The Real 'Third Way' Is the Labor Movement
Turn off cable news and find out what politics can be.
There is a political group called “Third Way” that embodies the Clintonian idea that the key to unlocking perpetual political victory is to navigate a path directly in the middle of the two political parties. It is an old and dreary idea, yet its superficial appeal never goes away. From “No Labels” to Andrew Yang to a perpetually refreshed pool of 18 year-olds having their very first electoral insight, the intuition that the path to power lies in the middle of an imaginary spectrum is too obvious to ever disappear. There is also a rich literature mocking this idea–as naive, or as an undercover effort by partisans of one side or the other to attract patsies to their cause under a flag of truce. None of this is very helpful. Groups like Third Way and No Labels are, in fact, a toxic mix of stupidity and corporate interests crusading as common sense; the critics are right about that. At the same time, the allure of this theory is driven in large part by the very real brokenness of our two-party system. Republicans suck and are evil, Democrats suck and are marginally less evil, money controls politics, everything is gerrymandered to hell, politicians lie to get elected, your vote doesn’t matter. All of these things are true. What the yearning for a Third Way really represents is a desire to somehow break out of this hopeless dynamic.
The problem is you don’t hear a lot of really good ideas for how to do it. The reason is that people are trying to come up with ideas bounded by two assumptions: One, that political power in America means electoral politics; and two, that the left-to-right, red-to-blue spectrum is how politics should be understood. Both of these things are wrong. Electoral politics are the most familiar form of “politics,” because they are presented to the public like sports, and everyone sees them. But there are two straightforward vectors for exercising political power. One is money. Most people are not particularly invested in this one as their own salvation, because most people are not rich. The other, though, is labor power. This is the one whose door is open to everyone. This is the real Third Way: the labor movement.
People generally do not think about the labor movement in these terms, because most people have no real personal connection to the labor movement. That’s the consequence of having only one in ten workers in America as union members. In 1950, when one in three workers were union members, and everyone had seen the United States government working hand in glove with organized labor to get through the war, and even Republican presidential candidates were happily pro-union, it would have seemed far more intuitive to think of labor as a political power center. Now, unions as an institution are weaker, and their presence in pop culture has dried up, and fewer people grow up in union families, and the majority of people just don’t think of organized labor, because organized labor does not affect them in any obvious ways. But those conditions can be changed. The structural reality is still real. The average person in the average place with the average job and the average bank account has little real power in electoral politics. And certainly little ability to use wealth as a weapon. But that person has the full ability to turn their own labor power into political power that is very real. This is the way. This is the way, for everybody.
There you are, Joe Schmoe in Peoria who works at the office. You unionize your workplace. Now you are a member of a larger union. That union has financial resources. That union has a political operation that can actually exercise power, because it represents thousands of motivated people. You can democratically participate in your union in a way that you cannot democratically participate in any other institution in your life. You can run for an elected position in your union and then become, yourself, a political force to be reckoned with. Because you have an army at your back. This army welcomes everyone.
Unlike every other shitty bastion of exclusivity in this world, the labor movement’s door! Is! Open! To you! You get your coworkers together and organize to improve your own lives and unionize and at that point you have formally gained entry into a vast machine of power that does not require you to give a million dollars to a PAC or shoot people with a machine gun. You do work, and solidarity enables you to collectively exercise the ability to withhold your work and that means you have economic and social and political power, and the labor movement can help you formally exercise all of those things. It is the skeleton key that opens the door to true participation in civic life–a door that most Americans, reasonably, believe is closed to people like them.
Furthermore: Throw the red vs. blue party politics dynamic in the trash. Welcome to the labor movement. We don’t care. WE DON’T CARE. What matters is not whether you watch MSNBC or Fox News or which yard signs you have in your yard. What matters is that you and your coworkers provide the labor that enables business to make money, and by coming together you can turn off that spigot of money until the business gives you your fair share of everything. And you can scale up that very basic principle nationally, by being a part of organized labor as a whole, and demand things that make life fair for regular ass working people everywhere: Decent wages and decent health care and fair treatment and the basic ability to have an acceptable standard of living in exchange for giving all of those hours to work. Everyone wants that. Turn off the TV and look at your coworkers–even the ones who are different races or ages or genders or backgrounds, even the ones who get on your nerves, or play annoying music, or steal your lunch out of the fridge–and realize that, on a fundamental level, you are all on the same team. You are workers who want to live decently. The labor movement allows you to fight for these things. Politics is not screaming people on cable news; politics is this.
When people bemoan the divided state of America today and wonder what they can do, I say, “organize your workplace.” I don’t care where you are or what you do. Make a union and watch yourself magically become a political player. I have been all across the country and seen fast food workers and grocery workers and construction workers and office workers and a million other kinds of the most regular ass workers you can imagine come together in unions and thereby become a political force that every mayor and governor and Senator must wrestle with. Because they have actual power. The labor movement has its own flaws, and I will happily write a lot about those things on another day, but today I just want to tell you that our entire unhappy nation could be transformed if people took their angst and their anger and their frustration at our broken political system and put that energy into the labor movement.
This is not anything that would have passed for a revolutionary insight 75 years ago. But today, the idea that unions are a little niche off to the side of American life, rather than an institution that can sit at the center of everything, has made this argument sound odd to most people. It ain’t odd. It’s the truth. Don’t just look out at the dreary landscape of dead end jobs and cynical politicians and vampire-like businesses and assume that there is no way for you to get a toehold in the hostile American power structure. Don’t assume that your only choices are cheering for one of two unsatisfying political parties, or descending into full apathy. There is a third way, and it’s not Andrew fucking Yang. It’s the labor movement. It can become the sun around which the more familiar political world revolves. All it needs is more people. All it needs is you.
Out-fucking-standing.
if it wasn't thé USA i would say Proportional Representation electoral reform is the answer, but that's impossible for you. so failing that, hyper local efforts like a union. and voting for city govt's as their decisions greatly impact your day to day.