The Time of Monsters and Modest Beginnings
Grant us the serenity to accept the things we can't (yet) change about the world, the courage to change the (small but important in the long term) things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
On Martin Luther King Day, Donald Trump will return to power. Those with a lot of cash who wish to celebrate his return will have many opportunities in the next few days to do so.
You could join Steve Bannon at the “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, hosted by a publishing house whose book offerings include reprints of the “classic” works of Russian White generals from the 1920s, Nazi sympathizers, devotees of Francisco Franco, and leaders of today’s “Dark Enlightenment.” If bathing in nostalgia for the glory days of fascism is not your speed, you can instead roll up to the Crypto Ball, which will be celebrating “the first crypto president” (their words). It will give you the opportunity to hear a live performance by Snoop Dogg. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire who allegedly once hoped to chase immortality by taking infusions of teen blood — is hosting a fête at his beaux-arts DC mansion with Trump’s new “AI czar” David Sacks. Right after the inauguration, you can go back to brunch . . . at the Spotify brunch: drink mimosas and eat French toast with Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Ben Shapiro! And cohosts Mark Zuckerberg and Miriam Adelson (widow of the casino billionaire and Trump’s top bankroller and a major funder of Zionist organizations in her own right) — definitely the best odd couple of the weekend — would welcome you at their black-tie reception Monday night.
If the prospect of some of the worst people in the world laughing and clinking glasses at the dawn of the next phase in our Age of Inequality makes you sick, I share your pain. It’s all the more disorienting following this week’s news that Trump’s team clinched a cease-fire deal in Gaza. After living through more than a year of the Biden administration’s very earnest, all-out, no-stone-left-unturned efforts to do the same, it’s hard to know who to be more disgusted with. The monsters who not-so-quietly aided and abetted a fifteen month genocide and who are now packing their bags, or the monsters who are moving in to take their place.
Two Bad Responses
Two equally unhelpful but understandable reactions are on offer: wallow in despair and end up checking out of politics altogether, or lose our heads trying to respond and “stop” all the shit that is coming in the next two years.
Dropping out is no option. We’ve come a long way since 2015. This country once again has a real labor left with a substantial democratic socialist current within it. That was the stuff of dreams for a long time, and a few difficult years are no excuse to pack it in.
But reconstituting a “resistance” whose task it is to protest and try to respond to every Trumpian outrage can’t be the main task of the labor left either. The left is simply too small and too weak to have much hope of generating the kind of pushback needed to stop whatever Republicans have planned. There will be other groups in the world of liberal nonprofits who lead that work, and the most effective “resistance” — if it comes — will be put up by sudden, decentralized, snowballing, and widespread actions against Trump’s worst decrees. Think of the protests against the Muslim ban in the first months of 2017. We should absolutely join those kinds of actions, but our main task can’t be trying to lead them.
Building Blocks
The work ahead for us is laying the modest building blocks of a future, much stronger, party of working people and left-wing ideas. The kind of party that actually could put up an effective resistance to the monsters who are cycling in and out this long weekend.
That work is already underway all across the country in fits and starts. There’s a big new organizing drive by the United Auto Workers at a Ford Motor-backed EV plant in Kentucky. The left in Portland had a breakthrough in November, electing a slate of DSA-endorsed candidates to its city council. They’re now figuring out how to turn that foothold into a platform to organize from. In New York City, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Zohran Mamdani is on the brink of a breakout campaign for mayor, being the first to qualify for public campaign funds in a crowded field after raising more than half a million dollars from 6,500 supporters — more supporters than the next six more establishment competitors combined.
Amazon workers and their allies across the country have new opportunities to build on the momentum gained from last month’s strike. California teachers in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Oakland successfully lined up their contracts so that they will all expire in June. That means more than 50,000 workers will potentially be on strike at the start of this summer, led by some of the most militant unions in the country. Comrades in north New Jersey will have another chance of putting a democratic socialist — a friend of this blog, Jake Ephros — on Jersey City city council. And comrades across the country are still at it building the next generation of labor organizers through groups like Labor Notes, the Rank & File Project, and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
If there’s hope for the future it’ll come through channeling our anger, outrage, and despair (and hope) into these campaigns and strengthening these kinds of organizations. And it’s through these bases that we can more meaningfully participate in whatever fightbacks are coming against Trump’s policies. New efforts are needed too, including more work in the battle of ideas that takes seriously the role of media as both a popularizer of our politics and an organizer of our people and our work. If Trump’s victory in the face of a massive cash disadvantage teaches us one thing, it’s that: don’t underestimate the role of media in politics and organizing.
Getting Our Verve Back
Many on the labor left I talk to (many who read this blog), and myself as well, still feel down about our prospects. I have two hypotheses for why that is. First, it’s natural that after a five-year sprint between 2016 and 2021, exhaustion set in, and time was needed to rebalance political work with all the other obligations of life.
Second, something political did change in 2021. Those at the head of the new insurgent labor left, including both national politicians and left-wing union leaders, fell for the trap of thinking they were part of the Biden administration. They were “on the team” and they pivoted from a confrontational, outsider tactic — which kept the labor left’s grassroots activists feeling alive and purposeful — to a cooperative, insider approach. The latter tactic was demobilizing, demoralizing, and confusing for the tens of thousands of activists who looked up to those leaders. And bereft of national leaders championing our cause and giving it national coherence, much of the glue that held together the far flung and diverse projects of the left came undone once Biden won.
For better or worse, 2025 will hopefully change that. People like Bernie Sanders are on the offense again — check out his latest appearance on Hasan Piker’s podcast for an excellent takedown not just of the Harris campaign but of the Democratic Party as a whole. (Though AOC has drawn precisely the opposite conclusion. She assured congressional Democrats that she has “matured” and is a team player now, paid out a quarter of a million dollars in party dues, and promised not to support primary challenges against her conservative colleagues.) And hopefully we are all learning to trust our own instincts more and to develop our own national perspective and sense of direction.
We have to accept that we don’t have the power to change national politics right now, but that’s no reason to get discouraged.1 No small movement ever starts out with that kind of responsibility or strength. The movement that will finally put an end to this Age of Inequality many years from now will grow out of the purposeful, modest, but important work we do today.
With that in mind, I’ll be reciting my own version of the serenity prayer this long weekend: Karl Marx in red heaven, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot (yet) change about the world, the courage to change the (small but important in the long term) things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. That’s the kind of perspective we’ll need to put the verve back in our work and to turn our modest beginnings into something much bigger.
Careful readers of this blog might remember a piece I wrote last year called “Socialists Can’t Sit Out National Politics” and wonder if what I’m suggesting here is at odds with what I wrote then. I don’t think so. My point in that piece was that democratic socialists need a national perspective, a national strategy, and an idea of what we would do if some kind of crisis or breakthrough put us in a place to actually shape the national terrain. I still think we need that. I don’t think that’s at odds with acknowledging that our real advances and achievements are unlikely to include changing national politics in the near term. Had Harris won I think we’d be facing more-or-less the same fact.