The Hole at the Heart of the Democratic Party
Labor needs to fill the vacuum. Or else.
One of the most striking things about the “should Biden drop out” saga is the extent to which it has been a completely insular affair. Though it is a crucial question that impacts the entire nation, the meaningful conversation is between, on one side, the most high-profile slice of the national political media, the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, and national Democratic elected officials; and, on the other side, the president and a tiny handful of White House advisors. That’s it. All the rest of us are reduced to fingernail-gnawing spectators in this momentous decision.
Now, it is not surprising that any of these groups would be trying to influence the outcome here. One does not become a billionaire megadonor or the host of a network Sunday show (or even a Substack writer) without having an ego big enough to believe that you should be listened to. Furthermore, in this case I happen to agree with these people. Biden needs to step aside, quick fast, for the good of the country. But watching this process play out has been a good way to see who really matters in the Democratic Party—whose voices are being heard in the room when the stakes are high. And it is equally easy to see whose voice is not being heard: the voice of the people.
I apologize for using a term that may sound corny or idealistic or like it came from a T-shirt that you buy at the gift shop after you see The Liberty Bell. Let me be more specific: there is no organized force or interest group that can legitimately claim to represent the bulk of the Democratic coalition that is considered important enough or strong enough to have an influential voice in this conversation. Though “elites” is a much-abused term, you must admit that this internal struggle is an all-elite affair. It is a classic inside Washington power broker fight and is addictive to those who love that sort of story. “Democratic,” it is not.
This is bad. It is bad because the Democratic Party purports to be (at least compared to the Republicans) the small-d democratic party, the one that cares about regular people and not just the rich. To the extent that this is not the case in reality, we should be trying to make it more true. It is also bad because all of the groups involved in this discussion live in insular little worlds and are therefore more likely to miss things and make bad decisions. It would be both more just and healthier for the party if something that could credibly claim to represent a wide swath of The People who make up the party’s base and clientele were right in the middle of this argument, and if its preference held a lot of weight.
Who is the imaginary group that might fill this role, in a healthier Democratic Party? It is organized labor. That’s who it is. And sixty or seventy years ago, when organized labor was strong, when one in three American workers was a union member, it did fill this role. Who else could it be? Even if the largest interest groups, like the 38 million-member AARP, speak for only a slice of the electorate. The AARP advocates for retirees, and The Sierra Club advocates for the environment, and the NAACP advocates for Black people, and all of that is well and good, but none of those interest groups can say they represent the entire base of the Democratic party. Labor can. Labor is all working people and their families—the majority of the voters in this country, and the group whose empowerment is supposed to be the core existential reason for voting for Democrats. The AFL-CIO, even in its present weakened state, has more than 12 million members, in hundreds of industries, in every state, in every single demographic, up and down the entire income spectrum. It is the closest thing there is to a Voice of the People with a direct line to the White House.
So what the fuck is the problem?
The Biden administration, to its credit, has been uncommonly solicitous of unions. Biden has spent more political capital than any Democratic president in the past half century on doing good things for labor. Even though union density has been declining for decades, the political influence of unions is unusually strong with Biden in the White House. With that in mind, what has been the sum total of the involvement of organized labor in this critical struggle over whether or not we should leave the party’s fate in the hands of an 81 year-old man who can’t really speak in full paragraphs? It was this: a July 3 statement from AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler saying “The stakes of the 2024 presidential election couldn’t be higher… That is why the AFL-CIO endorsed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in June of last year, earlier than we’ve ever endorsed in a presidential race, and why we continue to stand in strong support of them today.” Not only is this the opposite of “trying to exert influence on a controversial matter,” but it proudly waves around the asinine decision to endorse Biden a year and a half before the election—a decision that has made the nation’s largest union coalition nothing more than an administration cheerleader throughout the labor movement’s entire debate over Gaza, and now, again, during the question of whether Biden should stay or go.
Union leaders certainly have strong feelings about the Biden question, as do millions of union members who watched that debate in horror. The AFL-CIO is the group that should be turning those concerns into action within the White House. Instead, like a whipped dog that finally gets adopted from the shelter, the AFL’s entire relationship to the Biden administration, in political terms, has been one of gratitude. “Thank you so much for seeing us!!!!!!!!!” is basically it. Thus their instinct when Biden’s political survival is threatened has been to show loyalty, rather than to ask themselves, “What is the best course of action for the working class?” Biden’s defenders will say that we must rally around him because it is important to defeat Trump. No shit. The entire reason people want to get rid of Biden is to defeat Trump! The issue here is not just that our candidate may be too old to serve the four year term he is running for—which is, by itself, a valid reason for him to bow out of the race—but, more immediately, that the whole country just witnessed him being dreadfully old and incapable of carrying the message we need him to carry and this is going to cause him to lose to Trump and all of us are going to get screwed because of that. In this case, loyalty to Biden is in direct opposition to the interest of the working class, because Biden’s weakness makes it more likely that Trump will come to power.
Labor’s notable absence from this fight is therefore distressing. The AFL-CIO appears to be gutless. What about the big unions that are not in the AFL-CIO? The SEIU, for example, is spending $200 million of its members’ money to help get Biden election. That is a lot of fucking money. Ari Emanuel and Reed Hastings have given the Democrats far less money than that, and they both feel very comfortable publicly telling Biden to drop out. Yet SEIU has said nothing. Nor have the Teamsters, whose president may have blown his chance to influence the Democratic Party anyhow by coyly flirting with Trump like a teenage girl threatening to run off and marry her dirtbag alcoholic boyfriend, just to make her parents mad. All in all, there is zero evidence that America’s 15 million union members are having their collective power exercised in this discussion very much at all.
I often try to get the point across that you should care about the labor movement not because you’re a union member (statistically, you probably aren’t) but because organized labor is the path to a better world, the mechanism that can fix the problems that concern you. Imagine an alternate world—a world in which the Democratic Party had as its base a big and strong and wide coalition of organized labor, representing tens of millions of working people all across the country, supporting an agenda based on the well-being of those working people, serving as a clear and discernible counterpoint to the inequality-promoting agenda of Republicans. The Democratic Party and organized labor can grow stronger together, each helping to build the other. Democrats can pass laws to make labor organizing and winning strong contracts easier. Unions can grow exponentially, and—relevant to today’s topic—can serve as an unsullied pipeline that delivers the true preferences and interests of the working class directly into Washington, where lawmakers would be forced to be responsive to it, because labor was strong.
This orientation—labor unmistakably at the heart of the Democratic Party—would make the party better and its policies better and would also lay to rest the bullshit Republican attempts to cast themselves superficially as the party of regular people, which unfortunately is having some success, due to the Democrats’ own inability to be true to what they should stand for. To get closer to this world, unions themselves need to make some important changes. If they are going to claim to be able to represent the will of workers to Washington, they need to be democratic organizations themselves. They all need to have “one member, one vote” systems that allow members to truly elect their own leaders, something that is shamefully rare in the union world. They need to make presidential endorsements based on a vote of the members, not simply the vote of a few top leaders. If a million-member union endorses a presidential candidate, that should mean that the members voted to endorse that candidate. That is what makes the endorsement worth a damn. It would also have the salutary effect of forcing the union’s leaders to make the case for the candidate of their choice to their own members. It would promote communication about where candidates stand and what their policies are and how those policies would affect working people like the members of that union. It would create more political education. And that is what unions can and should be: not just places that get contracts, but centers of democratic action, where regular workers can plug in and learn things and grow politically and become involved in the political system and exercise collective power.
This is not utopian. All of these things are possible. The first step is for unions to see to it that they are themselves democratic spaces internally. If they’re not, they just make members cynical, and they fall prey to the same flaws that cause people to hate Washington so much. The second step is: unions need to organize many millions of new workers. If only ten percent of American workers are union members, how can unions claim to represent the entire working class? It is a farce. No wonder the general public’s eyes glaze over when I talk about this. Not even a writer of my caliber can make people care about something that seems so remote to their own lives. We need to get people in unions, and we need to make sure that those unions are democratic organizations that can live up to the standards that we are preaching for the Democratic Party, and then we can become the most legitimately powerful force in that party, and then we can tell Joe Biden, “Take a hike, Jack—time to go sizzle on a beach chair and leave the White House to people who can string a few zingers together to chase this fascist back into his hole.”
If you have a two-party system and the party that is supposed to represent the interest of common people is instead captured by megadonors and well-connected insiders and the group that should be able to exercise the collective power of the working class is too cowed and unimaginative to make themselves a player, then guess what… regular people will lose faith in that party. And because we are in a two-party system, many of those regular people will drift towards the other party. And that is what is happening in America. Watching the acute crisis of Biden’s futile attempt to hang on to the death play out in back rooms is a vivid illustration of why we need to make the heart of this party accessible to the people it is supposed to be working for. Organized labor is the one and only tool that is capable of doing that. They need to get their fucking shit together. Both in the long run, and also, please, right now, on this topic, before it is too late.
Related reading: The Distance Between You and the Revolution; Bernie Lose Because America Doesn’t Have a Strong Labor Movement; The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is.
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Earlier this week I spoke to the NPR station in Jacksonville for 30 minutes about my book and the labor movement. It was a great interview (with the person who was my very first editor at my first journalism job), which you can watch here. You can order my book wherever books are sold. If you’d like to buy an autographed copy for $40, or if you’re interested in having me speak to your group, email me: Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com.
This coming week I may be writing less frequently, because I will be covering the National Conservatism Conference for In These Times. It will be terrible. Look for that story by the end of the week. I will also be covering the Democratic National Convention in August for Defector. If you see me there, say hi. I simply love going to terrible shit shows.
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Like you, and everybody else, I do not know in reality if dumping Biden is a net positive or not. I tend to lean dump because I can’t see how playing defense for four months can ever bring out the energy required to win this election. But I know there are risks to switching it up at this point and remember vividly what the Eagleton affair did to McGovern’s chances.
But, that said, I think a bigger takeaway is that we need to recognize a lot more openly that Biden or Harris or whoever are just ciphers for the thing that we really care about, small d democracy and the chance to lead dignified lives. A decision must be made and it must be made soon, but what that decision is, is less important than our recognition of what it represents.
It’s like we’re in a landing craft off Omaha beach trying to pick a platoon leader. The reality is that the doors will open and all of us need to act as one to gain the beach. If someone falls we’ll adapt and move on.
My bigger concern is the battle plan. This election is winnable but it won’t be won with caution or mealy mouthed recitation of economic statistics. We need to clearly define the danger Trump represents and we need to make sure our less involved countrymen get the message and understand the stakes. The press is not going to do that for us. We need much bolder messaging and we need to make this a referendum on Trump and Heritage and Supreme Court and the whole of the criminal fascist bandwagon.
One more comment. This is what Catlin Johnstone wrote also in the times andI agree:
"(America) is run by a few billionaires and government agencies. You don’t get a real vote, and even if you did you’re all propagandized anyway. It’s not a real thing...
It’s actually pretty obnoxious to live in the imperial core and yet spend most of your political energy fixating on a presidential race whose outcome will have no effect on the murderousness and tyranny of the imperial war machine abroad. Focus on opposing the empire itself."