Remaking the Coalition
Put labor at the heart of the Democratic Party and watch what happens.
In a two-party political system, each party will by definition be a coalition so broad that it stretches the bounds of sanity. The Republican Party, at least, manages to keep its insane coalition working towards one fundamental interest. It is the party of capital. It exists to serve the interests of capital. Cutting taxes on the rich and wiping away regulations for businesses and building strong police and military forces to protect the wealth of the few is why the party exists. To accomplish this it waves the flag and the bible and uses racism and culture wars to pull in a crowd of people who can be persuaded to vote against their own economic interests. At its core, it knows why it is there, despite the fact that many of its own voters don’t. Even in the chaos of the Trump administration, when the crazies appeared to have supplanted the capitalists at the party’s controls, the Republicans made sure to get their tax cut passed. Its purpose was served.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is more like a trash can full of factions who should logically be enemies but are forced together by our systemic limitations. Hardcore socialists, and CEOs who support gay marriage. Militant civil rights activists, and bankers who think that throwing people in prison for marijuana is a little excessive. Pro-choice activists, and strict Catholics who don’t believe in starving the poor. Elizabeth Warren, and Larry Summers. Me, and James Carville. You get the idea. The Democrats are a Big Tent Party less in the celebratory, inclusive sense, and more in the way you might feel if you arrived at a group camping trip to find that there were not individual accommodations.
“Fuck. It’s just one big tent.”
Because of this, internal Democratic Party politics will always be a cutthroat, zero-sum power struggle between ideologically opposed factions, all grasping for controls of the huge, teetering ship. Awareness of this dynamic is acute in the party’s left wing. That’s because, at least in my lifetime, they have almost always been the losers in the internal power struggle, a minority faction alternately wheedling and hollering as the moderates and the neoliberals steered the ship confidently to the right. This was true during both the Clinton years and the Obama years. It took the ascendance of Trump, a crisis that neither party’s establishment was ready for, to weaken the neoliberals’ hold on the party’s controls. The realization that they were the ones who had fucked up the country enough to make Trump’s ascendance possible made them seem a little less omniscient than before.
Even after Biden was able to beat back the challenge of Bernie in the primaries, it was clear that progressives were strong enough in the party to make real demands. Biden acquiesced to a “unity task force” that produced a set of progressive policy demands as he took office. Biden’s domestic policy team, particularly at the FTC, the NLRB, and his economic advisers, were markedly more progressive than those in past Democratic administrations. Unions had more clout in the White House. Things had ticked to the left, domestically at least. Biden was not radical enough to see his way to not helping Israel incinerate thousands of children, but he did some good economic stuff. Keynes would be proud.
Kamala Harris’s abrupt jump to the top of the ticket has snapped all of the party’s factions into a high state of alert. Nobody is exactly sure where Harris is going to land on the Democratic political spectrum. She ran on the left in the 2020 primaries, but most everyone assumes that a fair percentage of that was bullshit. The question is how much. Her VP pick will be seen as a proxy signal for where she wants to plant her ideological flag, but in truth, that is just a small skirmish in a much larger battle. Which faction is going to have Harris’s ear for the next four years if she wins? Was Biden’s little progressive jaunt a temporary response to the twin crises of Covid and Trump—a necessary adjustment that the Democratic Party will now snap back from? Or has the left actually succeeded in moving the center of the party in our direction?
There is a level of incalculability to ranking the movement’s of all the party’s factions—if you get granular enough, there are too many, and each is not just pushing its own agenda but also responding to what everyone else is doing, and to what the Republicans are doing as well. On top of that, many of the more focused constituencies are happy to sell out broader ideals in exchange for movement on their own issues. Is the Sierra Club really going to push hard on Gaza? Is Planned Parenthood going to spend its political capital on the tax bill? Let me distinguish here between the horse trading of normal politics and the bigger issue of the ideological self-image of the party as a whole. For simplicity’s sake, we can reduce the party’s main competing factions to two: Money people, and progressives.
Kamala Harris is, as we speak, under intense pressure from money people—the rich center of the party, the people who would have been staunch and proud neoliberals 20 years ago but now are more evasive and slightly chastened neoliberals. The Democratic billionaires want to know that she won’t stray too far off the reservation, policy-wise. Marc Lasry and Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and company would like Harris to be much more like Obama, who mostly outsourced his economic policy to Wall Street, and less like Biden, who at least leavened that impulse by installing some personnel that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wanted. Reports that Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, Uber’s top lawyer, is going to be a “close adviser” is certainly an ominous sign. But the progressive wing of the party does not need to meekly stow away their values and sign on as silent partners in the name of defeating Trump. Quite the opposite.
Let me suggest a way for the congenitally hapless Democratic Party to break out of its natural inclination to be forever locked in a dispiriting battle between being those who want it to be a party of social progress and those who want it to be a more polite version of the Republicans, a Chamber of Commerce party without all the discomfiting talk about genital examinations in high school sports. Let me name a single constituency, a single faction, that is capable of uniting the vast majority of Democrats around it. This is a group that can pull in construction workers and engineers, house cleaners and home builders, teachers and civil servants, bank tellers and airline pilots, baristas and Hollywood actors. Yes: It is organized labor. Is it “populist?” Sure. Is it “progressive?” Intrinsically, if not in its branding. It is the big tent that Democrats aspire to be.
Put labor at the heart of the Democratic Party. Build the party around that. Allow organized labor, the unions, the AFL-CIO, to represent the center of the party, and then allow the respective wings to sprout off of it. Labor has a number of attractive qualities that make it suited for this role. It is progressive not because of any abrasive ideology but because it is made up of workers and represents what is good for them. It embodies the progressive agenda simply by trying to do what is good for working people. At the same time, it is very much integrated into the fabric of American institutions in a way that should serve to pacify the money people. Institutional organized labor, the biggest unions, are multibillion-dollar organizations with substantial investments in the financial markets and such a large membership that they are unlikely to find themselves as far to the left as other, smaller party factions. Labor, I say to you, is the compromise candidate of the Democratic coalition. For the moderate faction of the party, I promise that labor does not want to destroy all of America’s institutions. For the left wing of the party, I promise that labor is a hell of a lot more progressive, due to its very makeup, than the donor class of the party and the corporate lobbyists that now exert so much unhealthy control. And from an electoral point of view, “We are labor” is as good a pitch as the Democrats could ever hope for—one that is simple, intelligible, and promising all at once.
Labor does not need to try to represent America. It is America. Yet neither party has thought to claim it. Republicans hate it, and the Democrats have long been happy to make organized labor a junior partner, a desperate little dog fed on scraps, an afterthought that doesn’t require much attention because it has no other choice but to stick with you, given the options. I am suggesting a very different relationship. I am suggesting that labor be the heart of the Democratic Party, and the party make labor’s agenda its own, and that any constituency that wants to deviate from that agenda be forced to fight and claw in the way that progressives have long been forced to fight and claw for any ounce of influence. I am not, by the way, just talking my own book here. My own politics are on the left wing of the labor world; organized labor’s center is to my right. But I would vastly prefer to negotiate the Democratic Party’s positions with unions, who are accountable to millions of workers, than with rich power brokers who are accountable only to a tiny set of investors just as rich as themselves.
Embedding organized labor at the heart of the party means giving control of the Democratic Party to a democratic institution. Unions make bad decisions, sure, but they themselves can be moved through small-d democratic political organizing internally. That cannot be said for Citigroup. A group that can say “we have a million members who are working people who organized and decided to join us for their common good” has far more democratic credibility than any corporate representative or billionaire donor ever will. Investing labor with more power to govern the Democratic Party’s own maneuvering is smart, and savvy politics, and inherently progressive as well.
The left wing of the party, I’m sure, would get on board with this setup. (Those who rose with Bernie Sanders over the past decade have notably evolved closer to this position in recent years, as they recognized that labor must be the foundation of any mass progressive movement.) The Hollywood liberals would accept it—they’re all union members themselves. The normies of party, the regular folks who just don’t want Trump, could easily be made to see the appeal of an institution representing every type of working person, even if they don’t know much about unions. The money wing of the party, the Tony Wests and Reid Hoffmans, would not like it. But fuck them. They should be the junior partners in this coalition. There is an entire party of capital sitting right across the street. The rich people who have enough moral fiber to not want to hop on board with fascism in order to protect their fortunes are left with one choice: the Democrats. Get on board, fuckers. If this sound harsh, understand that this is essentially the message that Democrats have long sent to organized labor itself—a group that has tens of millions of members, not just a few.
A few concrete things need to happen to make this sort of evolution possible. The first is that unions need to organize more people. Ten percent of workers are union members today. That’s not enough. To claim our rightful place in the political mainstream, we need to be able to credibly say that we represent everyone. We need to organize, much, much more. (Read my book for more on this.) Second, institutional labor itself must gain some self-respect. Joe Biden was nice to the AFL-CIO, and the AFL-CIO was so dazzled that it yoked itself to Biden like a puppy, endorsing him 18 months before the election and then being forced into the role of uneasy apologists—for the massacre in Gaza, and then for Biden’s own failing health. The AFL-CIO, lacking belief in its own power, fell into the role of hype man for its patron in the White House, which ended up being both political foolish and a little embarrassing to watch. These two items are related. Unions must organize more to get independently stronger to feel comfortable making more demands of the Democratic Party, rather than feeling lucky when the Democrats deign to do anything for them.
For now, just give it some thought. Think of the entire Democratic Party coalition, arrayed before you: all of the single-issue interest groups, the far left, the moderates, the Silicon Valley people, the Wall Street types, the Hollywood people, the economic populists, the anti-racists, the oppressed, the whole damn gang. A lot of variety, no? Who or what has the power to unify this crazy grab bag? Who or what can lay claim to touching the most pieces of this splintered array of groups? Labor can. Labor is all. Let’s reorient this wild leaky ship around the one thing that is—while not perfect—the closest we can get to a coherent center mass for the party on the other side of fascism. Like they say about democracy itself, this is probably the worst system, except for all the other ones.
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Speaking of Democrats’ poor relationship with labor: the Crooked Media Workers Union, members of the Writers Guild, East, are walking out today, after trying to get a fair contract for more than a year. These people work at a progressive podcast company. Give them a fair deal! You can follow their progress here.
Want to know something funny? I am going to be covering the Democratic National Convention for Defector Media, and the assholes at the DNC turned down our application for media credentials. (They credentialed Gawker multiple times, so they are not historically very picky.) Despite this disrespect I will still be in Chicago doing journalism the old fashioned way. Email me with tips about good actions that will be happening where the action always is: in the motherfucking streets.
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Totally agree. Many in labor have been too cautious in asserting our needs within the party. Obama was a breakthrough in important ways, but also appointed Arnie Duncan as Sec of Ed, who embraced testing, charter schools and a bs "race to the top" ed plan, and Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff.
With all the JD Vance attention, it also opens up some space to talk about the real needs and potential of the rural poor. My book, Unionizing The Ivory Tower, is the book about the appalachian working class Vance DIDN'T write. A story of mostly white working class, originally socially conservative workers learning to build a fighting union and through that experience realizing our connections to other workers and issues around gender, race, and broader struggle.
Labor can and should be the central force within a political party and we can be that in cities, suburbs, and rural America too.
I completely agree with you with regard to Unions BUT like what happened in England, they can be brought and sold. Privatization rears it's ugly head.