations with respect to the relations of exploitation) they face broadly similar structures of trade-offs with respect to these kinds of choices.1

I don’t know of anyone identifying with the analytical Marxist tradition who would claim that which strategies workers can and do pursue follows automatically from their class position; in fact, in the absence of concerted efforts to build cultures of solidarity in workplaces and across society, it is more likely than not that they will choose individualistic strategies of “going along to get along” or one-off acts of resistance rather than sustained collective action, as Vivek Chibber argues in The Class Matrix.

Riley’s criticism of analytical Marxism on this point is substantively unfair, then. But this isn’t merely an academic dispute. As Riley acknowledges in his piece, analytical Marxist thinkers have had a significant influence on the ideas of the new democratic socialism in the United States. It was not foreordained that the new US left would gravitate toward class politics and economic populism. Prior to the left’s rebirth in the middle of the 2010s, the dominant ideas were very different: prefigurative, utopian anarchism; postmodernist and postmaterialist social theories; a disproportionate focus on organizing the most marginalized; and a skepticism of labor and appeals to a working-class political subject. Basic Marxist ideas, clarified and synthesized in the thinking of analytical Marxists, helped provide foundations for this new left.

Constructing the Horizon

Riley’s second criticism of analytic Marxism is that it errs in trying

to develop a critique of capitalism by listing its “harms” — the negative counterpart to interests. But “harms” are only politically relevant if they are linked to historical alternatives. The capitalist harms that Wright lists in the opening pages of Envisioning Real Utopias, for example — inefficiency, a systemic bias toward consumerism, environmental destruction, limiting democracy and so on — do not constitute a critique of capitalism because many could be applied to any form of social production, including socialism.

Riley is correct with his premise here: For capitalism’s flaws to be “politically relevant,” workers must have a conception of a desirable and feasible alternative. Moreover, those who advocate for such an alternative have an obligation to explain, in relatively concrete terms, how their proposed vision of socialism would avoid, or at least mitigate, the harms associated with capitalism. To put it another way: they must explain how socialism, as they envision it, would serve people’s interests better than capitalism does.

But again, this is not something Wright or others in the analytical Marxist tradition would at all disagree with. In fact, the attempt to formulate such alternatives to capitalism was the focus of much of Wright’s later work, including Envisioning Real Utopias.2 Attempts to devise such frameworks continue apace. (I’m particularly excited for the forthcoming The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World from Bhaskar Sunkara, Ben Burgis, and Mike Beggs.)

Now, I gather Riley would reply to this that workers cannot meaningfully be said to have an interest in bringing about such theoretical constructions. “Imaginable and viable alternatives” to capitalism, he writes, are “historically constructed through struggles.” There’s something to this — if philosophers’ and economists’ visions of a socialist future are not appreciated and endorsed by workers and incorporated into a realistic political strategy for achieving it, those blueprints are of little use. And what socialism actually looks like will have to be worked out, to a great extent, through widespread debate and experimentation in actually trying to build a new society. In that respect, Marx was not entirely wrong in refusing to write “recipes for the cookshops of the future.”

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But that’s no reason to reject the work, here and now, of making arguments about what a more just political-economic order could look like. These arguments aren’t meant to replace the collective deliberation or experimentation that are important parts of struggles to build a new society; rather, they provide us with jumping-off points or guideposts in that endeavor. Polina Whitehouse puts the point well in her Jacobin article “The Left Needs Utopian Thinking.” “It is through making plans and attempting to carry them out that we exercise our constructive agency, collectively as much as individually,” she writes. “While we can never know all the relevant circumstances to perfect our plans, fallible goal-setting exercises are nevertheless valuable.”

Riley actually provides a good argument for why thinking through such real utopias is an important part of “doing” socialist politics. If socialists are to make the case to wider layers of the working class that they should get organized and fight, and if we want to make a case that goes beyond fighting for basic and immediately realizable reforms, we need “real utopias” to show that workers have a reason to fight not just for changes within the system but a change of the system itself.

So, Riley’s criticism of “the new Marxist culture” misfires on both counts. The notion of material interests is an essential foundation for socialist political practice — and for beginning to imagine alternatives to capitalism, which is in turn necessary to orienting class struggle in an emancipatory direction.

Until one month ago, it seemed clear that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters were on the ascent. They were remaking global politics with a new tariff regime and a bellicose, rechristened Department of War. At home, they carried out another great upward redistribution of wealth — the fifth redistribution of the neoliberal era, following Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, George W. Bush’s in 2001 and 2003, and Trump’s own in 2017. They unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a wave of repression and threats to cow their critics and opponents in social movements, academia, and even the corporate world.

But Trump and MAGA seem dangerously close to losing the briefly held Mandate of Heaven. Are we entering a new political moment? A few data points are suggestive.

The much remarked upon off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and a smattering of local races saw Democrats far outperform Kamala Harris’s poor showing last year. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign organized a massive upsurge in turnout. While Mamdani won just over half of the city’s voters, the election marks a significant change from voting patterns in 2024, which brought big shifts toward Trump in the city and signaled potential trouble ahead for the Democratic Party. Fast-forward a year, and the Republican candidate for mayor, Curtis Sliwa, was keeping Trump at arm’s length and couldn’t crack 10 percentage points in the final vote.

Trump’s own administration seems to know something has changed. The White House is trying to recalibrate its message and is floating the idea of sending most Americans a $2,000 check next year. Maybe a bribe can buy MAGA more time.

Polling numbers tell a slightly different story, but if anything it’s one even less favorable to the right wing. The big turn against MAGA came much earlier this year. The common sense about Trump’s strength has just been slow to adjust.

For example, after a brief and partial recovery in the public’s level of pessimism about the country’s future in January, the percentage of those saying they think the United States is on the wrong track is growing again (see chart one below; in all the charts more positive numbers reflect better news for Trump and the GOP, more negative numbers bad news). Trump’s approval rating headed south from day one, wasting away a brief honeymoon and suffering its steepest decline in the spring. A short-lived revival in support followed in May and early June after the shock of the tariffs wore off, but it ceased by the start of the summer and it’s been downhill since. Polling from the last three weeks suggest that there’s another wave of defectors from Team MAGA taking shape (chart two). Congressional Republicans still have greater public support than Democrats (chart three) — a mark of justified public disgust at the Democrats’ (mis)leadership class — but that edge is sliding. And when pressed to say who they’ll vote for, more Americans have preferred Democrats since the spring (chart four).1

Polling never tells the full story about the power of an administration. But it’s an important measure, and as I’ve argued before, a big swing against Trump in popular opinion would be a powerful check on his regime.

What gives? Some possible explanations for the change in circumstances:

1. The withholding of funds from food stamps during the shutdown did especially significant damage to Trump (see a good analysis of this here). More than 40 million people, about one in eight Americans, depend on food stamps to eat. Many of them are from struggling working-class families who Trump and the GOP hoped to integrate into their camp. Millions now also face a sharp increase in their health insurance premiums or will be kicked off Medicaid due to the One Big Beautiful Bill. That will bring the White House more grief in the months to come.

2. The No Kings mobilizations on October 18 brought out between five and six million people — by one count the largest mass political mobilization in US history. That has given renewed vigor to the opposition to Trump, and the sight of thousands of protesters in small towns and mid-sized cities all across the country probably had an effect.

3. Internal divisions among the Republican’s natural base do the administration no favors. The first six months were marked by a remarkable degree of Republican political unity. But Elon Musk’s predictable falling out with the president was a sign of things to come. Trump’s tariffs are being challenged by groups who would otherwise be his natural allies: many small businesses and the Chamber of Commerce. A small but hardy group of Republican congressmembers, including Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have become vocal critics of the Trump administration’s support for the genocide in Gaza, and they seem to represent a considerable minority of GOP voters. And new revelations in just the last few days about Trump’s long-standing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein could jeopardize the unquestioning loyalty granted to him by more figures in the Republican establishment.

This is what a changing political moment feels like, even if it’s too soon to say Trump is in retreat. But a full shift to more favorable political terrain will require a change in the tactics of the anti-MAGA forces of the center and left as well. Until that comes about, MAGA will be down but not out.

Flipping to offense depends most importantly on new leadership. Blame for the absence of a real organized opposition to Trump and MAGA belongs to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. The pathetic eleventh hour surrender on the shutdown by a gaggle of Senate Democrats in return for a couple hollow promises is at least partly Schumer’s doing. Every botched press conference, low-energy denunciation, and sternly worded letter to the White House by Schumer and Jeffries this year reinforces the understanding that they’re not fit to lead the opposition to Trump’s GOP.

As Sanders himself pointed out, it is not realistic to think that progressives could take the leadership of the opposition to MAGA in Congress given the balance of forces in the Democratic caucus. The party is still dominated in DC by centrists who seem to fear the left as much as they fear Trump. But Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, joined by a new Mayor Zohran Mamdani, could provide a different kind of leadership for the opposition.2 Their Fighting Oligarchy tour was a promising start and showed that there’s a hunger out there for new leaders. Could they now put together a platform for the elections in 2026? A left-wing version of the famous Contract with America in 1994. Could they build a national slate of progressive and left Democratic primary challengers and, potentially, independent populists running in red states and districts?

The danger of overestimating Trump and MAGA at this point is that some of these questions won’t get posed. So long as the anti-MAGA forces are on defense, the instinct to crouch and be cautious (or roll over and play dead) is strong. And the space to run on a positive program (even a cheerful program, as Meagan Day put it in a great recent piece) seems limited. But if the cracks are opening up in the MAGA coalition, then a new political push is possible. My Age of Trump–induced pessimism makes it hard for me to believe that could be true — and I’m sure that’s the case for many others. But moments change, and the task of a political opposition is to hasten that shift and make the most of it.

Zohran and DSA

Neal: One of the highlights of the night was that they had the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA)’s elected officials on stage. These socialists in office came on stage in their red DSA shirts to talk to 13,000 people about the important role that NYC-DSA has played being an anchor for the Left in the city. Multiple times they asked people to join DSA, to get organized.

Nick: People have been worried about the extent to which Zohran is or is not really still a representative of DSA. I think this is a good sign that he still very much feels like a part of the organization, even if, as we’ve discussed a few times, he’s not willing to endorse the national DSA platform in its entirety.

Heckling With Substance

Nick: Not long after the DSA crew was up there, the leaders of the New York State Democratic Party came out on stage as a group: State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and, of course, Governor Kathy Hochul.

Neal: To me, that was the highlight of the night in many ways. I wasn’t expecting it to be. I think a lot of people, myself included, were a bit concerned that Kathy Hochul was speaking. She has been an adversary of the Left in the city and the state for a long time; she was even Andrew Cuomo’s successor as governor. She’s a Democrat, but she’s very much the quintessential corporate Democrat. Now she is endorsing Zohran after first resisting doing so.

I don’t know what she expected, honestly. She got up to give her speech about why we need to go vote for Zohran. It had no substantive content. But I think it was pretty clear right from the start when she started speaking that the audience was not gonna be with her — they were not going to have her back that night.

Nick: She definitely got a very chilly reception. Pretty quickly. someone started a chant of “Tax the Rich,” which broke out across the stadium. For folks who haven’t been following as closely, part of the interesting dynamic of the race and of Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani is that Zohran has said he’s going to pay for these new social programs — free buses and universal childcare, building more affordable housing — through raising taxes on the rich. Now, the mayor does not have the authority to do that. He would need the legislature and the governor in Albany to propose that and sign off on it. Hochul has said, even as she has endorsed him, that she is not gonna support any new taxes. So that’s something the crowd was eager to pick up.

You can watch the substantive heckling below:

Neal: There were multiple points where people broke out chanting “Tax the Rich,” and I think you and I got pretty into it. The people around us were really into it. I was thinking about it too from the point of view of the people who were sitting near us. From talking to them, my sense was that a lot of them were not ideologically committed lefties. These were nice Democrats who were interested in the mayor’s race and thought Zohran was really cool, and they really liked what he stands for. Some of them had Kamala Harris buttons on.

I was thinking, what is their experience of this particular moment? From their reaction, it seemed like they were really getting into it. Because from the point of view of a lot of people, it’s a no-brainer: of course we need to tax the rich to achieve these things. It was a great moment to draw out that tension between the very progressive platform that Zohran is running on and then the role that Hochul may play trying to stop it.

Having that really clear chant — it wasn’t booing. I think it would have been kind of whatever, you know… politicians get booed or heckled sometimes. But this was a really substantive challenge to her.

Nick: Heckling with substance.

Neal: It’s almost like a dare. It’s like, “You’ve come here —now you need to take the next step. Are you serious about this? Yeah? Show us you’re serious.” And she did say at one point: “I hear you.”

Nick: We should explain how this all ended. The heckling or the “substantive challenge,” as Neal put it, continued throughout her remarks. People were really not giving her a positive reception. Eventually — and this has been picked up by the mainstream media as well — Zohran had to come out. He comes out onto the stage unexpectedly, and to applause, as you might expect. He goes up to her, shakes her hand, raises her hand in his, and then gently escorts her off the stage to applause and cheering. And some continued “Tax the Rich” chants. So that was a pretty hilarious denouement.

Neal: What I really like about that incident is that it does build the pressure on her. The next fight is, how do we fund these programs that Zohran is fighting for? It puts the pressure on her, and she has to get reelected next year. So she’s got to try to convince a lot of these people who became excited about Zohran’s campaign to support her. She knows the pressure is there.

Also, Zohran knows the pressure is there. He can see from his own base that he’s helped build what they want. They know what is necessary to achieve the agenda.

The Democratic Base’s March to the Left

Nick: Hochul was obviously reluctant to endorse Zohran. She didn’t endorse until September, pretty late after he’d won the Democratic primary. She is, as we’ve emphasized, not a progressive; she’s very much in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. But she’s clearly seeing where the wind is blowing somewhat in terms of the base of the party and the popularity of Zohran, his meteoric rise. She’s trying to capture some of that energy and momentum.

I would probably agree with you, Neal, that she is going to try to do the minimum possible substantively to try to capture that momentum. But to the extent that he and his base puts pressure on her, there’s an opening to try to get her to do more. A few weeks ago, she came out and said, actually, I am for universal childcare. Of course, she’s still saying she’s not going to tax the rich, which is what we need to fund it.

And did you see the reporting the day after the rally? She gave some speech where she said something like, “I don’t want to raise taxes, but you know, I’m hearing from a lot of people. I’ve got to make calculations.” She’s expressing some tentative openness to raising taxes. And Zohran has wisely not said yet that he is endorsing her for reelection, when he was asked about it in one of the general election debates.

So there is a question of how far we can move Hochul and other establishment Democrats. None of these people are our friends, of course. But under pressure, even politicians who are opposed to socialist politics will sometimes give in.

Neal: This gets to the fact that these important leaders in the Democratic Party are being forced to move with the course of events against their will. That gets at another interesting aspect of the rally, which is that this was a coming together of the three most prominent democratic socialist leaders in the country: Bernie, AOC, and Zohran. You have a recent Jacobin article, Nick, where you talk about the moment we’re living in now, where this group is becoming the face of the national opposition to Trump.

Nick: The Democratic Party on the whole has not had a coherent oppositional message or strategy. Very early on in Trump’s term, the Democratic strategist James Carville advised the Democrats to roll over and play dead — basically do nothing, let Trump and the GOP dig their own grave with their bad economic policies and other stupid political decisions. And the Democrats have been mostly doing that.

The current government shutdown is perhaps an exception. Or it shows that party leaders like Schumer are responding to some pressure from the base to try to take a more aggressive, oppositional stance. But I don’t think they’ve been messaging very clearly about what the shutdown is really about. They’re complaining about Republicans refusing to negotiate.

Whereas Bernie and AOC from pretty early on have been barnstorming the country, making opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism also about fighting oligarchy, fighting economic inequality, taking on the billionaire class — people like Elon Musk who are opposed to working people, who are opposed to having economic security and a good standard of living, affordable healthcare, all of those sort of bread-and-butter concerns.

They’ve been very forthright in opposing Trump’s authoritarianism and articulating an economic populist message that can appeal to people, especially a lot of the people who have been fed up with Democrats, who have not been voting for Democrats in recent years. That aligns very well with what Mamdani is doing in New York. Focusing on affordability, saying we need to tax the rich so that we can build out social programs that allow working-class New Yorkers to have a dignified life here and continue to be able to afford to live here.

Zohran, AOC, Bernie: they’re the ones who actually have a substantive, appealing anti-Trump message to offer. A strategy for winning back disaffected voters. The Democratic establishment doesn’t really have anything to say other than, of course, Trump is bad.

Neal: One of the interesting things too that the rise of Bernie, AOC, and now Zohran to this leadership role demonstrates is the fact that the base of the party has been transformed quite a bit. I don’t think any of us could have predicted five or six years ago the degree to which the Democratic Party base has been pushed pretty substantially to the left by the shortcomings of the Biden administration and the different popular mobilizations that have happened in the last five years around Black Lives Matter and Palestine — and also the horrible situation we find ourselves in now with the Trump government and the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to present any real alternative.

All of these factors have come together to create a base of the Democratic Party that is significantly to the left of where it was, even in the 2020 presidential election. You’ve got to remember, Bernie did OK in the 2020 presidential primary, but his presidential campaign wasn’t a smashing success.. It was a success for many reasons from our point of view: He really popularized the message. DSA and other organizations and labor projects grew out of it, which was very important. But he didn’t unite the party base around his campaign, far from it.

I’m curious what you think, but to me it feels like there has been a sea change in the base of the party in the last five years, especially in the last year. Something is going on inside the Democratic Party now. I don’t know how deep it is or how permanent it is, but it definitely feels like the party base is much to the left of where it had been in the past.

Nick: I don’t think I’ve looked at all of the relevant data to suss that out sufficiently, but definitely it seems like people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are very popular among the base. Zohran is probably not super well known outside of New York City, but in New York City at least, he is very popular among the base, and it seems among some nontraditional voters as well.

An Era of Ambitious Government

Neal: Zohran at one point said, “My friends, the era of government that deems an issue too small or a crisis too big must come to an end.” That’s obviously a reference to Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when he said that “the era of big government is over.” I think Zohran was clearly thinking about that and trying to present some sort of rhetorical rebuttal to it. I don’t think they have a pithy way of saying it yet. They should have said something like “the era of ambitious government is here.”

Nick: Right, they’re still workshopping the exact language perhaps. But that’s definitely what I thought when I heard that. This was an attempt to invert this idea that Clinton expressed as part of the ascendance of Third Way liberalism. Clinton was basically expressing the post-Reagan consensus that Democrats or liberals could no longer be proud defenders of ambitious government action or an aggressive public sector.

It’s very heartening to see Mamdani taking up this theme that we want to see government as a solution to our problems and that we want to expand the public sector and reimagine what the public sector is capable of. That has been a through line in his campaign: Building out public housing as a big part of the solution to the New York housing crisis, obviously the experiment with city-owned grocery stores, making buses fast and free, universal childcare. All of that is really about expanding the public sector, bringing the “era of big government is over” to an end.

Neal: That is the key socialist element of Zohran’s campaign: The push for defending the public sector and for building a stronger public sector. Moving away from these “public-private partnerships” that ultimately end up subsidizing private companies to try to deliver social goods.

The campaign is saying: “We don’t rely on that anymore.” We rely on municipally owned grocery stores. We rely on municipally provided childcare services. These things, I think, are a super important part of the socialist promise of Zohran’s campaign. Show that the public sector and maybe worker co-operatives can be an alternative to the private sector, to capitalist enterprises. It really makes me very hopeful about what’s possible in the future for articulating a positive vision of what democratic socialist politics is all about.

Nick: It’s common for people to collapse the distinction between progressivism and democratic socialism. There’s not always a clear, bright line between progressive politics or progressive policy versus democratic socialist policy or politics. We’ve often talked about it as democratic socialists having a different end goal, of more collective ownership or control of the economy.

Zohran — even as he tries to broaden his appeal beyond the hardcore DSA base — still foregrounds this public sector primacy in his pitch. And that the way we’re gonna pay for this is by taxing the rich and by taking on the billionaire class. That’s part of his campaign message; that class-struggle message is still really there.

He says: “The era of government that deems an issue too small or a crisis too big must come to an end. Because we need a government that is every bit as ambitious as our adversaries.” I find that really significant. The goal of government is not just to help people or improve people’s lives. It is of course about that, maybe primarily about that, but he also sees it as a matter of, we have to use the government to take on our adversaries. Which is channeling a kind of class-struggle spirit that we love to see.

Neal: Absolutely. Combine a robust plan for expanding the public sector, a plan to make the rich pay for these programs, and then — there are real limits to what you can do here as a city government, but still — a plan for strengthening the labor movement. I think you’ve got a really powerful democratic socialist message for municipal politics right there. This campaign is sort of stumbling into this vision of what a real municipal socialist politics can look like in the next ten, fifteen years.

Nick French: Today we’re trying out the Left Notes podcast, our inaugural episode. We’re going to be talking about the New York Times op-ed by David Paul Kuhn called “Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class.” This is one of many articles that have come out since the election about the Democrats’ struggles with working-class voters. What can and should they do to try to win them back? Neal, do you want to tell us more about the article and what you thought of it?

Neal Meyer: Sure. I thought this would be an interesting basis for us to talk more about strategy and politics today. This is based on a book that Kuhn wrote, and now he’s also producing a PBS documentary.

The premise is that the “hard hat riot” back in May 1970 — which was a fight between construction workers and antiwar protesters in Manhattan around the World Trade Center right after the Kent State shooting and the bombing of Cambodia — somehow exemplifies the problems that Democrats have with working-class voters. And it maybe even points to the origin moment or period when Democrats started to lose touch with working-class voters, starting first with white working-class voters. Then Kuhn also talks about how that problem extended to a lot of working-class people of color.

His argument is that the antiwar movement was driven by college-educated, liberal, left-leaning activists who were part of a counterculture in the United States. Some of that is true, of course: that they were in a kind of conflict or clash with a lot of working-class Americans who tended to be more supportive of the war or at least supportive of the US military. And that the antiwar New Left ended up being insensitive to the ideas and the traditions of these blue-collar workers; that they attacked positions that were once respected, like being a parent or a hard worker or a patriot or a soldier.

This is the tension that was coming to the surface in the early 1970s. Kuhn describes it as a fight between the “Old Left” constituency of the Democratic Party and the “New Left” constituency of the Democratic Party.

Nick: Like you said, there’s definitely some truth to this narrative. But there are a couple of things I think we want to take issue with in Kuhn’s argument.

This is used as part of a broader argument that Democrats’ issues with the working class are largely cultural. It’s that the Democrats have adopted, for the most part, the kind of cultural politics and attitudes of the college-educated or of the professional-managerial class, if you want to use that term. And this is really alienating working-class voters and has been since the time of this hard hat riot.

But before we get into that broader debate, we thought it’d be interesting to sort of question the precise shape of the narrative around this hard hat riot and Vietnam War politics. When Neal shared this article with me, we both remembered this OG Jacobin article from 2013 called “The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk” by Penny Lewis. Lewis points out that, actually, support for the Vietnam War was much higher among college-educated voters. And as you go down the education scale, to non-college-educated voters and then to voters without even a high school degree, opposition to the war rises. That’s an important corrective to what Kuhn is saying.

She also points out that most union workers did not actually support the NYC hard hat riot. A poll at the time found that 53 percent of union workers in New York City disapproved [of the workers attacking protesters] while only 30 percent approved. And also, these workers were actually encouraged by their conservative building trades union leadership — who were in a kind of war with the liberal mayor at the time — to go out and counter-demonstrate against the antiwar protesters.

That’s important historical context: that the Vietnam War politics that Kuhn is talking about wasn’t really just a case of lefty, antiwar, college-educated people versus the salt-of-the-earth working class who were behind the war effort. Actually, working-class voters tended to be even more against the war.

Neal: What’s funny — and Lewis points this out — if you go look at the picture in the New York Times article that they posted with it, and then the picture they posted with an additional series of letters that people wrote into the Times about the piece, you’ll notice there’s a lot of people in suits among these “rioters.” A lot of the people who joined in this riot were Wall Street types, executives and bankers who were around the World Trade Center when these fights were happening. They joined in and beat the shit out of these protesters.

It is a pretty interesting foreshadowing of some of the political coalitions that exist in the United States today. Definitely there is this managerial, very wealthy base of the Republican Party that is joining up with a lot of working-class voters. That’s undeniable now.

But again, the story of the 1970s and the antiwar movement is always presented as the little guy, the underdog against the big mean New Left —

Nick: Big College.

Neal: Big College, who are all snobs and condescending. Like you were saying, Lewis does a great job of showing how broad the opposition to the Vietnam War was among working-class people in this country. And that actually, if there was a base of support for the war by the early 1970s — I mean, everyone in the country was basically against it — but the remainder that did support the war, it was disproportionately college educated.

Labor in the Vietnam War

Nick: There is one interesting nuance about this conflict that Lewis talks about and also that one of the letters to the New York Times brought out. It’s true that the institutional labor movement at the time, as represented by the AFL-CIO, was very supportive of the Vietnam War and a lot of other Cold War–era US interventions and anti-communist efforts abroad. So that is a truth of the situation, and probably the building trades unions involved in the hard hat riot would fall into that camp [of being] pro-US military policy as well.

But that shouldn’t be taken to be reflective of the broader working class.

Neal: Of where the membership was at.

Nick: Exactly. And as this commenter points out, the institutional labor support for the Vietnam War was in large part the result of the anti-communist purges of the McCarthy era and the Second Red Scare that got all the lefties and radicals out of the unions and really aligned them much more tightly with the foreign policy interests of the US government.

Neal: Definitely. And it’s important, too, to say that there were divisions in the labor movement at this time also.

Nick: Of course.

Neal: A lot of the more progressive unions at the time, in the public sector, and I think at least some of the United Auto Workers (UAW) locals and districts and others were actually in a struggle of their own with the AFL-CIO leadership, which they viewed as very conservative, precisely on these questions you’re discussing, but also on questions of organizing new workers. That was also something that the AFL-CIO was not really focused on at the time. So there was a conflict going on inside of the labor movement over these political questions as well.

But yeah, you’re absolutely right to say that the AFL leadership — George Meany, who was the president at the time — they’re not reflective of the American working class. These top officials are extremely well paid, very comfortable, relatively conservative people. Especially on these questions where they wanted to be in sync with the American policy elite, including the policy elite of the Democratic Party. Because even though this was still a period when the Democratic Party was to the left of where it ended up being in the late 1970s and ’80s on economic questions, on foreign policy, the Democratic Party sucked. They were just as bad back in the ’60s and ’70s as they were in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. And the AFL-CIO leadership [thought] this was an issue on which they felt they could be in alliance with the party and cooperate with them. This is why they were very supportive of US foreign policy, especially under Johnson in the ’60s.

The Long Road to Dealignment, 1980–2024

Nick: Let’s zoom back a little bit. Why does this matter? I think the reason we’re talking about this article today, and the reason the New York Times is publishing articles like this, is because of this somewhat perennial debate about “Where did the Democrats go wrong with the working class? How can they win them back?” So I wanted to ask, what’s the actual timeline with loss in working-class support for the Democrats? And as someone who’s studied this — you’re working on your dissertation on this [topic] and published a great article about it in Catalyst earlier this year — what’s the timeline, and what do you think are the actual reasons for working-class voters fleeing the Democratic Party?

Neal: It’s important first of all to distinguish between white working-class voters and black and Latino working-class voters in the late twentieth century. Because there are different timelines here.

There is a drop-off in turnout, especially in certain past elections, for Democrats among black and Latino working-class voters. But looking at those that vote, they remain relatively loyal to the Democratic Party through at least 2008, 2012. And I think the reasons they remain loyal are pretty obvious: for example, the Republican Party was the party that was more opposed to integration and civil rights by the ’70s and ’80s.

So we’re going to talk a little bit first about changes in the voting patterns of white working-class voters in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century.

Now it’s true that in 1972, when Richard Nixon is running against George McGovern — this is two years after this hard hat rebellion that Kuhn talks about — there’s a big drop-off in support for the Democratic Party, basically among all white voters in that year. The exception being professional-class, college-educated, “knowledge economy” workers: this one group does continue to support McGovern, who’s quite left wing on basically every issue for a Democrat.

The rest of the country swings against McGovern. But at the subpresidential level, in Congress, the fight for the Senate, the fight for the House, Democrats retain their New Deal coalition. Which has white working-class voters very much at the core of its base of support. And a lot of affluent college-educated whites are still voting for Republicans at this time. A majority of them are.

That is especially true in the South, by the way, which is really interesting. There’s a story out there that the Democrats support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the middle of the 1960s, and then white working-class voters specifically have this massive backlash against integration, and that’s how the Democrats lose the South. But that story is wrong.

Nick: “It’s just racism.”

Neal: Yeah. This story is totally wrong. First, the Democrats remain the majority party in the South — it’s more contested than it had been — but they remain the majority party in the South until the early 1990s in congressional elections and also in the 1976 and 1992 presidential elections. They mostly retain that position because they put together a biracial coalition of white and black working-class voters. They lose a lot of the college-educated, affluent Southern whites first. Those are the southerners who most move against the Democrats in the late ’60s and ’70s.

In the North, there is this drop-off in support for the Democrats among classic parts of the New Deal coalition. But in 1976, four years later, Jimmy Carter, who’s the governor of Georgia, basically rebuilds the New Deal coalition quite easily and wins. It’s a relatively close election, but the reason he wins is because he’s able to put together a coalition that involves a lot of working-class people of color and a lot of white working-class voters all across the country.

Then even through the ’80s, you see this base of support hold up for the Democratic Party among working-class people of all racial backgrounds. And in 1992, when Bill Clinton wins the presidential election in 1992, the same thing is true. It’s the same kind of New Deal coalition at the core of the Democratic Party victory.

It’s after 1992 that we start to see real problems for the Democrats among white working-class voters specifically. There’s a lot of reasons for that. A big one has to do with the Democrats’ embrace of free trade.

The impact of NAFTA, the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, is exaggerated when it comes to explaining manufacturing job loss. But its political impact has not been exaggerated. People thought it meant the Democrats were abandoning industrial workers. And it was a very well-publicized and very controversial debate at the time. It was a huge struggle to get it passed through Congress too in ’93 and ’94. And then there’s a huge backlash against the Democrats in 1994 at the congressional level. Some people go to Republicans; some people stop voting.

From there, for about fifteen years, you have a new normal in the United States. Now there’s a lot less of the kind of clear class divide that you used to have, at least among white voters, for the ’90s and 2000s.

You get one brief restoration of the New Deal coalition in 2008, when Barack Obama really does get a lot of white working-class support in that election. But after 2008, we see this pretty dramatic collapse of support for Democrats among white working-class voters. That is the world we’re living in now.

And now, after 2008 — especially in 2016, 2020, 2024 — we are starting to see the same things happening among working-class people of color.

So it’s a long process. And this narrative that the 1970s are the key to the story, at least in terms of voter behavior, I think is just totally, totally wrong.

Nick: Even from what you’ve said already, it sounds like the idea that it’s the adoption of college-educated or “PMC” cultural politics that’s driving this process also seems highly dubious, right? If we really don’t start to see the working class drop off until the ’90s and the adoption of NAFTA.

Neal: Maybe we can talk at the end a little bit about the kind of cultural tensions that exist inside the Democratic Party, because I do think that’s the kind of valuable kernel inside of the Kuhn article that we’re talking about today. But yes, I think the idea that it’s this culture clash doing the main work driving class dealignment is wrong.

The place where I saw red in that Kuhn op-ed was at the very end when he says something like, “It’s the down-home pragmatists, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who were able to rebuild the Democratic Party’s coalition and win.” That drove me crazy, because it’s Carter and Clinton’s economic strategy in the late 1970s and then again in the 1990s that really wrecks the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition.

Carter’s embrace of austerity and his embrace of high interest rates to take down inflation — this caused a serious recession in 1980 and contributed to a loss of working-class support. I mean, people of all kinds of backgrounds turned against the Democrats in 1980 because of the bad economy. But there was a lot of loss of support among working-class voters that year, and it really did set the first real seeds of doubt among people about Democrats’ commitment to redistribution and the old New Deal economic program.

People weren’t wrong to think that, because the Democratic elite were also talking in the same way. They were saying, “We’ve got to get rid of the New Deal. We’ve got to turn our backs on the New Deal.” After Carter’s defeat and Reagan’s victory, they were talking quite explicitly about a need to turn to the right.

Then that impulse really gets turbocharged under Clinton, again through NAFTA, but also Clinton embraces the need to have a balanced budget. He drops his promises to reform health care. He drops his promises to the labor movement to try to make it easier to organize. This really drives down support for the Democrats among working-class voters.

So again, this idea that Carter and Clinton are somehow the saviors of the Democrats’ electoral coalition . . . it’s just wild. I guess the one grain of truth in this is that they did win the elections in 1976 and 1992, and they did win with relatively populist coalitions. But then they turned their backs on those coalitions!

The other funny thing is that, actually, of the three Democratic presidents between Carter, Clinton, and Obama, Obama was the one who won with the largest margin, not Carter or Clinton. I don’t know why Kuhn decides not to mention that. But if there’s someone who really put together a winning coalition, it was Obama, not Carter or Clinton.

But again, Obama also ran on the same formula. This is the recipe Democrats use to win: They run on a populist program after years of disappointment in Republicans. They get elected, and then they do not push their populist program through. They go back to neoliberal economics, and then they lose their base in the process.

Nick: Again, the title of this article is “Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class.” But looking at the history that you’ve laid out, Neal, it really does not feel as if history supports that case. If anything, it suggests the opposite, right? You have these successful Democratic presidential contenders who run on these populist programs, essentially. And then, as you say, when they get into office, they don’t follow through. And then, of course, people are disappointed, not because they refuse to be bought, but because they’re not being given anything . . .

Neal: A better title for the article might be “Democrats Cannot Swindle the Working Class.” You can’t promise people a bunch of things and then not deliver and expect to continue to win their support.

Nick: I do want to get into Kuhn’s sort of positive suggestions a bit more. But before we do that, I was wondering if you could talk about the most recent period where we see dramatic working-class defections, since 2016 essentially. What’s going on there, and what’s going on specifically with non-white working-class voters?

Neal: I think it’s the same process basically.

There’s a promise on the part of Joe Biden in 2020 that he’s going to bring a new New Deal. “We’re going to really break with the past.” “We’re going to bring back the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt.” Biden was really into that sort of rhetoric.

I think the tragedy is that of all of the Democratic presidents since Johnson — Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden — Biden was probably the one that actually most wanted to do that. And we could and ought to have a whole discussion in the future about what really happened in the Biden years.

But regardless of his intentions, it definitely didn’t work out that way. We had massive inflation. Democrats were not able to move their legislative agenda through in any permanent way. They got these temporary COVID relief measures, which you’ve written about in the past, through — but then they all expired. And then people’s main experience in the middle of the Biden years was losing these benefits or their friends or someone they know losing the benefits that they received under the COVID welfare state.

Nick: And being hit by inflation that was unprecedented in recent decades.

Neal: Absolutely. And then watching Biden support the genocide in Gaza. The Biden administration was a disaster. But maybe it is interesting in the sense that despite how disastrous it was in 2024, Biden and Democrats did retain the support of a lot of college-educated people, especially college-educated white people, actually.

There was a backlash against the party among everyone else. But Democrats retain that support among this professional layer of society who I think are most polarized against the Republican

Party. And that does tell you that politics now is a lot about this kind of culture war. And Republicans have succeeded in defining it that way.

But to some extent, Democrats have allowed it to be so; they have embraced defining it that way as well. I think that’s what the whole running against the evil Trump, the big orange Cheeto man, electoral strategy is all about. That is also a culture war strategy on the part of the Democrats.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Nick: Yeah. So Kuhn is one of many Democratic or liberal commentators who is making the case right now that in order to win and to win back working-class voters, the Democrats essentially need to moderate on cultural issues or social issues or whatever you want to call them — “noneconomic” issues. He seems sympathetic to or friendly to the idea that Democrats should also embrace economic populism. But he thinks moderating on the cultural stuff is really important as well.

We could talk about this for hours probably, but I wanted to get into it a little bit and get your sense of this idea: to what extent cultural issues are really driving what’s happening now, and how should the Left think about it — as people who actually at the end of the day are interested in building working-class political power, not necessarily just helping Democrats win elections.

Neal: I think two things, or at least two things.

One is that when parties win elections, they usually do it on economic questions. So if you’re able to put together a compelling story or a compelling program around economic reforms that people buy into, especially when the other party is currently in power and there’s dissatisfaction — and in the US in the neoliberal era there always is dissatisfaction with the current party in power, basically, because neither party can deliver a good economy for working-class people. So when a party can present a compelling economic program and they’re running against an incumbent who’s got a shitty economic situation, they win.

I think even Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 are versions of this. I don’t really buy the argument — I don’t think you do either — that Trump won primarily because of his appeal to reactionary cultural politics.

His economic strategies had a reactionary component to them. The idea that we’re going to get jobs back by kicking out a bunch of immigrants — there’s absolutely a racist, xenophobic element to that. But the main electoral appeal is that it is an economic explanation about how he’s going to improve people’s lives.

We don’t think it’s right. We don’t think it’s actually a solution for people’s problems. But it is an economic argument. I think that’s the way that Trump won. Democrats won in 2008 and 2020 on similar economic questions.

But I do think that Kuhn is right that there’s a tension or a problem that exists in balancing economic and cultural issues. And it’s especially a problem in the US political system where we only have two political parties. If you really want to be crude about how issues break down, there is a left-wing and a right-wing position on economic issues, and there’s a left-wing and a right-wing position on cultural issues.

If you make a two-by-two chart showing the four possible combinations of those positions, a majority of the country doesn’t fit into any one of those four possible boxes. A majority of the country is not right-wing on both economic and cultural issues. We know that for sure. A majority of the country is not left wing on both sets of issues. And a majority of the country is not right-wing on cultural issues and left-wing on economic issues, or vice versa.

That is a challenge in a two-party system for any political party that wants to run on both sets of issues. If you emphasize both, you’re going to run into this problem where a majority of the country is going to be upset with one half of what you’re offering.

I want to be a part of, and I think you want to be part of, a political party that’s left on cultural issues and left on economic issues and doesn’t apologize on either question. I think that works in a large part of the country.

But I think we also have to be realistic that there are parts of this country where Republicans take their power for granted where they probably could be taken down. It doesn’t even have to be by a candidate that’s right[-wing] on cultural issues. I would hope it wouldn’t be. But it might be a candidate that mostly focuses on left-wing economic issues, someone like Dan Osborne in Nebraska. And we need people like that out there challenging the Republicans in these sort of currently safe red districts, where maybe a more left-wing cultural argument won’t yet play.

Nick: Yeah, I definitely agree with all of that. I mean, the Dan Osborne case is really interesting. It does seem on certain issues, such as immigration, he’s definitely not using the sort of rhetoric that we would endorse.

Neal: Yeah, I think it goes too far on immigration. It doesn’t seem necessary.

Nick: But he had a solid economic pitch. We should point out also, he was not running as a Democrat, which gets to a different issue that the Center for Working-Class Politics has recently done some really interesting research on. This question of whether in some places — like these red states or red districts — the Democratic brand is toxic somewhat independently of particular issues: the party brand itself is just something that is in really bad shape and can’t be salvaged, at least in the near term. But I think even in blue states and blue districts, that maybe a version of what you’re saying still applies. That we want to lead with the economics and really focus on the economic issues, as opposed to cultural issues that are perhaps more divisive among a working-class electorate.

Bernie Sanders is for the most part very progressive on social issues and always has been, yet he has always done a really good job of bringing the conversation back to class struggle, “class war” essentially, and economic issues. And Zohran Mamdani, in his own way, in the particular context of New York City, has done something similar, where he has really hammered on the affordability crisis, constantly bringing the conversation back to that. He takes very brave, principled stances on Gaza. And he is pushing, I think, a very progressive reform message around policing and public safety. But he hasn’t allowed divisive cultural issues to frame the campaign. It’s really the economics at the heart of it.

The following is adapted from a talk given at Jacobin’s 15th anniversary conference, “Socialism in Our Time,” on September 13, 2025, in New York City.

Many of us on the left today joined because we were inspired and got organized on the basis of Bernie Sanders’s program for a “political revolution.” The essence of that program is by now very familiar, and it is the de facto program of the democratic socialist left today. It includes Medicare for All, a Green New Deal to address the climate catastrophe, new labor laws to enable a surge in union density, and more. Not only is it the de facto program of our new socialist movement — it is a program that now enjoys broad popular support.

At the risk of sounding overly optimistic in an especially difficult time, I would say that the election of a government on the basis of this program in the United States some day in the future is entirely possible. It is, at the very least, a major goal of our new socialist movement to achieve that. A government of the left dedicated to enacting this program for a political revolution would encounter all kinds of challenges, from stiff resistance from business, to a relentless attack campaign from the mass corporate media and harsh attacks from the political center and the right. Nevertheless, the eventual victory of such a program is not impossible to conceive. It is no more radical than programs of reform that have been fought for and realized before in many countries all over the world.

For many if not most of us in the socialist movement, that is the horizon with which we are more or less working on a daily basis. Our main question is how to build a movement that is capable of winning such reforms.

Naturally however, the longer-term questions of socialist strategy are also on our mind. And here lies the theoretically more challenging and less obvious question of whether there is a “democratic road” to socialism: a road that moves from a program of reforms very much won within the logic of the capitalist system to a program of structural changes that begin to alter the system itself.

These structural changes to the capitalist system are those that strengthen labor and expand the public sector in a way that threatens capitalist ownership at a major scale — this means, for example, the nationalization of finance and the major corporations. This more radical program also includes the expropriation of the great family fortunes — the breaking once and for all, in today’s terms, of the oligarchy and the abolition of the billionaire class. Only this kind of program can smash the immense power of a small investor class over the lives of billions of people and effect a radical democratization of society.

The challenge here is that as a socialist government and movement heads in the direction of systemic changes — to make “despotic inroads on the rights of private property,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto — there will come a point when further progress provokes a real showdown with capital. Systemic changes like nationalizing the major financial institutions, for example, pose an existential challenge to capital as a whole in a way that, say, Medicare for All simply does not.

Probing the Limits of Reform

That showdown may take the form of capital strikes, semi-legal moves to destabilize a socialist administration, and even attempts to depose a democratically elected government by force. This has been a challenge in one form or another posed to every even somewhat ambitious government of the left — from the French Popular Front in the 1930s to Salvador Allende's government in Chile in the ’70s and many more besides.

We do not know where precisely those limits are — where challenges to capital provoke not just resistance but a willingness on the ruling class’s part to try to bring down a democratically elected government. Finding those limits is what Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman had in mind in their classic essay “Beyond Social Democracy,” when they said that a task of a socialist government is to “probe the limits of reform.”

The key question is what — when these limits are reached — will be the response of a socialist government? Will it retreat and equivocate, trying as the social democrats of the 1970s did to reach a modus vivendi with capital? Or will such a government go further, mobilizing popular forces to support a more radical program? And will it accept the risks inherent in a real confrontation with capital, a rupture with the way things have always been done, with all the uncertainty and dangers that come with that?

For those of us who believe that a) the limits just described do exist, and that capital will not tolerate its own abolition by gradual steps, and b) that when those limits are reached, further conflict and not retreat will be the order of the day, the question is how to prepare strategically. Preparation is especially difficult since it’s impossible to predict where the precise limits to reform exist, when they will be reached, and under what conditions.

If that is right, we face the challenge today of building the kind of movement and party that will not back down in that moment of rupture. If there is a “democratic road” to socialism, it will take a party and cadre strategically prepared to find it and take it, knowing full well the risks that it entails. To use a rough metaphor: if we don’t know details about the road we’ll be driving down, finding and preparing a vehicle for the most likely and difficult circumstances is a wise move.

Learning From Social Democracy

Here the lessons that can be drawn from the failures of the social democratic parties of the twentieth century — setting aside their many achievements — are important to consider. Miliband and Liebman’s “Beyond Social Democracy” is especially useful on this point. Miliband and Liebman identify two of the major errors of social democratic parties and the lessons to be drawn from them.

First, social democratic parties were marked by a pervasive equivocation — especially in the postwar period — on whether public ownership, nationalization, and expropriation were a fundamental part of the socialist project. That reluctance to challenge the ownership rights of capital eventually led these parties to redefine the meaning of socialism, from a new social order to be realized in the future to a set of values and a spirit of solidarity that could coexist with capitalism in the present.

The lesson here is relatively straightforward: parties that are ambivalent about the goal of democratizing economic power will never see the need to move toward, let alone see through, a rupture with capitalism.

Second, social democratic parties were marred by a tendency to contain the rank-and-file activities of party members and movement activists, to channel all work into the electoral arena, and ultimately to disempower the activist layer in their own parties. In doing so, they undermined the grassroots strength that carried them into government in the first place, hollowing out their movements and reducing them more and more to a small community of hyperleaders and elected officials on the one side and a mass of demobilized supporters on the other. That kind of movement will not have the grassroots muscle to generate the popular power needed to push a government of the future through serious challenges — certainly not in any transition to socialism but also not even in fights for more basic reforms.

Evaluating Our Movement Today

Building a movement that guards against these errors is essential to building a robust movement for democratic socialism. This idea raises two further questions.

The first question: To what extent have we really accepted the immense long-term challenges of the project we are embarking on?

For too many, socialism still means public libraries and public schools. The task of a new socialist movement is to popularize a much more ambitious conception of what we’re aiming at. We need to develop a version of socialism that is about more than solidarity and community, as important as those values are, and treats socialism as a destination, a different kind of society where public and cooperative ownership over the economy predominates. And the work toward that goal begins now, not some day in the future.

The second question: To what extent are some of the leading elements in our new socialist project too uncomfortable with being at the head of a boisterous, often unruly mass movement?

The appeal of political movements that vest almost all power in an autonomous leader or set of leaders — the kind of project developed in Spain around Podemos and around Bernie Sanders in the United States — is that political spokespeople of the left could contest elections while keeping an often undisciplined mass activist base at arms length. But without the deliberation and the development of cadres which can only occur in mass membership organizations, these movements place limits on their own growth.

It is to the credit of the US left that we have built the Democratic Socialists of America, which for all its problems is still the seedbed from which new left-wing leaders of unions, social movements, and, potentially, the next mayor of New York develop.

Only an organized movement with hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists will be able to build the kind of mobilizations and actions that can a) keep socialist leaders fixed on the real goal of building a new society and b) create the kind of disruptive energy that will be needed in a period of rupture to overpower capital’s resistance.

All who venture into these kinds of strategic questions acknowledge the abstract, open, and necessarily inconclusive nature of these debates. That goes with the territory of speculating about events that are so far removed from our concrete tasks and challenges today. The value of these reflections is the role they play in setting the terms of debate for and expectations of our growing shared political project. And while we can’t know or predict when and where we will come up against harder limits to reform — understanding and discussing why there are limits in the first place, and what our intentions are when they do descend, is key.

In my most recent post for Left Notes, I argued that democratic socialists differ from contemporary social democrats in terms of their end goals. Democratic socialists aim at ultimately abolishing capitalism by bringing most of society’s productive assets under collective or worker ownership, whereas social democrats are content with a reformed, worker-friendly version of capitalism. 

In a follow-up piece, Neal explored another important division within the socialist camp, on the question of strategy. Partisans of an insurrectionary road to socialism believe that socialists are most likely to achieve their goals through a popular, extralegal uprising that overthrows the existing state. Believers in a democratic road to socialism think the path to building a postcapitalist society most likely runs through the democratic election of a socialist government.

On this question of strategy, though — what Neal calls “the transition question” — we can and should make further distinctions. Even if you and I agree that the road to socialism runs through democratic election of a socialist government, we might have all sorts of disagreements about what a socialist government should do once it’s elected. 

Here I just want to take up one set of questions: a socialist government’s relationship to building popular power, and the implications that has for the pace at which a transition to socialism might be carried out and the conditions for its success.

Popular Power

I agree with many on the Left who emphasize the need to build institutions of working-class power at the grassroots, independent of the state. Such institutions of popular power might include trade unions (or sectoral or national trade union federations), workplace cooperatives, tenants’ unions, and democratic assemblies (from the neighborhood level to larger geographic units, like cities or regions).

For proponents of a democratic road to socialism, such institutions of popular power play two important roles1:

First, in a society that has not yet transitioned beyond capitalism, they are workers’ means of fighting back against the power of capital. Through organizing themselves in unions, tenants’ councils, and the like, working-class people are able to use their collective strength to resist exploitation — by, say, striking for higher wages or withholding rent to demand housing improvements. Such institutions can also act as a counterweight to capitalist pressure on the state, mobilizing to get governments to pass pro-worker reforms and, ideally, to bring more of the economy under collective ownership and control.

Second, these institutions are essentially seeds of the new order inside the old, and they become the muscle behind a socialist transition. Socialists often argue that, as more of the economy is socialized, popular institutions of workplace and neighborhood democracy can and should take on a greater role in ordering our everyday lives. The experiences of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, and various citywide general strikes are seen as offering glimpses of what such a popular, democratic reordering of society might look like.

Beyond Popular Power

But popular power alone is insufficient to effect a socialist transition.

First, socialists have to win and hold majority support for our project. Building popular power is not sufficient for maintaining majority support, because even in the most optimistic scenario the activist base that makes up the core of institutions of popular power will always be a minority of society. Socialist governments must also try to pass popular policy reforms to bolster their legitimacy and popularity, potentially strengthening their hand in pursuing more radical economic transformation down the road.2

Second, state policy is necessary for certain fundamental aspects of a socialist transition. It falls to the national government, for instance, to nationalize (certain) firms and industries, to set up needed public banks, and to establish and enforce regulations governing everything from financial transactions to environmental stewardship to workers’ rights. These sorts of questions can’t feasibly be addressed by institutions of popular power alone (though a democratic socialist government would certainly incorporate their input or assign them decision-making authority as appropriate).

Moreover, a socialist government can play an essential role in promoting and developing institutions of popular power. By using their public platform and their legislative authority to build up such institutions, they help workers expand their collective power and begin to lay the groundwork for a more fundamental transformation of the economy and the state.3

Popular Power and the Chilean Experience

The overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity (UP, Unidad Popular in Spanish) government in Chile in the early 1970s is a source of cautionary advice as we think about the tasks of a socialist government. In a 2023 article for Catalyst, René Rojas persuasively argues against a common analysis on the left that the UP government was overthrown because Allende did not push hard or fast enough — in particular, that Allende did not sufficiently mobilize or empower the organs of popular power that supported the government.4

Some on the left say that the UP government was fatally compromised by a large-scale capital strike, which might have been prevented had Allende moved more quickly to expropriate private property. Yet as Rojas points out, the UP government and its supporters (often acting on their own initiative) were actually nationalizing and expropriating firms at a rapid pace: “By 1973, over half of the total national output was accounted for by the public sector, including banking, mining, foreign trade, basic industry, and even important light manufacturing sectors like textiles and key foodstuffs.”

In addition, Rojas convincingly argues that Allende had not secured a popular majority for a more aggressive program, and concerns at the time about the loss of popular support if the UP government exceeded its mandate were reasonable. Rojas notes that Allende’s government was elected on a pledge to begin the transition to socialism — which meant “accomplish[ing] critical transformative and redistributive reforms that would better position working people and the labor movement to carry out more comprehensive anti-capitalist restructuring” down the road — not to complete it. Most of his base was not ready to support some kind of revolutionary confrontation with the capitalist class.

Finally, Rojas contends that workers would not have been practically prepared for such a showdown:

Rising popular power organs — such as the cordones, comandos, and local supply and price boards that combated hoarding and took control of the distribution of consumer goods — were key instruments that workers built to confront measures deployed by elites against the Chilean road’s progress. Yet they were erected atop organizational and strategic capacities that generations of workers, poor people, and their parties had painstakingly struggled to develop. Faced with the prospect of an unwinnable civil war, Allende was compelled to avert a useless bloodbath. As the campaign for socialism was to be fought over the long haul, Allende and popular militants understood the need to preserve and nurture these capacities. His unwillingness to risk their destruction in a premature and hopeless final battle reflected a commitment to promoting workers’ interests in a manner rooted in the class’s demands and preferences.

Rojas makes a compelling case that Allende’s best chance for averting a coup lay in shoring up support among the significant portion of the working class loyal to the Christian Democrats (CD). This required coming to an agreement with leaders of the party’s left-wing faction (which was broadly supportive of the UP’s “road to socialism” up until right before the coup); such an agreement would have  “meant restricting the scope of ongoing expropriations, tamping down on preparations for armed confrontation, and making explicit assurances of enduring political pluralism and civil liberties.” The failure to come to such an agreement reduced the UP’s working-class support and allowed right-wing, pro-coup CD leaders to marginalize their party’s left.

The Allende experience therefore suggests that a socialist government needs time and broad political alliances to develop its project, including the building up of popular power. There is every reason to think that the alternative, racing to a direct and final confrontation with the capitalist class, will likely be disastrous. Of course, this perspective — emphasizing the need for a longer transitional period between capitalism and socialism, and the need to forge compromises with more moderate forces — has plenty of critics among people who also say they believe in a democratic road to socialism.

Last week, I returned from my seventh national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America. This past week I joined my friend and fellow delegate Chris Maisano on the podcast Left on Red, hosted by NYC-DSA comrades Susan Kang and Stylianos Karolidis. We talked about the main takeaways from the convention and the big debates in the organization today. Chris and I also took a short trip down memory lane to 2015, when we returned from that year’s DSA convention excited about the potential Bernie Sanders’s campaign had to revive the organization. Chris and I hosted a meeting in our living room in Brooklyn where a group of about a dozen comrades decided to refound the New York City chapter of DSA, which had been nonexistent for years.

You can check out the full interview and my thoughts on the convention above (if you prefer Apple for podcasts, that link is here). I won’t summarize it here. But I thought it would be fun to tack on a couple of short reflections on DSA’s other six national conventions that I’ve attended since 2013, since they provide a series of short but revealing snapshots of the organization at different stages of its growth:

2013 in Emeryville, California: Tom Hayden is the keynote speaker, he reminds us all that the future lies in the long struggle to reform the Democratic Party. There are no more than 120 delegates, and that represents virtually the entire active membership of the organization. A meeting of the youth wing of the organization brings together about a dozen people — and that’s everyone under fifty.

2015 in Bolivar, Pennsylvania: My comrades and I lose the fight to pull DSA out of the Socialist International. Also, DSA gets banned for life from an Orthodox Christian retreat center because one comrade tried too aggressively to convince a nun to become an atheist.

2017 in Chicago, Illinois: DSA is back. There are hundreds of delegates, the first seriously competitive national leadership election in a decade at least, and a mostly new slate of fresh faces is elected to lead the organization. It’s not clear where this new DSA is going, but it has real energy again. DSA leaves the Socialist International, endorses the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and makes electoral action a much more central part of its project.

2019 in Atlanta, Georgia: A heated convention. Two years of factional battles are mostly resolved with the defeat of DSA’s “horizontalist” and localist tendency. The various caucuses that made the argument for a stronger national organization prevail. Members are preparing for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign; DSA embraces the “rank-and-file strategy” as its labor orientation. This is the first convention where most of DSA’s largest and longest-lasting caucuses (Bread & Roses, Socialist Majority Caucus, Red Star, North Star) all made appearances.

2021 virtual convention: By far the worst convention I ever “attended.” The in-person event canceled because of the pandemic, hundreds of delegates attempt to do democracy online, with very underwhelming results. I remember very little about this event.

2023 in Chicago, Illinois: My memory of the post-2021 convention period is one of an organization that was relatively dormant nationally, beset by more internal fighting than before, and less productive. The 2023 convention is a useful reset, and I think DSA starts to rebound after this. Most important is the creation of full-time cochair positions, which eventually replaced the unelected national director position as the key leaders of DSA.

Nick French’s post two weeks ago for Left Notes provoked a few interesting reactions that got both of us thinking more about the meaning of democratic socialism. The main question posed to Nick by a number of comrades had to do with the robustness of his distinction between democratic socialism on the one hand and other kinds of socialist politics on the other.

On X, one challenge was posed by a comrade named Nik against the idea that there is a clear distinction between democratic socialists and social democrats. Nik wrote: “I think my issue with this though is European social democrats started off as Marxist and for the most part claimed their goal was socialism until very recently like the 90s.”

In a similar vein, in the comments trenches of Nick’s article,1 Adam pointed out that the line between democratic socialists and some who call themselves communists today is blurry too:

Here in Austria, the Communist Party has found success running on a platform essentially the same as [Zohran] Mamdani’s. Does that mean they’re democratic socialists? In a certain sense, yes, but they still identify as Communists because that’s the specific socialist political tradition they come from – a political tradition that had radically democratic origins that are now being reclaimed, in spite of the tradition’s Stalinist degeneration.

How to respond? Let’s set aside the messier question of specific labels for a minute and try to make some meaningful conceptual distinctions between different kinds of socialist projects, distinguished in terms of these projects’ end goals and means of getting there.

The Socialization Question

The core distinction in Nick’s piece has to do with a project’s orientation to changing the basic property relations in a society. Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of society’s productive assets (the “means of production”) by a small class of capitalists. This economic system produces many problems that all political projects of the left, from the most radical to the most moderate, try to address in some way.

Some projects want to address these problems by lessening the suffering of those on the losing end of the system while respecting and even defending the basic property relations of capitalism. These projects may lay claim to the socialist label out of some combination of loyalty to the tradition they emerged from and a belief that they are still loyal to a set of values that could be called socialist, even if they think those values can coexist with a capitalist economic system.2

Other projects are not opposed to that kind of amelioration but want to go further. They want to restructure the economy as a whole by moving toward a system that combines public ownership and worker cooperatives, potentially with some much-reduced-in-significance private ownership sector. Nick’s piece does a great job of laying out the details of this point, so I won’t go into it further.

Let’s call this issue the socialization question. To rephrase it: Does a socialist project respect private ownership rights, or is it trying to socialize (take under public or cooperative control) most productive assets?

A good illustration of this difference lies in the changes made to the UK Labour Party’s program in the 1990s. In 1918, the Labour Party adopted as part of its objectives the nationalization of much of private industry. The text of Clause IV called for: “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” In 1995, Tony Blair altered the language of Clause IV. Although his new version explicitly identified the Labour Party as a democratic socialist party, it defined socialism in terms of a set of values — solidarity, respect, tolerance — rather than as a new set of property relations. Where the Labour Party had once been for the socialization of the means of production, after 1995 it no longer saw this as an essential element of its version of democratic socialism.3

Another way to think about the socialization question is in these terms: Is socialism a destination? That is, is it a new economic system designed according to a set of values and to be brought about by taking the means of production into common ownership (the position of those who believe socialization is vital to the socialist project)? Or is socialism more like a moral compass? That is, is it exclusively a set of values, which can be realized within the capitalist system (the position of those who oppose the need to socialize the means of production)?

The Transition Question

Adam’s question gets at a different problem of definition. How does a socialist project aiming to socialize the economy intend to achieve its goals? Let’s call this the transition question.

Historically in capitalist democracies, socialist politics has also been split over this question. Socialists of different stripes have made different wagers about how they might come to hold state power. These different wagers often manifest themselves in different approaches to building organizations as well as different focuses for political work, a point I got into in “The Politics of the Three Lefts” last year. For our purposes here, the most important difference is over strategic objectives.

There are those who wager that the most likely and most desirable path to socialism in capitalist democracies would be by means of a democratic road to socialism. These democratic roaders see the election of a socialist government as a key strategic objective of their socialist project. (It’s necessary to specify that this is a position relevant only to capitalist democracies because there can be no democratic road in authoritarian regimes.)

Then there are those who wager that the most likely (even if not necessarily the most desirable) path would be by means of an insurrectionary road to socialism. Insurrectionary roaders see the installation of a socialist government on the back of a mass uprising that overthrows the existing government as a key strategic objective of their socialist project.

That’s the main difference. I say “a key strategic objective” in both cases because forming a government is just one big step on the long road to socialism in both projects. Following the coming to power of a socialist government, both democratic and insurrectionary roaders want it to make progressively deeper attacks on the private property rights of major corporations and big capitalists. And both projects, at least in theory, want to rebuild the structure of the state to put political power in the hands of working-class people and to minimize the power of the capitalist class.4

The smartest advocates of both roads have also always been clear-eyed that a new government — regardless of how it comes to power — will be fatally weakened without popular power behind it. Popular power means having an active and militant base of millions built around a mass party, powerful unions, neighborhood assemblies, and other social movements. That base needs to be able and willing to act independently, and if necessary challenge, a socialist government if it falters. This is the most important element in achieving any socialist transition.5

Socialist Projects of Types I, II, and III

If we combine the socialization question and the transition question we can specify three different types of socialist projects. (The chart at the top of this article illustrates this typology.)

A Type I socialist project is one that respects the economic structure of a capitalist economy and has no ambitions to socialize it.

A Type II socialist project is one that is committed to socializing the economy and sets as one of its key strategic objections the election of a socialist government.

A Type III socialist project is one that is also committed to socializing the economy but sets as one of its key objectives the installation a socialist government through an insurrection.

One Divides Into Two, Two Become One

Coming back to the question of social democracy, democratic socialism, and communism, let’s put the types to use by means of a ridiculous pairing.

In 1964, Maoists in China were locked in a strenuous debate about dialectics and contradictions. Orthodox followers of dialectical materialism defended the slogan that “one divides into two”: Everything contains contradictions inside itself and eventually splits into pieces. The pieces develop from there. Thirty-two years later, in 1996, the Spice Girls released the love song “2 Become 1” about two people merging themselves into a romantic relationship.

The actual labels we use to describe strategic differences in the socialist movement are messy because over the last 150 years one divided into two and two became one many times over, with very little respect for clean semantic distinctions.

To provide a sketchy history of the evolution of these labels in the twentieth century: Before 1914, both future dyed-in-the-wool reformists like the right wing of the German labor movement and future insurrectionists like the Russian Bolsheviks identified as “social democrats” and even saw themselves as being part of the same political project. One divided into two over the course of World War I, however, and by the early 1920s distinctions between social democrats and communists began to map fairly well on to distinctions between Type II and Type III socialists.

In the postwar period, two became one in one sense as communists in most Western European countries increasingly gravitated toward a democratic road. In fact, it was a communist, Nicos Poulantzas, who coined the term “democratic road to socialism.”6 The seemingly obvious distinction between social democrats as Type II and communists as Type III blurred significantly. Both camps began to look more and more like Type II, and the term “democratic socialism” became increasingly fashionable to describe this kind of politics.

But in another sense one divided into two. Many from the social democratic tradition became Type I socialists and surrendered any hope of challenging the capitalist class’s ownership rights over most of the economy’s productive assets. This transition picked up speed in the 1980s and ’90s — there was after all, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “no alternative” to capitalism.

Now, returning to the reactions to Nick’s post mentioned above: Adam is right to note that the historic traditions that the Communist Party of Austria and the Democratic Socialists of America come out of are very different. But as he also notes, their politics today are basically indistinguishable: they both fit comfortably into Type II. Nik is likewise right to note that many social democrats in postwar Europe believed that they were working toward building a socialist economy, they too were at one point Type II.

That’s all to say that history’s twists and turns have left us today with a complicated vocabulary for talking about socialist strategy.

One response to that complexity is to give up on the label game altogether. It’s tempting, but in my mind the fascination with questions like “What is the difference between socialism and communism?” in 2016 and 2020 during Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns is a reminder that the popular demand for labels and definitions is high (see the graph below, higher values mean greater interest in the search term at a given point in time). This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Labels help people arrange their mental maps of different sets of ideas and strategies and help them understand political debates.

Debates over how to define the term “democratic socialism” (and communism and social democracy) will continue, and they’re worth engaging in. Socialists will be hard pressed to resist supplying the arguments needed to meet the demand for definitions and distinctions. And since there are meaningful differences between the three types of socialists I’ve described here, there is a value in trying to connect those definitions to these real differences.

It’s certainly true that at the moment the meaning of democratic socialism is contested and the boundaries between democratic socialism and social democracy in particular are not perfectly clean. In the 2020s, both Type I socialists and Type II socialists (I put myself in the latter camp) lay claim to the democratic socialist identity. Discussions over the meaning of that identity are in part a semantic argument. But that semantic argument is also the entry point into a strategic debate about the long-term objectives of the socialist movement. Are we fighting for the kind of social democratic welfare state that many European countries have, and that Europe’s social democratic parties now act (at best) as custodians and conservers of? Or are our sights set higher? As someone who believes that the answers to those questions matter, I therefore also think the debate over the meaning of the labels is worth joining.

Thanks to Zohran Mamdani’s shock victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary last week, the New York Times is again asking what it means to be a democratic socialist. It’s a question worth revisiting, especially since the label is so widely contested even among democratic socialists ourselves.

How does the Times answer the question?

The term has no singular definition, and its supporters and critics assign it various descriptions. But the simplest way to understand democratic socialism, from an academic standpoint, is as an ideology rooted in its opposition to capitalism and wanting to shift power to workers from corporations.

In the United States, the policies that self-described democratic socialists advocate for generally do not involve the complete abolition of capitalism, but rather working within the system to enact left-wing priorities, such as raising the minimum wage. That makes them closer to social democrats — a common ideology in Europe that emphasizes strong social safety nets and government involvement in areas like health care — than traditional democratic socialists, who tend to see less room for compromise around capitalism. Either way, it places them further to the left than the average Democrat.

Although the New York Times has an illustrious record of dishonest left-punching, this characterization of democratic socialism actually isn’t a bad starting point. It is true that democratic socialism is based in “opposition to capitalism” and “wanting to shift power to workers from corporations”; it is also true that prominent democratic socialist politicians, from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Zohran Mamdani, have largely called for reforms in the vein of European social democrats or reviving and expanding FDR’s New Deal rather than “the complete abolition of capitalism.”

Does that mean self-described democratic socialists in the US are really just our version of European social democrats? I don’t think so. While I won’t speak for the personal beliefs of Bernie or AOC or Zohran, there is a philosophical distinction between social democracy and democratic socialism, and an argument for thinking the political project of Zohran et al. advances the cause of democratic socialism. 

The difference is that social democrats seek a class compromise between workers and capitalists as an end goal, whereas democratic socialists ultimately want to abolish the class system altogether. Social democrats believe, that is, that through government regulation and redistribution and collective bargaining, workers and capitalists can ensure sustainable economic growth whose benefits redound fairly to everyone, and that such an arrangement is indefinitely stable. Democratic socialists, on the other hand, reject the idea that such a compromise can last. We want to eventually establish an economic system that doesn’t depend on private ownership of productive assets and private owners’ exploitation of asset-less workers. 

Democratic socialists hold this goal for reasons of both moral principle and political strategy. Morally speaking, capitalism rests on the illegitimate domination of workers by capitalists in the workplace. This is true even in social democratic societies at their peak. And in most cases, capitalism produces a highly unjust and unequal distribution of the social product — a distribution that leaves some in miserable poverty and undermines the human flourishing of many people. In most cases, too, capitalism allows the very wealthy to wield undue influence in the political process through lobbying, campaign finance, and threats of capital strike and capital flight, and thereby undermines democracy. 

These moral objections correspond to a strategic objection to social democracy. Because it leaves immense wealth and power in the hands of capitalists and allows them to determine the direction of economic development, social democracy makes it easy for capitalists to undermine any class compromise that might be temporarily struck. It’s true that social democratic societies in some times and places have achieved a greater degree of equality than is the case in most capitalist societies, and in many cases these societies succeeded in putting some limits on the wealthy’s political influence. But those achievements were eroded sooner or later by ruling classes whose real source of power — their ownership over the means of production — was not successfully challenged.

How do capitalists use their immense wealth and control over the means of production to roll back social democratic reforms? Capital can use its almost-unlimited war chest to bankroll political and media opposition to unions and pro-worker policies and parties; when that is insufficient to get its way, it can use its structural leverage — its ability to withhold investments or take its money elsewhere — to force reformers to back off and eventually to undermine reforms already won. And under capitalism, profit-driven economic growth will undermine the durability of labor-movement strength and the social cohesion needed for left-wing forces to take on capitalist power. These claims are borne out by the actual history of social democratic societies, which have ultimately found their achievements halted and significantly undermined — thought not yet completely rolled back in most countries — by capitalist counteroffensives.

But what do democratic socialists mean when we say we should go beyond capitalism? Here I think we should admit that we don’t have a well-defined or widely agreed-upon goal. Most of us agree, in the near term, that we should try to establish the kinds of reforms that Nordic social democrats achieved at their height, including a generous and universalistic welfare state and strong unions with sectoral-level bargaining that reduced income inequality. 

When it comes to abolishing private ownership, most socialists reject the central planning model of the Soviet Union. But there are a variety of proposals for how to bring productive assets under more collective control while maintaining some benefits of market allocation — from worker co-ops to social wealth funds to John Roemer’s “coupon socialism” to state-owned or state-leased enterprises — with many theorists suggesting a mix of different forms of firm ownership and governance.

The institutional setup of a postcapitalist society would need to be the result of messy debate and experimentation over years or decades rather than theoretical dogma. We need to figure out through trial and error what economic policies actually facilitate equality and freedom and, more generally, human flourishing. When Karl Marx wrote that socialists should not seek to lay out intricate designs for a future socialist society, he must have had something like this point in mind. (The experimental attitude Zohran recently expressed when it came to his idea of city-owned grocery stores is very much in this spirit.) It might even be the case that some amount of private ownership (in the form of individual proprietorships or small businesses, maybe, or a limited startup sector) is beneficial for the sake of innovation or simply promoting individuals’ desire to live the way they want, so long as that doesn’t have oppressive consequences for others. 

@thebulwarkmediaZohran Mamdani on city-run grocery stores: "No matter how you think about the idea, I do think that there should be more room for reasonable policy experimentation in our cities and in our country....if they work, they work, and if they don't work, c'est la vie."

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Democratic socialists should countenance the possibility that political and economic realities are such that a return to the height of social democracy in, say, 1970s Sweden (as opposed to the abolition of capitalism) is all that’s on the table for the foreseeable future. But where social democrats see that as an end point, democratic socialists maintain the ideal of moving beyond capitalism, even if we may not reach it in our lifetimes. And we see social democratic reforms that expand the public sector and strengthen workers’ bargaining position and workplace rights — like those proposed by Zohran — as helping move us closer to that goal.

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What does it mean to run as a democratic socialist for mayor? And what sets a socialist candidate for mayor apart from progressive candidates? Those are the questions that many on the left are wrestling with as the momentum mounts for Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City.

Is Zohran’s platform indistinguishable from a progressive platform? In two important senses the answer is clearly no. First, Mamdani is running on a platform that puts rebuilding the public sector at its fore: most prominently through a plan for free and better buses, a test program to build publicly owned grocery stores, and an aggressive attack on the city’s wasteful dependence on private sector consultants. Mamdani also supports expanding the city’s childcare program and renovating and expanding public housing. This platform breaks with the center-left’s current submission to the belief that the private sector is the best means to deliver public goods.

It’s also a smart reply to the recent “abundance” arguments made by many in the party’s establishment. Yes, we need to build out transit and increase housing development, but the public sector should do those things. A strong defense of the public sector against privatization, and a willingness to push for its expansion instead of opting for “market-based solutions,” is an essential part of what it means to be a democratic socialist, and it’s a cause that Zohran has joined with force.

Second, for generations, all Democratic politicians in New York (including progressives) have pledged their fealty to the state of Israel. This is a game that Zohran (alone in the field of candidates) has refused to play. Not only is he the only candidate to refuse to make a symbolic trip to Israel, but he has popularized a true and damning criticism: that Israel is an apartheid state without equal rights for all its citizens. This combination of a vigorous case for the public sector and a solid commitment to international solidarity against the US-Israel alliance is the democratic socialist core of his platform.1

Raising Expectations

Those on the left who are primed to think that Zohran’s platform is “merely progressive” ignore the context in which that platform is being put forward. In a time of general retreat and demoralization, Mamdani’s campaign is reviving hope with a much more ambitious vision of left-wing politics. In a time when there is no precedent for left-wing governance in any major city in the country, his campaign is putting forward concrete pro-worker demands that are broadly popular, can test the bounds of what’s possible, and lay the groundwork for even bolder reforms to public transit, housing, and childcare, as well as the further expansion of the public sector.

Socialist platforms have historically followed the same logic. The Communist Manifesto includes demands that seem almost shockingly modest from our vantage point: the end of child labor, a progressive income tax, free public schools. The German Erfurt Program calls for the end of laws discriminating against women, universal suffrage, the separation of church and state, and free medical care (the last, alas, is still a radical demand in the United States). The socialist movement is “progressive” in this sense: it progresses as its power grows, moving from more modest to more radical reform fights. Zohran’s platform is the platform appropriate to a still very small and weak movement. Bigger reforms — say, a municipal version of single payer healthcare or a universally free public transit system — can be added to the agenda as our movement grows and our initial reforms are won.

None of this is to suggest that the pressure to adapt to mainstream politics and play by its rules isn’t a serious threat. If Zohran wins the Democratic nomination, and especially if he wins the general election in November, that pressure will become intense. Those on the left who scoff at these concerns as a “fear of power” or who exaggerate the power that a Mayor Mamdani would have are dangerously naive. Campaigns like Zohran’s are desperately needed — and if he won it would be an incredible opportunity — but the campaign and a potential administration will be much stronger if that threat is taken seriously.

Both the platform and the character of the campaign have had another beneficial and intended effect: both are raising expectations for what’s possible in electoral politics. The signs of this are clear. Zohran’s campaign has mobilized tens of thousands of people in a city where municipal politics are usually a dreary affair. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has grown by thousands of members. People are starting to believe again that left-wing politics can be about something more than playing defense against the onslaught from the far right. And for this reason, the campaign is starting to turn the screws on the centrist leadership of the party whose current strategy seems to be a return to Obama-era moderation.

When Progressives Echo Left-Wing Ideas

When left-wing activists and politicians raise people’s expectations, the effect is contagious. One reason I think a few of my friends and comrades on the left are skeptical of how radical Zohran’s platform really is is because key elements of it have been embraced in recent months by other progressives in the race. But months ago, the most prominent progressives running for mayor (including Brad Lander, who wanted to “see the data” first), refused to endorse the rent freeze Zohran first championed. As Zohran’s campaign took off and Lander’s straggled behind, Lander came on board. At last week’s debate, all except Andrew Cuomo and Whitney Tilson (the hedge fund manager who has served as Cuomo’s attack dog in the campaign while polling at 0 percent) endorsed the freeze.

That move is familiar. In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, many progressive (and faux-progressive) Democrats, hoping to catch up to the Bernie juggernaut, came out in favor of Medicare for All. Their support was conditional and in many cases more than a little duplicitous. The fact that they felt the need to endorse Medicare for All reflects the fact that progressive politicians and their staffers straddle the world of mainstream liberal politics on the one hand and the world of left-wing movement on the other. Torn between the two, they’re pulled in one direction or the other depending on where the energy is. The fact that progressive Democrats endorse left-wing demands in certain circumstances is a mark of progressives’ weakness; they do it only when the tide seems to be turning. It’s not a sign that the left is moderating its politics.

If nothing else, that makes progressives a good weathervane for knowing which way the wind is blowing. In 2025, those progressives are making a choice that ought to send us a clear signal: thanks to the work of the Zohran campaign and the New York chapter of DSA, the socialist left in the Big Apple has the wind at its back again.

The happiest, or at least most entertaining, news in US politics last week had to be the blowup of relations between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. After trading insults on social media — including Musk accusing the president of being “in the Epstein files” and Trump threatening to cancel all government contracts with Musk’s companies — a rapprochement between the president and his erstwhile advisor seems very unlikely.

Earlier this week, I wrote at Jacobin about the pathetic yet unsurprising calls coming from some Democrats, in the wake of the breakup, to try to bring Musk back into their corner. Despite his devolution into a raving reactionary and the ultimate Trump donor, Musk in a sense does belong in the Democratic Party. He became the world’s richest man thanks in no small part to the billions in federal subsidies Tesla and SpaceX received under Democratic presidents. Yet Dems’ former alignment with Musk — and the prospect they might team up once again — is a great encapsulation of what’s wrong with our would-be opposition party. As I put in my piece:

 The fundamental problem with Musk is not that he went from being a “good billionaire” to being a “bad billionaire.” The problem is that we have a political system that enables the existence of billionaires and that facilitates their subversion of democracy — a system propped up by both major parties.

That some Democrats are now seriously discussing whether and how they might woo Musk — an erratic, union-hating, austerity-crazed billionaire who promulgates fascist conspiracy theories about “the great replacement” and the genocide of white South Africans — back to their side is a consequence of this warped system.

Because the party takes no bold positions and sees its path to victory as being the anti-Trump and anti-GOP party, there is no person or idea beyond the pale for it to embrace, so long as it hurts Trump. We saw this in Kamala Harris’s campaign, of course, when Dems proudly championed the endorsement of the Cheneys or when they let billionaire Mark Cuban brag about his influence over the campaign to the New York Times. 

The more Democrats cozy up to billionaires and pro-corporate warmongers, however, the harder it becomes for them to be anything other than the anti-Trump party. As the tent gets more and more ludicrously big — stretching, potentially, from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk — the more the ever-widening contradictions between the party’s supporters make offering a positive program well nigh impossible. The growing tensions in their coalition are then a further spur to double down on defining themselves solely as “anti-Trump.” 

Breaking this cycle would mean deciding to stand up to the billionaire class — something Dems are for the most part loath to do.

Read the full article at Jacobin here.

It seems like not a week passes that we don’t learn about a new perverse use of artificial intelligence or get more information about its destructive effects. Earlier this month, much of my X/Twitter feed was talking about James D. Walsh’s New York magazine feature, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” The article is about, well, you can guess: the ubiquity of college students using AI to cheat on assignments, in both STEM and humanities classes, and college instructors being stumped as to what to do about it.

I saw some reactions to the piece suggesting that Walsh was being sensational: that AI-fueled cheating is not as common as he makes it out to be, or that there are obvious ways professors can AI-proof their assignments (e.g., assigning in-class, written Blue Book or oral examinations instead of term papers). Even if not everyone is cheating, however, in my own limited college-teaching experience post-ChatGPT, and that of other college instructors I’ve talked to, it is indeed widespread. And at least in many disciplines, there isn’t really a substitute for long-form argumentative writing of the kind that is especially vulnerable to AI cheating. 

Perhaps the problems here are manageable. But there’s something deeply disturbing about the habits and attitudes of the students that Walsh talked to. One of them, Chungin Lee, was a serial AI cheater at Columbia University, who dropped out to launch a start-up — whose aim is to build an app that helps students cheat on all manner of assignments. (Eventually, the hope is, the app will run in a wearable headset where it could even give you prompts to help you “cheat” on dates.)

Most of the students Walsh talked to do not come off as viciously amoral as Lee. An anonymous freshman at another university, who reported using ChatGPT to cheat in all her classes worried that she had become “dependent” on AI, said she “already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit” and that she would scroll TikTok “for hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork.” ChatGPT is, naturally, the solution to this problem.

I don’t mean to write a “kids these days” screed. Most of the blame for this sorry state of affairs has to be placed on the adults who brought this world into being. When it comes to higher education in particular, as Walsh himself observes, the set of incentives that is driving the current AI-cheating crisis took shape long ago:

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. . . . In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core.

I think this is right, though we can expect AI to speed the rotting. Sadly, this process — of a valuable sphere of activity being degraded into a mere means to an end, thereby leaving the door open for tech innovations like ChatGPT to blow the house over — has not been confined to the campus.

Killed by Convenience

I recently found out about a particularly incredible application of generative AI. The family of a man who was killed in a road-rage incident in Chandler, Arizona, used AI to create a simulation of the deceased man giving his own impact statement in the sentencing of his convicted killer. “The state asked for a 9.5-year sentence, and the judge ended up giving [the killer] 10.5 years for manslaughter, after being so moved by the powerful video, family says,” according to ABC 15 Arizona. “The judge even referred to the video in his closing sentencing statements.”

I’m tempted to reach for the contemporary cliché that this is something out of a Black Mirror episode — that this incident calls for even greater suspension of disbelief than the Netflix show does. While I can certainly understand the family of a murder victim going to great lengths to honor their memory, and to seek what they think of as justice — why would a court of law indulge the fantasy that an AI program could bring a person back to life? And more importantly, why would a judge see such a performance as relevant to their decision?

The absurdity of this use of AI surpasses what I previously thought of as a peak case, of people having romantic relationships and falling in love with chatbot companions. As I’ve discussed here before, I think mistaking human-chatbot interactions for real human relationships is a grave metaphysical and moral error. It also comes with very tangible risks, shown by the case of the teenage boy who was pushed into committing suicide by his AI companion, and by a number of people who seem to be having psychiatric delusions triggered by their conversations with ChatGPT. And that’s not to mention the way generative AI is adding a layer of fake (but often undetectably so) slop onto our already attention-sucking, anxiety-producing, mind-melting social media feeds.

How did we get here? The incentives driving the purveyors of social media and AI are clear enough. What ultimately matters for Silicon Valley is not the actual usefulness of its inventions or their broader social consequences, but what people are willing to pay for them. In this, of course, tech capitalists aren’t different from any other capitalists. But what is maybe distinctive about the contemporary tech sector is the way its products are interacting with consumers’ preferences and values.

Think about many of the consumer products we associate with the conveniences of modern capitalism: telephones, automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators. These either allowed us to do things we were previously unable to do — like talk over long distances, or keep food for longer periods of time without it going bad — or to be much more efficient in doing things we were already able to do, like traveling via road or doing the dishes or the laundry. While some precious souls might romanticize the days of having to correspond by mail or horse-and-buggy transportation, most of us are happy we have the tools we now have to facilitate valuable activities like staying in touch with distant loved ones, or just to make day-to-day tasks like feeding and clothing ourselves easier.

At least in some of its prominent uses, AI is doing something profoundly different. The processes of reading, grappling with, and writing texts oneself is necessary for one’s actually learning the subject matters that the texts deal with. The student who uses AI to do these things is obviously not developing the skills to do them themselves, nor in all likelihood are they learning whatever it is the relevant texts — and the process of grappling with them — might have to teach.

Unsatisfied

The prospect of students using ChatGPT to read and write for them en masse, then, is worrying for our future. Even if we’re bullish about large language models (LLMs) overcoming their current defects to produce more accurate and artful imitations of human writing, we at the very least need literate people to produce original research and writing. And even if — a big if — we think that AI will one day be able to do that (perhaps we’ll digitize all the historical archives and the whole physical realm of flora and fauna and celestial bodies, and perhaps LLMs will become capable of making truly novel arguments), we at least need people who are capable of checking the AI for accuracy. 

But set aside these more technical worries. Grant for the sake of argument that the skill defects created by students using AI as a crutch will ultimately be remedied by AI, as its evangelists seem to imagine. Still, I would maintain that it’s intrinsically bad for people to not learn to read, grapple with, and produce thoughts on their own. It is bad, in other words, for people not to learn how to think. It is destructive for them, as individuals, not to develop their capacities for rational thought, and destructive for us as a society. (And it is not so far-fetched to imagine it leading to dystopian outcomes.)

The problem here is that what is in fact a final good, or an end in itself, in the classical philosophical terminology — something valuable for its own sake, and not just as a way of getting or bringing about something else we care about — is being treated merely as an instrumental good, or a means to an end. The creators of AI encourage people to use it to do the sorts of research, insight extraction, and thought that would have once been the purview of human subjects. These activities, as philosophical traditions stretching back to antiquity have stressed, are worth doing and caring about for their own sake. When we ask AI to engage in them for us, we are treating final goods as if they were instrumental goods.

The same can be said about substituting AI companionship for the human kind. In that case, conversations or relationships are seen merely as a means to the end of making us feel good, of releasing the appropriate neurotransmitters in one’s brain. But that, I’d think it wouldn’t need to be said, is a depressingly, perversely instrumental view of human relationships.

To be sure, none of this matters from the perspective of the tech capitalists; they just care about making money off of AI. But their ability to profit from AI depends on consumers actually finding it useful for certain things. And clearly, consumers are finding it useful — to complete homework assignments so they don’t have to do any reading or writing themselves, or to enjoy the frictionless simulation of human interaction and companionship without the inconvenience of having to deal with an actual person.

AI might be very good at satisfying these consumer preferences. The problem is, the preferences themselves are corrupt. They are corrupt precisely because they involve the inversion of instrumental and final goods discussed above: treating thinking as a burden that needs to be gotten through so we can get an A, or treating conversation merely as a means to a desired sense of comfort or affirmation.

The claim that some preferences are distorted may be a hard pill to swallow in our contemporary cultural moment, when the primacy of individual desire and choice has become common sense and convenience and efficiency are cherished among the highest human values. To be on the left, however, means wanting to expand genuine autonomy and the opportunity to flourish for all people. And that means leftists can’t avoid reckoning with the facts that some desires are deeply misguided, and that catering to their satisfaction is fundamentally at odds with our goals of promoting autonomy and human flourishing.

I’ll leave it to others — but not ChatGPT — to figure out a more complete left-wing response to AI. But any response should start by fostering a deep skepticism about the supposed benefits of Silicon Valley’s miracle product, forthrightly challenging Big Tech’s economic and political power, and being willing to advocate for severe restrictions on AI’s use — even, or especially, when consumers find it too seductive to resist.

In ongoing intraleft debates, many arguments are thrown against the idea that the left needs its own political party.

One such argument goes like this: Maybe it would be desirable for socialists, union organizers, and movement activists to come together to build an independent political party in the United States with its own name and ballot line, but it is impossible to have one given how parties are regulated by the government. This is because — so the argument goes — anyone can register with a party regardless of whether they really agree with it, parties are required to use government-administered nomination processes to choose their candidates, and anyone registered with a party can vote and/or run in its primaries.

These alleged facts about how parties are regulated supposedly make it impossible for political parties to exist in any meaningful sense in the US. Anyone can join a party and run as a nominee of that party, even if they don’t agree with it and hold ideas that are totally opposed to the party’s program. If hostile forces try to hijack a party’s ballot line, the rules that govern parties make them helpless in the face of such raids. In a certain sense, parties in the US don’t even really exist — you could go so far as to say that the way that parties are regulated by state governments means that real political parties are illegal in this country.

Again, this is not my argument, but it’s a common one that will probably sound familiar to those versed in the Democratic Socialists of America’s internal debates. And it is the alleged permeability of parties in the US, especially the strong rights of anyone registered with a party to run for its nomination and vote in its primaries, that makes DSA’s strategy of working within the Democratic Party possible.

This is the argument that Michael Kinnucan made recently, now published on the blog of DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus under the title “Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States.” Michael’s article is built around a hypothetical case in which leftists form a new “Socialism Party.” Such a party, Michael argues, would be helpless to stop “milquetoast liberals” from winning its nomination and would be incapable of un-endorsing candidates who abandon or reject from the start the party’s program. The left might launch an independent labor party, but its distinctive politics could quickly be overwhelmed by libertarians, MAGA Republicans, or Abundance liberals. “[A]ny state rep candidate who can get a couple dozen people to check a box on a form in any district in the state can run as an official candidate of the Socialism Party and we can’t do a thing about it” (emphasis added).

For anyone interested in building a group of elected officials and grassroots activists that are united around a shared strategy and program, organizing as an independent party that is vulnerable to this kind of raiding and potential entry by hostile candidates could in fact be extremely counterproductive. “Procedural regulation,” Michael writes, “makes candidate accountability impossible.” Therefore, by becoming a formally recognized, independent party, the hypothetical Socialism Party surrenders any right to control who is and who isn’t a voter in its primaries or a candidate on its ballot line — even if a potential candidate disagrees with the Socialism Party on, for example, as serious an issue as the genocide in Gaza. “Do members of the Socialism Party want to strip SP elected officials of party membership if they support a war or genocide? Too bad, the state says those elected officials will still be eligible to run and vote in SP primaries.”

It’s not just the hypothetical Socialism Party that faces these problems, according to Michael. The major parties do too. “If the Democrats had been able to disqualify AOC from running as a Democrat, or disqualify left-wing voters from voting in primaries . . . no doubt they would have. But they can’t.”

To sum up, Michael writes:

The state has set rules such that it is ILLEGAL for us to have an organized group of socialists who make collective decisions and have those decisions be binding on an electoral US party. It's not merely hard or impractical — it's impossible.

Parties Don’t Work That Way

As an objection to building an independent party, Michael’s argument is an interesting challenge. But it’s based on a number of assumptions about how parties work that don’t seem to be accurate.

I have not reviewed every state’s electoral codes governing parties. But I’ve examined a few, and I haven’t found any so far that support Michael’s account of how parties are regulated. Instead, it seems to be the case that state laws explicitly protect a political party’s right to define what it means to be a member and also provides clear mechanisms by which a party can enforce that definition. After a hearing and a decision is reached by the party leadership that a voter is not in sympathy with the party’s principles, party leaders can instruct the board of elections to unenroll said voter from the party. Unenrolling a voter makes them ineligible to run for the party’s nomination or even vote in its primary.

Take New York, for example, where Michael and I both live. If you look up § 16-110(2) of the New York state election law, there is a clear procedure that parties can use to unenroll individuals or candidates — a means by which a party could prevent candidates from running on that party’s ballot line or even prevent a group of voters from voting in that party’s primary. You can register as a Democrat in New York, but if the party leadership decides you do not meet its definition of what a Democrat is, they can unenroll you.

There are a number of legal cases that involve the application of this procedure, including a case in 2009 (Walsh v. Abramowitz) in which hundreds of New York’s Police Benevolent Association members attempted to enroll in the Conservative Party and were then disenrolled from the party after Conservatives held a hearing and expelled them for entryism (it's a wild case for many reasons).

Contrary to what Michael seems to say, the courts in the cases I’ve read repeatedly stress that it is essential to protect parties’ ability to expel those in fundamental disagreement with their program. Only by having this power can parties actually define what it means to be a member of their party and offer distinct politics and programs to voters. Some of the cases I've read emphasize the need for such a mechanism to protect minor parties in particular. These small parties are otherwise especially vulnerable to raiding because their nomination contests involve many fewer voters.

Against what Michael and some others in DSA argue, then, parties in the United States very much are legal and have the legal right to defend themselves from raiding by hostile forces and from candidates whose politics are not in line with the party’s principles.1 The fact that such mechanisms are rarely used in the US speaks to the ideologically-broad nature of the Democratic (and, until recently at least) Republican parties — but that’s a choice those parties make, not a rule forced on them.

There are other, more compelling reasons to do electoral politics inside the Democratic Party. I wrote about one that I disagree with but take seriously last year: that by being a “junior partner” in the Democratic Party fold, socialists might be able to win important reforms. But “parties are illegal” is not a compelling argument for working inside the Democratic Party. We should add that to the list of not-great reasons for doing so, alongside flawed arguments that the spoiler effect or restrictive ballot access laws pose insurmountable challenges to running serious independent general election campaigns.

Follow-Up

Since I wrote this reply, Michael replied to some of the points above. Michael says that the point in his piece was that having an independent party does not in and of itself improve a political project’s ability to discipline its elected officials.

This is a different point from the original argument that political parties in the United State are illegal. I’m glad Michael wrote the original argument down in article form, because it’s one that I’ve heard many times in DSA and one that needs to be debated more.

But the new argument Michael puts forward is also interesting. And on this point, I think I agree with him. Having a distinct labor or socialist ballot line and an independent party identity would not automatically make it easier for leaders to build a unified party.

I think it would help. The fact that elected officials of an independent labor party would no longer caucus with Democrats inside legislatures would, I imagine, make them less susceptible to pressure from Democratic leaders to spurn the left. And being part of a distinct, publicly-recognizable party does generate a degree of unity. Think of how united Democrats and Republicans are today; there’s a reason people refer to these as “tribal identities.” But a formally independent party — desirable as it is for many other reasons — is not the key to creating a unified bloc of elected officials and members.

Consider for example the Labour Party in the UK. Like other parties in the UK, it is usually a fairly unified group in Parliament. But there have been times when that unity has fallen apart. In 2003, for example, more than 100 Labour members of Parliament voted against Tony Blair’s push to join the Iraq War. They were not forced to vote with the majority of the leadership just in virtue of being Labour Party members.

The point here is that having an independent party is not identical with having a unified party, in the United States or abroad. Political unity and discipline are not won simply by having an independent party. They are the result of building up a party culture that respects an internal decision-making process and the outcomes of that process, and a result of building up a sense that “we’re all in this together” and that we have to act together. Michael is right these qualities are not created simply by being a formally-recognized political party.

But again, that’s a very different argument than the original idea that parties are illegal in the United States. It’s time we put that argument to bed.2

It’s hard to look away from the political storm wreaking havoc on this country. As someone who mostly thinks and writes about the left’s electoral strategy and our relationship to the Democratic Party, I’ve had a hard time writing about my usual subjects.

But last week, Catalyst published a long-form article of mine, “The Democrats Embrace Dealignment.” That’s as good a time as any to take a short break from the chaos and think about something somewhat removed. So here’s the capsule summary of the argument (though I hope you’ll check out the full piece over at Catalyst):

In the article, I take up and argue for Bernie’s pithy explanation for the Democrats’ 2024 drubbing. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” I think he’s right on the money.

A lot has now been written about the extent of class dealignment, which is the shorthand label for the process of workers and center-left politicians drifting apart. My article focuses on explaining how class dealignment came about, and to do so I start by identifying its origin point in the 1990s. Up until the ’90s, Democrats could count on majority support from working-class voters in congressional elections, while Republicans depended on the middle class (see the figure below for what that looks like — more detail in the full piece). And although Democrats lost every presidential election between 1968 up until 1992 save one, which meant they lost a majority of voters from both classes, their presidential coalitions disproportionately relied on working-class support as well.

That historic coupling between working-class voters and the Democratic Party came undone because Democrats pursued a very different economic strategy under Bill Clinton than they had pursued before. Party leaders made austerity, free trade, and financial deregulation their version of “peace, land, and bread.” I go into some detail in the piece about why Democrats made this turn, but suffice it to say that the results weren’t pretty — especially since the party’s right turn came in the middle of deindustrialization and its free trade policy in particular became an easy target for critics. As I also show in the article, leading Democrats at the time, including many in the party’s economic policymaking circles, were fully aware of the negative consequences their program would have for the party’s working-class supporters. They pursued the program anyway.

Crisis and Opportunity for the Democrats

It didn’t take long for voters to punish Democrats. The 1994 midterm election was a wipeout — the first time since 1952 that Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives. Democrats were then locked out of control of Congress for the next twelve years, the party’s longest losing streak since the 1920s.

All this amounted to a major crisis for the party. But rather than change their economic program, Democratic leaders gradually coalesced around a different solution to their ills: change their social base. Here’s Al From, CEO of the party’s centrist faction, the Democratic Leadership Council, who put the party’s new strategy perfectly:

The New Economy is creating a new electorate that demands a new politics. The sharp class differences of the Industrial Age are becoming less distinct as more and more Americans move into the middle and upper-middle classes. The New Deal political philosophy that defined our politics for most of the 20th century has run its course; the political coalition it spawned has been split. Like Humpty Dumpty, the New Deal coalition cannot be put back together again. The new electorate is affluent, educated, diverse, suburban, “wired,” and moderate. And it responds more favorably to the New Democrat political philosophy than to any other.

In pursuit of organizing this new wired constituency, Democrats increasingly focused their attention in the 2000s on affluent, suburban parts of the country. These areas were the terrain deemed to be most fruitful for the party to pick up seats in Congress and votes in presidential elections.

On the policy front, Democrats’ top power brokers, financiers, and economic strategists became increasingly concerned in the 2000s that the mood of the country was turning against the neoliberal order they had helped design. It’s in this period that the party’s top strategists, many with Wall Street connections, began to talk about rebuilding the social safety net. That paved the way, after Democrats’ landslide victory in 2008, for the Obama administration’s push to expand Medicaid access and subsidize health insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act.

But these efforts had pretty severe limits. The party’s unshakable commitment to working with capital on any proposed reform program gives capital a veto power over the party’s policy agenda. That was true for Bill Clinton, it was true for Barack Obama, and it was true for Joe Biden (something I first wrote about back in 2021). In the Catalyst piece, I call this the “corporate filter,” because party leaders never seriously pursue policies that can’t get significant business backing. That’s why every Democratic administration since Harry Truman’s has promised to reform labor law and none have delivered.

The payoff of the piece is to put the blame (or the credit, if you’re one of the many Democrats who view the party’s “brahminization” as a good thing) for class dealignment on the party’s leadership, and in particular on its business-friendly economic program. As I argue at the end, the fundamental assumptions of that economic program — especially giving veto rights to the leading sections of capital over the party’s reform agenda — have not changed at all, even under the Biden presidency.

The Upshot for the Left

What this means for the left and the labor movement’s electoral strategy depends on how optimistic you are about our chances to remove the party’s leadership. It’s the party leadership that has to be dislodged and replaced if there’s going to be any hope of pursuing both a much more ambitious (and less business-friendly) reform agenda and a new electoral strategy focused on building a working-class majority.

If you are optimistic that a new party leadership can be installed in the near term — by replacing Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries as the party’s congressional co-consuls and then by winning the 2028 presidential nomination battle for someone from the progressive left — your marching orders are clear.

But for my part, I can’t see how that could come to pass. To begin with, replacing Schumer and Jeffries would require replacing 50 percent + 1 of the existing crew of Democratic senators and representatives. Without a left majority in both Democratic caucuses (something that is, I think, inconceivable), Schumer and Jeffries will be secure in their leadership roles. There has been talk of replacing Schumer, but given the present composition of the Democratic Senate caucus, that would be a cosmetic change if it happened. They’re not putting Bernie Sanders in charge of the party. Prospects for winning the party’s 2028 presidential nomination seem equally bleak, especially as the party’s middle-class, suburban makeover makes it harder and harder for a genuine candidate of the labor left to grab the nomination.

Luckily for those of us looking for an alternative, we’ve got examples to look to. The real Bernie model — the story of how an unapologetic, pro-labor, independent, democratic socialist conquered Vermont back when it was a red state — should be better known. As should projects like the Vermont Progressive Party, California’s Richmond Progressive Alliance, and union activist Dan Osborn’s run for Senator in Nebraska last year. Independent politics can work if it’s pursued seriously. For the last decade, much of the left’s electoral energy has been poured into trying to work within the Democratic Party and hoping that its leadership can be nudged left. As I conclude my Catalyst piece, I think it’s past time that we change direction:

If the 2024 election puts the labor left on a more aggressive course to challenge the party, it could yet have some positive long-term effects. We can work toward that change. Any ambitions for developing a robust response to the ongoing climate catastrophe, rebuilding an economy that guarantees good work and social support for all, securing racial justice and the defense of civil rights and personal freedoms, and forging a more peaceful and cooperative world order — to say nothing of loftier aspirations for winning a democratic socialist future — rest on finding a more independent and confrontational approach to a Democratic Party that has fully shorn itself of its New Deal heritage.

This interview is being copublished with In These Times.

There can be no doubt that the last few years have seen a surge of energy in the labor movement, including union breakthroughs at corporate behemoths Amazon and Starbucks, an explosion of new organizing in higher education, and reform in the United Auto Workers leading to a victorious strike at the Big Three automakers and a serious push to unionize auto in the South. Yet despite all this, overall union density has continued to decline, now standing at just 9.9% of all US workers. Labor’s continued weakness is all the more troubling given Donald Trump’s recent election victory and his administration’s aggressive attacks on federal workers, labor protections, and basic civil liberties.

How might labor finally reverse its long decline and help forge an alternative to the ascendant MAGA movement? In his new book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, labor scholar Eric Blanc argues that the key lies in the approach he calls “worker-to-worker organizing”: relying on the initiative of rank-and-file workers to lead union drives and organize one another, making use of new opportunities provided by digital tools. According to Blanc, new organizing advances at Starbucks, the NewsGuild, and the UAW were made possible by worker-to-worker organizing, and the labor movement can best build on these wins by applying the worker-to-worker organizing model more widely.

For Left Notes and In These Times, Nick French interviewed Blanc about the argument of We Are the Union. They discussed how the worker-to-worker model differs from more traditional left-wing approaches to union strategy, why twenty-first-century social and economic conditions might call for novel organizing tactics, the opportunities and dangers posed by digital tools, and the prospects for worker-led unionism powering left-wing breakthroughs in the political arena.

Worker-to-Worker Organizing

Nick French: Could you briefly explain what the "worker-to-worker" organizing model is? What's the central argument of your book?

Eric Blanc: I'd start by talking about the reason this matters. We need tens of millions of more workers in the union movement in order for us to win all the transformative policies and changes that are urgently needed, because unions are working people's major tool to combat corporate power and greed. Whether it's the question of reversing economic inequality, defeating MAGA, or winning a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, all of these things are off the table as long as the labor movement only has 6 percent of the workforce in the private sector organized and 10 percent total.

My book tries to address the question: what would it actually take to organize at scale? How do you unionize tens of millions of workers? I argue that some of the recent unionization drives — like Starbucks and in media and to a certain extent in the auto industry — have demonstrated a form of organizing that is scalable because it's less staff-intensive. The argument of the book is, first and foremost, that the currently prevailing organizing model of the labor movement can't win widely enough; it can't scale, because it's just too costly in terms of money and in terms of time.

So you have to find a way to pass off the types of tasks normally done by staff onto worker leaders. Coaching, training other workers, initiating campaigns, and strategizing: these are things that are normally monopolized by staff, and that if you're going to build a real mass movement of unionization, you're going to need to find ways for workers to take ownership over those responsibilities.

And that’s not only true in offensive battles — it’s just as true for the big battles right now to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s attacks on federal services and federal unions. There aren’t enough staff to organize millions of federal workers to fight back, which is why a new worker-to-worker organization, the Federal Unionists Network, has emerged and is playing a key role in the fightback.

Nick French: Coming out of a left-wing tradition of unionism, a lot of what you say sounds familiar and unobjectionable. So who really disagrees with the idea that workers should be leading unionization efforts, or that workers should be the ones driving their unions? Who are your main philosophical opponents here?

Eric Blanc: The major obstacle is not that anybody is arguing staff should drive unionization, but that the nominal goal of having workers take the lead (which most unions at least pay lip service to) has not actually been widely implemented in practice. It's much easier said than done. What I try to show are the precise mechanisms through which this type of bottom-up organizing is possible. Most unions still aren't doing it, and certainly not at the scale this period of crisis demands, so it’s necessary to concretize what this looks like and to motivate its urgency.

A lot of unions think that in today's conditions, we're just going up against such powerful enemies that unless you have an extremely staff-intensive approach, it's not possible to win. So even when [they believe] you need to train worker leaders, the assumption is still that you have to have this army of staff behind them. That was the prevailing practice in the 1990s, and staff-intensive organizing is still the prevailing practice today. My book is trying to say to unions: if you're serious about implementing our goals of empowering worker leaders, this is the only way to do it at scale and to do it consistently.

You're right that the argument is in some way a standard, long-standing left argument. It's shared by Labor Notes and goes back to the Communist Party: the idea that workers should be in the driver's seat of the labor movement. But I don't think that Labor Notes has fully articulated what that looks like for building new unions today; their project of putting workers in the driver's seat has been primarily oriented around transforming existing unions. So I see this as very much in the Labor Notes spirit, but trying to put flesh into the vision of what this looks like for bringing new members into unions.

Relatedly, I argue that new organizing does have to take a different form than it did in the 1960s or '70s, or in the 1930s. And there are real debates in the movement about the extent to which you can just concentrate on a few critical big workplaces. This is part of the tradition going back to the '30s, which a lot of leftists in the 1960s and '70s still had; I think that hyper-concentrated approach is less valid today than it was fifty years ago and a hundred years ago. That's maybe a third point of divergence with parts of the left-labor tradition. I argue for an approach that seeks to unionize a very wide range of industries, and I argue that targeting strategic workplaces has to be combined with a more widespread seeding of drives.

(De)centralization and Targeting

Nick French: I want to press on that point a bit. Sure, there's not really the equivalent of the big Ford River Rouge auto plant and the surrounding, tightly knit neighborhood communities. But isn't there still a reason to focus unionization efforts on companies or on sections of the economy where workers have more economic or social power? Sometimes you seem to advocate a less targeted approach in general, even at the level of companies or sectors. It's sort of, "We need to try to organize everywhere."

Eric Blanc: In the book, I try to soberly analyze the changes in the political economy since the 1930s and the industrial and social dispersion that has come about through the decentralization of industry and housing. With the rise of the service sector and suburbia and long commutes and the decentralization of industry, the average worker today works in a small workplace and doesn't live next to their coworkers; and the biggest companies in the United States in terms of workforce today are dispersed into thousands of relatively small workplaces all across the country that are harder to disrupt through central choke points like you had with some of the key auto plants in the 1930s.

In the Flint sit-down strike, if you took down one or two mother plants, you could take down the entire production and distribution line nationwide. The nature of logistics and retail today makes it so that in order to hit an analogous level of disruption, you have to organize far more workers, more widely. Essentially, my argument is that the question of scale becomes much more important because of this socio-economic dispersion.

My point isn’t at all that there are no longer choke points or that there are no longer strategic workplaces to focus on. I'm pretty explicit in the book that you do have to be strategic, and there are still industries and companies and occupations that are more strategic than others, and I talk a lot abut the importance of salting such targets. Salting is, by necessity, targeted, and I've been supporting the Democratic Socialists of America's new Workers Organizing Workers program to build wide-scale salting. When you have a salting program, you're trying to focus them on the most strategic places. You're not just saying, "Hey, go wherever"; what we do is help put people in the best places to initiate and support the country’s most pivotal campaigns.

And of the things I point out in the book is that part of the reason the labor uptick of the last four years has caught people's imagination is it’s gone after the biggest companies. I don't think it would have caught people's imagination if you hadn't had such high-profile targets. But to get to high levels of disruption, you need far more workers unionized than you did in the past.

And I don't think it's so helpful to counterpose targeting and what I call "seeding." To maximize the impact of targeted organizing, you need to combine this with efforts to proactively spread widespread seeds of unionization in the company or industry you’re trying to unionize. What that looked like in auto, for instance, was that the United Auto Workers (UAW) organized a massive strike in the Big Three, and it used all of this attention focused on it to call on all autoworkers across the entire United States to unionize. What they were doing was mass seeding. It was targeted at a specific industry, but they cast the seeds very widely rather than predetermining one or two plants to focus all their attention on.

If you look at what happened at Starbucks, salts were crucial for winning an initial union election in Buffalo in late 2021. But in order for them to win at scale nationwide, they had to pivot to seeding. They couldn't then go salt thousands of new stores or send staff to target these from the outside. Instead, they called on everyone in the company to start unionizing, and they gave tools for these workers all across the country to start self-organizing. It was relatively targeted in the sense that they were trying to organize Starbucks — they weren't calling on every coffee worker to unionize. But they had to pivot away from hyper-focused targeting to encourage this level of broader self-organization.

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The Role of Digital Tools

Nick French: Another issue I wanted to talk about was the importance you place on digital tools for worker-to-worker organizing. A point I saw Jane Slaughter raise in her review in Jacobin the other day was that you can't build trust the same way with digital tools as you do with face-to-face interaction. Is that a problem? More generally, what sorts of challenges or dangers might the use of digital tools pose?

Eric Blanc: I was surprised by Jane's comment, because my argument in the chapter I have on digital technology is that while digital tools can be used for shallow mobilizing — that's frankly how most of the nonprofit left has used them — they should be used instead for deep organizing. It depends on how you use these tools.

My argument isn't that digital technologies can replace one-on-one conversations, but that they do two specific things that are very important for scaling up worker-to-worker organizing. One is they lower organizing costs, which makes it possible for workers to start self-organizing without needing the same degree of union resources. For instance, if you can meet over Zoom instead of having to rent an office hall, this helps workers start self-organizing before having to affiliate with an established union.

The second thing new technology does is allow worker-to-worker coaching to happen on a national level. This is really a game-changer. Up until maybe ten years ago, the only possible way for workers to coach other workers in this type of organizing was locally. If you were trying to coach a union drive all the way across the country, you would have to pay a staffer to go out and talk to that drive. There was no way for workers to have the kind of intensive back-and-forth training and coaching that good organizing entails. But now, because of digital technologies, workers are able to connect with each other in any part of the country, and that's how these big campaigns at Starbucks and in the NewsGuild in particular have grown so widely through worker-to-worker mechanisms.

I’m not saying this replaces workers at a worksite talking to each other in person or one-on-one. That's not the argument. And in fact, what they're training these workers to do over these remote trainings and coaching sessions is how to do precisely that: how to have intensive deep-organizing conversations with their coworkers.

The big danger of digital is that people use this as a substitute for the traditional, time-tested tactics of building solidarity and community. In fact, the book argues that one of the crucial things we need to do much more of, given our social atomized context, is socialize. If anything, organizers need to proactively encourage socializing more than they did in the past, when workers tended to feel more connected to each other because they lived nearby, went to same churches, drank at the same bars, all that. You need it far more than in the past, because workers don't feel as connected to each other intuitively as they maybe did in previous eras. The question is: How do we use digital tools to help rebuild up that type of dense working-class culture?

Union Reform, New Organizing, and Political Change

Nick French: Earlier you said that this older left-wing tradition of bottom up-unionism has not really focused on the question of how to organize new unions, and it's been more focused on union reform. On that point, especially thinking about some of the examples we've been talking about and that you talk about in the book: one reason why a lot of folks have focused on union reform, I think, is because of the idea that, in order to do new organizing at scale, we need to get the institutional resources of major unions behind it.

The example of UAW reform and the UAW's subsequent new organizing efforts is a great example of that. And Starbucks, in a way, insofar as the later drives had institutional union support. On the question of strategy and where to focus our energies is, what's your answer to the idea that there's a wisdom in focusing on union reform, rather than going out on your own as a salt or just organizing your workplace, wherever you happen to be?

Eric Blanc: When it comes to union reform, I think my book is very much in the Labor Notes tradition, which poses the centrality of union transformation. I agree with that 100 percent.

Where I’m trying to push in a new direction from the Labor Notes tradition — at least as it tended to be practiced until very recently — is the idea that union reform always has to happen first and then new organizing will only happen after. But that hasn't been how it's always turned out.

It's not the case that you always have to wait for unions to be reformed through a caucus in order to start new organizing — in fact, new union drives have often turned out to be the key first step toward union transformation. I give an example from the NewsGuild, where an LA Times worker named Jon Schleuss helped unionize the paper in a very bottom-up way in 2019, despite a relatively moribund union organizing culture. And after they organized their shop, Jon and his coworkers decided that they had to take that same bottom-up energy and run against the incumbent president. In a major upset, they won that election and have proceeded to transform the Guild nationally. Self-organization in new organizing can bring in the energy that makes it possible then to transform the union; it wasn't just because of a preexisting internal caucus.

Union reform ideally takes the form of fightback troublemakers winning union leadership. But it also can look a bit like what happened in Starbucks Workers United, where workers started self-organizing from below across the country in 2022, and that dynamic pushed Workers United, and then SEIU, to start dedicating real resources to a militant, risky, grassroots campaign that they had not initiated from above.

So union reform also takes the form of workers starting to self-organize and pulling somewhat risk-averse unions into dedicating more resources toward new organizing. If we're going to have enough fighters in the labor movement capable of transforming and taking back their unions, a big part of that is going to be workers entering the labor movement via self-organizing their shops mechanism and then, with that energy, posing the question of electing a new fighting leadership. So I think it's more dialectical than “transform existing unions and then the external organizing will follow.”

Nick French: Zooming out to the topic of broader political change, your perspective is that electoral politics on its own is insufficient: we need a powerful, militant, democratic, worker-led labor movement to actually push through the kinds of changes that Bernie Sanders was championing in his presidential campaigns, for instance. What do you think the prospects are for the labor movement politicizing? In other words, how do you see what's currently happening in the labor movement and the worker-to-worker approach you're hoping to spread transforming the political arena? Are there prospects for it reviving some of the hopes we felt at the height of the 2020 Bernie campaign?

Eric Blanc: I think Bernie could have won if we had a more powerful, more militant labor movement. And for the equivalent of a Bernie to win down the road, or to pass big transformative reforms like Medicare for All, or to definitively isolate MAGA, you're going to need to have that bottom-up piece of the puzzle.

One of the most promising things about the recent labor uptick is the political transformation that could make possible within the labor movement. You have the influx of a lot of young radicals into labor — folks who were politicized through Bernie, through Black Lives Matter, and through a kind of anti-systemic critique. That orientation is frankly at odds with the overarching political thrust of the leadership of the labor movement whose idea of politics primarily consists of cozying up to elected officials rather than articulating a working-class political vision and organizing a majority of people around that.

We've seen instances of what an alternative could look like. Starbucks Workers United, for instance, took a really strong stand on Palestine, and that ended up playing an important role in forcing the company to the bargaining table. And one of the things I would love to see is these bottom-up unions and this radical energy leading more unions to supporting anti-establishment candidates running for office, whether independently or within the Democratic Party. Most unions didn't support Bernie or AOC, which I think is just hugely self-defeating. Unions should also be running their own members for office. Run more workers who have led strikes like [independent Nebraska candidate for US Senate] Dan Osborn.

We need unions right now to push back hard against this idea that the secret to success is for the Democrats to be MAGA-lite, or to pivot to the center rather than articulating a compelling alternative vision. I think it's incumbent on radicals to push for labor to start forcefully articulating a political approach that can win all working people away from Trumpism.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” That’s the justifiable attitude that many on the American left have to this country’s sclerotic/anemic/antidemocratic “democratic institutions.”

In 2013, Bernie Sanders summed up the situation in our pseudo-democracy1 this way: “Today, virtually no piece of legislation can get passed unless it has the OK from corporate America.” Study after study shows that this is true: even if a majority of the public supports a policy — Medicare for All, policies that would strengthen unions, raising the minimum wage, etc. — if the policy runs afoul of the interests of the capitalist class, it’s not going to go anywhere.

As we think about what force could grind the Trump administration’s blitzkrieg against our rights and the public sector to a halt, public opinion therefore looks like a poor candidate.

But turning majority support into a winning reform campaign is a far more complicated and difficult task than turning widespread and generalized opposition to a government into a brake on that government's actions. When governments lose the support of the people, their days of aggressive forward motion do in fact come to a close.

How could that be?

When a majority turns hard against a government, the government’s own party members begin to turn against it as well. It's clearly true that the vast majority of politicians are self-interested and eager to protect and advance their own careers. Politicians of the governing party have to worry about their reelection chances. When public opinion begins to go south, it’s those politicians most vulnerable to defeat who get cold feet first. But even politicians with more solid bases of support — who often tend to hold the leadership roles in a party — will get restless if the popular mood really turns negative.

A loss of popular support in turn erodes the reservoir of patience and support granted to leaders by party members. Aggressive and risky moves become harder and harder to take. Opportunities also open up in these situations for aspiring party heads. A leadership that is clearly flailing invites challenges from within its own ranks from politicians on the make who have an appetite for risk. These developments lead to tension and eventually open conflict inside the governing party.

A party whose popularity is sinking also risks losing market confidence. Investors look for stability and predictability. A government whose days seem numbered can offer neither. Uncertain about what comes next in the economy, markets sour and investment slows down. Economic troubles can also exacerbate popular discontent on their own and ratchet up the pressure on governments to retreat (as famously happened to the socialist François Mitterrand in France in the early 1980s and more recently happened to the Tories’ Liz Truss in Britain in 2022).

Finally, an unpopular government will find its room for maneuver within the state — in its interactions with bureaucrats and even military leaders — constrained. It was not a fluke that in June 2020, when Trump's popularity was at a low point and the Black Lives Matter movement raged in the streets, military leaders successfully resisted Trump’s attempts to deploy soldiers to crush the demonstrations. Had Trump’s government retained a much greater degree of popular support, it would have been much harder for the military to resist his calls.

There’s a reason why even authoritarian leaders fear public opinion and invest so much in trying to shape and control it. And why when they lose the public’s support their regimes collapse — often in spectacular fashion. Think of the Mubarak government in Egypt in 2011.

What’s needed now is a force that can “flood the zone” of the Trump administration, to use commentators’ favorite sports metaphor for describing the president’s new favorite tactic. Widespread, popular revulsion at the Trump regime could be that force. A government that retains the support of half of Americans, as Trump’s does today (but that’s changing), is far more dangerous than one whose support has fallen to 40, 30, or even 20 percent.

Assembling a popular majority against Trump and the Republican Party is the main task of the moment. Our tactics and mobilizations need to be judged in that light — do they get us closer to building a majority against this disaster?2 That won’t be enough to move us on to the offense or to empower us to actually change this country for the better. But thwarting this government’s destructive agenda has to be the first step.