“This is a movement like nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said in his victory speech. “The greatest political movement of all time.”
Not so much joy on the other side of the aisle. Television commentator Joy Reid blamed “white women” for Democrat Kamala Harris’ loss. Others saw the vote as proof the United States is a racist, sexist nation.
What the election really proved is what Labor South has long lamented: the near-total alienation of the modern-day Democratic Party from its former base: working class Americans. Bernie Sanders, an independent but more recently a loyal fellow traveler with Democrats, said much the same after this election.
“This election was largely about class and change and the Democrats, in both cases, were often on the wrong side,” Sanders said in a recent Boston Globe op-ed. “The Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.”
Ah, Bernie, once you were a hope for America. You preached those words when you ran for president in 2016. However, when Joe Biden won the presidency four years later, you grabbed his coattails and enjoyed the ride as a powerful committee chairman in the U.S. Senate. At the end of every new critique of unhinged capitalism, you told us to support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Who would follow you today, Bernie? You’ve lost your credibility.
The fading voice of Franklin D. Roosevelt courses through the ruins of today’s Democratic Party.
“The provision of a decent home for every family is a national necessity if this country is to be worthy of its greatness,” Roosevelt said in his annual message to Congress on January 6, 1945. “Most of our cities need extensive rebuilding. Much of our farm plant is in a state of disrepair. To make a frontal attack on the problems of housing and urban reconstruction will require thoroughgoing cooperation between industry and labor, and the federal, state, and local governments.”
Many Americans today cannot afford to buy a home, and many more cannot afford skyrocketing rent prices. A growing population of homelessness is witness to this. Wall Street took advantage of recent recession and foreclosure crises by buying up countless homes at bargain rates and then charging an arm-and-leg for people to get back in them. Harris talked about providing help on down payments, and Trump talked about building new homes on federal lands.
Neither talked about the real culprit: Wall Street, the same Wall Street where private equity firms buy up companies like Toys ‘R’ Us and Bed, Bath and Beyond and bury them in impossible debt in order to enrich themselves at the expense of thousands of lost jobs. Neither party talks about this because both are utterly beholden to Wall Street.
What the Democratic Party prefers to talk about are diversity, equity, and inclusion, the issues that divide us, not unite us, issues grounded in beliefs that the United States and its white citizens are inherently racist and sexist and part of an irredeemably racist and sexist system. Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders past and present dismiss working class disgruntlement as the complaints of “deplorables”.
The Republican Party traditionally has made no apologies for listening to Wall Street instead of Main Street. Trump promises a new kind of Republican Party, but his big solution to working class disgruntlement in his first term was a giant tax cut to the wealthy.
What we have today is a plutocracy.
Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon Musk are fantastically rich, veteran members of the 1 percent club that gained nearly two-thirds of all new wealth in the world between 2020 and 2022. Erstwhile Democratic campaign worker Evan Barker wrote in Newsweek in September how she found mainly “glitz, glamor, and ostentatious wealth” in inner Democratic circles, a far cry from her Midwest upbringing. “Candidates spend most of their time talking to the rich, but the only path to elected office is to be rich, or to know lots of rich people.”
Many of those in those inner party circles went to Ivy League schools, where a recent study shows that one in every six students has a parent who earns more than $600,000 a year.
Joe Biden likes to brag he is the most pro-union president since Roosevelt. True, he once stood on a picket line and helped restore the National Labor Relations Board to some union equity. However, he undermined the railroad workers striking to get a decent sick days policy, and his underlings worked behind the scenes to bring a quick pre-election end to the Boeing workers’ strike and the dockworkers’ strike on the East and Gulf coasts.
Will Trump be any different?
“Roosevelt, though indubitably a leader, was an instrument of the popular will rather than a creator of, or a dictator to, that will,” historian Henry Steele Commager once wrote.
Will Trump deliver for the working class in meaningful ways? Will he end Biden’s war against Russia in Ukraine, get Israel to back off its genocide of Palestinians? Will he truly “make America great again”?
If not, those working class voters who elected him may decide that they have the real keys to power, not some big talk politician. The protagonist Larry Donovan in Depression-era worker-writer Jack Conroy’s novel The Disinherited talks about this.
(To the right, worker-writer Jack Conroy)
“I knew the only way for me to rise to something approximating the grandiose ambitions of my youth would be to rise with my class, with the disinherited: the brick-setters, the flivver tramps, boomers, and outcasts pounding their ears in flophouses. Every gibe at any of the paving gang, every covert or open sneer by prosperous looking bystanders infuriated me but did not abash me. … I felt like a man whose feet have been splashing about in ooze and at last have come to rest on a solid rock.”
Once workers have found that “solid rock” of solidarity and then determine that neither party will ever serve their interests, they will be the bearers of a revolution that may indeed make America great again.
