The mayor’s speech foregrounded his democratic socialist convictions and provided example after example of how his City Hall has disproved skeptics’ claim that “the Left could debate but could never deliver.” Highlights include big wins like expanding universal child care and pushing through a tax on secondary-home “pied-à-terres”, as well as smaller but real improvements like filling 102,000 potholes.

It’s fantastic that Zohran is delivering the goods and is using his platform to advocate for democratic socialism. And the tightrope act he has pulled off while engaging with New York’s centrist governor has been shrewd. But it’s a problem that ordinary New Yorkers are receiving the goods instead of helping win them.

These policy wins felt very different from Zohran’s victories in the primary and general elections. Those were experienced as our wins, because they arose not only from Zohran’s actions, but also from the actions of a million voters and almost 100,000 volunteers. In contrast, the recent policy wins felt like gifts from above.

To truly transform our city, workaday New Yorkers need to get into the fight. And we need the mayor’s help to make that happen.

Who Owns the Wins

Zohran’s campaign and early administration have rewritten the political playbook on many important questions, revealing political opportunities for the Left that, before his mayoralty, many thought weren’t there. But when it comes to actively boosting mass organizing, Mayor Mamdani still has room for improvement.

Rhetoric about mass involvement has not yet been consistently matched by deeds. Take Zohran’s election night speech. It was moving, it was rooted in the socialist tradition, and it argued that “we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”

What the speech didn’t do is tell the millions of people watching at home what they could do to get involved in that fight. And for the most part, New Yorkers have returned to the daily grind.

In the fight to tax the rich to pass his agenda, Zohran has put out numerous useful informational videos. But at no point has he called on or provided onramps to his supporters to pressure the elected officials blocking that path, nor did he attend the Tax the Rich rally put on in Albany by organizations like Our Time and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). Nor is he slated to attend this Thursday’s tax the rich rally in front of Gov. Hochul’s office.

In fairness to the mayor, there’s no cost-free formula to resolving the dilemma of how to relate to Hochul, given that he simultaneously has to pressure and work with her. The mayor has to choose his battles wisely. And given that the governor did concede the pied-à-terre tax after repeatedly insisting that she would not tax the rich at all, and that City Council speaker Julie Menin is also now pushing for increased revenue, perhaps Zohran’s approach on taxing the rich was tactically correct. Credit where credit is due: the admin has achieved much so far, even without much bottom-up organizing.

The problem is that Zohran’s hesitancy so far to use his massive platform to help New Yorkers join the fight has been less the exception than the norm. For the most part, the message we’ve gotten from the administration and the mayor since election night is, “We’ve got this.” It’s certainly a big improvement from decades of neoliberal neglect. But where are the viral videos about how New Yorkers can get organized to pass his ambitious policy goals?

While Mayor Mamdani’s active support for NYC-DSA’s congressional candidates like Claire Valdez has helped recruit people to the organization, fewer than 2,000 people have joined since the election. NYC-DSA now has roughly 14,000 members — a big step forward from our movement’s former marginality, but still a relatively modest number compared to the roughly 100,000 Zohran campaign volunteers and 1 million voters who backed him in the general.

It’s true that Zohran has walked picket lines and that the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants is doing important work supporting some tenants’ organizing against bad landlords. Furthermore, the admin’s Office of Mass Engagement (OME) is a promising initiative. Hopefully we’ll very soon see big things from OME; Zohran’s lack of an initial focus on bottom-up organizing could be because it takes time to set up a robust new city office. On the other hand, even the best city agencies won’t have much latitude to wage big policy fights or antagonize establishment politicians — for that, you need working-class organizing outside the state.

Overall, the scale of Zohran-backed organizing initiatives is significantly below what is demanded by the moment.

Sewer Socialism

In his first hundred days speech, Zohran framed his approach as replicating Milwaukee’s famous socialist administrations in the early twentieth century: “Today we know these leaders as the ‘sewer socialists.’ But for years, Milwaukeeans knew them simply as leaders who delivered. It’s time we bring that to New York City.”

Zohran is right that Milwaukee’s sewer socialists made significant improvements in the lives of working people. At the same time, however, they always focused on building up workers’ organized strength in mass unions and the Socialist Party. As party leader Victor Berger put it, “We must have a moral, physical and intellectual strengthening of the proletariat, before all things.”

A sense of this can be gleaned from the Milwaukee Free Press’s story about the speech Berger gave at the election night rally when the socialists won the 1910 mayoral race:

Mr. Berger stepped forward, and a hush fell upon the audience as he began to speak. “I want to ask every man and woman in this audience to stand up here and now enter a solemn pledge to do everything in our power to help the men whom the people have chosen to fulfill their duty,” said Mr. Berger. Like a mighty wave of humanity, the crowd surged to its feet, and in a shout that shook the building and echoed down the street to the thousands who waited there, they gave the required pledge.

One of the core differences between the socialists and even the best of progressives was that the latter were not consistently oriented toward building bottom-up organizations. The Milwaukee Socialists’ rank-and-file political machine, combined with their leadership of the state’s entire organized labor movement, provided City Hall with the power it needed to drive through legislation and shape public opinion.

Indeed, the city’s socialist mayor Daniel Hoan underscored that if other cities wanted to emulate Milwaukee’s success, electing “honest and competent men” was insufficient: “A permanent political party must be formed to supply encouragement and active assistance to the current executive and his administration and to ensure that successive executives carry on the desired policies.”

One of the key reasons why Socialists were successful at passing transformative reforms was that establishment politicians feared that failing to do so would enable the Socialists and their unions to convince Milwaukee constituents to vote them out in the next election.

Given that the sewer socialists lacked a majority on the city council, historian Todd Fulda notes that Mayor Hoan took “a populist approach to governing, appealing directly to the citizens of Milwaukee to support his reforms and pressure the nonpartisan aldermen to support them as well.” The same approach informed the party’s approach on a statewide level, leading the organizers to map out the legislature to figure out pressure points to flip movable office-holders.

One socialist journalist at the time noted that “many of the things that the Socialist administration has done and is doing could have been done and may have been done by non-Socialist administrations.” But such gifts from above “always had the defect and taint of something being handed to the workers with an air of benevolence.” This was no longer the case:

With every slight advantage now gained in education, social and economic conditions, the worker feels that it is his by right of the strength of the class to which he belongs. … This is really the great thing that the election of the Socialists to power in the city and county has done for the workers, or rather that the workers did for themselves.

Why This Matters

With Zohran delivering the goods, excellently communicating this to the public, and remaining very popular, is a focus more on bottom-up organizing actually necessary? Yes, for four key reasons.

First, it’s going to take a lot more power to pass Zohran’s most ambitious policy goals, such as free childcare for every New Yorker aged six weeks to five years and building 200,000 affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized housing units. Opposition and sabotage from our local oligarchs and their political lackeys have been relatively muted for the time being. Unless far more working-class New Yorkers get involved in the fight, it’s hard to see how the full agenda can be won.

Second, even with the most charismatic politicians in the world and the best communications game, popularity and good vibes can evaporate quickly without a strong organized base. When the first serious crisis hits (and it will, eventually), ordinary people are going to look to trusted messengers in their lives, workplaces, and neighborhoods to figure out whether they should still support Zohran or not. Until we help develop a widespread intermediary layer of organized working-class leaders — well beyond the reach of the current college-educated left — our project remains fragile.

Third, Zohran can only be mayor for two terms. If we depend entirely on his charms and brilliance to deliver wins for us, it will be much harder to sustain this momentum and to keep transforming New York into the affordable city we know it can become.

Fourth, everybody is looking to Zohran’s tenure as mayor as a model — locally, statewide, and potentially for national executive office. We’re going to fall short across the US and the world if the lesson learned from his time in office is just that you have to deliver and communicate well.

Even the most principled, charismatic, and competent leftist politicians on their own can only deliver so much as long as working people stay on the sidelines. And since most of our candidates elsewhere won’t be able to rely on Zohran’s astronomic charm, nor the same level of media attention, grassroots organizing elsewhere becomes even more important. We need all anti-corporate officials, Zohran included, to use their platforms and positions to directly encourage and funnel ordinary people into mass democratic organizations and wide-scale campaigns for change.

Zohran has articulated this vision; it’s now a question of consistently putting it into practice. As he declared in his election victory speech: “Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together.”

More

• The Schools Drop ICE campaign got its first big win earlier this month. Under pressure from below, the University of Michigan decided to stop contracting with ICE Air charter companies. Now it’s time to spread this nationwide.

• Rutgers students and faculty disrupted our Board of Governors meeting to demand Rutgers become a sanctuary campus and drop its contracts with corporations propping up ICE. You can share the viral IG clip here and sign up here to get involved on your campus — lots of exciting plans in the works for this summer and fall.

• See you at the NYC-DSA rally to tell “Governor Hochul: Tax the Rich!” this Thursday, April 30, 05:30 PM outside of Hochul’s New York City Office: 919 3rd Ave. RSVP here.

• NYC-DSA is launching a campaign to tell the Rent Guidelines Board to Freeze the Rent. Join the mass launch call this Sunday May 3 at 8pm.

• This Friday is May Day! Check out the May Day Strong website to find information about how you can join the action planned in your town.

• Word on the street is that an exciting new initiative is going to be announced in the next few days by City Hall’s Office of Mass Engagement. Make sure to get plugged in once it’s public.

• Please share this article widely! This newsletter depends on your help to get the word out, really appreciate all the support you can give.

In the aftermath of the “No Kings” demonstrations of March 28^th, there has been renewed interest—and concern—that in many cities the participation of people of color generally, and Black people specifically, has been limited. To my knowledge, no one has done any study on this, so we are forced to rely on a combination of anecdotal information and historical analysis and patterns.

What is completely obvious to anyone who looks at our situation is that the victories won by progressive social movements in the ‘1960s’ have been set back over a more than forty-year period of relentless attacks. Focusing on the Black Freedom Movement for a moment, these setbacks have been resisted over time and taking many forms. The Black-led electoral upsurge that began in the late 1970s and lasted through the end of the 1988 Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign is a case in point of that resistance.

That said, the combination of repression (including assassinations of leaders and activists), strategic confusion and disagreements, and the decline in active mass democratic organizations among African Americans, contributed to a growing malaise, tending towards despair. Not altogether different from the twenty-year aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, there started to be a noticeable though not overwhelming turn inward, with parallels in the direction of the politics and philosophy of Booker T. Washington.

In our era, the 1995 Million Man March was an example of this turn inward in the aftermath of defeat. The march had two significant downsides. First, it was all-men. To paraphrase the late Amiri Baraka, one does not go to war and leave half the army at home. Second, there were no demands on the state or corporate America. The march was very much focused inwardly on Black America and, specifically, on Black men. Though mass activism certainly did not disappear in the 1990s, the fact that more than a million people would converge on Washington, DC and not place demands on the state given what was happening—and continued to happen—to Black America was phenomenal.

Over time and with the exception of the trade union movement, non-profit advocacy rose to largely replace mass organizing and the building of member-controlled mass democratic organizations. While those engaged in the advocacy work are overwhelmingly dedicated and very much committed to justice and democracy, the large-scale turn away from building personal connections with the grassroots along with challenges associated with the growth of social media, the increased environment of isolation has had a noticeable impact on the willingness of many people to engage in struggle, at least over the longer term.

2020, and the rebellions and protests that followed the murder of George Floyd may appear to be an exception to this but one must be careful with such a conclusion. The 2020 revolt was both amazing and historic. Black-led but multi-racial, it appeared to shake the foundations of the country. In fact, the protests resulted, almost immediately, in shifts in policy by government and corporations alike. I would further argue that it contributed to the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 elections.

Nevertheless, that movement failed to build and sustain a progressive institutional presence. While many organizations received significant financial grants to do their work, few of them turned in the direction of mass organizing and the building of mass democratic organizations. There was also little attention paid to the inevitable counterattack that we should have all been expecting from the far Right.

When that counterattack occurred, specifically in the context of the attacks on alleged Critical Race Theory, along with the hysteria built by the far Right in connection with Latin@ immigration, the progressive movements of color were caught flat-footed. Of course, there was resistance but the momentum arising from 2020 was lost during the remaining Covid years and the period of the Biden administration. The far Right was able to shift the narrative and, along with frustration and anger in connection with Biden’s support for the Israeli genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, cynicism, nihilism and paralysis grew.

Thus, today we have found ourselves attempting to come to grips with a level of despair and demobilization that is the result of a combination of the pounding that Black America in particular has received, as well as the absence of a counterstrategy that will take us to a post-Trump/post-neo-liberal USA. Arguments about African Americans being fearful of demonstrating are ludicrous, though there are some African Americans who have promoted such a fear, encouraging us to sit home lest we somehow provoke Trump to bring about martial law.

Those who say that the demonstrations fail to address the demands of Black people have only an element of truth in that, yes, the demands need to expand. That said, Black folks have marched many times under banners that have not specifically addressed us. Ask any number of Black trade union members who have gone on strike over wages, hours and working conditions (sometimes with demands that ignore outright the issues faced by Black workers).

If anything, I would suggest that there is a challenge for the Black Left and, for that matter, all leftists of color. During the Vietnam War it was not unusual to see antiwar demonstrations that were overwhelmingly white. Though people of color were always active in such demonstrations, things tended to change when leftists of color organized and mobilized their respective constituencies to engage. Probably the most notable example among people of color was the 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War that mobilized tens of thousands of Chicanos in the streets of Los Angeles.

Within Black America, significant work was done by the Black Panther Party, SNCC and others to reach Black America in connection with the war, not to mention the impact of the oration of Dr. Martin Luther King during the final year of his life. The antiwar work among Black Americans also included organizing among enlisted personnel in the military. The Young Lords Party, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and other Puerto Rican radicals mobilized Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland in opposition to the war. There was nothing short of a ‘rainbow’ of opposition to US aggression and the growing Right led by then President Nixon.

Today’s Black Left—indeed, all leftists of color—needs to make it their mission to replicate such an approach but under 21^st century conditions. There is nothing wrong with having our own contingents in larger rallies; there is nothing wrong with specific outreach to our constituencies. In fact, that is precisely what we need to do. But we must also connect this to a fight for what many people refer to as a Third Reconstruction, that is a progressive future grounded in demands we articulate right now which reflect the needs and aspirations of the oppressed.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to address a community gathering in Baltimore, Maryland that a friend of mine helped organize. The aim was to speak about ICE and the threat that it held for not only Latin@ immigrants but for all immigrants of color and for non-immigrant populations. Perhaps thirty people in the room. They were Black Baltimore residents, many of whom had little to no historical background on ICE, nativism in the USA, and the threats to democracy that are hiding behind the sophistry of the Trump administration.

They sat there and listened; they asked great questions; and many of them wanted to do something as a result of the meeting. They were not viewing this gathering through a computer screen, doing their email at the same time. They were there in-person and were engrossed. That’s how we begin.

[Guest essay re-published with permission from the author and Z Magazine]

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime trade unionist, cofounder of the Black Radical Congress, past president of TransAfrica Forum, cofounder of standing4democracy.org, and an author of fiction and nonfiction.

Within forty-eight hours of Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports across the country, Steve Bannon was on his War Room podcast explaining the plan. The airport deployment, he explained, was a “test run” to “really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” Bannon’s guest, MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, agreed enthusiastically: armed immigration agents should be stationed at polling places in November.

I wish we could dismiss this as hot air from two blowhards. But Trump’s airport initiative appears to be aimed at getting Americans used to seeing ICE officers everywhere, so that their presence at voting locations in the fall might feel like just one more step rather than a radical escalation.

Noncitizen voter fraud is the stated justification for Congressional Republicans’ voter suppression legislation, the SAVE Act. This bill would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship documentation to vote, a move that would disenfranchise roughly 21 million citizens. The administration’s own data, however, confirms that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. That hasn’t stopped leading Republicans, who see the upcoming midterms as an existential battle, from casting doubt on what’s left of our fragile democratic processes. They understand that posting armed federal agents at polling places can help swing the election by making it much harder for anti-Trump constituencies to vote during the midterms and in 2028.

On college campuses and in immigrant neighborhoods, for example, ICE agents could systematically demand that everybody in line show a passport or birth certificate — basically imposing the SAVE Act through force. Large-scale ICE provocations along these lines on election day could disrupt polling locations, dramatically drive down turnout, and cast doubt on any election results that don’t go Republicans’ way.

Bannon just said the quiet part out loud. This is voter suppression infrastructure being built in real time, in the open, with the explicit encouragement of the president’s close political allies. We should take them at their word.

State Legislation Can Stop This. Where are Dems?

Federal law already prohibits deploying military personnel to polling stations. But there’s a gap: the law doesn’t explicitly cover civilian federal agencies like ICE. That’s the loophole the administration is exploiting. So why haven’t Democrats and pro-democracy organizations yet prioritized fights to fix this legal loophole?

States run their own elections in our federalized system. And any state legislature can pass a law explicitly barring armed federal agents from polling locations. Since blue states have their own armed forces, such a law would have real legal teeth — arguably more than a federal statute that this administration would never enforce against itself.

New Mexico has shown this is possible. On March 13, it became the first state to enact a law barring armed officers in federal service from polling sites or within 50 feet of a ballot box during the voting period. Similar legislation has been proposed only in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington.

Why isn’t every blue state legislature treating this as a five-alarm fire? We’re eight months from the midterms. Bannon and his allies are telling us, on the record, that the Trump administration intends to deploy armed immigration agents to polling places. And the administration itself has systematically refused to rule it out.

Shouldn’t campaigns for state legislation banning ICE at polling places become a priority for every union, every democracy defense organization, and every progressive coalition? Such fights would be a perfect next step to keep up momentum after recent No Kings marches and the upcoming May 1st actions.

The worst thing the pro-democracy movement can do right now is wait. Wait to see what Trump does in November, and it’ll be too late. Agents will already be at our polling places. And at our doors.

Building Fighting Capacity

Of course, legislation alone won’t save us. This administration has shown it’s willing to defy court orders and ignore laws it doesn’t like. But there are two reasons such fights could make a big difference.

First, the laws themselves matter, especially when enforcement does not depend on Trump’s whims. A clear state statute banning armed federal agents from polling locations gives election officials, state attorneys general, and courts a concrete legal basis for physically blocking deployment. It moves the fight from the murky terrain of verbal commitments and administrative discretion onto solid legal and institutional ground. Even an administration that doesn’t respect legal boundaries has to factor in the serious costs of openly violating state election laws or clashing with local police.

Second, what might matter even more: campaigns to pass these laws can build the bottom-up fighting capacity we need to defend democracy.

And rather than yet another backroom lobbying effort, we could leverage fights around passing these laws to get large numbers of ordinary people to talk to their co-workers, neighbors, and fellow students about the importance of defending democracy this November and beyond. Because whether your number one issue is rising costs, Palestine, or justice for immigrants, the precondition for achieving any progress on any of this is simple: preventing MAGA from permanently usurping political power.

Going on Offense

Instead of waiting and seeing what Trump will do in November, or planning only defensive actions, we can go on the offense now.

A campaign to ban ICE from polling places would provide a concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today, months before the election. Mass trainings could onboard and develop scores of new leaders in this fight nationwide.

This fight would set the debate on our terms, not Trump’s. It would create opportunities for rallies, town halls, and direct actions against intransigent electeds, creating opportunities to pull people into the movement who aren’t yet engaged. It would build the kind of organized, mobilized base that can respond rapidly when the administration escalates — whether that means ICE at the polls, federal seizure of voter data, or some new attack on electoral integrity we haven’t anticipated yet.

MAGA’s strategists are not hiding their plans. The question is whether we’re going to get organized enough to stop them.

More

• My best student asked to speak with me after class Tuesday and immediately started weeping as she explained that ICE this week nabbed one of her family members. This administration’s cruelty at home and abroad is unbearable, I don’t know how I’d keep myself semi-together if I didn’t have organizing as an outlet to ward off depression. Appreciate all of you doing the work.

• The Schools Drop ICE campaign continues to build momentum — check out our new comprehensive database on contracts that 2,463 universities have with ICE enabling companies like Flock Safety, Enterprise, and ICE Air.

• Every student in the country should be building towards May 1 walkouts against ICE, war, and Trump! Sign up here for organizing support from Schools Drop ICE to make that happen.

• Please share this article widely, thank you! Due to your all’s intrepid boosting, the excellent NYT opinion writer Jamelle Bouie shared my article on anti-war strategy in his latest column, which impressed my mother (always an important metric).

Instead of that outward facing work, my timeline for the past few days has been full of anti-imperialist radicals in the US defending Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American author who Zohran Mamdani rightfully distanced himself from last week. Abulhawa continues to mix justified opposition to Zionism with clear antisemitism, such as defending an Australian Neo-Nazi by pointing out that the judge who sentenced him was Jewish, dabbling in Holocaust denial, and suggesting that no Jew anywhere in the world should feel safe.

The online discourse around Abulhawa is indicative of many dynamics, including — as I pointed out in a recent piece on America’s missing anti-war movement— the prevalence of counter-productive ultra-leftism among too many American anti-imperialists. Even if we leave aside the fact that bigotry should be rejected as a matter of principle, anybody with even half a foot outside of Twitter’s far-left echo chamber should see that antisemitic remarks make it much harder to build a mass movement at home to stop US militarism and aid to Israel. Yet, for too many American leftists today, practical anti-war activism doesn’t seem to expand far beyond performative radicalism, heated rhetoric, and deference politics.

This type of ultra-leftism has a long lineage in the US, as do debates over how to build mass anti-war opposition. So rather than relitigate more hot-takes, it’s helpful to take a step back and examine what type of anti-imperialist politics within the US has actually been effective.

Today’s anti-war activists can learn a lot from the tactics and strategies that put an end to the Vietnam War.

The decades-long resistance of the Vietnamese people, whose heroism is hard to overstate, was obviously a central factor in the US defeat. But Vietnamese revolutionaries were also the first to underscore that they could not win without a strong peace movement within the belly of the beast. To understand how that movement succeeded, there’s no better place to turn than Fred Halstead’s extraordinary 880-page history Out Now: A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War.

Halstead served on the steering committees of virtually every national antiwar coalition from 1965 to 1975. He was a garment cutter, a World War II navy veteran, the presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1968, and at six feet six and 350 pounds, one of the most physically imposing chief marshals in the history of American protest. His book is a week-by-week, meeting-by-meeting account of how tenacious organizers built a movement that helped end a war and the strategic fights they had to win along the way to do it. As we’ll see, it was independent mass action — not liberalism nor ultra-leftism — that proved most effective.

The Fight Over Demands

From its earliest days, the Vietnam antiwar movement was consumed by a three-way fight over what to demand. On the right stood organizations like SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which wanted the movement to call for “negotiations.” Their logic was practical: all wars end with negotiations; the task was to strengthen the hand of congressional “doves” who were beginning to criticize escalation. SANE wanted to work closely with liberal Democratic politicians, to convince them that negotiations should begin. In that framework, “immediate withdrawal” slogans were a liability — they would shut off the friendly ears of Establishment figures who accepted the basic premises of the cold war.

The liberal wing of the movement thus hitched its fortunes to the Democratic Party, trusting that patient lobbying and respectable protest would eventually move the administration toward peace. But Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had no intention of rolling back US imperial influence. Even as SANE and its allies cultivated relationships with sympathetic Democrats, LBJ was dramatically escalating — pouring hundreds of thousands of troops into Vietnam and intensifying the bombing of the North.

The strategy of working through friendly channels inside the party proved fruitless: the very politicians the liberals courted either fell in line behind the president or found themselves powerless to change his course.

On the opposite end of the anti-war spectrum stood ultra-left groups like the Spartacist League, which wanted demonstrations to march under banners reading “Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution.” Alongside them, the national leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) increasingly argued that the antiwar movement should adopt a “multi-issue” program encompassing opposition to racism, capitalism, and imperialism as a whole — or that the movement was simply “working on the wrong issue.” In a remarkable position paper prepared for a crucial 1965 convention, SDS leaders Lee Webb and Paul Booth flatly declared: “Essentially, we think that the movement against the war in Vietnam is working on the wrong issue. And that issue is Vietnam.”

In the middle stood the radical pacifists around A.J. Muste and Dave Dellinger; the Trotskyists of the SWP and the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA); and the independent committees to end the war in Vietnam that formed much of the backbone of the new movement. These groups — nonexclusionary, action-oriented, open to anyone willing to work against the war — argued for “immediate withdrawal,” later crystallized into the slogan “Out Now.” Halstead recounts that the local antiwar committees discovered through direct experience that it was far easier to reach ordinary people with a demand for getting the U.S. out of Vietnam entirely than with the complicated and equivocal appeals favored by the negotiations wing. “Bring the Troops Home Now” was concrete and unambiguous. It left the government no room to equivocate. Johnson claimed to favor negotiations too. But Johnson could not say “Bring all the troops home now.”

The principled case went deeper. Halstead noted that demands for negotiations, when directed by Americans at the American government, implicitly recognized some U.S. right to be in Vietnam — something to negotiate over. The U.S. simply had no right whatever to be militarily involved in Vietnam, and the only honest demand was to get out.

At one heated meeting, a negotiations supporter shouted: “Bullshit. How do you even withdraw without negotiations?” To which several people on the other side shouted in unison: “On ships and planes, the same way you got in.”

Halstead’s three-way schema — liberalism, ultra-leftism, mass action — is useful. But it doesn’t fully capture an important current that cut across all three categories: Black opposition to the war, which emerged after decades of deep on-the-ground organizing for civil rights and via the inspiration of anti-colonial struggles abroad. SNCC’s 1966 statement against the war was one of the earliest and sharpest organizational breaks with Cold War consensus. Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve — “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” — electrified millions. And Martin Luther King’s 1967 Riverside Church address, in which he called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” was a seismic event that broke the tacit agreement among civil rights leaders to stay silent on foreign policy.

Black anti-war activism was often multi-issue and effective. It connected Vietnam to the draft’s racial inequities, to the diversion of resources from domestic needs, to the broader structure of racial oppression. But this type of multi-issue politics could not always be easily exported into different social contexts in the US.

How Revolutionary Slogans Shrank the Mass Movement

Ultra-leftism was no more effective at ending the war than liberalism. But it came wrapped in revolutionary rhetoric that made it particularly seductive to the young radicals the movement depended on.

Foreshadowing today’s debates over how to relate to anti-imperial resistance in Palestine and Iran, Halstead explained why the demand for “Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution” was not helpful. He “saw no useful purpose for them in a demonstration appealing to Americans with demands directed at the U.S. government. We were, after all, not speaking to Vietnamese.” He continued: “Both from the point of view of those simply opposed to the war, and those who, like myself, were partisans of the Vietnamese revolution, our central task as Americans was to put maximum pressure on the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. That would help the Vietnamese revolution more than anything else we could possibly do.”

The “multi-issue” argument was even more damaging, because it was wielded by SDS, which had the largest base among radicalized students. One SWP leader characterized the multi-issue debate as “largely a sham battle that covered up rather than elucidated the issues at stake.” His reasoning was simple: “All the radical organizations are multi-issue and none believe that society can be changed... by a program or pattern of activity around a single issue. Thus any member of SDS, YSA, Du Bois, M-2-M, has a multi-issue approach to the war.” But the committees to end the war in Vietnam were united fronts, not revolutionary parties. “Any attempt to add further planks to their program would destroy them. Those who make them up agree on this basic point and no other.”

The problem with SDS’s multi-issue approach was not that connecting the war to other struggles was inherently wrong. Black radical movements were doing exactly that with great effect — and socialist organizations like the SWP and the Black Panthers were recruiting people to precisely such a comprehensive vision of how society’s ills were intertwined.

But when SNCC or King connected Vietnam to racial injustice, they were articulating what masses of Black Americans already felt. The connections were drawn from below, from the concrete realities of communities that were disproportionately drafted, disproportionately killed, and systematically denied the freedoms they were supposedly fighting to defend abroad. That kind of multi-issue consciousness deepened and broadened the movement. SDS, by contrast, was doing something very different: asking coalitions of people who agreed on one thing — that the war had to stop — to first adopt a comprehensive analysis of imperialism, capitalism, and racism as a package before they could march together. Far from deepening the movement, that just erected barriers to entry.

In New York, SDS literally voted to dissolve the citywide committee to end the war in Vietnam rather than allow it to continue as a focused antiwar coalition. A bloc of forces led by SDS supporters carried a vote to shut down the coordinating committee and replace it with a regional SDS group operating under SDS’s multi-issue program. An SDS leader chaired the meeting — though, as Halstead notes, it was apparently the first meeting of the committee he had ever attended. The YSA had opposed this move, and a general assembly was scheduled days later where the focused antiwar approach would likely have carried. So SDS simply killed the organization before the vote could happen.

Later, SDS’s trajectory carried it further and further from mass politics. By 1968, meetings that were supposed to build radical community bases had “sifted down to a handful of SDSers sitting in a room escalating their rhetoric.” The faction that became the Weathermen adopted the slogan “Dare to struggle, dare to win” and tried via spectacular bombings to substitute the will of a tiny minority for the patient work of building a mass movement. And as Dellinger himself later admitted, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protest clashes with armed forces “helped create a movement mystique of revolutionary derring-do and heroic street encounters as goals in themselves. This polarized the movement around the question of street violence and gradually led to a tragic separation between the organized movement and large sections of the antiwar public.”

When it came to demands, SWP leader Peter Camejo, in his famous 1970 speech “Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action,” identified a core problem with turning away from a clear focus on Vietnam. Calling for “Stop Imperialism” instead of “Bring the Troops Home Now” was an abstraction. “Even Nixon can say, ‘I’m against imperialism too — that’s what Britain and France and Holland did in the 18th and 19th centuries.’ But Nixon can’t say, ‘Bring all the troops home now.’”

In other words, the ultra-left demand and the liberal demand converged in their practical effect. Both let the government off the hook. “Negotiations” was too weak to pin the war-makers down. “Smash Imperialism” was too abstract. Only concrete, immediate, non-negotiable demands generated maximum pressure to actually constrain the ruling class.

Mass Action and the Question of Leverage

The SWP’s position on tactics was often caricatured as a fetish for big marches. But it was something more interesting — and more strategic — than that. What the SWP argued for was a strategy of independent mass action: activating and involving the broadest numbers of Americans in the fight.

Halstead wrote in 1965: “It is well within possibility that not just a few hundred thousand, but millions of Americans can be actively involved in the struggle against the Vietnam war. A movement of that scope, even though centered around the single issue of the war, would have the most profound effects on every social structure in the country, including the trade unions and the soldiers in the army.”

Much of SWPers focus was thus on reaching and winning over ordinary Americans to oppose a war that remained popular as late as 1967. And as anti-war sentiment grew, this persuasion work increasingly was combined with deep organizing work to make it visible.

Evolution of Anti-War Sentiment in the 1960s

Here are some examples of what this looked like on the ground.

In San Francisco in 1967, over two thousand activists distributed more than 400,000 leaflets for Proposition P—a binding referendum on immediate withdrawal—at “every conceivable public place in the city, including those where GIs gathered.” A special project organized by Catholic students, unionists, teachers, and nuns put 40,000 leaflets into the hands of parishioners at Catholic churches across the city.

Across the US, the YSA-led Student Mobilization Committee (SMC) built genuine organizational infrastructure—weekly chapter meetings with majority-rule decision-making, open steering committees, citywide representatives, regional conferences that drew six hundred activists at a time in Boston alone—and published not only its own Student Mobilizer but a GI Press Service designed so underground military newspapers could lift whole articles and cartoons.

At Fort Jackson, South Carolina, a drafted YSA organizer named Joe Miles started by playing Malcolm X tapes in the barracks for fifteen Black and Puerto Rican GIs; within weeks, eighty soldiers were attending meetings of “GIs United Against the War in Vietnam,” and the organizers had made a conscious, debated decision to reach across racial lines and invite white soldiers.

By the October 1969 Moratorium, millions of ordinary Americans were canvassing door to door, picketing, and leafleting in actions that reached every state, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands—while the SMC had active chapters on over three hundred campuses. The movement built real united-front coalitions on the principle of nonexclusion—welcoming everyone from SANE liberals to Trotskyists to Catholic priests to Black nationalists—and it tested its message at the ballot box, where antiwar referenda won 63 percent in Detroit, a majority in San Francisco, and 66 percent in Madison, with the strongest support coming from working-class precincts. A protest bubble this was not.

When appropriate, the SWP and SMC’s advocacy of independent mass action also took the form of militant actions like student strikes or, even more ambitiously, the establishment of “anti-war universities” aimed “not to shut down the universities but to take over their facilities and use them to spread the antiwar activism to other sectors of the population.” During the May 1970 student strike, for example, at the University of Illinois Circle Campus students commandeered printing facilities and phone lines, the Art and Architecture Institute ran twenty-four hours a day producing posters that blanketed Chicago, and teams were dispatched daily with tailored leaflets to GIs at nearby bases, workers at factory gates, and high school students in surrounding neighborhoods. Students, like many Black Americans, were ready for more militant action than most of the rest of the population.

And, yes, SWP activists — who by all accounts were central leaders of the peace movement nationwide — also spent a lot of time advocating for and building peaceful mass marches. They were right to do so: generally, this proved to be the tactic best suited for drawing the maximum numbers into visible opposition. Millions poured into the streets, particularly in 1969 and 1970.

It’s worth noting that big demonstrations in the 1960s had a different impact than they do today. Partly that’s because it took a lot more outreach and logistical work to organize them in a pre-digital era. Getting big numbers in the streets thus built and demonstrated a degree of organized power that they don’t necessarily do today. They also tended to attract more media attention.

The SWP’s orientation towards mass outreach and big peaceful protests often put them in sharp conflict with those who favored subordinating mass action to small-group confrontations, acts of individual resistance, and direct action by committed minorities. Dellinger dismissed mass mobilizations for immediate withdrawal as united fronts organized around the “lowest common denominator.” Halstead responded that getting the U.S. out of Vietnam was the movement’s central purpose and the reason for its existence. There was nothing “lowest” about it. The SWP championed mass demonstrations because of what they could set in motion — specifically, because visible mass opposition in the civilian population made it easier and safer for people with actual structural leverage to act.

GIs could express their own opposition to the war more readily when millions of civilians were already marching. Workers could begin to question the war when antiwar sentiment was no longer confined to campus radicals.

Halstead insisted on “pointing the antiwar movement toward the great mass of ordinary working class Americans, including those in the military.”

The SWP did not view GI activity as a substitute for building the civilian movement. On the contrary: “Without a mass antiwar movement in the civilian population the GI movement could never get beyond occasional isolated individual acts.” But the reciprocal factor was powerful: “Any antiwar stand earned by GIs cut, like nothing else could, through the ‘support our boys’ demagogy of the hawks. Conversely, the more massive the civilian movement, the easier it was for the GIs to express their own opposition to the war.”

That strategic bet paid off.

How the Mass Movement Broke the Army

By 1968, several hundred antiwar GI newspapers had appeared — Vietnam GI, published by a veteran who accumulated a mailing list of thousands of GIs in Vietnam itself; Fatigue Press at Fort Hood; the Bond, distributed at bases across the country.

GI coffeehouses sprang up near bases. At Fort Lewis, near Seattle, a team of civilian activists tried a new approach one evening — instead of leafleting, they simply walked onto the base and started conversations. “Most of us started with, ‘I’m here to talk about the war in Vietnam,’” one organizer reported. “The GIs were friendly and quite eager to talk. After 20 minutes, almost every table was the scene of discussion and debate.” When MPs ejected the civilians, GIs followed them outside, indignant, offering to invite them back in as personal guests. “Each antiwar person went in a different direction with several soldiers and kept on talking about the antiwar movement for about an hour, while the MPs were frantically trying to keep up with all of us.”

In San Francisco on October 12, 1968, five hundred active-duty GIs marched alongside 15,000 civilians for immediate withdrawal. A Military Airlift Command general tried to get permission to discharge one of the organizers, and sent a message to the Pentagon warning that the demonstration could have “severe impact on military discipline throughout the services.” GIs somewhere along the transmission chain copied the message and leaked it to an antiwar newspaper. It was reprinted and distributed at military bases across the Bay Area.

Then came the collapse. By 1971, what had started as scattered individual acts of conscience had become a crisis of the entire American military. Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., a marine corps historian, published an astonishing assessment in the June 1971 Armed Forces Journal: “The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our Army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.”

Heinl reported that conditions had “only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle Mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.”

“Search and destroy” missions had acquired a new name among the troops: “search and evade.” It was common for patrols to light fires to signal their position to opposing forces, so neither side would stumble into a fight. A process called “working it out” spread throughout Vietnam: a unit or a GI would refuse an order, everybody would sit down and talk, the order would be modified. Officers and sergeants who refused to participate in these discussions risked being “fragged” — having a fragmentation grenade tossed into their bunk.

In the morale-plagued Americal Division, Heinl reported, fraggings were running one a week in early 1971. The division was disbanded before the year was out. “Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” Heinl wrote. Literature circulating among GIs on the West Coast quipped: “Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer.” Author Arthur Hadley, visiting Vietnam during this period, reported that a majority of the battalion commanders he interviewed had been personally threatened with murder.

For Black soldiers, opposition to the war was inseparable from opposition to the racism they faced in uniform and had faced their entire lives. Unsurprisingly, working-class Black troops were disproportionately assigned to combat units and suffered casualty rates far exceeding their share of the population. They faced pervasive racism within the military itself — Confederate flags in barracks, racial slurs from officers, discriminatory enforcement of discipline. And Black GIs, many of whom were inspired by the Black Power movement, were often the driving force behind organized resistance; Heinl’s own assessment documented widespread racial conflict as a major dimension of the military’s collapse.

By 1971, the American ground-combat force in Vietnam had become, in Halstead’s summary, “a net liability” to the war effort, “and this reality, above all, forced Nixon to continue the withdrawals in spite of the failure of ‘Vietnamization.’”

That didn’t happen because small groups of activists confronted the police or because revolutionary students chanted about Ho Chi Minh. It happened because millions of ordinary civilians made it clear, through mass mobilizations organized around the simplest possible demand — Out Now — that the war had no popular mandate. That civilian movement gave permission and cover to GIs to express what they already felt. And what GIs felt, once expressed and organized, made the war machine grind to a halt.

What This Means Now

Liberalism, ultra-leftism, and mass action continue to be the main strategic alternatives facing the anti-war movement.

Like LBJ in the 1960s, Democratic leaders continue their longstanding commitment to US imperialism. An impulse to work with the Democratic establishment and to raise only demands acceptable to it helps explain the weakness of our peace movement and why, until recently, so many liberal and progressive organizations refused to fight for an end to military funding for Israel. The continued refusal of Schumer and Jeffries to take a hard stance against the illegitimacy of this war in Iran is deplorable. Fortunately, the Democratic base is increasingly irate at the old guard. And we should expect huge numbers — and lots of anti-war sentiment — at the upcoming No Kings rallies.

On the other hand, the impulse to justify or amplify rhetoric destined to alienate most anti-war Americans speaks to the influence of ultra-leftism among many individuals who otherwise could be focusing on effective outwards-facing organizing. Similarly, the impulse to load every coalition and protest with every demand — to insist that every anti-war mobilization also be an anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist formation before anyone can walk in the door — is the same approach that led SDS to dissolve the New York antiwar committee rather than let it remain a focused single-issue coalition.

We shouldn’t confuse the role of a socialist organization like the SWP, or the Black Panthers, with the role of a broader mass movement around specific widely and deeply felt demands.

Like many other activists committed to a mass action approach, SWP cadre understood the war as a racist product of imperialism. They wanted to overthrow capitalism. But they recognized that the most effective way to act on that understanding was to build the largest possible movement around the most concrete, non-negotiable demand — and to orient that movement toward the people with real social leverage. Demands and tactics that might be appropriate for Gaza today or Harlem in the late 1960s shouldn’t be exported into very different contexts.

Far from downplaying the importance of fighting against racism and capitalism, SWPers and the anti-war movement they helped lead showed that it was through the empowering and radicalizing experience of mass action that most Americans would become open to more anti-systemic ideas. Education and propaganda could go only so far as long as most working-class Americans were resigned to conditions at home and abroad. As Camejo underscored, “Our aim, in fact, is to move people around broader and broader issues, but we’ve got to deal with reality … People don’t suddenly understand everything at once.”

Independent mass politics has lost none of its relevance today. But this doesn’t mean we can just copy and paste the tactics of the 1960s into a very different military and social context. The absence of a draft, the increased US reliance on air wars, and the atomization of American life pose new challenges. So too does the fact that Trump is escalating attacks on so many different fronts at once: in today’s conditions, there might be more space for combining widely and deeply felt demands into multi-issue joint actions like No Kings and May Day. We’ll need to think rigorously and experiment in practice to identify chokepoints and to find the best way to concretize a mass action approach to stop Trump’s imperial and domestic assaults.

But the task remains to build the kind of mass movement that can reach into the places where power actually operates and make it impossible for business as usual to continue. That requires concrete demands that millions of people can stand behind, a relentless focus on outward-facing organizing, and the creation of open democratic coalitions that don’t screen for ideological purity.

You don’t help end a war by raising the most radical slogan or by whispering in a senator’s ear. Instead, you build something so large, so broad, and so persistent that the people whose hands are on the machinery start to refuse.

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• Please share this article! Everything you do to get the word out means a lot, thank you!

• The first I heard that Thomson Reuters employees were organizing against their company’s ties to ICE was when a New York Times reporter called to ask if I knew my research had sparked their effort 😭 Here’s the article, it’s a great thing to share to encourage folks to organize at work against ICE complicity.

  

• One concrete thing you can do to fight against Trump’s wars — as well as ICE — is to join and support the QuitGPT boycott against OpenAI.

Why then has there been so little collective protest against the US-Israel offensive? Answering this question is not easy. What follows are seven hypotheses rather than definitive conclusions. But exploring why we’re lacking an anti-war movement today can help us move to actually start building one. And for the sake of Iranians, the Middle East, and working people in the US, we’d better do so as soon as possible.

1) Americans Feel Powerless

A key reason why so many young people in the 1960s threw themselves into the fight against US military involvement in Vietnam was that the civil rights movement had recently demonstrated the power of mass action. As Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)’s founding manifesto in 1962 put it, “the Southern struggle against racial bigotry … compelled most of us from silence to activism.” Looking back, one participant recalled that such examples of success “gave the feeling that you could actually make a difference, that you needed to take a stand.”

Now the biggest obstacle we face in our country is a pervasive sense of powerlessness. SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn was right to underscore the difference between that era and our current moment: “The issue holding us back today, to me, is the idea that what you do won’t make a difference.”

To overcome this feeling of resignation, we need more inspiring examples of successful struggles. Minnesota’s successful mass resistance against ICE, for example, has begun to energize activism nationwide. The challenge now is to find and scale up winnable bottom-up campaigns, like getting our schools to break with ICE or getting millions of consumers to leave companies like OpenAI that are enabling Trump’s war machine. Proving in practice that we have power in smaller battles can inspire millions to join the fight against this administration’s worst horrors at home and abroad.

2) People Are Hoping the War Ends Quickly

Like so many others, I wake up every morning and hope to see a headline suggesting that the always-mercurial Trump has decided to call a quick victory in Iran, like he did in Venezuela. At least, in that case further atrocities against civilians would be halted.

Given the administration’s disinterest in trying to manufacture consent for this war and the obvious political risks of rising gas prices, it’s been hard to believe that Trump would so willingly risk his presidency — to say nothing of the lives of Iranians and US service members — on a long, armed intervention with no clear endgame. Nevertheless, the war continues to deepen.

The fact that Trump moved so quickly and with so little regard for public opinion has left many of us in a state of shock. Whereas George W. Bush spent a year trying to convince us to invade Iraq — sparking a deliberative process into which mass protests could intervene — Trump’s speed and dismissal of public opinion has created little space for Americans to break out of spectator mode. This helps explain the paradox of why an exceptionally unpopular war has so far been met with exceptionally little mass protest. But insofar as the war continues, expect increasing numbers to start taking collective action.

And even if Trump does call victory in the next few days or weeks, this is unlikely to put a stop to his imperial ambitions. We’ll still need to ramp up our anti-war agitation to stop the administration’s push for regime change in Cuba, its continued funding of Israel, its belligerence towards China — and to make the 2028 presidential election, in part, a referendum on runaway military spending, US imperial wars, and US support for the genocidal Israeli state.

3) Trump is Doing So Many Horrible Things

In contrast with George W. Bush — whose imperialist exploits were his singular focus — it is easy to get overwhelmed by Trump’s across-the-board attacks and it is difficult to quickly respond to every new outrage. Our side’s organized forces have been stretched thin. Personally, I’ve been spending about ten volunteer hours daily for the last month helping support the new Schools Drop ICE campaign; I’ve not had a single extra hour to organize around another issue lately, limiting my ability to participate in other essential efforts like organizing against this war.

The good news is that the upcoming No Kings protests on March 28 and the day of disruption on May 1 provide excellent opportunities to bring together all our anti-Trump demands and struggles. Opposition to war is likely to be a major focus of those actions.

4) People Confuse Mobilizing with Organizing

Even if the upcoming No Kings and May Day actions are massive and denounce imperial domination from Iran to Cuba to Palestine, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve rebuilt a powerful movement against the Trump regime generally or its wars in particular. A movement is a movement to the extent that ordinary people organize between protests — in other words, when they get actively involved to win over others to the cause.

One of the challenges of our current era is that digital technologies make it much easier to get existing supporters into the streets without much organizational infrastructure or person-to-person outreach. In other words, social media facilitates mobilizing. But the flip side is that big protests don’t demonstrate as much power as they used to and their preparation doesn’t build the same type of on-the-ground relationships and new leaders that movements depend on for their power.

SDS leader Mark Rudd is right that today’s young people, “lack instruction on how to do the hard work of person-to-person organizing. Instead, contemporary youth are left with the iconographic photos of protests from the sixties — and little understanding of the work that inspired such protests in the first place.”

Angela Davis spells this out even more clearly:

Demonstrations [are] supposed to demonstrate the potential power of movements. … But these days we tend to think of that process of rendering the movement visible as the very substance of the movement itself. If this is the case, then the millions who go home after the demonstration have concluded that they do not necessarily feel responsible to further build support for the cause.

That’s why we should look at March 28 and May 1, not as one-off protests, but as mechanisms to recruit, onboard, and train as many people as possible into ongoing campaigns.

5) No Draft

The end of the draft in the US is certainly one of the factors explaining why we have less anti-war activity today than in the 1960s. With fewer Americans in harm’s way, and with an increasing reliance on long-distance aerial bombardment, the costs of war are less immediately and directly felt by Americans than in the past.

That said, we shouldn’t overstate this factor. The United States experienced significant anti-war movements even after the draft ended in 1973, notably in the 1980s against US intervention in Central America and during the early 2000s against Bush’s push for war in Iraq. So while the absence of a draft and changes in war methods can help explain the difference between today and the Vietnam era, they don’t go that far in explaining the puzzle of why we aren’t yet seeing levels of anti-war activity comparable to the 1980s or 2000s.

Overall, America’s turn to capital-intensive air wars raises the importance of organizing to demand that sky-high US military spending — upwards of $1 trillion yearly — and demanding those funds be used to fund public services at home.

6) Sectarianism Has Helped Marginalize Anti-War Activity

Rather than build the broadest and deepest possible opposition to US military aid and interventions abroad, too much anti-war activity in recent years has leaned into alienating, excessively radical rhetoric and slogans, while tying widely supported demands against war to unjustified and unhelpful romanticization of any and all anti-imperialist forces. Consistently opposing imperialism does not require justifying Hamas’s killing of civilians or the Islamic Republic’s repression of pro-democracy activists.

And instead of relentlessly focusing their fire on politicians like Trump, Biden, and Schumer who have pushed or enabled atrocities abroad, a bizarrely high amount of activist energy has gone towards calling out elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even though she has never voted for US military aid to Israel and has vociferously opposed the war in Iran.

Unfortunately, the impact and continuity of many righteous encampments in solidarity with Palestine were undercut by provocative rhetoric that cynical opponents could easily misrepresent, by an excessive focus on activist “security culture,” and by the absence of concerted efforts to win over and mobilize majorities on campuses. Intense repression against these valiant but relatively isolated efforts chilled campus organizing. Especially since students are often a vanguard of anti-war and anti-authoritarian organizing, reviving a culture of mass politics on colleges remains a key task.

Reviving an Anti-War Movement

What steps can we take to help revive a powerful anti-war movement in the US? Most immediately, each of us — and each of the organizations we belong to — can commit not only to attending the March 28 No Kings demonstrations, but to going all in to reach out to our neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, and co-congregants to join as well. You can take the opportunity to ask them what they feel about the Iran war or ICE; note how crazy it is that the US spends nearly a trillion yearly on war while everyday people can’t get by at home; and then pivot to a friendly ask for them to join you at the rally.

And don’t just talk to the people who you know are already left-leaning. Most Americans are strongly against this war and just don’t know what to do about it. It’s time to reach widely and to break beyond our echo chambers. That’s what makes a movement real. And what can set into motion the type of mass non-violent disruption at work, school, and beyond that Trump and the war machine can’t afford to ignore.

A second concrete step you can take is to support the QuitGPT campaign. This boycott has taken on an added level of urgency — and anti-war content — after the Pentagon two weeks ago refused to accept Anthropic’s contract stipulations that its AI not be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous military attacks. Unburdened by any principle beyond profitmaking, OpenAI immediately stepped into the breach and signed a contract with the Pentagon that, as one top company executive who resigned last Saturday put it, “was rushed without the guardrails defined.”

Just as Tesla Takedown succeeded in forcing Elon Musk out of the White House, so too can QuitGPT punish OpenAI for its enabling of a US military machine that is massacring grade school girls in Iran and hurtling the world towards catastrophe. Unlike so many online boycotts, this is an organized effort with a measurable impact that people can get involved in to help scale up. According to QuitGPT organizers, over 4 million people have already taken part in the boycott.

Trump wants us to believe we’re powerless to stop him. But the reality is that this is a widely unpopular regime waging one of the most unpopular wars in US history. As body counts, oil prices, and US taxpayer costs continue to rise, Americans are going to be increasingly looking for ways to stop the bloodshed. Mass collective action in that direction is long overdue.

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• Please share this article widely! This substack is of and for organizers like you — and it depends on your help to keep on spreading widely. Thanks to your support, Labor Politics is about to reach 10,000 readers! I genuinely appreciate all your help with this — and for your organizing work on the ground.

• One important part of ending US war and imperialism is building a strong voice for our vision in the halls of power. Claire Valdez is a fantastic DSA member and union organizer running for Congress in New York City — she could really use your financial support. (And if you live in the city join us for a labor fundraiser with Claire on March 28.)

• ICE is the main arm of Trump’s war at home. Join the Schools Drop ICE campaign to force our colleges to break with ICE and its corporate enablers.

• If you’re not a member of DSA yet, what are you waiting for? Join here.

But we should be honest: this didn’t start with Trump. For decades, both parties have shared the same basic commitment to U.S. military dominance over the world. Fifty-five percent of House Democrats voted in favor of the most recent US armed forces budget.

Establishment liberals like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries prefer a more stable and less erratic version of empire. That’s why their objections about the Iran attack are about process and “strategic clarity,” not a break with the underlying goal of U.S. supremacy. For her part, Kamala Harris on the campaign trail promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

What almost never gets seriously questioned in mainstream US politics is the premise itself: that Washington has the right to bomb, invade, or attack any country across the globe whenever it decides it has a sufficiently good reason. There are important exceptions — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, James Talarico, and others have taken clearer antiwar stances.

But it’s not enough just to oppose this war on Iran. Nor is it enough to demand an end to US aid to Israel. As long as the United States spends almost $1 trillion a year on the military, there will be overwhelming institutional and political pressure to use that machine, justify that machine, and keep expanding that machine — while insisting that there’s no money at home to make life affordable for working people.

Anti-MAGA forces need to stop treating military-budget cuts like a fringe talking point. In the midterms and in 2028, we should agitate for serious reforms to the US war machine. What’s a reasonable-but-ambitious starting point? Cut the armed forces’ $886 billion budget in half.

That’s not pie in the sky. A military budget of “only” about $443 billion would still leave the United States the biggest military spender in the world. But it could mark a real step away from the strategy and practice of imperialism.

Humanity needs international cooperation, not conflict. The United States’s deepening rivalry with China threatens to push the globe into another catastrophic great-power spiral at precisely the moment we need to confront actual existential questions like climate breakdown and how to develop AI slowly and carefully enough that it doesn’t wreck our livelihoods or human civilization.

And with so many working-class Americans barely hanging on, freeing up roughly $500 billion every year would go a long way toward making life in this country livable again.

We are constantly told that universal childcare is too expensive, housing is too expensive, healthcare is too expensive, public transit is too expensive, climate adaptation is too expensive. One simple solution is to cut the military budget in half.

Better Ways To Spend Half a Trillion Dollars

So many life-changing policies would become possible if America halved its military budget. Here’s what $443 billion yearly could fund if directed fully toward each item:

1. Medicare for All — Most estimates put the net new federal cost at $300-400 billion/year (replacing premiums, copays, and deductibles currently paid privately). $443 billion/year would essentially fund the transition to a single-payer system, covering every person in the country while eliminating out-of-pocket costs.

2. End hunger — Making breakfast and lunch free at every school costs about $20 billion per year. Expanding SNAP and WIC to fully eliminate food insecurity would run another $50-100 billion. $443 billion could end hunger in America and completely transform the school nutrition system with money to spare many times over.

3. Build millions of public housing units — Average cost to build a quality affordable unit is roughly $200,000-$300,000. At $443 billion/year, you could build 1.5 to 2 million new public housing units every single year. The entire estimated national shortage is about 4-7 million units, so you’d close the gap in three to four years and then have an ongoing budget for maintenance, renovation, and continued construction.

4. Cancel all medical debt — Total medical debt in active collection is estimated around $195 billion. You could eliminate every dollar of it in the first year and still have over $240 billion left for other health investments that same year.

5. Cancel all student debt — Total outstanding student debt is roughly $1.8 trillion. You could wipe it all out in about four years, then fund free public college permanently going forward with money to spare.

6. Make public college and trade school free — Total tuition revenue at all public colleges and universities is around $80-90 billion per year. $443 billion covers that almost five times over. You could eliminate tuition, massively expand capacity, and fund living stipends for students.

7. Universal childcare and pre-K — Estimated cost for a universal, high-quality system is roughly $70-100 billion per year. $443 billion would fund a system where every family in America has access to free or near-free childcare from birth through age five, with well-paid unionized staff, and still leave $340+ billion on the table.

8. Green energy transition jobs program — The entire Inflation Reduction Act was about $370 billion in climate spending spread over a decade. $443 billion per year would be roughly twelve times that annual rate. You could retrofit every building in the country, build out renewable energy infrastructure nationwide, and fund union-wage jobs for every displaced fossil fuel worker many times over.

9. National high-speed rail network — California’s single high-speed rail project is estimated around $100 billion. $443 billion/year could build a comprehensive national network connecting every major metro area within a decade, something comparable to what China and Europe have built.

10. Repair all deteriorating infrastructure — The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the US infrastructure gap, the gap between the amount of money needed for basic infrastructure maintenance versus how much is actually allocated for it, at roughly $2.6 trillion over ten years. $443 billion yearly covers that completely — every bridge, road, dam, water system, school building, and electrical grid — and leaves room for new construction.

11. Universal home and community-based care — There are roughly 800,000 people on Medicaid waiting lists for home care for elderly and disabled people. A comprehensive universal program would cost an estimated $150-200 billion per year. $443 billion fully funds this with well-paid caregivers and eliminates every waitlist in the country.

12. Federal jobs guarantee — Most estimates for a program guaranteeing a $15 per hour job with benefits to anyone who wants one range from $300-500 billion/year depending on uptake. $443 billion lands right in that range, potentially employing 10-15 million people in public works, caregiving, environmental restoration, and community development.

13. Expand and strengthen Social Security — Eliminating the taxable earnings cap is the usual funding mechanism, but $443 billion/year could increase average benefits by roughly 35-40%, lower the retirement age, and extend the trust fund indefinitely. That would lift virtually every senior out of poverty.

14. Community health centers and mental health services — There are currently about 1,400 federally qualified health centers. Estimates suggest we need roughly 8,000-10,000 more to provide universal primary and mental health access. At roughly $5-10 million per center for construction and staffing, $443 billion could build out the entire system in a single year and fund operations for decades.

15. Weatherize and retrofit every home — Average cost to fully weatherize a home is roughly $5,000-$10,000. There are about 35-40 million homes that need it. Total cost: $200-400 billion. $443 billion/year does the entire country in one year, cutting energy bills for tens of millions of families immediately — and reducing carbon emissions.

16. Universal paid family and medical leave — A comprehensive 12-week paid leave program is estimated at roughly $50-75 billion/year. $443 billion funds this nearly six times over. You could offer six months of paid leave and still have hundreds of billions remaining.

17. Fully fund and transform veterans’ care — Veterans Affairs’ (VA) current budget is around $400 billion but is plagued by staffing shortages, long wait times, and crumbling infrastructure, with Congress consistently failing to fund it adequately. $443 billion a year could double VA healthcare staffing, eliminate every wait list, build state-of-the-art facilities in every region, fully fund mental health and suicide prevention programs, end veteran homelessness (roughly 35,000 veterans are unhoused on any given night), and guarantee every veteran world-class care without bureaucratic delays — all while keeping the existing VA public healthcare system rather than privatizing it.

The staggering thing about this list is that even the most expensive items rarely exceed $443 billion individually. You could fund several of them simultaneously with half the military budget. For context, the US spends more on its armed forces than the next nine countries combined.

Peace Is Possible

Even though more Americans want to cut the military budget than expand it — and even though this war on Iran is widely opposed — the military itself as an institution remains remarkably popular. Cutting the military budget in half is ambitious and would be controversial, since so many communities across the US economically rely on supplying goods and services to the military. Why not start with a smaller proposed cut? This is a reasonable question.

My response is, first, that $443 billion a year is still a huge amount of money. Second, there’s a huge amount of fat that can be quickly and easily cut because military spending is rampant with waste, irrationality, and lack of financial accountability. Third, there is strong precedent for a massive military cut: military spending was cut in half from 1945 to 1946 in the wake of World War II. By 1948, the armed forces budget had been cut 89 percent from its wartime total, as factories converted to peacetime use. The same conversion strategy used then — deep Pentagon cuts combined with job guarantees, wage protections, retraining, union-led transition planning, and long-term public contracts for civilian production — can be used to transition us today away from an economy oriented towards destruction, towards one based on producing services and providing goods that humans actually need.

Finally, along the way to our goal of halving the budget, we should also support intermediary military budget cuts like the 10 percent proposed by Bernie Sanders. Realistically, it will probably be through the accretion of such partial steps forward that we’ll achieve our goals. In part, that’s because it will take time to reconfigure and transition the plants currently being used to produce weapons and military goods. But in that process, it’s crucial we keep the public’s eye on the prize of a dramatically different US military.

The problem with modest proposed military budget cuts on their own isn’t just that they don’t free up enough money for domestic programs. It’s also important that we spark a serious national debate about how the United States can begin relating to the world in a way that does not hinge on domination and exploitation.

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the US government was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That remains true today. But it doesn’t have to remain true tomorrow.

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We don’t need vague calls to stop shopping at these places or one-off rallies — we need sit-ins, pressure campaigns, *organized* boycotts, employee and consumer petitions, sickouts, demands from elected officials, and non-violent disruption to force these companies to immediately break from ICE.

Yet, to my surprise, almost every reply treated my post as a push for individual consumption changes. Here’s a representative sample of comments:

• Sigh. I already boycott Home Depot, and to see Lowe’s on this list makes me sad. I don’t have a local hardware store to choose from. 😢

• I cancelled Prime last summer. I promise you’ll save money and be fine 🙏🏼

• Good luck avoiding business with Amazon.

Why was a call for collective organized action almost universally seen as a manifesto for personal shopping advice? Part of the answer may just be that people don’t read Instagram captions. But there’s also something deeper going on: individualism and atomization pervade our culture, and even action to change the world can, by many people, only be imagined as individual consumption choices rather than taking action together with other people.

This atomization is a relatively new phenomenon. America used to be a country full of clubs, labor unions, churches, neighborhood associations, and bowling leagues. But now, as sociologist Robert Putnam famously put it, we are “bowling alone.”

Without strong membership organizations in our daily lives, and with social media exacerbating our isolation, political consumption has become fundamentally personal rather than collective. Consider the influential quote from Anna Lappé to Oprah Magazine two decades ago: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

Consumer choices can be powerful. But it is misleading to suggest that consumption decisions by isolated individuals matter that much. To effectively use your purchasing power to combat corporate injustices such as ICE’s private-sector collaboration, you need to join an organized effort. Like bowling, boycotting is best done together.

For a consumer action to spread and sustain itself, we need to actively persuade everyday people that participating will make a tangible difference. We need to show that many others are also participating. We need to choose targets and tactics wisely. And we need to lean on membership organizations and highly visible campaigns to maintain and deepen forward momentum.

Class and Consumption

A problem with most online calls for boycotts is that they underestimate how challenging it is for everyday people to “buy ethically.” If you have lots of disposable income and time, it’s not that hard to engage in political consumption. But for everyone else, it’s not so easy to find the money or the free time to look up bad companies or to find and purchase alternatives.

Scholarly research confirms this dynamic. One quantitative study of large-scale survey data concludes that “people in higher-class positions use their purchasing power as a means of political voice more often than people in lower-class positions.” Studies of low-income Americans show that even when they’d prefer to buy a more virtuous product, they often do not pull the trigger because such products tend to be more expensive.

That’s why it’s unhelpful for efforts like the new Big Beautiful Boycott against pro-Trump companies to say that “every dollar is a choice.” Not everybody has the same amount of freedom to choose different products. Nor, contrary to Anna Lappé’s suggestion, are working people voting for the policies of Jeff Bezos when they order something on Amazon — or when they use the internet, which at this point almost inevitably means interacting with an app or website reliant on Amazon Web Services.

Exhortations to shop differently too often end up blaming the victim rather than the real enemy: the handful of billionaires that control our country’s wealth and political power. And it’s a logic that dovetails with the classic right-wing claim that leftists are hypocritical to criticize capitalism because we buy its products (as if we had any other choice).

This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to tap the purchasing power of the working-class majority. In fact, boycotts were a central and effective tactic of the labor movement a century ago — and they can be a central tool to help end American authoritarianism, especially when they are one part of a larger organized, collective campaign.

Effective and Ineffective Boycotts

What kind of boycott can actually stop ICE and pull away Trump’s pillars of corporate support?

A prominent example of a suboptimal initiative is Resist and Unsubscribe, entrepreneur and marketing professor Scott Galloway’s push to get people to stop shopping with a dozen Trump-supporting companies. On the one hand, it’s great he is drawing attention to ICE’s corporate collaborators — this is certainly a step forward from his 2019 endorsement of billionaire Michael Bloomberg for president. But Galloway’s effort also feeds into the prevailing assumption that everyday people have no power to change the world through organized collective action.

Resist and Unsubscribe insists upon a strategic false dichotomy. Galloway claims that the only two options for resistance are pursuing tactics like “citizen outrage,” which he says that Trump will ignore, or hitting Trump-collaborating corporations in their pocketbooks by unsubscribing. What this framing ignores is not just that public outrage still does matter — as we’ve seen in Trump’s retreat from Minneapolis — but that there are more effective ways to inflict economic costs on these companies than boycotting alone.

Think about labor strikes. Companies can’t make any profits when nobody shows up to work. Yet Galloway dismisses workplace leverage and dubiously insists that “over the past several decades, unions have proven they don’t work.” Recent experience suggests otherwise.

Minneapolis’s January 23 anti-ICE, union-backed mass strike and consumer boycott had a serious economic impact and helped pressure the state’s cowardly CEOs to call for ICE to de-escalate. Threats of work stoppages, slowdowns, and internal company disruption similarly provide leverage to exciting new campaigns like iceout.tech, an initiative by and for tech employees to force their companies — including all of the tech giants on Galloway’s list — to break from ICE. In that same spirit, Google workers in 2018 forced their firm to stop working on the Pentagon’s Project Maven, an initiative to make drones powered by artificial intelligence more efficient.

But even if we leave aside the question of workplace power, Resist and Unsubscribe still falls short. Galloway is right that consumers have a huge amount of potential power. But it will take organized campaigns to tap it. There are plenty of examples of effective consumer boycotts that we can learn from: the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the United Farm Workers (UFW) grape boycotts of the late 1960s, the late 1970s boycott of Coors, and the recent Tesla Takedown. These experiences highlight six key takeaways for effective consumer boycotts.

1) Have Clear and Winnable Demands

If you want a boycott to make a difference, you need to be very clear what you’re asking companies to do to get your business back. The UFW’s grape boycott, for instance, demanded companies recognize the farmworkers’ union. But neither the Big Beautiful Boycott nor Resist and Unsubscribe make any demands; as such, they don’t concentrate pressure on companies to do anything specifically different. If businesses think you are done with them forever no matter what they do, what’s their incentive to change their behavior?

Demands should also be winnable. Since the biggest obstacle to social change is the public’s sense of resignation and powerlessness, it’s crucial to hone in on ambitious but realistic fights. Most ordinary people don’t make personal sacrifices unless they see a plausible way their participation could make a real difference. And successful campaigns like the recent push to get Avelo Airlines to end its ICE contract are key levers to build momentum and inspire other similar fightbacks.

2) Push for Big Numbers

The more participants join a boycott, the more impact it will have. This might seem like an obvious point, yet it’s remarkably rare for consumer boycotts to actively push to involve the big numbers of people necessary to make a real economic difference. The reason this is so rare is simple: you need organization to even try to get to scale. Just posting a meme or a website isn’t enough.

Here’s how organizer Stephen Lerner described the behind-the-scenes efforts that made the UFW grape boycott so effective:

To pull this off at scale, you have to do real organizing on the ground, that’s the only way you can do sustained and escalating activity. Support for the farm workers was intensely organized in city after city, neighborhood after neighborhood, churches and synagogues. It wasn’t just a general call for a boycott. We focused on building self-sustaining committees of supporters that could drive the work locally — the pickets, the actions, all that. It was a massive operation around the country, with thousands of active supporters and hundreds of full-time volunteers working on this.

Similarly, we saw in Minnesota that the January 23 day of “no school, no shopping, no work” caught on in large part because it was called by strong organizations with broad popular legitimacy like SEIU Local 26 and Unidos MN. In contrast, the day of action on January 30 fell flat in large part because the call came from small, left-leaning student groups.

It’s true that there are exceptional moments where calls for boycotts can go viral even in the absence of organization behind it. That’s what happened when pro-Palestinian customers boycotted Starbucks in late 2023 and when Americans immediately cancelled Disney and Hulu subscriptions after Jimmy Kimmel was indefinitely suspended last September. Such instances, however, are the exception that prove the rule — most successful boycotts are organized and most unorganized boycotts are failures. And because the latter have no structure for onboarding and developing new activists, they don’t leave behind a sediment of organization necessary for sustaining the battle. Moments have to be seized, but defeating authoritarianism requires more than volcanic eruptions of activity.

3) Keep the List Short

The more companies you add to a boycott list, the harder you make it for most people to participate. That’s why long lists of corporations to boycott like the Big Beautiful Boycott or Resist and Unsubscribe tend to be disempowering. In practice, it’s almost impossible for most people to keep track of all the bad companies out there, let alone to find convenient and affordable alternatives.

This point was hammered home to me yesterday in a text message I received from an old friend: “I just saw a post by Scott Galloway about all the companies to divest from and it felt like literally all of the main ones people use and their alternatives lol.” But because she had read the recent interview I did with Sunrise Movement leader Aru Shiney-Ajay, my friend added that she didn’t get discouraged this time: “I just heard Aru’s voice in my head saying how overwhelming it is, if you give a list of 50 companies to avoid to someone.” As Aru noted, “that can be paralyzing. It doesn’t move people into action, and it doesn’t get people into organized formations.”

4) Make Your Impact Measurable

Just hurting a company’s profits is not enough to move them. If they can’t assess the particular impact of your boycott, they might attribute their business troubles to all sorts of different sources, from supply chain troubles to labor costs. That’s why you need to make it as clear as possible how much your organized efforts are making an impact.

Unfortunately, Resist and Unsubscribe has no way to measure its participation or economic impact beyond Galloway’s questionable estimate of how many people he expects to delete apps after seeing his webpage.

In contrast, Tesla Takedown put a central focus on publicizing the decline in Tesla profits after they began protesting Elon Musk’s DOGE wrecking ball. And without organizing so many public Tesla protests, they would have had a much less credible case that anti-Musk energy was driving the company’s troubles.

A measurable public impact is also critical for involving large numbers. It’s a classic collective action problem that most people don’t participate in joint actions unless they know lots of others are joining too. Just seeing an online post or website is not enough to move most people; you need to do everything possible to show them that their action is part of a wave.

5) Make the Boycott Time-Bound

If you do end up targeting a large number of businesses, or a huge corporation like Amazon or Google that most people cannot realistically extricate themselves from, it’s important to make your boycott short enough for most people to actually be able to participate. For example, January 23 was a one-day boycott of all companies in Minneapolis, and May 1 will be a similar action nationwide. In the same spirit, Starbucks Workers United called for customers to boycott the company for the duration of their strike this winter. Time-bound boycotts also have much more measurable impact than indefinite ones, because you can compare before and after profit margins.

6) Target Intermediary Institutions

Wide-scale popular involvement in a struggle generally requires not only a widely and deeply felt demand, but a clear path to victory. That’s why the quickest path towards serious economic disruption is often to target big intermediary institutions like schools or local governments over which we have an exceptional degree of leverage. Schools and colleges in particular have often been in the vanguard of successful divestment fights, from the anti-apartheid movements in the 1980s to more recent efforts to divest from fossil fuel companies.

It’s an encouraging sign that students, professors, staff, and their unions have launched a new escalating campaign, Schools Drop ICE, to force colleges to end contracts with five corporate targets that are essential to enabling ICE: Enterprise, Hilton, Target, Flock Safety, and ICE air carriers. Winnable campaigns like this provide a unique opening for developing new organizers and for going on the offensive against ICE, so that sustaining momentum doesn’t take more horrors like the murder of Alex Pretti and Renée Good.

Don’t Just “Do Your Part”

A common response to these criticisms is that “every little piece of consumer action helps the resistance.” And in a certain sense that’s true. All other things being equal, it’s a good thing if people stop shopping at bad companies.

But it’s not self-evident that this positive contribution outweighs the negative impact of so many well-meaning Americans feeling like they are “doing their part” purely through individual consumption choices. The goal of a boycott is not to make ourselves feel better. The goal is to make society better.

With millions of Americans’ resistance still limited to consumer choices plus attending an occasional protest, we’re leaving a lot of potential people power on the table. If even a fraction of these individuals became active participants in campaigns and organizations, our chances of victory over ICE and Trumpism would increase significantly.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Two decades after Anna Lappé made her famous quote about voting with your dollar, she reflected on the limitations of this approach:

It’s not that I disagree with this time-tested sentiment: yes, when we shop, our choices make ripples — sometimes huge ones. But I know that in order to make the transformative changes we need … we’re going to have to organize. We’re going to have to realize that only together can our voices, and purchases, have the kind of world-changing impact we so need.

Lappé is right. It’s time to stop boycotting alone.

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Daniel Denvir: A big part of what the socialist left has been trying to do is to make the case to the liberal Democratic base that the only way to address the root causes of MAGA and of Trump is by confronting neoliberalism and the forever wars, and by overthrowing the Democratic establishment.

And what seems really significant right now is that these left-populist, democratic socialist politics — the kind we see in Zohran Mamdani’s coalition as well as in Bernie’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour — are breaking through in a really powerful way. How did the liberal base, which had placed their faith in the Democratic establishment to protect them from Trump, become so radicalized over the last twelve months?

Leah Greenberg: I don’t think you can separate the reaction that the liberal base has had in this moment from the broader societal dynamics that we have been seeing unfold. In Trump 1.0, there was at least a pretty solid pretense by corporate actors, by a lot of different institutions across society, that they were attempting to hold some set of things around the norms of liberal democracy, protect some set of vulnerable populations, and so on.

We can all be really clear that was not out of the goodness of their hearts. But it did create a pretty significant contrast. And what we’ve seen this time around is just a total elite institutional collapse in the face of Trumpism starting, basically, immediately after he was elected.

So I think for folks who believed what the Democratic leadership was telling them — that this was an “oncoming fascism,” that it was going to be a direct personal threat to them and their communities and their neighbors — to watch this combination of Democratic leadership fecklessness going quiet to the extent that they were having really internal circular arguments about blaming the groups instead of any kind of meaningful accounting about what had happened, and then simultaneously watching a bunch of other institutions across society — everybody from Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to Target and basically every corporation you could name — immediately rush to bend the knee, created a much more clear illustration that the project to consolidate MAGA political power and the project to consolidate corporate power were one and the same. That set the stage for a lot of what has unfolded since.

Waleed Shahid: If you look at universities, law firms, the federal government, media, and employees of organizations affected by Big Tech consolidation, there’s a tangible difference between 2017 and 2025 in terms of the kinds of upper-middle-class or middle-class white-collar workers that are probably ideologically or effectively liberal — but are really being squeezed by this administration, being attacked by this administration. Not just in terms of rhetoric but also in terms of policy.

J. D. Vance, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk really hate this liberal class. They have fan fiction about replacing the liberal class with robots and artificial intelligence. And I just think that there’s a way in which that class is being squeezed, and the party and the elected representatives who are supposed to represent that class not really having the fight in them to represent that in a big way.

Eric Blanc: I agree with Leah that the main thing is that not only is Trump way worse this time, but also institutions are fighting way less. That contradiction is a deeply radicalizing dynamic.

It does, I think, predate the election though. For instance, the inability of the Democratic Party establishment to push out Joe Biden and the whole age debacle, which we’ve sort of forgotten all about, really did expose to a lot of the liberal base that, contrary to the rhetoric, the motivations of the people on top seem to be much more about ego and career than about fighting fascism. That really was a very eye-opening experience.

Then there’s just a general dynamic where, because the authoritarian drive of this new administration is so deep, liberals for positive and maybe limited reasons really feel the attack on democracy as core to their politics in a way that maybe other segments of the population don’t to the same extent.

So there’s a radicalizing in response to events, in a way that if you don’t actually think that the system was working as well, as many leftists or maybe like non-college-educated workers do, maybe even attacks on democracy aren’t as at the forefront in your mind. But if you really do believe, and I think liberals are right to believe, in the importance of defending liberal democracy, then it just seems like an all-hands-on-deck moment to them more than any other part of the population.

Daniel Denvir: Joshua Cohen had an interesting post recently where he described the liberal revolt against the Democratic Party establishment as a relatively autonomous revolt that the organized socialist left is in a good position to channel, organize, and help lead — but does not, and maybe cannot, actually control. What do you make of this argument, and what are its implications for how the socialist left should think about building bridges with this liberal insurgency?

Waleed Shahid: Two of the main mass mobilizations that have been successful in the past year have been the Tesla takedown protests and No Kings, which to me are two different iterations of what maybe is called “the autonomous liberal revolt.” I think that these efforts show that people are looking to express their anger and frustration and want to be able to do it in a way that feels not necessarily ideological or even socialist, but as a part of a fight against Donald Trump and fascism.

I think that the third most successful mobilization that had national impact was Zohran’s election. Where the rubber meets the road is obviously in elections because there are very few places where people who are socialists or even social democrats can win an election with just people who identify with those terms. You have to build a coalition across ideology and across demographics. Often the people — some of the younger populist socialist candidates — embody that fight against authoritarianism much better than the Democratic establishment.

Leah Greenberg: Pulling from that argument, around why there’s this crisis of faith right now, the fundamental proposition of Biden 2020 was that Trumpism was a temporary insanity that could be fixed by electing the most run-of-the-mill, most persuasive candidate. You’d get him in, the adults would be back in charge, things would be okay, and this fever would break. That was the promise. And a lot of people went for it or even grudgingly went for it. And so I think the basic issue that is happening right now is that there is no follow-on proposition or no follow-on promise from Democratic elected leadership that explains this moment.

It’s clearly not a temporary fever. MAGA is a force in American politics, and it is going to be a force for an extended period of time. How do you actually fundamentally get out of this situation where every four years, every election is a referendum on democracy and is a threat of authoritarian consolidation? I don’t think Democratic leadership has offered a meaningful theory that replaces the “this is a temporary fever” framing. Someone being able to successfully make a convincing proposition about this is actually how we shift our politics in a direction that doesn’t involve constant confrontations with the worst 30 percent of American society — I think that’s going to be the way that you break through.

Eric Blanc: What I’d add to that is that this is in many ways a surprising dynamic for the Left, which is to say that the liberal vote is in many ways a surprising development for the socialist left. I don’t think that people were exactly prepared to see not just a repeat of Resistance 1.0, and it’s part of the reason we’re having this conversation today. There has been a shift toward trying to make sense of it, but I think we probably have to go further to be really concrete. For instance, DSA only just recently joined the No Kings coalition and I think that’s a good sign that people are trying to figure out how we work with this sort of broader liberal resistance movement.

But there was also a tendency sometimes to be a little bit condescending toward the No Kings protest, for instance. So when we’re thinking about how we relate to the liberal resistance, I think this is a good thing to keep in mind. Our major task right now isn’t only to differentiate ourselves from liberals — especially liberals who are out there fighting — but to engage with them and to be the best builders for No Kings rallies.

Waleed Shahid: One other thing I’d add to the trajectory of Democratic Party liberalism: the Democratic Party establishment warning liberals about the threat of fascism is where immigration becomes a huge issue in the story, where, contrary to popular belief, white liberals tend to be a very big demographic in favor of immigrant rights in this country.

Just this past week from the right and left wing of Democratic Party liberalism, both David Brooks and Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times had columns about immigrant rights. Goldberg’s column was about immigrant rights groups that you should donate to for the holidays. David Brooks had a column about a church in Connecticut that’s helping undocumented immigrants and people seeking asylum from combating ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

I think that now, because the elected officials aren’t leading the fight on immigration as much, that creates such a huge opening for this class of people who really care about inclusion and pluralism and protecting the vulnerable to have autonomous ways of engaging that are filling a vacuum that isn’t being provided by the leadership class of their party.

Leah Greenberg: If I may offer the reverse, mirror image of that, I think the two early signs of the disjuncture between the base and elected leadership were H. R. 9495, the nonprofit-killer bill, which they tried to move in a bipartisan fashion immediately after the election, and then the Laken Riley Act in January. A very firm memory I have is trying to communicate to Democratic electeds that our base was genuinely alarmed and upset and did not understand why we would be offering Donald Trump more power around enforcement, on nonprofits, more power to go after immigrants and consolidate a secret police force — and getting somewhere between dismissal and contempt in reaction. And people saying, you know, not only do we disagree, but we disagree and this is why we lost the election.

Then by mid-February, when the calls and the volume and the anger was boiling over, having a lot of those people be like, “Why is everyone so mad?” Our reaction was, “We’ve been telling you this has been building. There’s actually just a consistent gap between the communications you’ve made to people about what you care about and the things you’re doing. And that’s coming back to attack you.”

Daniel Denvir: Leah, many have remarked that for the liberal base, it’s not so much “Left versus center” so much as “fighters versus folders.” But are they increasingly becoming one and the same?

Leah Greenberg: I would describe it as an x-axis and a y-axis around how far to the left your politics are and how much you think this moment is an emergency that requires using all the tools in the toolbox. That ultimately requires structural reforms that meaningfully address the roots of the crisis.

What I would say with our folks is that people identify in a lot of different places on the x-axis of left to center but are all at really, really high levels on “this is an emergency requiring everything that we have.” And there tends to be a lot of correlation in people who are both on the left axis and “this is an emergency” axis. There’s a lot of overlap in what’s required.

When we talk about structural reforms at this point, it’s not just what we were talking about in 2021. It’s not just the For the People Act. We are talking about the Voting Rights Act, but it is voting rights plus what are we going do about the Supreme Court? What are we going do about the two-party system that keeps creating these conflicts? What are we going do about the consolidation of corporate power that has allowed Big Tech fascists to operate as a backstop to this administration?

I think there’s a lot of overlap when you talk about what is the ultimate set of solutions to the moment that we are in that would allow us to meaningfully create a country where people belong and are dignified and have a voice. So I’m not sure I would focus on the labels per se, but I do think that when you’re actually talking about what gets us to the other side of this and what gets us to a genuine improvement in people’s lives, there’s a lot of potential for overlap.

Daniel Denvir: It’s not just liberals who have changed since the first Trump administration, as a number of people have commented already — the socialist left is in a pretty different situation too. In the years following the 2016 election, many on the Left rejected or were at least skeptical and suspicious of a lot of aspects of the liberal resistance. Many on the socialist left saw this resistance politics as framing Trump’s election as the product of “Russian interference” and wanting to just turn back the clock to the pre-Trump politics — as Leah mentioned, this idea that “the fever will break once the adults are back in the room.”

At the same time, there was this intense debate within the socialist left as to whether Trump’s project was fascist. Everyone on the Left opposed Trump. But there was a sometimes interesting, sometimes arcane debate over whether “fascist” was the right concept. But now, everyone on the online left loves Jennifer Welch and agrees that Trump’s project is fascist. While there are some on the Left who might have some reservations about the Resistance, I think increasingly the majority agrees that we should definitely be linking arms and joining in.

Eric, how would you describe that trajectory on the socialist left and the politics internal to the socialist left on how to relate to the liberal resistance?

Eric Blanc: The first thing I would say is that it’s a game changer, as we’ve been already talking about, that the liberal resistance this time around is very explicitly being pitted against the Democratic establishment. If there’s one thing socialists like to do, it’s to fight the Democratic Party establishment. So there’s an obvious affinity there, which explains a lot of the openness to engaging.

There’s also, I think, a question of urgency. A lot of the Left last time around, myself included, had a somewhat valid take that the Trump administration wasn’t as much of a radical departure from Republicanism and right-wing politics.

And as liberals suggested, if anything, maybe we downplayed the threat even this time around. I would say, just fess up — I didn’t think Trump this time around was going to be as bad as he’s been. I think a lot of us underestimated that. And then there’s an immediate thing, not just in the abstract, but like, what does it mean that, speaking from personal experience, I’m a leftist — I really have for the first time in my life had to consider what’s going to happen if I lose my job for speaking out.

There’s an urgency, and I’m coming from a place of relative privilege. I have a union job. I’m teaching at a public university. But I think there is an extent to which just the intensity of the authoritarian attack across the board has led to a feeling among the Left that it is “all hands on deck” to an extent that didn’t feel as much the case last time around. So the question I was asking is, what do you do with that?

I actually feel like what the Left knows how to do really well is fight the Democratic establishment. I don’t think we have as much recent experience with what it looks like to work in coalition with liberals against the right wing. It’s not that anyone’s opposed, but it just requires different things that we haven’t consistently done in a recent period. So the question of really trying to scale up a broader fight is the task. It does require continuing to make these cases that our main fight right now is with the right wing and not with the liberal Resistance.

Waleed Shahid: One other thing is that there’s always — it’s very rare, almost never happens — a candidate on the Left who wins an election by being publicly known as a leftist or the campaign is waged on those terms. So there’s constant rebranding of what the fight is in the Democratic Party — a rebranding that I’ve participated in between the old guard and the new generation. Change versus status quo establishment. There’s a way in which sometimes the political weather is blowing in the right direction, where liberals become the kind of place where you have to figure out which one of those you’re going with, and that switch becomes really effective for elections.

Another thing I think about is in 2020, the two congressional elections that were very much buoyed by the racial justice movement during the George Floyd protests — Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman . . . when the New York Times endorsed Jamaal Bowman, the polling that we saw among white college-educated liberals, went from like 17 percent to like 70 percent overnight. In retrospect, when you look at Zohran Mamdani being rejected by the New York Times several times by their editorial board — the New York Times told New York voters not to vote for him, and yet he still won. This gives me a sense that the gatekeepers of liberalism, particularly in the Times, are becoming less and less salient between 2020 and 2025.

Daniel Denvir: And Zohran’s biggest neighborhoods were brownstone Brooklyn. Actually, his highest percentages were in Park Slope, Cobble Hill, and so on.

Waleed Shahid: One way you can think about that is that No Kings is the “over forty-five” expression, and the anti-oligarchy tour by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the “under forty-five” expression. Maybe age is primarily the divider there due to different experiences of the financial crisis and politics since Barack Obama.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that liberals become a really important fulcrum in these kinds of forward-movement-backlash moments of a more progressive politics. Because in 2023 to 2024, I think we experienced a little bit of that backlash to Black Lives Matter in particular. Now that we’re experiencing a backlash to the backlash, there’s a real opening here to combine those two spirits of the anti-oligarchy tour and the spirit of the No Kings marches.

Leah Greenberg: I do think there’s also an important kernel in there about the delinking of mainstream liberals’ faith in mainstream media as well. One of the big shifts that we’ve seen is around where people have confidence to get their news and analysis from. The reality is that, I mean, obviously the Washington Post is not where it was, given the Bezos takeover. But even with institutions like the New York Times, there’s just a great deal more distrust in the role that the mainstream media has played.

Waleed Shahid: Hence the rise of Jennifer Welch.

Daniel Denvir: I want to get into that generational point you just made. I’ve been doing a lot of work in Rhode Island building coalitions with liberal Resistance groups. I have two separate meetings this week with local Resistance groups around the state to build for the 2026 primaries. One of them is an Indivisible chapter.

One thing that I found surprising since starting to do this work more intensively is that we all know that the crowd at protests like No Kings can be on the older end. But when I started to have conversations with a lot of these leaders, they were like, “Where are the young people?” And I was very surprised because I think of it the opposite way — that young people are extremely involved in groups like DSA, doing the encampments against the Gaza genocide, and so on.

So there was this total fun-house-mirror situation where you had the older folks in the liberal Resistance thinking that younger people are just totally demobilized in the face of the fascist threat. I was like, who do you think organized the Zohran campaign in New York initially? This discussion that we’re having about building socialist and left-liberal coalitions seems to also be fundamentally a conversation about building intergenerational coalitions.

Waleed Shahid: It’s really an interesting phenomenon that the No Kings protest tends to be attended by people with multiple degrees, sixty-years-old and up. And while my sense of the anti-oligarchy tour is that it’s much younger, I don’t know how race and gender play into those two different things.

But yeah, I think the marriage of those two fights and the tension between them is the future of a kind of progressive realignment in the Democratic Party. In 2020, it was obviously divided through an election that was not ranked-choice voting, and in which I would imagine many of the people who are powering the No Kings protest did not vote for Bernie Sanders but maybe voted for Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg.

Obviously, it’s the opposite with the anti-oligarchy tour, where I assume the vast majority of the people voted for Bernie Sanders. The interesting thing is that the No Kings protests don’t have an elected leader who’s the spokesperson. And there’s something really inspiring about that, about a citizen-generated endeavor that is not carried through the star power of someone like an AOC or Bernie. And at the same time, the policy or ideological components can be a little less clear compared to the anti-oligarchy tour, where I think it’s clearer what the politics are.

I’m also curious about both your experience, Leah, and your experience, Dan. There was so much discussion in the middle part of this year about a word we haven’t used but that’s been thrown out for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and that’s “abundance” [based on the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson]. I feel like on the rank-and-file level, driving the political expression in the No Kings mobilization or Indivisible, “abundance” is not the thing that’s animating them.

That’s an assumption I have. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I think there’s a way in which the elite discourse among liberalism is not mapping onto the mass discourse of where people are every day, where rank-and-file “wine moms” are at.

Daniel Denvir: One really remarkable thing is that for the recent No Kings protest, there was a breakthrough agreement to have a Palestinian speaker and have a whole Palestinian liberation contingent in the No Kings protest. I think this was debated and decided among a group of grassroots liberal Resistance organizers in Rhode Island, and there was some dissension. But they ultimately came to a solid decision to coalesce with specifically Jewish Voice for Peace. That represents not just this breakthrough between the socialist left and left-liberal Resistance, but it was also a fundamentally intergenerational coalition because it was much more gray-haired people sitting on one side and much more millennial and Zoomer on the other.

Leah Greenberg: I think that mirrors a lot of where we’ve ended up in terms of the national framing. In the first No Kings march in June, I marched next to Ruwa Romman of Georgia who was one of the speakers. And we have tried to be really intentional about balancing the fact that No Kings is not an entity that has a platform — it doesn’t have a set of policy ideas that it’s advancing; it is a broad front against authoritarianism — and also being really clear about inclusion of voices that recognize the Palestine movement.

So there is a continued negotiation, and there’s a continued process of building together at the local level that has been ongoing, and it’s in different places, in different contexts. I do really think that that knitting together of the intergenerational context and the broad front is really important.

There are so many different threads that I want to respond to here. First, in terms of the 2020 cycle, we had a really extended conversation with our leaders in 2020 around whether we were we going to endorse in a presidential cycle. Should we endorse? Who are we for?

We have some data out of that that suggests that the top candidate among our folks was Warren, very strong. There was a strong but smaller Bernie faction. There were some folks who were kind of scattered around the different moderate candidates. Things shaped up in the later stages pretty quickly in a way that limits our ability to say who went where as different candidates came in and dropped out. But the bigger dominant feeling for folks was that they didn’t really think that a presidential endorsement was the top priority for locally based organizing hubs that often had a very strong foot in a local race or a congressional race or a broader suite of activism that they couldn’t disrupt in order to have some effect on the presidential race.

That was where people ended pretty consistently. We respected that very much on a national level after having that conversation. And so we have some sense of where people’s optimal politics are.

Also, people had a really different take on primaries overall during the first Trump term than they do this time around. That’s where people were, just practically speaking, on abundance. I think this has been one of the places where there is just a huge gap, as you put it, between the conversation that is preoccupying elite commentators and the conversation that is happening among grassroots activists and rank-and-file folks.

Because immediately after the election, I think there’s this very confusing moment where Abundance, which is a book that was intended for a Kamala Harris term or a second Biden term, gets kind of rebranded as an answer to why we lost and gets sucked into this super toxic discourse around the recriminations post-2024 and this extended set of arguments and discussions around remaking the party.

I can’t stress enough how much none of that was of interest to people who were freaking out about fascism — which is actually unfortunate in a lot of ways. As somebody who has a lot of enthusiasm for abundance politics myself, I think that conflation set the stage for a number of things that were not super healthy. And while I think you’ve done a lot of work trying to untangle those currents and appreciate that, the functional impact was that I think a lot of people who might well have been open to various parts of that argument mostly perceived it as kind of irrelevant to the questions of the day, which were, “What are we actually going to do to protect fundamental rights, to fight back against this massive onslaught?”

Eric Blanc: The depth of youth radicalization that’s continued really puts a lie to one of the major talking points that happened after Trump’s reelection in 2024, which you might remember when there was this move from the establishment to fight against the groups and to say, “We need to pivot to the center, drop fighting for immigrants and trans people.” Part of the argument was, young people are making this dramatic shift to the center — if we don’t meet them —

Daniel Denvir: As part of a “vibe shift.”

Eric Blanc: I was always really skeptical of that. I didn’t think it was in the data. There was a marginal thing with young men, and it seemed like a lot of the youth vote was over economic anxiety. The experience of the last year decisively proves that contrary to that claim, young people remain very consistently on the Left.

If anything, on the radical activist young left, which I am pretty deeply involved with, I think there is actually still or was somewhat of a hesitancy to go all-in on the fight against authoritarianism. Part of that has to do with Palestine. It’s worth flagging because it’s true that we’re coming together with more liberal people. But there was also an experience that so many young people had of going to encampments and feeling like big liberal institutions essentially were screwing them over. Think about university elites, but then also a lot of the punditry, the New York Times. . . . There’s a real polarization, and I think there was also maybe a skepticism of some liberals for not foregrounding the fight against the genocide more. We were still living a little bit in the shadow of that, and it hasn’t been fully overcome.

The other thing I would add is that the Fighting Oligarchy tour and the Zohran campaign — these were not exclusively or only about fighting authoritarianism. It had this combination of [fighting authoritarianism and] a radical economic approach.

The place above all where we can reconnect the radical young activist left with liberals is on fighting ICE. This is one thing that really brings everybody together; there’s a real deep revulsion among both of these wings at what the Trump administration is doing against our undocumented friends and family and neighbors. That is a place I would hope that we can, in the immediate term, scale up far more.

Daniel Denvir: One big shift that I’ve noticed between the first and second Trump administrations in terms of ordinary members of the liberal Resistance is a stronger emphasis on fighting the Trump regime, rather than derogatorily speaking about or demonizing ordinary Trump voters.

Notably, Zohran launched his campaign by standing on a street corner and asking people why they’d given up on Democrats and why they voted for Trump. And he went on about a year later to win those neighborhoods back.

Leah, you’ve touched on this, but we’re seeing this really powerfully right now through the anti-oligarchy framing, which was first put forward by Bernie and then AOC and these rallies and has become the dominant left and liberal way to interpret what’s happening right now. What it’s doing, I think very powerfully, is connecting the dots between economic and political authoritarianism.

But that really wasn’t part of the mainstream discussion or liberal Resistance discourse during Trump 1.0. What is it about the conditions of Trump’s second administration that have allowed for this anti-oligarchy framework to become perhaps the dominant one? And what sort of political work does that framing do?

Leah Greenberg: There are two pieces. First, the mask is fully off. You have a bunch of corporations that had a frame around corporate social responsibility, a frame around, for example, doing meaningful work to protect the 2020 election from sabotage. If you go and you look at the list of corporations that tried to donate to protect that election compared to who has donated to the Trump ballroom, I think the degree to which corporations have been very visibly avid and enthusiastic collaborators with the Trump and MAGA agenda — how even the corporations that people ostensibly think of as “good corporate citizens” have behaved, have gotten rid of their DEI policies, have trashed their climate policies, have donated to the Trump ballroom or to the inauguration — there is no meaningful, credible argument that delinks the consolidation of corporate power in this country from the consolidation of right-wing white Christian nationalist power. I think that is a revealing reaction.

In the first Trump term, I think a lurking assumption underlying a bunch of the strategy was, this guy got elected by a fluke. It’s a quirk of the political system.

The other thing is that there was no meaningful Democratic leadership interpretation of what was happening in the first four months. There was this powerful Fighting Oligarchy tour with Bernie and AOC making a really clear connection between what was happening on the corporate power side and what was happening in Washington. I think the fact that the act of stepping into that leadership vacuum was very important for linking those two things together.

Now, there’s sometimes a framing that suggests that there’s a lot of daylight between a No Kings and a “No Oligarchs” frame. I think that that’s not particularly valid on the ground. What we’ve experienced is that there’s a lot of openness to an overarching story about corporate power. Bernie spoke at our most recent No Kings in Washington; he was the headliner. We do see people really making those connections. We see a lot of enthusiasm among our own folks for corporate campaigns, for theories of how you actually dissuade this kind of corporate collaboration and enablement.

Daniel Denvir: I think we can’t overstate the role played by the world’s richest man becoming a freakish fascist accelerationist, in the powerful DOGE way that he did, in really waking people up to the connections between economic and political structures.

Leah Greenberg: A hundred percent.

Waleed Shahid: I imagine one of the most foremost intellectual leaders of the liberal resistance is Erica Chenoweth, who’s a scholar of antiauthoritarianism and resistance against dictators across the world. They are someone who is not very Pollyannaish about the kind of economic leverage needed to get rid of authoritarians and dictators. And a lot of their work revolves around things like boycott strikes and noncooperation.

After Trump was elected, Erica did a whole tour among liberal media about their research. If you’re a liberal or someone who participates in the No Kings march, that is another place of synergy, where the intellectual you’re reading is saying, you need to figure out a way to generate economic leverage and create consequences on the regime for their actions, whether it’s lowering their public opinion or breaking apart their coalition or creating resignations. That’s a form of politics that’s much more common in other parts of the world and less common here.

Eric Blanc: I want to talk a little bit more about what you mentioned in passing, Dan, which is why there’s significantly less blaming and focus on Trump supporters than there was last time around. Part of that is there was an open acknowledgement from all parts of the Left and the center that the Democratic Party is losing working people.

That wasn’t exactly as prevalent last time around. There was some talk about the white working class, but this time around, from above, you have the Democratic establishment blaming the groups and “woke” for why we’re losing workers. Then on the Left, there’s a strong case that essentially it was economic anxiety, and the fact that Trump did so much better than last time around among Latinos and, to a certain extent, among black voters — I think that undercut an assumption that people had under the first Trump administration that racism was a sufficient explanation for what was going on.

From the second you have to start talking about losing the working class of all backgrounds and economic anxieties, this has a really different valence for how liberals and the Left look at who voted for Trump and how we relate to the moment we’re in. It’s really positive to a certain extent that people are talking so much more about the working class and economic anxiety. The answers we give are very different than the Democratic Party establishment, certainly for MAGA. But the fact that there is this sort of talking about class is new. I don’t think that was the case in 2016, or certainly not before that.

Daniel Denvir: Not to be too much of a partisan socialist here, but I do recall in the first years of the first Trump administration intense hostility from many liberal commentators when people on the Left, myself included, tried to contextualize Trump’s rise in economic misery, anxiety, contradiction — not just in terms of working-class people being disaffected with the Democratic Party, but also in terms of the economic system that we have creating a class of McMansion-dwelling small businessmen who are fascists.

There was an intense hostility from many liberal commentators to discussing that at all. They were simply saying, instead, what I think is far more comforting for some people: “This is the eternally racist soul of working-class white America reasserting itself.”

Leah Greenberg: I wouldn’t underestimate the psychological impact, and what it sets in motion, to win the popular vote versus losing the popular vote. In the first Trump term, I think a lurking assumption underlying a bunch of the strategy was, this guy got elected by a fluke. It’s a quirk of the political system that we have that he has been able to take office. And our job is to create as much visible opposition, so that people who might go along with his agenda understand up front that they’re going to face electoral consequences for it on the back end.

The second term, if you lose the popular vote, by definition, you’re going to need more people the next time around. So the first strategic imperative is to drive down that popularity and win more people over, and then start to create the sense that there are going to be consequences for enablers. That, I think, is the arc that we saw this year.

Waleed Shahid: I want to go back to the 2020 data that Leah mentioned, where it just shows a deep divide between the kind of liberal commentariat and the liberal rank and file, and then a distinction between partisan Democrats in the coalition versus partisan liberals in the coalition. The plurality of people were with Elizabeth Warren, who I think fits within the anti-oligarchy politics. The plurality of Indivisible’s base was not Joe Biden voters, in the primary at least. That maps on to the Zohran/Brad Lander/Andrew Cuomo electorate — where people who are older tend to be much more attached to partisan Democratic language and framing than what I imagine is true of Indivisible’s base. That also shows the divide between the liberal intelligentsia and commentary versus the liberal rank and file.

Daniel Denvir: Let’s tease that point out a little, because the militancy of the proverbial “liberal wine mom” has become an iconic, ubiquitous, celebrated point of reference for us on the Left in the last few months, exemplified most powerfully by the wonderful Jennifer Welch.

But it points to this question of who we’re talking to and who we’re talking about and who we’re not talking about when we talk about the liberal Resistance. So to break this out into two parts — first, who are the “wine moms”? What do we mean when we invoke them? Are they the latest iteration of “suburban soccer moms”? Do we mean something else by that? Do we mean contradictory things?

Then, to get to that point you just made, where do other key segments of the Democratic Party coalition — black people, Latinos, Muslims — where do they fit into the emerging political conjuncture. Not to suggest that these are neat categories either, but—

Waleed Shahid: “Bros.” You forgot “bros.”

Daniel Denvir: Yeah. What about bros? It does recall that amazing video from Zohran’s election night when it was Mehdi Hasan, Jamaal Bowman, Hasan Piker, and Prem Thakker, like bro-ing out on camera at the victory party. Mike Cernovich had a meltdown about the intense virile masculinity that the socialist left was putting forward.

Waleed Shahid: That’s what they wanted, sorry! In primary elections, people are trying to campaign out their path to 50 percent. The way that’s often divided out is there’s like white college-educated, self-identifying liberals over the age of forty-five versus under the age of forty-five. Then there’s often black voters and Latino voters split out as separate demographics from that group of people.

What I’ve noticed is we’re kind of doing category illusion here, where I do think there’s a difference between the voters who can be described as Biden, Warren, or Bernie; they could also be described as Cuomo, Brad Lander, or Zohran Mamdani. But that difference is significant. In the Biden camp, there’s a lot of pride among that crew of people of the New York Times 2020 endorsement process where Biden was flatly rejected by the New York Times editorial board. Then there was that viral video of Biden talking to a black worker at the New York Times, I think a security guard who was in the elevator, and she said she was voting for him. We shouldn’t delude ourselves with the fact that that demographic is a huge part of primary elections.

The Democratic Party coalition and the antiauthoritarian coalition that is happening — its politics are happening with one foot in the things we’re talking about and one foot out. There’s a really big Target boycott being led right now by many black churches. And so there is antiauthoritarian and anti-oligarchy activity happening. My sense of that demographic is twofold, which is — one, we had the largest civil rights protests in this country’s history since the 1960s in 2020. That didn’t result in very much legislatively. Because when it comes to racial justice, the country is very schizophrenic. Second, there’s a feeling where I think the idea of competent leadership was huge in that election. Andrew Cuomo being Mario Cuomo’s son and a governor for three terms — that was also really significant. There’s two things happening with black voters in the Democratic coalition that is unique and pretty distinct from both the young socialist crowd and the older No Kings crowd.

Daniel Denvir: One quick thing that I’ll add before we hear from the rest of you is that, on the one hand, we have clearly seen black voter consolidation around what we might call the Democratic establishment pretty powerfully in multiple cases over the last decade. Yet when you introduce generational analysis to that, it gets a lot more complicated.

Eric Blanc: I have those numbers. Eighty-six percent of young Latinos voted for Zohran, 84 percent of young black people voted for Zohran, and then young white people were something more like 65 percent. So it really shows you how much of an age cleavage there is and how much potential is mostly still untapped for reaching into much broader segments of the working class than we currently have via the generational route. To me, that’s the next frontier where we can build out a more left base.

Daniel Denvir: Leah, you mentioned earlier a shift among the liberal Resistance base in terms of interest in primarying establishment Democrats. We saw this broad left-liberal coalition unite behind Zohran in New York, and it seems like we’re seeing something similar in Maine. To what extent is the liberal Resistance converging with DSA and the Justice Democrats’ strategy in terms of prioritizing primaries against establishment Democrats?

Leah Greenberg: We’re watching it unfold right now, and we’re trying to get more information. What I can say is that the overall orientation that people are starting from is categorically different than it was at this time around the 2018 cycle.

I think people have a much clearer understanding that there is a very direct relationship between the frustrations that they have with overall Democratic Party leadership and the need to get involved in the primary and the candidate cycle. There is a much stronger sense that there are a lot of people in elected Democratic leadership or in the Democratic establishment who are simply not up to the job — whether it is because they are of a generation that is simply not grappling with the challenges, or whether it is because they are corporate Democrats who are institutionally incapable of taking on the challenges that we have right now.

We’re seeing a ton of focus on money in politics, on crypto, on AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] money, on corporate money in general. We’re seeing a ton of focus on, are people compelling fighters who are capable of making the case about what they are doing? Not only people who are using their leverage, but who are actually also public communicators who are able to tell the story of what is happening.

For folks like Chris Van Hollen, who was nobody’s idea of a breakout star last year but who has done a combination of compelling public communications and genuinely meaningful actions that demonstrate how you use your leverage as a senator, I think we’re gonna see how it unfolds. But what we’re hearing from folks is just a totally different level of interest and engagement already, with a combination of getting involved in open seats and with taking some real direct action in relation to folks who are simply not living up to the job.

Daniel Denvir: If you look at the [difference in] net favorability among Democratic voters in New York between AOC and Schumer, it’s pretty wild.

Leah Greenberg: We called for Schumer to step down back in March after the first shutdown fiasco. I have never experienced a decision that involved such a disjuncture between the reception in Washington around the country. We had, I think, 93 percent of New York leaders and 97 percent of leaders around the country; we convened an emergency call of about a thousand-plus folks to talk about it the weekend after, with near unanimity. We got basically no blowback from anyone, because people were really clear that there’s no reason to have somebody representing the Democratic Party who is simply not capable of doing that on a public stage, who has a 17 percent approval rating, and also was struggling to actually successfully build out strategies and lead the caucus around them.

Daniel Denvir: Waleed, you recently wrote a piece intervening in a strategic debate on the progressive left over whether to prioritize running left-wing primaries against established Democrats in deep blue districts versus trying to flip Republican seats in swing districts. You make a very persuasive case that it’s the Left’s job, first and foremost, to primary incumbents and take over the party. Of course, it’s not that we don’t want median Democrats to beat median Republicans. But I think it’s pretty clear — clearer than ever since Zohran’s victory — that we can build far more power by building deep power at the core of the Democratic base.

Lay out your argument here and what the state of play in this debate is.

Waleed Shahid: A metaphor I use for this is thinking about the Democratic Party as a big ship sailing and drifting, and the political currents and swing-district Democrats are like the sails. They move with the winds. If the wind shifts right, they shift right. If the wind shifts left, they nudge left.

But the left flank in deep blue districts, they can be an anchoring force. Whether it’s AOC and the Green New Deal, or Jamaal Bowman in 2020, or even Zohran with affordability. . . . The number of Google hits after Zohran wins his primary for affordability skyrockets. It consolidates a term for Democrats to focus on because of his election.

Centrist and moderates use this term “wins above replacement.” I think what they mean by that is, does this Democrat — someone like Sherrod Brown — perform better than a generic Democrat? I think progressives [have] the idea of primarying incumbents and defeating them and then being able to tell a story about them and the platform you won on — that has such a big ideological value in the party for changing what it means to be a Democrat.

So instead of trying to take on these quixotic adventures in Montana or even Idaho, I think we should consolidate on home turf. We have limited resources. The donor class does not love our candidates, and we’re playing way too many away games and burning a ton of resources and energy trying to flip red and purple seats. We don’t have a ton of resources, and I think our real leverage for realigning the party is in electing people where many more of our voters currently are and aren’t fully organized into a political vehicle and political force.

I think about the Squad: on any given day, it is only six to eight members of congress, maybe a little bit more. There are a ton of seats in the country that are similar demographics to the Squad’s demographics — younger, urban, diverse — that could have a candidate that represents them.

Justice Democrats have a candidate in Memphis right now. They have a candidate in Harlem. This is what party-building looks like in some ways. If you’re in a Trump +3 district, you are going to be forced to moderate on a couple of different issues because of the pressure you’re facing from genuine Republicans and genuine conservatives. We still live in a democratic system, more or less, in which you are accountable to your voters. You might be a decent vote for Democrats, but I think about someone like Chris Deluzio or Pat Ryan, who are often held up as the populist candidates you could have in these purple districts. I think they’re great, but they’re not like Squad members or DSA members —

Daniel Denvir: Pat Ryan’s terrible on Gaza.

Waleed Shahid: Yeah. There are always exceptions to their populism in a way that you can’t count on them to be a part of a coherent political force. That said, I prefer Pat Ryan to a generic Democrat.

Daniel Denvir: One thing I’ll note to maybe complicate this — is there always a neat trade-off between the two? After all, we’re speaking on a day when there’s a special election in Tennessee with a very progressive state legislator, Aftyn Behn, hoping to pull off an upset. I have no idea what the real odds are, but it seems closer than people imagined against a Republican incumbent.

Leah Greenberg: We’ll see how it goes. Aftyn’s actually a former Indivisible organizer for Tennessee. What I would say is that when you’re in a year where there’s a wave, everyone should just start swimming.

I think that when you’re making decisions about where you concentrate resources on a set of strategic plays, you have one set of calculations. For us, it’s about supporting thousands of different groups that are making different decisions in their districts and then figuring out if there are a few places where we go in collectively in order to support decisions that are happening on the ground. Because fundamentally, a firm position that we have for our own folks is, it doesn’t matter if a national organization has come in with an endorsement unless it’s backed up by a genuinely significant level of local grassroots engagement in support of that candidate.

So it’s hard for us to have a really clear analysis. But the connection that people are making between, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to just constantly beg my Democrat to do what’s right?” and “Maybe I should look at this challenger” is a lot stronger than it has been in the past.

Eric Blanc: I agree with all that. What I’d add is I think there’s an additional part of the country, which is so deeply red, in which the Democratic brand is so toxic, that there is space [to run] more economic populist, independent candidates, someone like Dan Osborn generally. I think that that is something that we have to do. It’s an open question. I don’t know how far that will go, but I think it’s really smart and good to try to make that happen.

I don’t think it makes sense for DSA or Justice Democrats to endorse someone like Dan Osborn, who certainly doesn’t have our position on immigrant rights, for instance, or Palestine. But nevertheless, I think it’s a really positive development if that type of thing could happen more broadly.

I’d like to see more experimentation. Frankly, I think there would be a role for unions to play in some of these red states to anchor just straightforward economic populist — I would hope that they wouldn’t take bad positions on things, but maybe they wouldn’t take just any position on some of the hot-button questions we might have disagreements with. But that does really have a possibility of gaining traction right now. We maybe underestimate the extent to which there are huge divisions and demoralization in the MAGA base that could open big openings in places that we don’t currently think of as in play.

Daniel Denvir: Just look at Zohran — a huge victory — and at the way, generally speaking, NYC-DSA has been able to effectively build out their organization as a party-like formation with power and political independence, which is the gold standard for what the socialist left has been trying to do for a decade.

On the other hand, this proliferation of left insurgent campaigns is, by necessity, larger and broader than DSA and thus beyond its full control. Eric, how can DSA simultaneously stick to its focus and also help lead this broader set of currents? How does DSA help guide this broader front without liquidating its own identity and independence, which has been really important for the revival of left politics in this country?

Eric Blanc: It was an overall huge step forward that after Bernie 2016, DSA started moving toward a new type of left politics electorally, which was different than really what was the dominant trend before then, which was just to support any progressive and sort of anything goes.

The reason that that was limited was not just about the politics, although that’s part of it, but it also just didn’t build your organization. It didn’t build an independent identity. It didn’t build power from below. You couldn’t get volunteers to be excited time and time again afterward. So New York City DSA in particular, but also [chapters] elsewhere throughout the country, were right to build a socialist wing and to develop a huge amount of volunteer infrastructure out of that.

I would flag that it’s still quite uneven across the country. There are a lot of DSA chapters that still just do progressive endorsements.

Daniel Denvir: Katie Wilson — who is a more than sufficiently left-wing challenger, she’s a socialist as far as I can tell — did not get Seattle DSA’s endorsement for reasons I don’t know about.

Eric Blanc: I think there’s a difficulty in DSA now in how you respond to new terrain, where there are genuine left fighters who certainly aren’t DSA cadre, maybe they call themselves socialists or don’t, but they’re not necessarily sharing our politics.

There are also a lot of good and hard debates that need to be happening right now to figure out how we relate to someone like Graham Platner in Maine. How could you not want to go all in in Maine around someone like Graham Platner? My response in the internal debates in DSA on this stuff is — keep in mind, DSA arose out of, and we’re still basically in, the Bernie moment, right? Bernie was not a DSA cadre member. Our growth came largely out of, and in response to, Trump’s election but then also the Bernie moment, which was much bigger than DSA.

I think that there’s a possibility and necessity to walk and chew gum at the same time. What I mean by that is it makes sense for an organization like DSA to primarily focus on running socialist candidates. But particularly when there’s high-profile, very important battles in which you have essentially a Berniecrat running, I do think you need to be more flexible.

Waleed Shahid: I was someone who worked hard to get DSA to endorse Cynthia Nixon and also, on the other side, to get Cynthia Nixon to be open to the DSA endorsement. Same with AOC; same with Jamaal Bowman. Endorsements go both ways.

I think it’s a genuinely difficult problem in the American political system because elected officials in this country are much bigger than any organization or even party. We have a uniquely individually driven political system where every elected official ultimately ends up becoming their own small business owner and running their own brand.

Daniel Denvir: Following up on some points that Waleed made earlier, why is the Democratic establishment the way that it is? Why do it and its favorite media mouthpieces so stubbornly cling to convention even as conditions become so clearly entirely unconventional? Why are they so resolutely in denial of or hostile to their base? Why do they insist on concepts like “popularism” when they just mean moderation and triangulation?

Waleed Shahid: I was recently on a panel with someone from the WelcomePAC, which is one of these PACs that are political outfits attempting to elect “heterodox Democrats.” So what they mean by heterodox is anti-trans, often pro-life Democrats, anti-choice Democrats, pro-fossil-fuel Democrats, people who are a little bit more right-wing on immigration.

The moderator asked me and this other person, “Do either of you feel welcome in the Democratic Party?” Both of us said no. Then she asked, who is the Democratic Party for then? It was a challenging question where I’m like, I think that who the Democratic Party is for is embodied in the politics of the leadership of the party, which is, how do you create the math equations that will get you to 50 percent? How do I manage the coalition in a way and manage the groups and manage the message in such a polished way so that adds up to 50 percent — rather than just being a person a leader in the world and trying to mold a consensus?

It reminds me of the Whig Party in the nineteenth century where it doesn’t really add up. . . . The politics of the leadership and the politics of the establishment class is vote for me, because what else are you gonna do?

Eric Blanc: I would add that I think Trump winning is not an existential threat to them, but the left insurgents taking over the Democratic Party is an existential threat to that establishment class. That explains a lot of their behavior, because the reality is if we can both defeat Trump and do that in a way that is closer to Bernie politics than to fifty years of neoliberalism, all of them just lose their jobs. But it also proves them wrong about saying that the way you win is pivoting to the center.

Leah Greenberg: The vast majority of Democratic electeds are lawyers with degrees from Ivy League institutions or business owners. They are not themselves in any meaningful way credible representatives of the working class. The fact that that was often not even part of the conversation suggests some of the deeper problems.

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• Do you work at a company that has contracts with ICE or is cooperating with the Trump administration’s attacks in cities throughout the country? Does your workplace have a plan for what to do if ICE appears on-site? Are you ready to fight back? EWOC is organizing a one-hour training on Wednesday February 19 that will cover how to talk to your co-workers, legal frameworks for political speech in the workplace, and how to identify strategic targets. This training is for anyone, regardless of whether you’re in a union. RSVP here.

Everyone looking to stop ICE today has a lot to learn from the explosive mass movement that culminated in the “Day Without an Immigrant” on May 1, 2006. The spark was H.R. 4437, the Sensenbrenner bill, which passed the House of Representatives on December 16, 2005. Sensenbrenner’s bill would have made it a felony for immigrants not to have papers, while also criminalizing acts of support and solidarity.

The threat was clear and the response spread fast. As one Los Angeles protest sign put it, “You’ve kicked a sleeping giant.” In the spring of 2006, between 4 and 5 million people marched in over 160 cities. And on May 1, over a million people walked out and poured into the streets across the country. Ports slowed; classrooms emptied; restaurants, shops, and job sites went short-staffed or dark. Chris Zamora, a marcher in Los Angeles, described what that collective power felt like on the ground: “It gives me chills to be a part of it. Thirty years from now, I’ll look back and say, ‘I was there.’”

The mass marches and economic disruption worked: Sensenbrenner’s bill was killed by the Senate in late May. It was a historic victory for the immigrant rights movement and the American working class.

History doesn’t repeat, but it is definitely rhyming a lot these days. Sensenbrenner’s nightmarish vision has become a reality under Trump. The good news is that today’s fights against ICE don’t have to reinvent the wheel—we just have to learn from the last time America’s immigrants flexed their power and came out on top. Here are some key lessons from the spring of 2006.

Let Youth Lead

Before May Day 2006 became a national work stoppage, the spark jumped where sparks often jump first: young people. Thousands of high school walkouts erupted across the country in late March, showing millions that non-violent disruption was possible.

Youth catalysis is a common pattern in social movements. But this dynamic is especially prominent among immigrants because children of undocumented parents more frequently have papers, more often speak English, and more often feel rooted enough to intervene in American politics. Unsurprisingly, one study found that over 51% of May Day participants were between the ages of 14 and 28. A century earlier, it was precisely this layer of second-generation immigrant youth that led the era’s mass strikes and unionization efforts during the Great Depression.

Young Latinos also took the lead in convincing their parents to join the spring 2006 actions. Señora Pacheco, an undocumented immigrant, recalled that she participated in one of the local marches—her first ever political action—after her 11-year-old U.S.-born son convinced her to attend. Similarly, one Chicago high schooler remembered the conversation he had with his parents on the eve of May 1: “I told them how me and my friends are going to go and, if they go, it would be better ’cause at least if one more person [goes], that can make a difference.” Initially “they weren’t that into it [but eventually] they were agreeing with me, then they started to talk to me about the other stories of how they worked.”

Working-class youth today remain the most important, and relatively untapped, conduit for organizing more broadly and deeply among working people against ICE and Trumpism. In fact, kids of immigrants are even more strategically central today than they were in 2006 because fears of speaking out are exponentially higher now. At a moment when undocumented parents are often justifiably scared to leave the house for weeks on end, the responsibility of their children to lead politically becomes even sharper.

We can already see glimpses of this potential. Though most young immigrants are not yet coming to our meetings or rallies, it’s significant that Zohran Mamdani got his strongest support among these demographics: 86% of young Latinos voted Zohran, 84% of young Black people, and 66% of young whites.

In Minneapolis, the first walkouts against ICE’s surge came on January 14, when thousands of St. Paul high school students walked out and converged on the state Capitol. And high school students were the only significant layer of the U.S. population to widely respond to the January 30 calls for a nationwide strike against ICE.

Connecting with and developing the organic leaders that initiated those walkouts is one of the key tasks for any anti-ICE movement that aspires to break beyond existing activists. (Left-leaning teachers should help connect walkout leaders to organizations willing to help them deepen their activism.) This means more than having token youth speakers at press conferences or non-profit board meetings; it requires providing resources and training to student leaders, involving young people in the decision-making of the broader fightback, and taking a cue from their more risky and disruptive inclinations.

Have Clear, Winnable Demands

Inexperienced activists sometimes think that raising more demands will broaden the movement by making sure everybody’s concerns are included. And radicals frequently double down on the most ambitious demands.

While the most appropriate number of demands is always context-specific, experience in 2006 and since shows that activating millions usually depends on centering a widely and deeply felt demand that’s also winnable. Laundry lists generally only appeal to the already-converted, and it’s hard to generate mass action around transformational policies that, however righteous, everyday people don’t think can be won anytime soon.

One reason the movement spread like wildfire in 2006 is that it was united around a clear, achievable demand: stop the Sensenbrenner bill. As PBS news coverage at the time noted, “That bill, known as H.R.-4437, has been the main point of protest for most demonstrators.” Those without financial cushions or immigration papers normally only take political risks in fights with a clear path to victory.

What’s our equivalent unifying demand today? If we want ordinary people to strike this year or 2028, what do we want them to strike for?

One initial difficulty organizing under Trump 2.0 was that his onslaught of attacks demoralized people (“what’s the point of protesting, he won’t listen”) and made it hard to focus mass attention around a particular fightback, since so many fires were burning at once. As such, the best we could do was No Kings marches and Fighting Oligarchy rallies that had a central slogan, but no unifying demands or concrete next-step campaigns.

But the horror of ICE’s siege has created a new dynamic, as seen in the January 23 strike concentrated around the demand “ICE Out of Minnesota.” Similarly, organizations like the Sunrise Movement have begun scaling up winnable campaigns to demand companies like Hilton break from ICE.

If we’re going to have a real nationwide mass strike in the U.S., it probably won’t be around a long list of demands or ambitious reforms like Abolish ICE or Medicare for All, policies that are more appropriate for a presidential platform. Rather, we should orient to seizing whirlwind moments to scale up mass non-violent disruption for immediate-but-winnable demands like “ICE Out of Cities” or “Respect Our Votes” after Trump tries to steal the election.

Media Matters

Getting to scale in 2006 came from a feedback loop between local organizing and a media “air war” that made people feel they were part of something bigger. Unions, community organizations, student groups, and assorted radicals played a key role in anchoring the movement.

But Spanish-language radio was a particularly decisive accelerant, with two nationally syndicated DJs, Renán Almendárez Coello (“El Cucuy”) and Eduardo Sotelo (“El Piolín”), playing a central role in promoting the fightback. This radio push didn’t happen “spontaneously.” As one account notes, “After organizers convinced the DJs that this was an important moment, immigration reform and the upcoming rally were constant topics on their shows.” A survey of marchers at the huge May 1 rally in Chicago found that just over half had heard about it on TV or radio.

This “air war” was paired with loose, fast coordination on the ground. Foreshadowing digitally enabled movements to come—with all their scalable strengths and long-term difficulties building sustained power—2006’s actions also went viral from below among young people via text messages, MySpace, and emails.

The problem now is that the media environment is far more atomized and Spanish-language media—recently taken over by finance capital—is much more hesitant to speak truth to power. In 2006, a few DJs could create shared rhythm across cities; today, attention fractures across feeds, group chats, and algorithms. Replicating that viral spread probably requires two things: first, movement organizations treating media strategy as core work—mapping the ecosystem, building repeatable content pipelines, and coordinating amplification rather than assuming it will happen organically; and second, the biggest platforms on the left—Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani—lending legitimacy and reach to campaigns that are already escalating on the ground.

This also means fights inside Spanish-language media organizations themselves. Their response to Trump’s horror show has been remarkably muted, reflecting the overall trend of corporate America to bend the knee to the new administration. Even before November 2024, the TelevisaUnivision leadership pushed positive high-profile coverage of Trump, prompting some Latino civic groups to publicly protest and demand changes. If 2006 proved what Spanish-language media can do when it acts like an organizer, the lesson for 2026 is that getting back to scale may require organizing the media.

Win the Normies

If you’re serious about building toward something like a general strike, you can’t just mobilize the already-convinced. You have to involve the mainstream masses, including people who don’t talk like activists or academics, who don’t follow movement Twitter, and who don’t want to feel like they’re joining a niche subculture fight.

The 2006 immigrant uprising learned that in real time, in part because opponents kept trying to frame immigrants as outsiders and criminals. Early on, that frame found openings. In Denver, marchers emphasized a familiar immigrant story—hard work, family, a better life—but the presence of Mexican flags and Spanish-language signs made it easier for anti-immigrant forces to paint protesters as “lawbreaking criminals unwilling to assimilate.” Organizers responded by sharpening a mainstream frame and a mainstream look: family, work, and belonging here.

After the March protests, a sea of American flags drowned out Mexican flags, not only in Colorado but across the nation. Rafael Tabares, a senior at Los Angeles’s Marshall High who helped plan that school’s March 24 walkout, insisted that his classmates “put away Mexican flags they had brought to the demonstration—predicting, correctly, that the flags would be shown on the news and that the demonstrators would be criticized as nationalists for other countries, not residents seeking rights at home.” This doesn’t mean everyone must perform American patriotism to deserve rights; last night’s beautiful Super Bowl halftime show by Bad Bunny showed how an expansive Pan-American vision can widely resonate in certain contexts and forms. But if you want your movement to win a majority, you have to think like a hardheaded organizer aiming at persuasion, not like an online poster fishing for likes.

Just as important was collective discipline, especially a conscious decision to avoid violence or property destruction. The marches were notable for having few arrests and virtually no acts of violence, and that mattered because mainstream coverage often scares off broad participation and sways public opinion by zooming in on the most chaotic image available, even when it’s peripheral.

Randy Shaw notes that in this respect 2006 differed from recent protests like the 1999 anti-WTO “Battle in Seattle” and the demonstrations at the 2004 Republican National Convention:

Although these demonstrations were primarily peaceful, media footage typically portrayed protesters battling police or engaging in conduct that detracted from their message. Activists often criticize the media for promoting such images, arguing that random acts are inevitable and cannot be controlled by event organizers. But such acts were absent from the immigrant rights marches of 2006.

If the goal is broad participation, you have to attract newcomers by making the action feel as safe and as collective as possible. Evelyn Flores, one of the student leaders, recalled that the sea of humanity she saw on May 1 spurred “the deepest emotions I have ever felt.” That feeling of collective power does far more to actually challenge the system than acts like vandalizing an ICE office or throwing a bottle at a cop.

Emilia González Avalos of Unidos MN put the question well on the Dig:

Are we disciplined enough? Are we disciplined enough to remain non-violent in a peaceful escalation that takes risks, that takes sacrifice, so that we can protect the normies that are coming and being onboarded, so that they feel that they have the courage to march in below zero degrees and not shop, not go to school, not use services for a day?

Answering that question strategically is the bridge from protest to shutdown: not just anger, but collective discipline that keeps the door open for millions more to join.

This also means involving mainstream institutions like churches—and 2006 shows why. The Catholic Church mattered not only because of its infrastructure and weekly contact with parishioners, but because it could legitimize protest in moral terms and pull participation into ritual life. In Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony announced that “if the Sensenbrenner bill was enacted and providing assistance to undocumented immigrants became a felony, he would instruct both priests and lay Catholics to break the law.” Sometimes it takes a preacher to help a movement move beyond preaching to the converted.

Mainstream outreach also brings real tactical dilemmas and debates. Church leadership and major unions pushed for after-work May Day rallies that minimized job conflict, attempting to steer people away from midday disruption. Mahony waged a very public and divisive push for students to stay in class and workers to stay on the job on May Day. Debates over these tactical questions were sharp and often bitter. But you can’t avoid those tensions if you want scale; you have to navigate them with the bigger goal in mind: building enough mainstream participation, legitimacy, and discipline that a broader shutdown becomes thinkable—and then doable.

Don’t Wait for Union Leaders to Call Strikes

Unions like SEIU and UNITE HERE played a key role across the country in providing staff and resources to make local marches a success. But the call for a “Gran Paro” (Mass Shutdown) on May 1 did not come from the unions. It came from Los Angeles’ community-based “March 25 Coalition,” which in early April called for a national boycott and work stoppage on May 1: “No Work, No School, No Sales, and No Buying.”

Unions discouraged their members from participating in the May Day walkouts, arguing that they risked losing their jobs and risked sparking unnecessary backlash against the movement. As such, in cities like Los Angeles and beyond organized labor took the lead in organizing late afternoon actions accessible to those who went to work.

The labor movement’s unwillingness to support the May 1 shutdown led one March 25 Coalition member to complain that “the last weapon the worker has against the employer is the strike, and the very institutions [unions] that live or die by the strike” actively opposed the push for one. “I think it’s shameful that the supposed leader [organized labor] of the working class in America was telling [immigrants] that they should behave” and not strike.

This type of labor-community split was fortunately avoided in Minnesota. Again, it was not union leaders who took the lead: community organizations called for the January 23 day of Truth and Freedom—with its call for “no work, no shopping, no school.” But unlike in 2006, Minnesota’s progressive unions immediately responded by endorsing the day of action. This didn’t mean they explicitly endorsed striking—a move that would have constituted an open defiance of labor law. But unions like SEIU Local 26 did not discourage their members from calling in sick for the day and their endorsement of the daytime rally gave it momentum and legitimacy. The result was a powerful social strike on the 23^rd. There’s no reason other cities and other unions can’t replicate this playbook.

Towards a New Upsurge

Working-class advances in the U.S. don’t generally come through slow-but-steady rhythms. In most times and places, working people keep their heads down. Every so often, however, millions of everyday people suddenly force open the gates of the political arena. In such moments of upsurge, the impossible suddenly becomes possible.

The spring of 2006 was one such upsurge. So is today’s non-violent mass resistance against ICE in Minnesota. We can’t know when exactly such a nationwide upsurge will shake the United States again—or what exactly will trigger it—but we’re moving in that direction. The brazenness and unpopularity of Trump’s regime are a very explosive mix.

There’s no magic formula for awakening the sleeping giant. But ramping up our organizing today against ICE can hasten such a working-class upsurge and position us to seize it as fully as possible. And when that giant fully awakens, nothing can stop it.

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They’re right to move in that direction. General strikes are a powerful tactic that have defeated corrupt and authoritarian rulers across the world, most recently in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, Puerto Rico in 2019, and Sri Lanka in 2022. As the union anthem “Solidarity Forever” puts it, “without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.”

Unfortunately, last Friday’s national call for “no work, no school, no shopping,” billed widely as an anti-ICE general strike over social media, came nowhere close to the projections of its most vocal advocates. Economic disruption was minimal, though workers from Grey’s Anatomy did force production to shut down for the day.

In contrast, Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom one week earlier on January 23 did give a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Many (though not most) businesses were shuttered. And over 75,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving -20°F chills. As SEIU Local 26 president Greg Nammacher put it on the Dig’s excellent new episode on Minneapolis,

We achieved things [on January 23] that were not imaginable two weeks before. … It really did feel like history to our members. I know many Uber and Lyft drivers just started crying when we were checking in with them that day about seeing [roughly one hundred] pastors getting arrested at the airport, seeing all those people pouring downtown to defend them.

How did Minneapolis achieve such a widespread work stoppage on January 23? What do the limitations of that day and the January 30 actions suggest about the path ahead? And what can the history of general strikes tell us about how to make the system’s wheels finally stop turning in the US?

Real General Strikes

Before we can answer those questions, let me briefly clarify what I mean by “general strike,” a term whose meaning has gotten twisted by overuse in recent years.

Academics and activists can endlessly quibble over definitions, but a general strike is basically a work stoppage that paralyzes multiple major industries. Such actions can be primarily political — demanding changes from the government — or economic, demanding changes from employers.

In that light, it’s not hard to assess whether recent anti-ICE actions in Minnesota and nationwide were real general strikes. On January 30, high school students walked out across the country, there were various sizable marches across the US, numerous small businesses closed for the day in solidarity, and a significant but unmeasurable number of people probably called in sick or didn’t shop. That’s great. But definitely not a general strike.

January 23 in the Twin Cities saw much more widespread workplace disruption. Schools were closed (though this was partly due to the extreme cold). Multiple cultural institutions like museums were shuttered. Organizers estimate that roughly 1,000 businesses, overwhelmingly small proprietors, participated and that roughly a million Minnesotans supported the action in some form that day.

This was a monumental achievement, further evidence of the state’s grassroots heroism and the strategic savvy of its progressive unions and community organizations. As Minneapolis Sunrise Movement organizer Aru Shiney-Ajay explained to me in an interview last week, January 23 “was a fantastic start.” But she’s also right that “we have a lot further to go to actually flex our muscles by shutting down the economy” and that “it’s going to take a lot more work” to build “real general strikes.”

This isn’t an abstract debate over semantics. There is a “boy who cries wolf” danger if too many calls for general strikes don’t materialize: when the possibility for one actually becomes real, too many Americans may tune out the message. (In fairness, the community organizations that initiated January 23 and the student groups that initiated January 30 did not project these as “general strikes.” That framing was subsequently pushed by influencers, celebrities, and left activists online.)

And it’s crucial to acknowledge the major limitation of both January 23 and January 30: neither seriously disrupted the major corporations that prop up ICE and the Trump administration. This is a sobering fact, especially since popular organization, ambitious union-community leadership, and grassroots momentum is stronger in Minneapolis than anywhere else in America. Minneapolis’ movement surged ahead after Renée Good’s murder — nevertheless, it still came up short of the type of disruptive economic power that can scare corporate America into breaking from ICE and the Trump regime.

But popular opinion is changing very quickly in our country. Trump and ICE’s brutal, unpopular actions are not likely to stop anytime soon. Organizing initiatives that might seem impossible today can suddenly become feasible in whirlwind moments of mass outrage and effervescence. Making the most of those openings will depend above all on what we do in the meantime. If we take a lead from Minnesota and pivot nationwide to involve millions of people via winnable fight-backs against ICE, a real general strike can become a reality in the US.

Momentum

Organizing a general strike requires some combination of three ingredients: momentum, organization, and militant, risk-tolerant leaders. The proportions can vary — if you have more momentum, you can succeed with less organization and so on. But until we have a sufficient combination of these factors, a general strike will remain a wish rather than a reality.

It takes much more than a viral social media post to shut down the economy. This doesn’t mean celebrities, influencers, and social media agitation don’t have a role to play: in the 2019 general strike that eventually brought down Puerto Rico’s embattled head of state, Bad Bunny, Residente, and Ricky Martin spread the action far beyond longtime activists. And radio DJs were central to generating awareness and energy for 2006’s “day without an immigrant” mass protests in the United States.

But conditions have to be ripe for a general strike to catch on. Of these external factors, the most important is momentum: a struggle’s propulsive forward motion, which leads large numbers of people to pay attention and consider joining.

The need for strong momentum cuts against the suggestion of some seasoned US labor organizers that you can bring about a general strike simply by scaling up traditional strike preparation tactics like having one-on-one conversations with all your co-workers and launching escalating super-majority “structure tests” to measure support. Almost every general strike in US history has been sparked by a much smaller labor struggle whose dynamism, popularity, and confrontations with authorities generate enough momentum for large numbers of other workers to suddenly jump in to show solidarity (see table below).

The 1934 San Francisco general strike, for instance, erupted as a response to the “Bloody Thursday” police murder of a striking longshore worker, Howard Sperry, and a volunteer from the cook’s union, Nick Bordoise. Bay Area politics was upended overnight. Tens of thousands of workers poured into the streets of downtown San Francisco that Sunday for the funeral march:

Faces were hard and serious. Hats were held proudly across chests. Slow-pouring like thick liquid, the great mass flowed out onto Market Street. … Not one smile in the endless blocks of marching men. Crowds on the sidewalk, for the most part, stood with heads erect and hats removed. Others watched the procession with fear and alarm. Here and there well-dressed businessmen from Montgomery Street stood amazed and impressed, but with their hats still on their heads. Sharp voices shot out of the line of march: “Take off your hat!” The tone of voice was extraordinary. The reaction was immediate. With quick, nervous gestures, the businessmen obeyed.

The employer’s association subsequent account of the strike noted that this funeral procession “was one of the strangest and most dramatic spectacles that has ever moved along Market Street,” and that by the end the march, “the certainty of a general strike, which up to this time had appeared to many to be a visionary dream of a small group of the most radical workers, became for the first time a practical and realizable objective.”

We saw a similar dynamic in Minnesota in response to ICE’s surge and especially after Good and Pretti’s murders. Mass consciousness advanced quicker in a few weeks than over two decades of ambitious, deep organizing for change.

Greg Nammacher from SEIU Local 26, which represents over 8,000 janitors and other property service workers, notes that their victorious struggles in years prior for progressive policy changes — including the 2023 “Minnesota Miracle” — “did not trigger the imagination of the broader community … it was not this level of being on top of a wave.” In contrast, most strikers in the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom were not union members.

Here’s how he describes the impact of the Twin Cities’ recent momentum surge on the Dig:

There are so many players in motion right now—organized on their blocks, organized through signals. Groups and structures that didn’t exist, or didn’t exist at an organizational level, just weeks ago are now playing key roles. So from my perspective, this is an incredibly hopeful story about combining systematic, intentional, self-conscious organizing with … understanding that in a movement moment when the entire community is provoked, things will move far beyond your organizational control.

This community outpouring, Nammacher notes, has required adopting a different approach to building disruptive actions:

Usually, when a union gets ready to strike — or when we’re trying to do turnout to an action — every single person we’re engaging has been carefully, relationally propositioned to step into action, supported in a very intentional, systematic way. And in this moment, there’s a surge of momentum that is just breathtaking and comes from every direction. It’s that heroism — and the risks that people, even outside of organization, are willing to take — that has combined to make this so powerful.

Minnesota shows that you can’t organize an ambitious mass strike like January 23, 2026 or May Day 2006 — let alone a real general strike — until the iron is hot enough. That’s one of the main reasons why all the recent online-based calls for nationwide general strikes have fallen flat. As angry as so many people are at ICE, fears about getting fired as well as day-to-day affordability concerns are still front and center for most working people, especially those without college education.

This dynamic also puts a question mark over the US Left’s over-focus on May Day 2028 as a projected general strike. While it’s great that the United Auto Workers’ initial call for this action has raised the discussion of general strikes, it was originally imagined as an action built by unions lining up their collective bargaining contracts with employers (something that does require years of preparation) — not as the North Star disruptive mass action aiming to save US democracy from Trumpism and the billionaires. There’s a danger that in the name of building towards May Day 2028, union and movement leaders could fail to seize the openings for disruptive action that may rapidly emerge over the coming weeks and months.

Moments have to be seized, as Minnesota’s January 23 action positively demonstrated. If Trump attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act or overturn midterm election results, we’ll need to act quickly.

Some have pointed to the 1886 May Day strikes — the call for which came two years earlier, in 1884 — as an example showing that projecting a general strike date way ahead of time can inspire people and give enough time to build up. But there are two major reasons this analogy is off. First, strike momentum was much, much higher in 1884 than it is today, as you can see in the following graph.

And, second, it was possible to lean on escalating economic strikes in 1884 and 1885 to generate momentum for May Day 1886, since the latter was also a strike for an economic demand on bosses, the eight-hour day. But as important as economic strikes are for empowering workers and raising wages today, they won’t generate momentum directly against ICE or Trumpism. And the experience of the past few weeks shows that the vast majority of workers, especially in the private sector, are not yet ready for the far riskier (and far more controversial) task of participating in a political strike. Easier onramps to fight Trumpism are needed — but ideally ones with more of a punch than one-off rallies.

So while it’s good to have May Day 2026 and 2028 as projected dates for joint action, the much more urgent and strategic question is how to start seizing openings and launching campaigns in the meantime that can generate enough momentum and mass involvement to make feasible widespread economic disruption and eventually even a general strike. Otherwise these planned-for dates, and the trainings to support them, will continue to mobilize mostly existing progressive and radical activists, not the tens of millions we need to win against ICE and Trump.

In Minnesota, grassroots momentum was sparked by external forces: the ICE siege begun in December 2025 and two murders of citizens by ICE and Border Patrol agents. Top-down horrors and bottom-up heroism in Minneapolis, in turn, has boosted anti-Trump momentum nationally. But we should expect Trump, Miller, and Homan to do everything in their power to control their thugs enough to avoid more viral killings of innocent white people, since all that bad publicity has clearly been counterproductive for their agenda. A sad reality of US politics is that the killings of immigrants like Silverio Villegas González, Jaime Alanis, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, and Josué Castro Rivera did not spark anything like the widespread response to the deaths of Good and Pretti.

While ICE’s deportations and jackboot tactics will very likely continue to spark outrage over the coming months, we can’t rely on the regime to provide organizing energy for us. Nor should we put out calls for general strikes that have no realistic chance of becoming real. What we need instead is an orientation to seizing whirlwind moments and launching escalating fights for winnable demands like the successful effort that forced Avelo Airlines to break from ICE and Sunrise Movement’s push for Hilton now to do the same. Such efforts can sustain, accelerate, and organize the forward momentum sparked by courageous mass resistance in Minneapolis.

Organization

Stopping and eventually abolishing ICE depends on involving and developing the millions of Americans who are not coming to our meetings or protests. In other words, it depends on organizing. Without such a relentless outward-facing focus — especially on strategic industries and occupations where our side is weak — we’ll never have sufficient reach and legitimacy to turn high-momentum moments into real general strikes.

Emilia González Avalos, executive director of the Minneapolis-based community group Unidos, put it well on the Dig: “Participation needs to feel collective, not heroic. There is a plan to win and a path forward for a bigger we: lower the cost of participation and normalize resistance to millions of ordinary people. Our safety is in numbers.”

At a moment of upheaval like our own, organizing doesn’t require people first join democratic membership organizations like unions or the Democratic Socialists of America — though as a member of both, I would definitely recommend you join both, since powerful membership organizations are essential for our movement’s long-term success.

The first mass-scale step towards involvement in Minneapolis was for people to get trained to legally observe and record ICE’s actions. From the outside, this proliferation of observers might seem like something that just “spontaneously” happened, but in fact it required that the community organization Unidos prioritize this as an onramp into the moment — a mass recruitment and training process sometimes referred to as “absorption.” Unidos has now trained an astounding 30,000 people in response to ICE’s surge. And this orientation to scaling up reflected their strategic understanding of the importance of building a majoritarian movement.

As González Avalos explains:

What we had to ponder as organizers was “How do we stop being a specialty group?” … What is the on-ramp for a popular front? And so that’s how we thought about this constitutional observer on-ramp. … Movements are early, brave, and clear. But they are not majorities.

Though legal observation was a relatively easy and simple task, the process of doing it — especially in the face of ICE’s increased belligerence — became a transformational experience for countless Minneapolis residents. “It changes people,” notes González Avalos. “Now, all of these constitutional observers are wanting to do more.”

Indeed, Nammacher observes that those neighborhood signal groups were “absolutely decisive in being able to move in this moment” to make the January 23 strike a success. An astounding 4 percent of all residents in every neighborhood are now members of one of those chats.

Though much of this explosive movement now lies outside of formal organizations, Minnesota’s longstanding progressive unions and organizations have left a strong imprint on the broader fightback. “Organizing capacity has played a large role because what we’re seeing is that folks are mirroring where the center of gravity is,” notes Minister JaNaé Bates Imari, Co-Executive Director of ISAIAH, a faith-based, Black-led community group central to the statewide anti-ICE fightback. Concretely, she emphasized in her interview on the Dig the important role Minnesota’s leading progressive organization played in helping the movement remain remarkably non-violent even in the face of the most horrific provocations:

Part of what is happening in Minnesota is a needling by the federal government to try to get us to respond in a particular way. And Minnesotans across the [political] spectrum have said we will not take the bait. … No one [is] confused about who the peacekeepers are in the midst of what’s taking place.

Taking a cue from González Avalos, the key question all of us outside of Minnesota should be asking ourselves is: What are the key on-ramps to actively involve as many Americans in sustained struggle against ICE and Trump?

As important as events like No Kings have been and will continue to be for displaying mass opposition to Trump, big weekend rallies without clear next steps or easy on-ramps for deeper involvement won’t be enough to overcome Trump’s masked goon squad. Nor will the proliferation of anti-MAGA “tables” (coalitions) for progressive non-profits and unions to talk to each other. We need to pivot to talking to and involving the vast majority of Americans who are not on our email lists or membership rolls.

In towns faced with ICE surges, the first step is mass trainings for legal observers. Elsewhere, we should focus on winnable campaigns that raise anti-ICE demands on companies and local governments, not still-abstract calls for general strikes. Because so many people in our country feel like nothing they could do could ever make a difference, we need easy on-ramps that give people a sense of purpose and power.

Our side’s weak base among working-class people is the single most central obstacle to forward progress. There are deep structural reasons for this limitation. A century ago, even non-organized workers had far stronger ties to each other because they tended to live next to their co-workers, attend the same churches, and drink at the same bars. But economic decentralization, urban sprawl, suburbanization, and neoliberalism have dramatically eroded those organic working-class cultures. Consciously fostering widespread organization is both much harder and much more urgent than ever.

In our atomized country, it should come as no surprise that January 30’s “general strike” never materialized nationwide, especially since the action was called by small left-leaning student groups. Compare that with the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom, which was called by influential organizations like Unidos, ISAIAH, SEIU Local 26, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, and the Minneapolis Federation of Educators. The legitimating strength of these organizations ultimately mattered more than the increase in momentum that emerged the next day when Alex Pretti was murdered on January 24.

But given that union density, the percentage of workers in unions, in the private sector is only 8.6% in Minnesota and only 5.9% nationwide, it’s not surprising that even January 23’s otherwise powerful action was weakest precisely in the places we need to be strongest: the corporations like Target, Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot that ICE depends on to function as well as all the other big companies whose CEOs have real leverage over the White House.

Whereas companies can’t make profits when their employees don’t show up to work, the titans of industry — and the White House — face no direct costs when local teachers and students walk out. School walkouts have an essential role to play in inspiring broader workplace and social disruption, but they’re not a substitute for it.

Recent experience abroad shows how crucial the private sector — especially its most central nodes — can be for defeating authoritarianism. Late on December 3, 2024, South Korea’s right-wing president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law. The militant KCTU union confederation threatened a general strike to save democracy and began immediately organizing rolling strikes in the most economically central metal and auto factories like Kia and Hyundai. This push, together with the broader pro-democracy movement of which it was part, forced the president out of office on December 14, 2024. (Yoon has since been indicted for leading an insurrection and is imprisoned — a fate that hopefully awaits America’s would-be dictator and his henchmen.)

To paralyze ICE and stop Trump, we urgently need far more private sector worker organizing. Non-union employees inside the belly of the corporate beast are no less courageous, but views towards Trump are far more uneven among blue-collar workers of all races and the organizing conditions facing blue-collar, white-collar, and tech workers alike are far more challenging. Whereas public sector workers and union members have more job protections, and college-educated professionals tend to have some financial cushion and autonomy, the norm for non-union workers in the private sector is paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyles, at-will employment, and fear of the boss.

Faced with this challenging context, we need far more campaigns like that of ICEOut.tech, an organizing initiative that in less than a week has already collected over 1,000 public signatures by tech workers and professionals demanding that their companies break from ICE. Couldn’t similar public petitions from workers of all skills and statuses be launched within Amazon, Target, Enterprise, Home Depot, and other ICE collaborating corporations?

Anybody at such companies should reach out to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to get support launching such initiatives — but to get to scale, they’ll probably need the backing of big unions and progressive organizations. Without a serious investment in resources, it’s hard to imagine how we could make possible campaigns along the lines laid out to me by union strategist Chris Brooks:

Imagine all these groups canvassing Target stores across Minnesota (and then later across the country) inviting workers to come to a meeting where they get grounded in the campaign to fight ICE by building a committee in their store, using the meeting to map all their coworkers, and setting the goal of having all of them sign an anti-ICE petition in twenty-four hours and then organizing a massive community supported march on the boss to deliver that in the store. Film it and put it out there. Have all Target workers wear ICE Out buttons. Build to a one day Target strike.

At Target, Hilton, Enterprise, Delta, and beyond, mass organizing trainings tailored for specific company campaigns can give fired-up workplace activists the tools and encouragement they need to break beyond the already-convinced. Deep organizing techniques like systematic one-on-one conversations and escalating build-up actions — buttons, petitions, rallies, and the rest — have lost none of their relevancy for building power and overcoming fear in these challenging private-sector workplaces, where you can’t assume that fighting ICE and Trump is already widely or deeply felt enough to overcome prevailing moods of fear and resignation.

Parallel mass campaigns by consumers demanding that these companies and others break from ICE can create the momentum and permission structure for more employees to take the risk of joining the fight, as we’ve begun to see in Sunrise’s Hilton campaign of escalating sit-ins and noisy late-night rallies to pressure the company to stop housing ICE agents. Community members can also directly engage workers at these companies by passing out QR codes with links to sign petitions as well as information about upcoming actions. And radical organizations like DSA can start encouraging members to get jobs and organize at companies that are strategically central for the fight against ICE and Trumpism, as well as public sector workplaces that have huge disruptive power like city transportation and airports.

We also need far more education and educational materials about the ties of these companies to ICE, much of which is hardly common knowledge internally, let alone among the broader public. But it’s important to keep in mind that the most important lesson workers and community members can learn — that they have tremendous collective power — can only be taught and learned through the process of struggle itself.

Who Will Lead?

We got lucky that Trump chose to pick on a city and state with movement leaders like Emilia González Avalos, JaNaé Bates Imari, and Greg Nammacher. Without their strategic thinking, bold initiatives for mass participation, and push for organizational alignment instead of turf wars and shallow coalitions, Trump’s provocation in Minnesota may well have succeeded in achieving its ugly goals.

Unfortunately, this type of labor-community leadership is the exception, not the norm. One key reason that organization and momentum among working people is still much lower than it needs to be is that most US union and non-profit leaders have continued with business as usual since November 2024.

Mass movements don’t just happen. Someone has to take the initiative. This doesn’t mean those of us in the ranks have to wait for a green light from above. The impetus for almost every general strike in US history has come from below — only once the grassroots got the ball rolling did top leaders eventually (usually at the last possible minute) jump on board. As one San Francisco union leader in 1934 put it, “It was an avalanche. I saw it coming so I ran ahead before it crushed me.”

But in today’s atomized context, when feelings of powerlessness are still so pervasive, it’ll likely take a combination of grassroots initiative and serious organizational resources to scale up. On this question, like so many others, Minneapolis has pointed the way forward. “There’s nothing we’re doing that’s rocket science,” insists Nammacher from SEIU Local 26. “This can be replicated anywhere.”

Whether you’re a rank-and-file activist or the head of an organization with deep pockets, there’s no time to lose. The public is with us. We have the power — and a moral responsibility — to defeat ICE, Trump, and their billionaire enablers.

So let’s get to work. Do it right, and we might be taking work off together sooner than you think.

More

• Work at a company collaborating with ICE? Reach out to EWOC to immediately get support organizing campaigns against ICE at your job.

• Unsure if your company — or a company in your town — is working with ICE? Here’s a great research resource to find out.

• Sign up here to get involved in Sunrise’s anti-ICE Hilton campaign.

The Twin Cities Sunrise Movement has pushed the resistance onto offense, targeting the Hilton hotels that quietly house ICE agents. This campaign to get companies to break from ICE has led to an impressive string of local victories, including getting a local Hilton to refuse service to ICE, sparking outrage from the Department of Homeland Security and the subsequent capitulation of Hilton nationally to the administration.

I spoke with Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise Movement’s executive director and a lifelong Minneapolis resident, about the city’s organizing pushback and how ICE’s opponents can go on the offense nationwide by pressuring companies like Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with the agency.

ERIC BLANC: What has it felt like to be a Minneapolis resident and organizer these past two months?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: It feels like living in a war zone. I was really reluctant to say that at first, but every few hours I get a Signal message about ICE — usually within walking distance of me. Two weeks ago, I had a friend who had a gun pointed at their head by ICE agents, and other friends have been dragged out of their cars and detained. It feels like you’re walking around and, at any moment, you could be grabbed and kidnapped. It’s come to a point where something as simple as recording an interaction with ICE can be met by being shot, which is a really different level of fear to carry around.

At the same time, it’s also the most organized community I’ve ever experienced anywhere. We’ve hit a density in Minneapolis where over 4 percent of every single neighborhood is in a Signal chat at the neighborhood level—and it might be higher, because those are just the Signal chats we’re centrally tracking. In St. Paul, there’s a neighborhood called Frogtown. It’s heavily Hmong. Every day, we create a rapid response Signal chat for people actively patrolling in Frogtown, and every day by 11 a.m., that chat hits its limit of a thousand people — which is to say that, at any given moment in one neighborhood, there are a thousand people out patrolling.

ERIC BLANC: Can you speak more about the sense of community that has emerged?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. And I’ve grown up here. But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.

There are these intense protest moments — like the number of times you pick someone up after they’ve been tear-gassed and use snow to wipe the tear gas from their face. But there’s also this everyday feeling of solidarity, because everyone is walking around with whistles. If you hear a whistle, suddenly people start swarming toward you. I’ve never felt so backed up. It feels like we’re all on a giant team together as a city. It’s incredible.

It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people — it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.

ERIC BLANC: Can you speak more about the fear and how people have overcome it?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: Part of it is that getting involved starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up. Standing and recording with a phone was what we were first training everyone to do. Monarca Unidos, an immigrant group here, trained something like 24,000 people on legal observer roles: standing and recording with a phone.

Everyone was prepared to do that, and then that became risky. But it was an identity people had taken up — “I can stand here and record with a phone” — and people didn’t want to back away from that.

Another example is that delivering groceries to undocumented people who can’t risk going outside was floated as a low-risk thing you could do. But in the last week, ICE agents have started following around white people carrying grocery bags, because they think that will lead them to undocumented people.

So now the people delivering groceries — which again is a very low-risk thing—have been trained that if ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper.

That type of thing is motivating courage right now. What we’re doing is very basic: it’s giving people food and walking around recording on our cell phone. And when you’re not allowed to do that — when that becomes high-risk — there’s a sense of, my basic rights are being violated.

Obviously it’s harder to directly confront an ICE agent. That’s high-risk. But delivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.

ERIC BLANC: Progressive unions and community organizations in Minneapolis called a day of “no school, no shopping, no work” on January 23. How was it?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: I was really proud. I was walking through the crowd and felt like crying in a lot of moments — it was a lot of people. I know several people, including some immigrants, for whom it was their first protest. I know a lot of people who called out sick from work too — hairdressers, drivers, all sorts of different people. I saw a lot of small businesses closed — not usually large ones. But that was very touching.

It was a fantastic start. We have a lot further to go to actually flex our muscles by shutting down the economy. But even popularizing the idea that regular people have control over how society works was essential. Real general strikes that can shut down an economy don’t happen in a week — it’s going to take a lot more work. But what we did was incredible.

ERIC BLANC: Can you speak about the work the Twin Cities Sunrise Hub has been doing around hotels?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: We’ve seen incredible rapid response networks across Minneapolis and the country. That’s fantastic and necessary. But Sunrise’s assessment was: we also need an offensive component. Because how are we going to stop ICE from doing what it’s doing?

The framework we use is “pillars of support.” What are the literal ways that support ICE to get around and operate in our city? Back in November, we did an analysis and identified a couple pillars: rental car companies, hotels. We also identified transportation on the roads, restaurants, and food delivery to the Whipple building, which is where they’re operating deportations and detentions. There are any number of supports. Then we narrowed down: which do we have the most control over and access to, so we can non-violently interfere with them?

Starting late November and early December, we decided to go in on a hotel campaign. We built extensive infrastructure to identify where ICE was staying, then started showing up in the middle of the night and making noise outside.

The logic is simple: if you make noise outside hotels, ICE agents won’t want to stay there and hotels won’t want to house them. If enough hotels don’t want to house ICE, then they don’t have somewhere to stay. And it’s both about the actual logistics and also socializing the idea that ordinary people are running institutions that support ICE to operate.

I’m excited to do this for hotels, but also to have people understand the logic enough that they start thinking about it everywhere ICE interacts: rental car companies, restaurants. It’s been working really well with hotels in general, and Hilton in particular.

We had one hotel publicly refuse to house ICE, which became a big national news story when DHS went after them. That’s a hotel we were targeting, and it was mostly because of our pressure. We had two more hotels temporarily shut down to avoid housing ICE and keep staff safe.

We’ve had two other hotels say they are kicking ICE out because they want to avoid noise demonstrations. We think that’s happening elsewhere too. There are several other places where managers or hotel staff told us ICE left after noise demonstrations because they don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night.

So it’s working — and we need to scale it up in Minneapolis and nationally. The real thing we want is for hotel companies to withdraw support for ICE. Ideally it’s not manager-by-manager, but creating a wave of hotels doing it is the first step.

ERIC BLANC: How do you see the role of employees — white-collar or frontline workers — at these companies?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: The workforce organizing piece is key. Immigrants are running a lot of these hotels. From our experience, a lot of hotel workers don’t want ICE there, and they request noise demonstrations at their hotels, or they let us know when ICE is staying.

We’re very clear with organizers and participants that we never direct anger at hotel staff, who aren’t the reason ICE is staying in the hotels, and we never engage in property destruction. There’s an opportunity for collaboration and strategy with workers — unionized workers in particular — to figure out which hotels to kick ICE out of.

ERIC BLANC: Can you speak more about your strategy of going on the offense? Because a lot of people right now are trying to figure out how we stop ICE. And what we’ve seen, beyond the important local defense and know-your-rights work, is mostly a lot of one-off protests or vague calls online to boycott companies. What you’re doing seems different.

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: I think about it as leverage and power: looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers.

Under a functioning democracy, you play the game of public opinion. If you convince the majority, then you can get legislation or win an election. But what we’re living under right now is not a democracy. In many ways, the feedback loop from public opinion to outcomes has been broken for a long time. It’s broken because of money in politics, because of the setup of our Senate, because of gerrymandering. And now they might just try to steal the election outright.

Public opinion still matters. It’s important that we have majorities on our side. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think public opinion alone will translate into victories, or that the midterms and 2028 will be normal elections.

A lot of establishment advocacy groups seem to be hoping we’ll show America that Trump is really bad, then in the midterms, we’ll take back power — a rerun of 2018 to 2020. I don’t think that’s accurate: just look at what Trump is doing now and how similar it is to how authoritarians in other countries have grabbed power.

So you have to switch from purely persuasion campaigns to the logic of non-cooperation. You have to look at what ways ordinary people are directly upholding a regime’s ability to logistically function: where the money flows, but also how they eat, how they sleep, who is doing the literal work enabling everything to operate.

Corporations aren’t the only method of looking at that. There’s many. Local governments are a piece. But I do think corporations are a really key one, particularly corporations that the public has a lot of access to and influence over.

A lot of the companies collaborating with ICE are shadowy and operating in the background. But there are also companies like hotels — places we all book, sleep at, and spend money at — that we can actually shift, because we have leverage over them. That’s the logic behind corporate campaigning: identifying the places where ordinary people are directly enabling Trump’s regime to function.

When you look at it that way, there are dozens and dozens of little buttons you can start to push. We’ve been brainstorming a lot of other ones too. For example: ICE agents drive around on the roads — could we get the city government to do construction on the highway entrances in or out of the Whipple building? Things like that. The question is: what are the concrete ways they’re moving around, and how do you put yourself in the way using every non-violent lever you have access to?

We zeroed in on hotels, because we wanted to pick something that anyone, anywhere can immediately recognize: “There’s a Hilton near me. I could book a reservation and cancel it. I could leave a bad review on Booking.com.” You want to pick campaigns that everyone has power over, because our strength comes from involving large numbers of ordinary people. If it’s just the same activists who have been doing this for years, we can’t win.

ERIC BLANC: Can you speak a little bit more to how you see the question of winnability as important for this? Because there’s a tension: if our only criteria for choosing targets is going after those that are most central to ICE’s functioning, you would start with the hardest targets: Palantir and Amazon. But while it’s important to educate people about their role, it’s not clear to me that we can start there with our campaigns, because Palantir and Amazon will likely be the last two companies to break from the administration, precisely because they’re so deeply tied to ICE.

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: Winnability is key. When you’re organizing a population against dictatorship, it’s important to understand what the main emotional barriers are that stand in people’s way. In a lot of countries, that ends up being fear. I look a lot to Otpor in Serbia as an example: they identified fear as the main barrier and said, “What’s the antidote to fear? The antidote to fear is humor. We’re going to be funny in all of our actions so that people aren’t scared.” It was great.

I don’t think the main barrier in the US is fear. It’s skepticism. Most people don’t believe in our ability to change things. So one of the most important things for organizers right now is to pick campaigns that are ambitious, tangible, and winnable — wins that aren’t so small they feel meaningless but are still actually achievable. Because one of the biggest things we need to prove to ordinary people right now is that we really do have power over how the government operates, and over what happens in our society.

Winnability is always important, but it’s particularly important in the US at this moment. That’s part of why we were picking hotels and Hilton: Hilton’s business model makes us directly relevant to how they make money, in a way that’s really helpful for applying pressure. Similarly, this was true of the Disney+ subscription campaign around Jimmy Kimmel, and also Tesla Takedown. It’s about identifying where there’s direct leverage — where we can interfere with how they make money in ways that can significantly damage their brand.

And I agree about Amazon and Palantir. I don’t think it’s bad to tell people about them. But I do think there’s a danger of overwhelming a lot of people right now. So many people tell us, “I don’t know where I’m supposed to shop. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Any interaction I have is bad.” That can be paralyzing. It doesn’t move people into action, and it doesn’t get people into organized formations. We need to build and deepen our momentum.

It’s much more effective to say, “Let’s go after one or a few targets at a time. Let’s actually knock them down, then move on to the next ones,” instead of “Here’s a list of 50 companies you shouldn’t shop at and 50 things you have to feel guilty about doing as you go about your everyday life.”

I think the first step is to go after companies that ICE is physically interacting with. Because that’s easier for someone who’s not on their phone all the time following politics to understand and see. That particularly means hotels, car rental companies, and places that allow ICE to stage in their parking lot or directly enter their workplaces — which concretely tends to mean Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot. Those targets feel more clear and urgent to ordinary people than companies who are financially supporting ICE through contracts (or that have refused to take a public stand yet against ICE).

For all those three companies, the demands are clear: stop housing them, stop renting them cars, stop letting them stage from your locations, and stop letting ICE into your workplaces.

And some of this is moving. There’s been a lot of protests at Target in Minneapolis, which makes sense here because the company is based in our city. I believe there’s a meeting with Target’s CEO that I believe is happening this week about Target becoming a Fourth Amendment workplace, which makes it much harder for ICE to enter. That could be really great, and a big step forward.

ERIC BLANC: I agree it’s crucial to have a few winnable but ambitious campaigns like that. Beyond those three targets — Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot — do you think there’s anything else organizers could be doing to pressure other companies?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: One really important and basic step folks can push immediately in their towns is to demand that every business, including small businesses, refuse to let ICE into their workplace. One fantastic element of neighborhood organizing becoming more offensive in Minneapolis is that twice this week, when I was sitting in different coffee shops, someone came in and asked the coffee shop to become a Fourth Amendment workplace and put up a sign on their door about closing on the 23rd and never allowing in ICE.

So many businesses I walk into in Minneapolis have that sign on the door, “ICE Is Not Allowed in Here.” Which is fantastic. That’s not the same as a corporate target, because it’s often easier to move singularly owned businesses. But it’s a really important neighborhood-level tactic.

ERIC BLANC: It seems like a big national organization like Indivisible or MoveOn could print up a bunch of “ICE is Not Allowed in Here” signs, and ask all their supporters nationwide to go talk to every local business about posting the sign.

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: And it’s not hard. It’s easy to walk into your coffee shop or corner store and say, “Can you put up the sign?” It’s within their rights, and it’s not a crazy ask for most business owners — it’s intuitive. It’s sort of the next step to the incredible mass mobilization work Indivisible has already been doing. They have a huge amount of leaders in every corner of this country, and here in the Twin Cities, they’ve been one of the groups helping drive key campaigns.

ERIC BLANC: What are the other tactics you’ve seen be effective in Minneapolis?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: For hotels, beyond noise demonstrations in the middle of the night, we’ve also been booking and canceling reservations, which we know is making them freak out about their bottom line. There’s a hotel downtown that we’ve booked out through May, which hopefully means ICE agents can’t book it because it’s full — and it also means the hotel is losing money.

We’re starting to review-bomb them on Booking.com. And we’re currently pursuing a strategy where we pressure the city council to revoke the liquor licenses of hotels that are housing ICE in any way. That could be a really smart pressure point. Liquor licenses are revoked in stages, so if you revoke one or two, it can quickly spook the others into falling in line. Fortunately, we have a very sympathetic city council that is actively looking for ways to get in the way of what’s going on with ICE.

For local government, in Minneapolis and everywhere else, the key point is that hotels are licensed, and there’s a vast network of bureaucracy that exists for a city to function. This is the time to use that bureaucracy for good: find every permit, license, traffic ticket — anything that enables a business to function — and make it clear that right now ICE is murdering citizens of Minneapolis and terrorizing communities across the country. If a business is going to support that, then they shouldn’t get the support of the city.

Non-violent tactics that waste a company’s time or money are really effective. For Enterprise, we’ve made and cancelled car reservations, saying the roads are too icy. I’m also interested in slow-driving blockades of Enterprise locations: driving at two or three miles an hour with fifty cars surrounding an Enterprise so ICE physically can’t get in or out to book their cars. We haven’t tried that yet, but it could be an interesting tactic.

At Home Depot, there have been instances of people lining up to buy ice scrapers and then getting in line to return them, in a way that clogs the lines. It’s not illegal, you’re not spending more than $2 that you get back within an hour, and it can be done at scale.

ERIC BLANC: What can unions and non-profits do to support going on the offense against ICE?

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: I see a lot of established organizations unsure how to respond right now, and corporate campaigning is actually a very clear way to plug people in and build momentum. Sometimes it can even be digital. If all you have is a giant email list, tell everyone on that email list to book and cancel reservations at Hilton every single day. That’s a good use of people’s time and energy.

So my advice is: pick a strategic target—or a couple targets—and go all-in. If you have a base that can mobilize in person and do things like noise demonstrations, or show up at an Enterprise location and cancel reservations, do that. If you don’t have a base that can show up in person but you have a list or a social media presence, there are digital tactics that are genuinely useful here too. It’s a straightforward thing to join, and the more the merrier. But we need to get beyond one-off protests against companies — what we need is a focus on sustained pressure campaigns at strategic and winnable targets. Explaining the logic to people of focusing on breaking ICE’s pillars of support is crucial.

The union question is important. It’d be great if unions set up tip lines to get information about which locations ICE is using for hotels and car rentals. And I do think ULP [unfair labor practice] strikes are an interesting idea for workers in places that are getting targeted. This is a labor issue. Workers are in unsafe conditions right now: they’re getting grabbed at work, and they’re getting grabbed on their way to and from work. These are genuinely unsafe conditions, especially if you’re a person of color in Minneapolis — regardless of whether you’re a citizen or not. Logistics workers like truck drivers also have a huge amount of potential disruptive power to stop things like food deliveries to ICE’s staging centers.

For unions that are serious about protecting workers and democracy, there’s a worker-centric approach that’s extremely relevant right now, and it could interfere with corporations’ ability to uphold ICE.

ERIC BLANC: And even if people aren’t in a union, they still have all sorts of individual and collective rights and leverage at work. Workers at a non-union Hilton, for instance, can still put up pressure against ICE — it’s harder without support from an established union, but it’s doable. And this moment could be an opportunity for those in the labor movement who are seriously thinking about defeating authoritarianism and organizing the whole working class, to say nationwide: Do you work at a Hilton, Enterprise, or Home Depot? Are you scared because of ICE? We’re going to support you to stay safe by fighting back. There are organizations like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee that are eager to support any worker in these companies or others who want to fight back at work against ICE.

ARU SHINEY-AJAY: People are hungry to get involved. They are really scared, and they want to know their rights. But, above all, there’s a level of “I’m ready to do things” that feels really unparalleled, at least in Minneapolis. And it’s going to spread to the rest of the country as ICE expands, as people fully understand what’s happening, and as we keep up the momentum through wins along the way.

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• Want to start organizing in your town against Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot? Sign up here to get involved in the Sunrise Movement.

• The Twin Cities Sunrise Hub has developed a great set of tools and tips for anybody to get started organizing against companies collaborating with ICE in your town — especially Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot.

• Please share this interview widely—post online, share in chats, text to friends! The more people who read it, the more likely it is this campaign will catch on nationally.

• If you are in an organization — a union, community group, DSA or Indivisible chapter, etc. — please push to get your group locally and nationally involved in this type of fight.

• In case you missed it, here’s the piece I co-wrote two weeks ago: “Want to Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators”.

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MLK Jr. was a political radical who spent his final years opposing militarism, denouncing capitalism, and demanding a massive economic redistribution. That’s why Zohran Mamdani’s go-to definition of socialism has been to quote King: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

And yet, even many of the most sympathetic “radical King” accounts still cling to a familiar American fairy tale: the Great Man who simply had it in him—born with moral courage, hatched fully formed, and then leading history forward by sheer force of charisma.

That story is wrong in a specific way that matters for today’s left. King’s radicalism wasn’t a private attribute. It was the outcome of apprenticeship inside an organized tradition—a network of socialists, labor radicals, and movement educators who did the unglamorous work of training leaders, building institutions, writing drafts, running logistics, teaching strategy, and connecting civil rights demands to bread-and-butter class politics.

It’s unfortunate that this institutional legacy has been scrubbed out so successfully that people might end up thinking King invented his own politics in isolation. In reality, he came up inside a web of socialist organizers and “movement schools” that treated racial justice and economic justice as inseparable—and, crucially, treated organizing as a craft you could teach.

Part of what makes the erasure so effective is an accompanying myth: that early American socialists—especially those associated with the old Socialist Party—“ignored race,” full stop, and therefore couldn’t possibly have helped seed the Black freedom struggle’s mass politics. There’s a kernel of truth there (the history includes shameful racism and exclusion), but it’s also a caricature that turns a complex tradition into a straw man—and, conveniently, makes it easier to pretend that socialism and antiracism only meet in the 1960s as a kind of happy accident. In reality, the US Socialist movement—including former racists like Victor Berger— after 1917 forcefully attacked white supremacy and empire rather than accommodating them, establishing an organized legacy that went on to play a central role in MLK Jr.’s politics.

This isn’t an argument for diminishing King’s heroism or agency. King was extraordinary. But if we care about the kind of politics he practiced—mass organization, movement discipline, and democratic socialism—we have to pay attention to the scaffolding that made it possible.

Myles Horton and The Highlander School

It’s tempting to treat the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott as the instant birth of the modern civil rights movement—one brave woman refuses to stand, a young pastor gives a speech, history turns. But the boycott succeeded because it sat on top of years of organizing: NAACP networks, church infrastructure, labor-style discipline, and political education.

Rosa Parks is often flattened into a symbol—quiet seamstress, tired feet, spontaneous defiance. But Parks was a serious organizer, a student of movement strategy, and someone who had been steeped in the traditions of interracial radicalism and labor solidarity. Her decision to sit in the front of the bus in December 1955 didn’t come from nowhere. It came from training, relationships, and political formation—including her relationship to one of the most important movement institutions of the twentieth century: the Highlander Folk School.

Highlander, based in Tennessee, was a radical training ground born out of the labor left of the 1930s. Its founder, socialist Myles Horton, saw it as a place to build power from below—first in the labor movement, and later in the southern freedom struggle.

Myles Horton came out of a world where socialism was a practical current in working-class life. Horton had studied under Christian socialist Reinhold Niebuhr and in his autobiography he describes learning politics from people like “the old Socialist, Joe Kelley Stockton,” a friend of Eugene Debs who made socialism tangible through his generous daily life and fierce class struggle politics.

Highlander, launched with financial support from Niebuhr and the Socialist Party, wasn’t designed to produce charismatic leaders, but to produce collective capacity—to teach ordinary people to analyze their conditions, talk to each other across divisions, and act together.

As Horton put it, Highlander existed so people didn’t wait for “some government edict or some Messiah” to improve their lives. Its radically democratic pedagogy insisted that “the best teachers of poor and working people are the people themselves,” and that the point was not adjustment to an unjust society but its transformation.

And though it often gets forgotten today, Highlander’s early political DNA was explicitly socialist. In one fundraising appeal, Horton described Highlander’s goal as “education for a socialistic society” and he made clear the school’s commitments: it existed “to help create a new social order.”

The school’s early focus was heavily labor-oriented—mostly white textile and mine workers in the mountains—but Horton and his team moved toward racial justice as they confronted the South’s core system of rule. Horton reached out to Black labor organizers in the 1940s and by the 1950s shifted Highlander’s focus “completely” toward fighting segregation.

Rosa Parks and Montgomery

Rosa Parks’s relationship to Highlander is one of those threads that gets cut out of the story because it complicates the heroic myth. Parks didn’t just feel her way into resistance. She prepared.

Montgomery’s movement anchor, Black labor organizer E. D. Nixon, insisted that effective civil disobedience required “careful planning” and “a well-trained and disciplined core of leadership.” This was the logic he had been taught at Highlander: organization first, then disruption. Thus Nixon arranged for Parks and other local Black activists to attend the school in August 1955 for a two-week intensive multi-racial training. Parks later recalled:

At Highlander, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops, and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.

Montgomery’s subsequent boycott matters here not only because it propelled that as-then-still-unknown King into national leadership, but because it was the first major breakthrough of the modern civil rights movement’s mass-action model: sustained collective discipline, economic pressure, and moral confrontation with Jim Crow power. It turned the struggle from courtroom battles into a social insurgency. King’s gifts—his voice, his steadiness under pressure, his ability to frame the fight in moral and democratic terms—were real. But the movement around him was also teaching him what kind of leader he needed to be.

That teaching came from people who already knew how to organize. And a surprising number of those people came out of socialist and labor traditions.

Bayard Rustin

If you want to point to a single figure who helped turn King from a gifted local leader into the organizer of a national movement, Bayard Rustin is hard to beat. Rustin treated nonviolent mass organizing as a technology of power. It was something you trained for, drilled, organized, and executed with precision.

Rustin is sometimes remembered as the man behind the 1963 March on Washington. That’s true—but it sells him short. Rustin wasn’t just an event planner. He was a strategist who carried decades of political experience in labor coalition-building, in Gandhian nonviolence, and in building structure and discipline. He was also a committed democratic socialist. As he put it in a 1958 report on his recent trip abroad, “The problem in Europe—as in the United States—is the absence of a vital socialist movement.”

Rustin also helped shape the intellectual and strategic framing of Montgomery. He constantly pushed King and other leaders to think bigger: don’t treat the boycott as a local dispute; treat it as a model. Don’t treat segregation as a “Southern problem”; treat it as a national crisis of democracy. And don’t separate civil rights from economic rights.

That last point is crucial. Rustin’s politics came out of a socialist tradition that understood racism as inseparable from political economy. He was relentless about moving from protest to power via majoritarian working-class politics.

This is also where Rustin’s own life shaped his political commitments. He lived as an openly gay man in a movement world that was often hostile to homosexuality. He survived repression, marginalization, and surveillance. Those experiences sharpened his sense that moral purity is not enough. You need organization strong enough to win.

King absorbed a lot of this. The “King style” people now admire—moral clarity fused with disciplined organizing and broad coalition politics—didn’t come only from the pulpit.

A. Philip Randolph

If Rustin helped professionalize strategy, A. Philip Randolph helped define the movement’s relationship to labor and economic justice.

Randolph became a Socialist Party leader in a Harlem milieu that fused class struggle with a Black freedom politics. In New York he and his co-thinker Chandler Owen tried organizing unions, got fired for telling the truth about low wages, and, with backing from the left-wing Jewish Daily Forward, launched The Messenger in 1917, which they advertised as “The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.”

Randolph’s socialism was a way of reading power and a way of building it. He believed Black freedom couldn’t be won only through courtroom victories or moral persuasion, because segregation was anchored in material domination: jobs controlled by bosses, housing controlled by landlords, and politics controlled by those who owned the economy. That conviction pushed him toward the hardest terrain in American life — Black labor struggles — and the belief that democracy required economic power for working people.

Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters wasn’t simply a successful union—founded in 1925 to organize the thousands of Black men working as Pullman porters on the railroads, it was the first major Black-led union to win a charter from the American Federation of Labor. It became a training ground for a generation of Black working-class organizers—including E. D. Nixon in Montgomery—who understood how to pressure institutions, bargain collectively, and build durable organizations.

Randolph also pioneered a tactic that would define the civil rights era: the threat of mass action as leverage. His proposed March on Washington in 1941—aimed at forcing federal action against discrimination in defense industries—was a model of using mobilization to extract concessions. It showed that you didn’t have to wait for goodwill. You could force change.

By 1963, that Randolph tradition culminated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event that is often sanitized into a warm memory of one speech about a dream. But the march’s very framing was a statement: jobs and freedom. Not just rights on paper, but economic demands.

And Randolph’s language was militant in its insistence on pressing forward. Randolph declared, “This march will not be stopped. It will go on.” That line was a warning to the political establishment that the movement would escalate until its demands were met.

Stanley Levison

Stanley Levison might be the least known of King’s key socialist advisers, but his impact was no less significant. Levison—introduced to King by Bayard Rustin during the Montgomery bus boycott—was a wealthy Jewish businessman and lawyer with a deep Marxist past, someone the government treated as a dangerous contaminant. Indeed, he was “a dyed-in-the-wool leftist” and “a full-blooded Marxist” until he severed formal ties with the Communist Party in 1956.

As his biographer notes, Levison did much of the backend work that made King’s work possible. Levison “counseled, raised funds for, ghostwrote articles and speeches for, did the accounting of, and often bailed out King” from 1955 to 1968.

That doesn’t mean Levison “made” King. It means King operated inside a support system built by seasoned organizers and radical intellectuals—precisely the kind of system that Great Man stories erase.

Levison also shaped King’s message in important ways, especially around class. As King put it in his book on Montgomery, the labor movement “must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality.” Levison’s politics mattered here. He was a Marxist with real ties to labor radicalism, someone who saw economic structure as the key to racial hierarchy. And he helped King articulate that link in public language.

Levison also brought a kind of ethical discipline that helped shaped King’s choices. When King considered a profitable lecture tour, Levison snapped, “You can’t do that,” and when King asked why, Levison answered: “Because the kinds of people that you will be preaching to about nonviolence are too poor to pay for your lectures.” King quickly agreed. It’s a small detail, but it underscores how personal virtue emerged from political discipline—one rooted in socialist movement culture.

A Forgotten History

If this socialist tradition mattered so much, why is it so absent from popular memory?

One answer is repression. Levison, Rustin, and others were targeted by the FBI and by politicians who believed civil rights could be discredited by association with socialism. J. Edgar Hoover treated Levison as “Mr. X,” a Communist figure supposedly infiltrating King’s circle.

Another answer is American political culture. Many people find it comforting to believe change comes from exceptional individuals, not from organization. It reduces history to biography. It lets you admire King without asking what kind of collective apparatus is needed to produce more leaders like him and to win real change.

And then there is the myth about early socialists and race: the idea that socialism is inherently blind to racism, making it easy to treat socialist influence on King as irrelevant or accidental. There were real failures and compromises across the white socialist and labor left. But there were also profound contributions—Randolph and Rustin’s entire careers being one of the most obvious. And their politics came straight out of the Socialist Party, which had made a sharp anti-racist turn after World War I.

The point is that King’s movement was built inside a broader left ecosystem that treated racial justice and economic justice as inseparable. None of this reduces King to a puppet. The opposite is true. King’s greatness was not just that he had advisers. It was that he listened, learned, and evolved. Many leaders resist that kind of learning. King actively sought it.

He also chose, again and again, to accept the risks that came with these relationships. Staying close to Rustin and Levison—both targets of intense repression—was not safe. It wasn’t politically convenient. King did it because he recognized that movements need thinkers, strategists, and builders, not just preachers.

The story of King’s radicalism is not the story of a lone genius. It is the story of a gifted leader who joined a tradition—and helped bring its best instincts to national scale.

No Solitary Heroes

We live in a moment when Donald Trump has helped hurl the United States back toward some of its worst legacies of racism, exclusion, and oligarchy. In this environment, the right lesson from King is that moral clarity has to be fused with organization, mass leverage, and material demands.

King’s most dangerous idea was never simply that racism is wrong. It was that democracy requires redistribution—what he and his circle increasingly framed as a kind of democratic socialism in practice: building a society where working people have power, where rights are real because they are backed by economic security, and where the fight against racism is inseparable from a fight for a better life for all workers.

That vision did not emerge from King alone. It was shaped and sharpened by a broader socialist tradition—through figures like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, and Stanley Levison—who taught him how to organize, how to think structurally, and how to connect the struggle for dignity to the struggle for material freedom for all.

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• Organizations in Minnesota have called for a mass day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23. Each of us, and all our organizations, should try to participate nationwide. It’s all hands on deck to protect our communities from ICE terror.

• In NYC, students will be walking out on January 23. The UFT, NYC’s teachers union, has also committed to participating in the day of action. Students and unions nationwide should follow their lead.

• The fight to tax the rich in NYC has taken on an increased urgency after it was announced that the city is facing an unexpectedly large budget shortfall due to Eric Adam’s mismanagement. We need your help to canvass and phonebank our fellow New Yorkers — sign up here.

Renee Nicole Good’s murder by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has left millions of Americans wondering how we can stop ICE from terrorizing our communities any further. There are many well-known ICE-fighting tactics that we can and should use, like protests, know-your-rights trainings, and neighborhood watches. But two recent victories show a promising, relatively underutilized path forward—one that deserves to be pursued further: we can target businesses to break from ICE.

ICE relies heavily on the private sector to help carry out its Gestapo-like crusade against immigrants and their allies. Without the logistical, financial, and political support of business, its capacity to terrorize our communities would crumble.

Over the past week, activists around the country successfully pushed Avelo Airlines to stop running deportation charter flights, and workers in Minneapolis pushed a local Hilton affiliate to stop renting rooms to ICE agents. But these wins are just a fraction of what could be achieved if the millions of people who are outraged by ICE’s thuggery organize to pressure all companies to stop working with ICE.

Trump’s Pillars of Support

Anti-authoritarian scholars and organizers stress that the most important thing for pro-democracy movements to do is to peel away a regime’s “pillars of support.” Even the most despotic of regimes can’t rule without the backing or consent of powerful external institutions. Businesses are society’s most important non-state institutions, and most of the biggest ones in America are collaborating with Trump, making themselves a very steady pillar of support for his rule.

These mega-corporations have immense financial and political power. It may seem like there’s nothing to be done to bring them to heel. But the successes with Avelo Airlines and the Minneapolis Hilton—as well as earlier pressure campaigns like the #Tesla Takedown, the fight to force Disney to rehire Jimmy Kimmel, and the boycott of Target over its Trump-friendly anti-DEI moves—show the immense leverage that consumers and workers have when provided an opportunity. We are not powerless, and there are concrete actions anyone can take to start eroding Trump’s support from big business.

Consumer pressure campaigns can start with petition gathering and social media callouts, then escalate to coordinated one-day boycotts. Workers have even more leverage: employees can circulate internal petitions calling on their CEOs to cut ties with ICE and organize collective actions like sick-outs.

Tactics can include rallies in front of targeted stores, flyering customers about a company’s ICE contracts or collaboration, and nonviolent civil disobedience that makes clear that business as usual won’t stand. Other creative ideas include setting up anonymous tip lines for employees to whistleblow on non-public ICE collaborations, pressuring job sites like Monster.com and Indeed to stop featuring ICE job listings, asking local small businesses to post “Immigrants Welcome Here” placards, and writing online reviews calling out companies’ collaboration with ICE.

The key is providing people with concrete, outwards-facing activities they can take right now, while building an escalating national campaign that can culminate in larger coordinated days of nonviolent disruption—for example, on May 1, 2026.

National online mass calls and trainings can give large numbers of people the tools they need to get started. National unions, immigrant rights groups, and organizations like Indivisible and the Democratic Socialists of America can leverage their volunteer activists and resources to help launch and support the campaign. And high-profile politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, and Zohran Mamdani can use their platforms to build momentum around this urgent fight.

Corporate Targets

The most strategic corporate targets fall into three categories: low-lift national targets, high-lift national targets, and local targets.

Low-lift national targets are mostly public-facing companies with relatively small ICE contracts that are set to expire soon, making them particularly vulnerable to consumer and employee pressure. Campaigns against companies like these can play a crucial role in generating further momentum against ICE, Trump, and their worst corporate collaborators.

Here are some examples:

• Dell ($18.8 million contract with ICE for Microsoft software licenses, expiring March 2026)

• UPS ($90,500 small package delivery contract with ICE, expiring March 2026)

• FedEx ($1 million delivery services contract with ICE, expiring March 2026)

• Motorola Solutions ($15.6 million tactical communication infrastructure contract with ICE, expiring May 2026)

• Comcast ($24,600 internet services contract for ICE Seattle office, expiring May 2026 — this could be a great fight for new mayor Katie Wilson to take on).

• AT&T ($83 million IT and network contract with ICE, with a potential end date of July 2032).

• LexisNexis ($21 million data-brokerage contract with ICE — this company is particularly vulnerable to pressure from university students and professor unions, since much of its revenue comes from colleges.)

• Home Depot and Lowe’s are using AI-powered license plate readers and feeding this data into law enforcement surveillance systems accessible to ICE. Their parking lots are also regular sites of ICE raids targeting day laborers.

High-lift national targets have deeper relationships with ICE, and will be harder to pressure. But two in particular need to be tackled.

• Amazon provides ICE with the digital backbone for its data and surveillance operations through Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s Whole Foods stores are a rich potential target for nonviolent disruption on big days of action.

• Palantir provides ICE with core data platforms that integrate and analyze information from many databases so agents can search, link, and manage deportation operations.

It will take longer to force these behemoths—the two worst corporate collaborators with ICE—to cut their ties, but it’s essential to publicize their centrality to Trump’s deportation machine.

Local targets can be found in communities across the country, where hundreds of smaller business have ICE contracts. Local activists can research and target these businesses—from contractors providing services to ICE offices to suppliers selling equipment—creating distributed pressure campaigns in every region where ICE operates. Hotels that rent rooms to ICE agents are particularly vulnerable targets, as the Minneapolis example demonstrated, and hospitality unions can play a key role in these campaigns.

Defend Immigrants, Defeat Trumpism

Breaking companies from ICE is a winnable struggle that can put serious pressure on the administration by raising the political cost of mass deportations and damaging ICE’s ability to function. No administration can survive long without the consent of corporate America.

Obviously, the stakes are highest for our undocumented friends and family members. But this fight impacts all of us. To stop Trump’s authoritarian oligarchy, we need millions of people — well beyond our normal circles of activists — to join the fight.

Who is going to stop Trump from invading more countries and stealing the 2026 and 2028 elections if not a mass movement from below? Who is going to force politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, to stand up for immigrant communities? Who is going to make corporations pay a price for collaborating with the Trump regime? We need to start building the organizing muscle and connective tissue now for widespread nonviolent disruption. Strategic organizing to win justice for all is the best way to honor the memory of Renee Nicole Good and the countless other victims of Trump’s inhumanity at home and abroad.

[Republished from The Nation]

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• We won a huge victory this week: NY Governor Hochul yesterday announced with Mayor Mamdani that she’s backing an ambitious extension of childcare across NYC and the state. But her funding is only promised for two years — which is why we need to ramp up our organizing to tax the rich, to make these big childcare victories permanent. Sign up here for an upcoming canvass.

• Are you a high school student in NYC — or know one? High school organizers are circulating this pledge to walk out when Trump surges ICE.

• Union organizer and democratic socialist Claire Valdez is running for Congress in New York’s 7th district. Claire is a fantastic comrade and she’s going to be DSA’s first cadre congressperson, please sign up to canvass and donate here!

• Union organizer Analilia Mejia is running for Congress in New Jersey’s 11th District. You should sign up to donate and canvass. (I got to know Analilia, Bernie’s 2020 Political Director, when I helped organize hotel and casino workers on the Las Vegas strip to vote for Bernie; I remember on the day of the primary weeping from joy with Analilia in the Bellagio ballroom the moment it was clear Bernie’s supporters outnumbered Biden’s backers. Seems like a lifetime ago —and hadn’t felt that type of political euphoria again until Zohran’s victory.)

• Please share this article widely on social media and beyond! A national campaign against ICE’s corporate collaborators needs all your help to get off the ground, everything you can do to share this piece is super appreciated.

Even with a couple of months’ distance, Zohran Mamdani’s election still feels almost unreal, like a dispatch from an alternate universe. But it’s happening: America’s largest city is now led by a young socialist, a Jacobin subscriber, and a committed member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

For many of us on the New York left, this is the high point of our political lives thus far, a vindication of patient, often grinding organizing. But amid the celebration, there is a note of worry — the feeling that we have won the sprint, and now the marathon begins. For November’s result to mark the beginning of a lasting transformation of not only one city but national politics, we have to start by acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: despite our impressive electoral reach, our movement’s roots are still shallow.

Things were very different when American socialism had its first big electoral breakthrough. The 1910 election of Socialist mayor Emil Seidel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, initiated nearly fifty years of leftist governance in the city. Milwaukee’s triumph was the culmination of decades of escalating working-class militancy and socialist growth. Mamdani’s, by contrast, has taken place despite far lower levels of union and left organization. Consider the raw numbers: while Milwaukee’s Socialists had roughly one member for every one hundred city residents, New York’s chapter of DSA has, even after a big surge in the past decade, one member for every 670 residents.

But organizational size isn’t the biggest difference. In the early twentieth century, Milwaukee’s Socialists led nearly every major union in the city and were woven into working-class neighborhood life. It was this on-the-ground power that made it possible for them to sustain their movement for so long and to pressure intransigent legislators from other parties to pass some of their policy planks, like improving infrastructure and strengthening workers’ legal protections. In contrast, New York’s democratic socialists don’t lead any of the city’s largest unions. And Zohran proved able to win over much of the working class despite NYC-DSA’s disproportionate concentration among college-educated voters in a handful of neighborhoods.

How did we get to this paradox of electoral strength without organizational depth? And what does it mean for Mamdani’s ability to govern, as well as for rebuilding a socialist movement worthy of the name?

How We Got Here

Socialists, not just in Wisconsin but nationally, were once deeply tied to a social base. The late 1930s witnessed the high-water mark of left power within the organized working class and US politics writ large. Well-rooted radicals like the Popular Front–era Communists, Wisconsin’s sewer socialists, and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party played a central role in a resurgent labor movement and acted as a left flank in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. But widespread elite-stoked backlash blocked the movement’s forward advance and culminated in the mass expulsion of leftists from union leadership nationally during the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s.

No other industrialized country experienced such a dramatic divorce between labor and the Left, a split from which both sides have yet to fully recover. Bureaucratized American unions became narrowly focused on serving their existing members and making backroom deals with Democratic leaders, while socialists henceforth found themselves largely isolated from the broader working class and its organizations.

Though the social movements of the 1960s provided an explosion of activist energy, the socialist left never came anywhere near its early majoritarian peaks. A retreat into academia and nonprofits from the 1980s onward further isolated American leftism, while the union movement, for its part, went into free fall under the combined impact of deindustrialization and Reaganism. By the 1990s and 2000s, both American socialism and, to a lesser extent, organized labor were located firmly on the margins of national political life. Lacking the collective vehicles to advance their interests — and living in an increasingly atomized society where working-class cultural bonds were being steadily eroded — workers turned to individualist survival strategies to simply get by.

The roots of socialism’s rebirth in the United States can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, both of which thrust the question of economic inequality back to the fore. But it really took Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign to drag organized socialism out of the political wilderness. Membership in DSA spurted upward from less than ten thousand in 2016 to nearly one hundred thousand by 2020, and insurgent electoral campaigns within Democratic primaries began to catch on. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in 2018, as was NYC-DSA’s first state legislator, Julia Salazar.

For the first time in more than a century, democratic socialism, at least in New York City, began to build a real political machine capable of vying for power. Faced with a hollowed-out Democratic Party and leaning on the volunteer energy of radicalized, downwardly mobile millennials, it became clear that you could actually win some races — particularly low-turnout contests in neighborhoods with large numbers of college-educated young people — even without very deep roots among the broader working class. Unions, for their part, continued to decline in number and mostly stayed aloof from, if not actively hostile toward, these electoral insurgencies. That distance between the Left’s electoral victories and the overall weakness of working-class organization remains the central contradiction of our political moment — we are a Left with ballots cast but few shop floors won, with more cultural importance than class power.

Zohran’s Breakthrough

Zohran’s mayoral campaign was a breakthrough for the Left in many ways. Unlike Bernie, he proved able to dramatically increase youth turnout. And perhaps most important, propelled by his astounding success with young minorities, he won over a decisive majority of working-class voters well beyond the white-collar workers and professionals upon which the Democrats and the Left have both increasingly come to depend.

However, precisely because his margins of victory were so unprecedented for a modern democratic socialist, it’d be dangerous to overestimate the Left’s strength. Though the roughly one hundred thousand volunteers that powered Zohran’s campaign constitute an important extension of organized power into the broader working class, most of these people are only loosely engaged. One of the crucial challenges for the movement will be to develop enough of these volunteers into cadre for Zohran’s agenda in office and, to the greatest extent possible, for a democratic socialist future.

November’s decisive victory demonstrates that working-class politics can effectively speak to the anger of everyday people. But in terms of organization, there remains an undeniable gap between the more than one million New Yorkers who voted for Zohran and the still quite narrow base of organized democratic socialists in New York City. Everything now depends on finding ways to bridge this gap.

Reverse Engineering a Workers’ Movement

The task ahead is to make use of the momentum of the mayoral victory, plus the levers of city hall and the reach of Zohran’s massive platform, to reverse engineer a working-class movement powerful enough to transform New York City. Many will do this by joining DSA, others by unionizing their workplaces — some by doing both.

Most urgent of all, huge numbers of New Yorkers will need to plug into efforts like NYC DSA’s Tax the Rich and Our Time, a new campaign meant to sustain and deepen Zohran’s canvassing operation to win free childcare, affordable housing, and better transit by taxing the rich. Workplace and neighborhood Our Time hubs could coordinate petitioning efforts, hold potluck socials, develop creative ways to reach peers, and escalate campaigns to pressure the governor and state legislators to back an affordability agenda. Changing the relationship of forces through outward-facing organizing will do far more to help make Zohran’s platform a reality than denunciations of the administration’s inevitable limitations and compromises.

Still, one socialist insight must never be forgotten: there are limits to how many doses of socialism within capitalism the system can tolerate even at the national level, much less the municipal one. And when you’re up against some of the world’s most powerful corporate interests, just getting elected and pursuing smart insider politics isn’t enough to pass even modest social democratic policies.

The fact that establishment politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani testifies to the strength of the movement behind him. But our veto-holding governor’s continued hesitation to support taxing the rich illustrates just how far we still have to go. To push Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund reforms — and to keep up Zohran’s popularity in the face of inevitable attacks and crises (including those imposed by Donald Trump) — New York’s left will need more popular depth and breadth. Without such a working-class movement, there’s a real danger that Zohran’s agenda will get blocked or that, even if it partially passes, most working people will be too busy with the day-to-day grind or too swayed by media spin to give him credit.

Nor can we expect that Zohran’s charisma and viral videos will be sufficient to keep him popular. When the going gets rough — and it certainly will in the face of concerted billionaire opposition — even the best communications game won’t be able to assuage the doubts, misunderstandings, and fears that will arise among ordinary people. For that, you need trusted on-the-ground organizers talking to their coworkers, neighbors, family members, and friends. Developing such a broad layer of well-rooted working-class activists is the key strategic challenge of the coming months and years.

Given that the central obstacle to socialist power and growth is working-class resignation, perhaps the single most important thing about Mamdani’s election is that it has the potential to erode the despair and fear that have dominated our daily lives and politics for decades. Zohran himself stressed this dynamic in his victory speech:

There are [some] who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears…. While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we do.

New Yorkers were given a reason to hope — and they seized it at the ballot box. The big question now is whether we will be able to lean on that hope to rebuild a powerful working-class movement in workplaces and neighborhoods across our city and across the nation.

[A version of this article was published in the recent print issue of Jacobin, which you can subscribe to here.]

More

• Here are steps you can take to oppose Trump’s criminal aggression against Venezuela.

• Paul Heideman has written a great new book, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos, you should get a copy here.

• Sign up here for upcoming Our Time/NYC DSA canvasses to talk to our neighbors about taxing the rich to make childcare free.

• As always, please share this article over social media and in group chats! I see this newsletter as a movement-building tool — and every little piece you can do to keep growing our readership makes a real difference. So share a quote you like from the piece? Or a takeaway of yours?

• Happy New Year all! Let’s make history in 2026.

Another polemical response insisted that white supremacist views were not a personal flaw of Berger. Rather, they arose from the sewer socialists’ “appeal to the lowest-common-denominator instincts of the workers whose votes they depended on, including racism.” Such criticisms echo a historiographic consensus, which for over 75 years has painted Berger as America’s prime example of a racist white socialist. Even otherwise sympathetic portrayals of Berger have suggested he remained a bigot his whole life.

Before I started researching Milwaukee’s socialists, I assumed that the consensus view was accurate. And that’s why I was so surprised to stumble across a 1929 obituary on Berger from Milwaukee’s NAACP praising “the very broad and sympathetic views Mr. Berger always had regarding us as a race, the unbiased attitude of his paper, The Milwaukee Leader, and his interest in the welfare of all.” How could one square this NAACP assessment with Berger’s infamous 1902 declaration that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many thousand years”? Maybe the Milwaukee NAACP was just saying something polite but inaccurate about an influential dead man?

Searching for answers, I started systematically reading The Milwaukee Leader, the newspaper that Berger founded in 1913 and edited until he was killed by a trolley car in 1929. What I found surprised me. It turns out that generation after generation of historians had somehow managed to overlook a remarkable transformation: not only did Berger eventually ditch white supremacist views, but he and his paper became ardently anti-racist during the 1920s, a decade when most of white America in both the North and South actively embraced Jim Crow. Using his bully pulpit as America’s first Socialist congressman, Berger became one of the country’s highest-profile white fighters against lynching, racism, imperialism, and nativism.

This is an important story to tell. One-sided portrayals of Berger have long steered US radicals away from learning from our country’s most successful socialist organization: no other group has come close to replicating the Wisconsin socialists’ continued governance over almost five decades, their per capita recruitment to socialism, and their degree of leadership within organized labor and the broader working class. Nevertheless, as a comrade in Milwaukee wrote me a few weeks ago, “the activist attitude here and elsewhere has just been: Berger said racist things so Milwaukee socialists were racists. And then a lot of people just stop there.”

We can’t afford to keep dismissing sewer socialism, especially now that socialists are about to govern New York City and Seattle. This doesn’t mean we should paper over Berger’s initial white supremacist views, which activists today are obviously right to reject. Nor am I suggesting that the major reason to learn from sewer socialism is because of Berger’s later anti-racist praxis. My point is simple: the evolution of Victor Berger’s strategy and practice shows that there’s nothing inherently racist — and therefore politically disqualifying — about sewer socialism.

I focus here on Berger — and his paper’s support for Milwaukee’s long-forgotten Black socialists like William Bryant — not out of any dubious desire to rehabilitate a bigot, but because dismissals of Milwaukee’s rich socialist experience have hinged on Berger’s chauvinism. I’m also trying to fill a gap in the historiography. Whereas Berger’s anti-racist transformation has been entirely overlooked in the published literature — an erasure that has, in turn, erased the contributions of Milwaukee’s first Black socialists — various excellent studies have already shown that Socialist mayor Daniel Hoan (1916-1940) joined the NAACP and fought the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and that Milwaukee’s last Socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler (1948-1960), was race-baited out of office because of his egalitarian approach to city housing and “race relations.”

Finally, Berger’s evolution is in itself a remarkable, somewhat puzzling, and ultimately hopeful story. Why did someone committed to racial chauvinism for decades drop this at precisely the moment when so many European immigrants across the US were eagerly adopting and assimilating into white racism? It’s ironic that Berger has long been cited as evidence of American socialism’s inability to break from dominant racial views, when in fact his life is proof of the exact opposite dynamic.

Berger’s Pre-War Racism

The consensus story told about sewer socialism’s founder gets a lot right about his views up through 1912. Though race was not a central focus of Berger’s writings, those that do touch on this are mostly abominable. One finds here a mix of “scientific” biological racism with Eurocentric assumptions that every people was at a different stage of civilization, with “the white race” in the lead by orders of magnitude. His infamous 1902 article “The Misfortune of the Negro” repeats the racist myth — frequently used to justify lynchings — about the “many cases of rape which occur wherever negroes are settled.” And the following year he similarly referenced “sexual maniacs and all other offensive and lynchable human degenerates” in a 1903 resolution condemning lynchings that he submitted to the Socialist International. That same year, Berger published a letter from a Texas socialist leader opposing social equality arguing that the “independence” of racial groups from each other would increase under socialism.

Parallel to this, Berger — a German immigrant himself — fought hard for the Socialist Party to oppose Asian immigration. Arguing in 1907 that the United States “must remain a white man’s country,” he wrote that Karl Marx’s famous call “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” had hardened into a dogma disproven by the subsequent rise of Asian immigration, which was undercutting conditions for white workers: “Open the doors to Chinamen, Japanese and Hindoos, and we shall not have Socialism in 500 years. There has not been any perceptible change in the modes of thinking of the masses of Chinamen, Hindoos and Japanese in a thousand years.” In his view, this was not just a question of uneven socio-economic development: “Scientists tell us that the anatomy of the Jap is different from ours — it is more simian (ape-like).” At the 1910 Socialist Party convention he made a similarly xenophobic intervention. And as late as 1912, Berger was still fine including in a collection of his earlier writings claims like the “brilliant culture of our country” was “by right an inheritance of the white race.”

In response to these arguments, Black Socialist W.E.B. Du Bois justifiably criticized socialists for concerning themselves only “with the European civilization, with the white races” and concluded that “so long as the Socialist movement can put a ban upon any race because of its color, whether that color be yellow or black, the negro will not feel at home in it.”

According to a recent polemic by the Marxist Unity Group, Berger’s racist stances reflected the sewer socialists’ strategy of tailing popular consciousness instead of boldly leading it forward. It’s true that running to win elections, as Milwaukee’s socialists generally did, pressures any political current to center widely and deeply felt issues in its electoral campaigns — and that this always carries a risk of marginalizing controversial stances. But Berger’s vile statements weren’t the result of fudging internationalist principles for the sake of not alienating the masses. He was just genuinely racist at this time. Conversely, during these same years Berger did not hesitate to champion all sorts of other controversial or minoritarian positions, including socializing the means of production, advocating revolution, arming the people to overthrow capitalism through force, abolishing the Senate, and ending the power of the Supreme Court.

New York’s leading Black radical Hubert Harrison made this point in 1911, when he was still a member of the Socialist Party. Against those in the party who argued against incorporating immediate demands to alleviate the condition of Black people (supposedly this would be resolved in passing through socialism), Harrison noted that the party’s congressman Victor Berger was fighting for an old-age pension bill, a demand that had no chance of passing anytime in the foreseeable future.

For the sake of understanding Berger’s later evolution, it should also be noted that even in this pre-war period one can already find some relatively egalitarian notes in his writings and actions. Unlike the early Karl Marx, he never saw colonialism or imperialism as forces for progress. Berger’s first paper, The Social Democratic Herald, published numerous anti-imperialist pieces and as America’s sole Socialist congressman, the first bill he presented after his 1910 election was to demand the removal of US troops from the Mexican border.

In Congress, Berger also argued in favor of raising federal employee wages regardless of race and voted for federal supervision of primaries in the South to guarantee Black voting rights. Despite his racism, Berger in 1901 criticized the US government’s “failure to protect the negro.” His infamous 1902 article framed itself as an attempt to explain “the barbarous behavior of the American whites towards the negroes, and the contempt evinced for their human rights.” And the 1903 Texas socialist leader’s suggestion in The Milwaukee Leader about voluntary racial “independence” under socialism was part of a letter demanding that the Louisiana SP reverse its decision to segregate its membership into separate white and colored branches. In the Socialist Party’s National Committee, Berger accordingly voted against granting a charter to the Louisiana SP until it rescinded this Jim Crow provision. On the other hand, historian R. Laurence Moore notes that “evidently the National Committee tolerated the practice of segregation among its Southern branches so long as segregation was not made compulsory.”

“Colorblind” Transition to a New Stance: 1912—1918

In the years leading up to America’s entry into World War I, Berger’s positions on race began shifting. The dominant tenor of The Milwaukee Leader and his editorials increasingly became a “colorblind” socialism that stressed the “identity of interests” of all workers, that raised (but did not focus on) demands for racial equality, and that mostly (though not consistently) dropped the explicit racism of years prior.

Whereas he had previously assumed there would inherently be conflict and distrust between racial groups, by 1915 the Leader was denouncing “the poison of prejudice and the degrading sense of advantage, of a superiority that passes itself off as inborn. Far from hating one another by instinct, the alien races are often instinctively drawn to one another.”

That same year, Berger argued that the populist movements of decades prior had become powerful by making “it manifest to the small white farmers that they had an identity of economic and political interests with the negro renters.” Similarly, in 1912 the Leader published this response to employer plans to break a New York City waiters’ strike via non-white strikebreakers:

This matter of using color against color, race against race, is one of the most dangerous things in this country. We have people from every part of the globe. Some of them speak English; some of them do not. Some are black, yellow, red, white. … There is not a waiter in New York city who, whatever his color, has any interests apart from all the other waiters. This is not a race question, but a wages question, a question of class, and all of them belong to the working class.

Such an orientation failed to identify or challenge the specific burdens facing non-white people at work and in society, and it sometimes downplayed the extent to which white chauvinism in particular was the key obstacle towards building working-class unity. But compared to years prior, it was a real step forward. In that egalitarian spirit, Berger’s proposed old-age pension bill in Congress explicitly included Black people.

Berger and the Leader also began questioning the scientific basis of “scientific racism.” Articles in 1914 and 1916 cited Columbia anthropology professor Franz Boas’s pioneering new research challenging dominant theories about biologically superior races. And in line with Boas’s case that there was no such thing as a superior civilization, the Leader in 1914 published a piece arguing that,

race hatred is one of the lowest and meanest of human passions. A race may have more cunning than another, but the race that makes the accusation may have more bluff. … Until we learn to judge every individual on his own peculiar merits, we haven’t taken a first good step toward social intelligence.

It should be kept in mind that Milwaukee was still over 99 percent white at this time — not until World War I did a considerable number of Black people arrive. Yet as early as 1912 the Leader was arguing that experience in Milwaukee had demonstrated the falsity of predictions “that the colored people would not be able to exist as respectable citizens but would become parasites and degenerates.” Lamenting that few had yet joined the party or unions, the piece quoted socialist union leader Frank Webster’s case that “the colored men are not only welcomed in the industrial [union] organizations, but they have proven in all the states to be loyal to their cause.” And it concluded by highlighting that Black students had begun enrolling in Milwaukee’s schools and that various Black workers were now on the city payroll. This practical experience with Black people in Milwaukee seems to have helped undercut Berger’s racism, especially from 1918 onwards.

What else can explain Berger’s shift away from racism? It helped that he was a voracious reader and non-dogmatic thinker open to changing his views when presented with new evidence. “We must learn a great deal,” insisted Berger in 1905. When both personal experience and the latest scientific research from Boas challenged Berger’s racist priors, he began to reconsider. The fact that he was already a Marxist — an ideology with deeply egalitarian and universalist foundations — significantly facilitated this process. Indeed, even in Berger’s most-racist period he had acknowledged that his white supremacist stances constituted a break from, rather than continuity with, the views of Marx.

Finally, letters to the editor by Black socialists may have also contributed to Berger’s shift. In 1915, for instance, he published a letter to the editor ridiculing white supremacy and World War I, signed by “DE AFRICA”:

we all know that the white race has been the most murderous on earth. … Think of it—a civilization (?) overwhelmingly Christian (?) in the fratricidal struggles of Europe, and tell me why a Christian ought not to be ashamed of his religion. … Who would not rather be Tousaint L’Overture, Booker Washington, Paul Dunbar, Fred Douglas, W. P. DuBois or any good, honest, hard-working “nigger” than to be a “Christian” king?

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t exaggerate the extent of Berger’s anti-racist transformation up through 1918. One still can find some blatantly chauvinistic pieces in the Leader in this period. A 1916 editorial of his warned of the “yellow peril” of Asian immigration. Another suggested that while socialism would bring political and economic equality to all and that “to the Socialist all races and nations are equally dear,” nevertheless white people would continue to be “history’s great favorite” for “a long time.” Black people were sometimes condescendingly presented as passive and unthinking victims of oppression. And while a 1913 piece praised the intellectual and political “renaissance of Asia” and a 1916 editorial objected to singling out Japanese for immigration restrictions, Berger in this period had not yet broken from assumptions that “the white race” constituted the highest form of civilization. Not until the post-war upheavals in the US and abroad did Berger finally become a committed anti-racist fighter in words and deeds.

Against Black Oppression in Congress and Milwaukee: 1918-1929

Sharply opposing the oppression of Black people and all forms of racial injustice became a regular theme of Berger and his newspaper during the war and especially throughout the 1920s. In addition to persistent calls for unity between “white, black, yellow workers,” the Leader week after week denounced race prejudice, the bogus claims of “race science,” lynchings in the south, white hate riots and discriminatory practices in the north, and the Ku Klux Klan nationwide, often on the front page.

A 1919 editorial in the Leader titled “A Nation’s Disgrace,” described in gruesome detail a recent lynching in Mississippi to question the myth that “we are so civilized, so democratic and so good” in America. “What intelligent person can expect that the Chinese, Japs, and other foreigners can look upon America from any other viewpoint than that we are brutal, half-civilized savages,” asked the author. The piece — soon reprinted in the Blade, Milwaukee’s main Black newspaper — concluded with a call to lead southern whites “out of the jungle and on to the highlands of Socialism.”

Other front-page pieces directly challenged the widespread racist claim that Black men were particularly inclined to rape: “Facts and evidence point in the opposite direction … They are certainly far less addicted than the American white group.” As a 1919 Leader editorial noted, “rape is no less rape because it is perpetrated upon black women.”

Berger’s paper also eventually started promoting thinkers who explicitly challenged the taboo — one shared by many anti-racist Black and white radicals of the era — around “social equality” (interracial coupling): “Intermingling of the races is inevitable and productive of good. … The time … will come when every thought of race will disappear.”

White racism — not just “racial divisions” in general — was forcefully challenged. One piece announced that the time had arrived “for another emancipation proclamation which will liberate the white race from its thralldom of pride and prejudice and bigotry.” Another reminded readers that “the great anthropologist, Franz Boas, has once and for all discredited the theory—or, rather, the superstition—that some races are inherently better or higher in the scale than others.”

Front-page pieces probed the sometimes subtle forms white racism took in the North, as well as the often justified suspicion of Black people towards white people after “so often [being] swindled by whites.” Another piece lampooned Northern white hypocrisy: “We in the North are still capable of shedding tears over a stage presentation of ‘Uncle Tom’—but if, at the same show, a Negro were to seat himself next to us, we would feel resentful and probably summon the usher, raise an uproar and demand that our seat be changed.” Racial divisions, Berger now argued, were one of the central reasons why America’s socialists and workers were “surely more poorly organized” than abroad.

A 1919 article in the Leader denounced the “race hatred” that American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers promoted within organized labor. Next year Berger published a report on a community forum in Milwaukee by NAACP leader Walter F. White who insisted that “as long as the negro worker is denied industrial opportunity, both by employers and labor unions, just so long will there be a deferring of adequate adjustment of relations between capital and labor.” The paper likewise ran reports countering racist myths like the idea that Black workers were responsible for lowering white worker wages. And it printed NAACP criticisms of the Typographical union for excluding Black workers, which meant that carrying a “union label” on a publication was “an advertisement that no negro’s hand is engaged in the printing of this magazine.”

One frequent contributor to such arguments in the Leader was William Bryant, a Black Socialist Party member and General Secretary of Asphalt Workers’ Union Local 88, who consistently hammered on the need for unions to overcome their racism and accept Blacks into membership. In that same spirit, Berger in 1923 published Black Wobbly leader Ben Fletcher’s case that “the history of the organized labor movement’s attitude and disposition toward the Negro” was “a record of complete surrender before the color line.” White workers’ racism, not “Negro backwardness,” was pinpointed as the prime obstacle to unity. At the same time, the Leader consistently highlighted the work of A. Philip Randolph’s Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Moving beyond a simplistic “colorblind” class against class approach limited to economic demands, Berger and the Leader highlighted the work, ideas, and exposés of cross-class Black organizations like the NAACP, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the Urban League. Comprehensive analyses of the situation and struggles of Black people in the North and South became a frequent motif of the paper.

Condescending portrayals of ignorant victims gave way to a focus on Black cultural and political agency. The Leader ran articles on Harlem’s renaissance, on Black contributions to art and science, on W.E.B. Du Bois’ new theater troupe, and on the importance of Black-authored books for “colored children.”

On the political front, Berger in 1926 reminded his readers that “it is only a little over half a century since the Negroes emerged from chattel slavery. In that brief time, they have made marvelous progress against incredible odds.” As early as 1918, the Leader’s front page ran articles from the Black socialist newspaper The Messenger calling on “colored people” to join the Socialist Party to wage a battle for economic freedom and racial justice.

Critics can respond to all this by correctly noting that anti-racist words don’t necessarily translate into anti-racist deeds. But the Leader itself made this point. And all the available evidence suggests that Berger’s practice in these later years did generally correspond with his new views on race and racism. Research beyond the pages of the Leader and the congressional record is needed for a well-rounded account of his and the party’s practice, but what I’ve found so far is more than sufficient to disprove the myth that Berger was a lifelong bigot — or that the Socialist Party did nothing concrete to fight racism.

A front-page piece in 1920 highlighted that Grace Campbell, a Socialist Party candidate for the New York state legislature, was “the first colored woman to be nominated for a public office on a regular party ticket in the United States.”

Within Milwaukee, one of Berger and the Leader’s central fights in the early 1920s was from day one to keep the Ku Klux Klan out of Milwaukee, a battle they waged together with the local NAACP branch. For Berger, this fight was front-page news and he did not mince words: a man “cannot belong to a society organized to persecute Catholics, Jews, Negroes and foreigners— and at the same time call himself a Socialist.” Contrary to a longstanding historical myth — recently repeated in a Marxist Unity Group polemic against my research — the sewer socialists never ran an open KKK member for office; in fact, they immediately expelled the member in question once an internal party investigation got him to admit he had joined the Klan.

The Leader in the last decade of Berger’s life was full of articles about collaboration between Milwaukee’s Socialist Party and Black church leaders, Black neighborhood groups, and progressive Black organizations like the local Garveyite UNIA as well as the Urban League.

For instance, one 1920 article quoted Reverend Edward Thomas from the Church of God and the Saints of Christ, who at a Socialist mass meeting announced that the Leader was “only Milwaukee paper which gave his people a fair statement during the [nationwide] race riots of August, 1919.” As early as 1922 and 1924, the local UNIA branch was holding mass electoral rallies for Berger and other Socialist candidates. Eschewing Garvey’s back to Africa focus, UNIA leaders in Milwaukee like Ernest Bland and Carlos Del Ruy became members of the Socialist Party and agitated among Black working people for its candidates and its ideas of working-class unity.

I have not found any evidence that 1920s Black activists in Milwaukee were even aware of Berger’s earlier racist stances; keep in mind that most had arrived only since 1917. Milwaukee’s pro-Republican Black newspaper, the Blade, was remarkably favorable to the Socialists, highlighting their anti-racist writings and actions like Mayor Hoan’s 1917 efforts to stop local theaters from discriminating against Black people. In turn, the Leader used its platform to boost fights against discrimination, such as a last-minute rescinded invitation for the Urban League to participate in an upcoming parade. The paper also ran stories on how to improve the health of Milwaukee’s Black community and asked “what should be done to enhance the position of Negro women workers?”

Though historians like Philip Foner have long framed Berger’s approach to race as the polar opposite of Harlem’s radical intellectual leader Hubert Harrison, Black radical William Bridges reported in 1920 that Berger pledged his “moral and financial aid” to support the Liberty Party, a short-lived all-Black party in New York led by Bridges and Hubert Harrison. And four years later, Harrison travelled to Milwaukee to speak at a Socialist-led forum to generate Black support for and participation in Robert La Follette’s presidential campaign.

In addition to public events to recruit Black people to socialism — New York’s Black socialist leaders Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph were regular speakers in town on this topic — Milwaukee’s Socialist Party also clearly went out of their way to include “colored comrades” as speakers in predominantly-white events and forums. Black socialist union leader William Bryant was not only a common speaker at multi-racial open-air forums and electoral campaign events for Socialist candidates like Berger, he also chaired the party’s biggest mass meetings. And though it may not seem like a big deal today, it was an exceptionally anti-racist action at the time in 1921 to invite a Black socialist like Chandler Owen to be a headline speaker at the party’s massive and multiracial May Day celebration at the Milwaukee auditorium.

Black community members responded positively to this agitation. At a 1924 launch for a joint UNIA-Socialist canvass of Black neighborhoods, Bryant noted that “the colored voters of Milwaukee, as a matter of principle, have in recent years voted overwhelmingly Socialist. They have done so because they have apparently discovered that Socialism as practiced in Milwaukee embodies the sublime principle of impartiality.” Secondary sources confirm that Black Milwaukeeans did in fact overwhelmingly vote Socialist in the 1920s and 1930s. Even if Bryant’s claim that “90 per cent of the Negro voters in Milwaukee are Socialists” may have been somewhat exaggerated, the available evidence suggests that Black people were Milwaukee’s racial group that most consistently voted Socialist. And given that Republicans ran the state and that Milwaukee’s Socialists were never a solid majority — the party almost never had a City Council majority in its nearly 50 years of Socialist mayors — Black electoral support can’t be explained away simply as a pragmatic “bet on the winning horse.”

Discrimination and inequality for Black people did not suddenly disappear in Milwaukee. Much more archival research is needed to uncover what Socialist practice looked like beyond the pages of the Leader, but Berger and his paper by now were clearly on the side of anti-racist progress. In 1925, for instance, the paper’s report on the recent Wisconsin Federation of Labor convention highlighted that “a resolution deploring ‘color prejudice and race discrimination’ in certain state trade unions was introduced by William Bryant, Milwaukee Negro. He argued that dangerous division in the ranks of labor results from race discrimination.”

Unequal housing was another major theme. While various secondary sources say that a Socialist-supported low-income co-operative housing project in 1921 banned Black people, I didn’t find any primary sources confirming this. In 1924, the Leader boosted the (ultimately successful) protest efforts by the local NAACP and Reverend Edward Thomas to stop the Milwaukee real estate board’s push for “a certain section of the city [to] be segregated as a ‘black belt.’” That same year, as the Leader detailed, Mayor Hoan suggested to Black activists Ardie and Wilbur Halyard that they start a building and loan association to help Black Milwaukeeans — who were systematically denied loans from banks — buy homes “farther out” from “ramsackle downtown.” With Hoan’s active backing and help navigating the state bureaucracy, the Halyards founded Wisconsin’s first Black-owned bank. Five years later Wilbur Halyard authored the NAACP’s condolence letter for Berger.

In 1925, Berger wrote a long article summarizing research findings on dire housing conditions for Black people in Dallas, with the suggestion that a similar study be conducted in Milwaukee. Next year the Leader published such a study together with the Urban League in a multi-part exposé.

Parallel to this, Berger attacked capitalist newspapers for always highlighting the race of Black criminals while never doing the same for whites: “Why do not the papers say that ‘John Smith, white,’ is accused of this and that.” In 1924, the paper celebrated the hiring of the city’s first Black police officer, Judson Minor, while lamenting that Socialists on the City Council had lost their fight against hiring 40 new cops. Two years later the Leader reported that Minor had announced his resignation, “saying he was unable to withstand the campaign of nagging and false complaints lodged against him.”

One of the boldest anti-racist actions taken by Berger’s Leader was its vigorous defense of Black reverend and Socialist ally Edward Thomas, who on the night of September 13, 1925 fatally shot a white man, Lawrence Bucholz, and almost killed another, William Sigfried. The spark was a car accident between Thomas and Bucholz. After the accident, according to Sigfried and Bucholz’s female companion, the Reverend “began to curse” invectives. Thomas drove away, but Bucholz followed. Upon arriving at Thomas’ house, Buchotz opened the Reverend’s car door and demanded he apologize. Thomas refused. What happened next was the subject of trial for first degree murder — persecuted by the state of Wisconsin — and a press campaign in the Leader.

Aware that lynchings across the US had been started for far less than killing a white man, the Leader immediately jumped to Thomas’ defense, highlighting the Reverend’s upstanding character and his insistence that he had acted in self defense:

Sympathy is felt for the Rev. Thomas. Bucholz, the man he is accused of killing, was powerfully built and had a reputation for great strength. The first reports that Thomas used profanity was denied today by his acquaintances, who said that such language was in no way habitual with him. He had a good reputation among both the colored population and many others in business and public life, it is said, and his interest in the city’s welfare brought him the appointment to a place on the Sane Fourth commission by Mayor Daniel W. Hoan.

During the trial, Mayor Hoan and other socialist elected leaders appeared as character witnesses for the defendant and the city’s assistant district attorney acted as one of Thomas’ lawyers. In a front-page story on the trial’s closing session, the Leader highlighted the call from the Reverend’s lawyer to the jury to “cast aside your prejudice against this man because he is colored and weigh him on the same scales of justice as you would want to be weighed upon.”

The Leader’s closing coverage did not hide where its sympathies lay:

The defendant told an apparently straightforward story and several times had to stop when his sobbing interrupted him. “I would not have shot if I could have helped it,” he said. “These two men rushed over to me, opened the door of my machine, and took several punches at me. I was afraid they would kill me and I then fired.”

The jury found Thomas not guilty, an astounding win for racial justice in a decade when such wins were exceedingly rare.

Berger’s egalitarianism was not limited to the written page. From 1919 onwards, anti-racism was a major theme of Berger’s campaigns for Congress and his work within it. The first plank in his successful 1922 congressional campaign opposed “race hatred” and the Ku Klux Klan. His editorials stressed that his incumbent electoral rival, W.H. Stafford, had “voted against the antilynching bill.” In 1926 and 1928, Berger introduced and fought hard for a new anti-lynching bill, which he boasted to the House was “stronger than any other” ever proposed because it had “teeth in it.” The following year he introduced a bill to outlaw the KKK.

What explains Berger and the Leader’s shift towards foregrounding the fight against Black oppression in the 1920s? It can’t be attributed primarily to electoral opportunism, since Black people only constituted about one percent of Milwaukee and the congressional district he was running in. Given the pervasiveness and deepening of racist assumptions among so many white voters in this era, the path of least resistance would have been to avoid any racially egalitarian planks. But, contrary to recent polemical claims about “tailing” racism, Berger’s political current chose to fight. Largely because of their proven track record of effectively delivering material improvements to Wisconsin workers, by the early 1920s they had forged enough political space for themselves to take up minoritarian stances on racism without automatically tanking their electoral chances.

Unfortunately, there are no formulas for how to effectively combine fights against oppression with majoritarian working-class politics — it’s always context specific. Organizing efforts, especially outside of the electoral arena, for not-yet-majoritarian demands are often crucial for shifting public opinion and winning changes. Yet just speaking truth to power doesn’t have much of a track record of success. And Milwaukee’s experience — like Zohran’s recent campaign — shows that centering widely and deeply felt issues in electoral campaigns can sometimes make it possible to simultaneously uphold more controversial stances that benefit a particularly oppressed group.

Another factor in Berger’s turn was the anti-German scapegoating he and his Milwaukee comrades were subjected to for opposing World War I — a stance that landed Berger a 20-year federal prison conviction (eventually overturned by the Supreme Court). Berger framed these jingoistic attacks against him and Milwaukee Socialists as a form of “race hatred” and it seems likely that his personal experience of persecution deepened his empathy for other persecuted groups.

Finally, Berger’s transformation — a turn taken also by the Socialist Party of America nationwide after 1917 — cannot be separated from the dramatic growth of Black radicalism during and following World War I. Assumptions of Black “passivity” or “backwardness” were clearly challenged by this rising tide of organized radicalism and, more specifically, by the interventions of Black socialists like William Bryant, W.E.B. Du Bois, Chandler Owen, and A. Philip Randolph — the latter of whom remained one of America’s most influential Black radicals and became the “father of the civil rights movement” by initiating Black mass actions for equality in the 1940s and by training many leaders of the 1960s freedom struggles.

It’s not surprising that Black militants led the fight for racial justice in Milwaukee. But it’s to Berger’s credit that he followed.

Pro-Immigrant, Anti-Imperialist: 1921-1929

Berger had always been consistently anti-imperialist. And this orientation deepened after the war, as he and the Leader lambasted American theories of “manifest destiny,” mocked anti-Turkish racism and “yellow peril” rhetoric, called on the US to accept Filipino and Haitian independence, praised Emiliano Zapata and opposed US intervention in Mexico, defended Moroccan anti-imperialist leader Abd-El-Krim, advocated Indian independence and praised Pandit Jawahari Lal Nehru, and stood in solidarity with China’s struggle for national independence and democracy. One quote about Morocco’s revolutionary struggle for independence should suffice to give a sense of the tenor and content of Berger’s anti-imperialism:

Our Wall Street press paints Abd-El-Krim and his Riff tribesmen as savages who threaten the sacred ideals of white civilization in Africa. The Wall Street editors overlook that the British tories used to paint the fathers of the American revolution just like that. … His fight for national independence is as just as the struggle of the 13 colonies against British rule. In election campaigns, our capitalist editors always tell us that America is dedicated to the proposition that all men have equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They don’t talk like that when organized labor tries to put this doctrine into effect, or when small nations that excite the greed of our hundred percenters defend their independence.

After the war Berger also underwent a major shift in his views and practice on Asian immigration to the US. As early as 1921, the Leader condemned “the anti-Japanese campaign” in America. Berger also published a report on a talk in Milwaukee from socialist philosopher Bertrand Russell about China: “Thoughts of yellow perils, ‘chinks’ and the like were straightway put to route [by Russell] … Instead of the Chinese being a danger to us, we are a danger to the Chinese, he said … they were more civilized than our western civilization.”

Immigration became a particularly immediate question for Berger in the spring of 1924, once Congress began debating the Johnson-Reed Act, which would entirely ban Asian immigration and significantly cap southern European immigration. Berger wrote that Congress “will scarcely be willing to open the [immigration] gates wide—they are too much afraid somebody with a little brains in his skull might sneak in.”

While initially clarifying that he opposed “unrestricted Japanese immigration” on economic grounds, Berger insisted that “the Japanese and the Americans have the same forebears. All are humans—brothers—and there is no reason why they should hate one another. Race prejudice is silly and unworthy. It is a fine thing for people of different races to intermingle. It is good for all, since it broadens their minds.”

For the Leader, Berger’s opposition to the Johnson-Reed Act was front-page news. Berger declared that he “takes no stock in the so-called superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and that the immigrant has been largely responsible for the growth of this country.” In May, Berger turned these words into deeds by voting against the Act. In an explanation in the Leader, Berger emphasized that he opposed both the Japanese exclusion provision and the broader restrictions, insisting that “the immigration bill … is an inhuman measure.” In that same spirit, Berger subsequently published coverage of Japanese protests against US discrimination — “speaking frankly the Americans are a foolish people”— as well as a subsequent piece arguing for an end to the US immigration ban on Hindus.

Asian peoples abroad were no longer seen either as threats to whites or helpless victims of imperialism, but as agents for both democracy and socialism. In 1918, the Leader published a guest editorial by Indian revolutionary Lajpat Rai, which concluded that European and American leaders “care only for the white race” and failed to “realize that the greater part of humanity lives in Asia and Africa.” A decade later, Berger’s editorial on Nehru in India underscored that “the Socialist movement is world-wide. It is growing everywhere, and it is not confined to Europe and America. … Oriental countries are going to insist upon their rights, and white countries will have to quit treating them as children, or there will be trouble.”

Not all of Berger’s formulations or assumptions about “the Orient” have stood the test of time. Berger’s speeches to Congress sometimes used antiquated rhetoric like “backward peoples” — including in his House-floor denunciations of imperialism. And while he broke from the ideas of racial or national superiority, Berger periodically referenced dubious ideas about supposedly longstanding cultural essences. As a 1914 editorial published in the Leader put it, “One [people] may have more culture, but the other may excel in simple honesty. And when it comes to summing up all the virtues, faults and capabilities of each race, one about equals the other.” Along those lines, in a 1924 speech to Congress against alcohol prohibition, Berger replied to claims that alcohol hindered productivity and morality by arguing that despite being such heavy drinkers, northern Europeans demonstrated higher amounts of certain “essentials of civilization” like “usefulness and virtue” than abstinent peoples like Muslims and Hindus.

Such isolated formulations, however, were the exception that proves the rule. Over again throughout the 1920s, Berger and the Leader questioned the idea that American or European societies were more culturally advanced. As Berger wrote in 1920: “We may yet see the white race returning to Africa and China for some better substitute for its downfallen civilization.” Questioning the “so-called civilization” of “the white race,” in 1922 he reminded readers that “some of the best ideas have come from [the Orient] — from peoples who do not have a white skin” and argued that India’s resistance movement had the potential to point the way forward for all countries.

By the post-war period, Berger and his paper had made it very clear where they stood in the battle against racism at home and abroad. As one Leader article underscored, “whoever sets Gentile against Jew, white against black, the races of the West against those of the East, approaches mankind with the kiss of the betrayer and the dagger of the assassin. There can be no compromise, no shadow of wavering on this supreme issue.”

Conclusion

Recent leftist claims that sewer socialism necessarily requires “tailing” the racism of white workers have little factual basis. Nor do assertions that Victor Berger was an incorrigible racist.

In the face of the evidence I’ve provided here, some critics may concede that Berger’s racial stances eventually evolved, while arguing that his earlier white supremacist ideas nevertheless disqualify him and his party from being any sort of positive reference point for today. But such a line of argument would be hypocritical since all socialist traditions at some point in the past held some reactionary ideas and practices on race, gender, or sexuality. A recent scholarly study, for example, convincingly shows that Karl Marx never broke from his belief that “‘races’ endowed with superior qualities would boost economic development and productivity, while the less endowed ones would hold humanity back. … For present-day standards, the racism displayed by Marx and Engels was outrageous and even extreme.”

If you repudiate Berger because of his pre-war racism, you have to also repudiate Marx — especially since Berger eventually went further than Marx in dropping racist assumptions. A more reasonable approach is to unequivocally acknowledge and reject all the chauvinist views of our socialist predecessors, while showing that there’s nothing inherently racist, sexist, or homophobic about their broader political strategy. Ironically, this has been precisely the approach taken towards Marx’s chauvinism (and the Black Panthers’ sexism) by some of the very same Left activists and currents who have recently used Berger’s racist statements as an excuse to entirely dismiss sewer socialism.

And if you repudiate Berger, you also have to repudiate Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s left-wing standard bearer. Challenging claims that racism was only a problem among the Socialist Party’s Berger-led right wing — an interpretation still commonly made today — historian R. Laurence Moore showed in 1969 that in the early 20^th century “almost all [white] socialists regarded Negroes as at that time occupying a lower position on the evolutionary scale than the white.” In 1904, while otherwise advocating for “colorblind” socialism, Debs wrote that “the Negro, like the white man, is subject to the laws of physical, mental, and moral development. But in his case these laws have been suspended. Socialism simply proposes that the Negro shall have full opportunity to develop his mind and soul, and this will in time emancipate the race from animalism, so repulsive to those especially whose fortunes are built up out of it.” And instead of challenging the myth of Black male “rape-maniacs,” he argued that the Black “rape-fiend” was “the spawn of civilized lust” in America.

My point here is not to suggest that Debs was as racist in this period as Berger or that Debs never overcame those ideas. The point is just that if you’re okay celebrating Debs’ positive contributions to the movement, you should be able to do the same for Berger.

Vilifying sewer socialism in the name of anti-racism not only ignores Berger’s later evolution, it also ignores the political agency and assessments of Milwaukee’s Black organizers like William Bryant, Carlos Del Ruy, Reverend Edward Thomas, and Ardie and Wilbur Halyard. Each of these leaders fought for a more egalitarian city, each pulled sewer socialism towards anti-racism, each enabled socialism’s widespread popularity among Milwaukee’s Black working class, and each saw Berger and his current as a force for racial justice. Unless you think these Black activists were dupes, it makes sense to trust their on-the-ground assessments more than subsequent historians or activists with obvious factional axes to grind.

Further research is needed to assess the extent to which Milwaukee’s socialists — in the party, in the unions, in neighborhoods — consistently put their anti-racist ideas into practice. It may turn out that the empirical record confirms the historical consensus that Milwaukee’s white Socialists even at their best never became as consistent and committed to fighting racial injustice as American Communists. But, either way, this article has shown that since there’s nothing inherently racist or “tailist” about sewer socialism, it’s wrong for leftists today to dismiss sewer socialism on these grounds.

Instead of clinging to debunked myths and doctrinaire formulas, our movement would do well to grapple with the broader strategic lessons of America’s most successful socialist organization on how to build mass working-class power in our country’s unique context. Today’s exceptional challenges and openings demand that we think more rigorously, organize more resolutely, and fight more widely than we’ve ever done before.

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Others disagreed. A few days later, the pro-Palestine group Within Our Lifetime (WOL) posted a public sign-on statement announcing that Zohran’s decision to reappoint Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner “betrays his campaign promises and aligns him with the NYPD’s legacy of policing, surveillance, and repression” and “effectively endorses the NYPD’s ongoing collaboration with the Israeli occupation.”

Tisch deserves our critique. She is a pro-Israel billionaire heiress who, as Ross Barkan notes, “sounds no different than a Long Island Republican when it comes to the topic of criminal justice.” But before digging into the debate over her reappointment, it’s useful to address an underlying strategic question: When and how should the Left criticize elected officials like Zohran?

Criticism is Good. But What Kind?

On the general question of whether it’s necessary for socialists to criticize Left elected officials, history is full of examples of movements demobilizing and subordinating themselves to their friends in power. It would be a tragedy if that happened in New York City. Given the constraints and pressure he is under, and the overall weakness of working-class organization after fifty years of neoliberalism, Mayor Mamdani is bound to make many decisions the Left will disagree with; refusing on principle to ever voice criticisms or to take an independent stand would be a road to ruin for organizations like New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Left as a whole, demoralizing activists and undermining credibility with supporters.

But there’s no shortage of leftists who are generally willing to disagree with or diverge from our new mayor and other Left politicians. Many NYC-DSA leaders argued in favor of the chapter endorsing New York city council member Chi Osse’s bid to primary Hakeem Jeffries despite Mamdani’s vocal opposition. Most currents of DSA supported a public statement criticizing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vote against an amendment blocking funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. For my part, this week I wrote on Twitter: “Instead of asking for more donations, would love to see Zohran start asking supporters to join mass organizing fightbacks. Even the savviest governance and comms strategy can’t get far without more people power on the ground.”

We can visualize the Left’s approach on criticizing allied politicians as a spectrum with “openness to criticizing Left electeds” on one side, and “never criticize Left electeds” on the other.

Apart from those who end up muting their voices because they join an administration (or become staff of an elected official), most US radicals today are quite far on the “open to criticizing” edge of the spectrum. But contrary to what some very-online leftists seem to believe, there’s far more to effective socialist strategy than a willingness to boldly champion our ideas and to loudly voice criticisms of electeds who fall short. If that’s all it took, we’d have reached socialism long ago.

One frustrating thing about the debate over Tisch is that we were mostly talking past each other. While supporters of the WOL statement foregrounded the importance of criticizing politicians, critics like myself tried adding an additional dimension to the discussion: How much power do we currently have to confront the NYPD?

Pushing back against leftist elected officials is important. But effective Left strategy always should combine an openness to criticism of electeds with a rigorous power analysis. More specifically, the intensity of our criticism of Left politicians on a given issue should correlate with our degree of power.

Let me give two examples. Hopefully we can all agree that it would be unjustified to denounce Zohran for not taking steps to abolish capitalism in New York City (whatever that would mean) given that neither he nor we have the institutional mechanisms, popular mandate, or organized force to do so. That doesn’t mean Left organizations should stop advocating this goal. But it’s not a reasonable thing to fight Zohran on — unlike, say, if he were to renege on freezing the rent or pushing to tax the rich. Conversely, when I voiced a (low-intensity) criticism that Zohran could be doing more to plug his supporters into organizing fightbacks, that reflected an assessment not just that this was desirable, but that it was immediately feasible.

Instead of looking at the question of power narrowly as whether a politician has the technical ability to support a policy, we should employ a more multi-faceted power analysis to answer the following questions:

Power Analysis

• How much does the public support that policy?

• Do we currently have enough power to overcome concerted ruling class opposition to instituting that policy?

• How strong are the mass organizations and movements supporting that policy? How strongly do they support it?

• How much institutional power does the Left politician have to implement the policy?

• Will passing the policy make it much harder to pass other urgent agenda points? Is the trade-off worth it?

• Was that policy part of the Left politician’s campaign platform?

• How strong would the popular backlash likely be if the Left politician supports that policy? Will it doom their re-election? How damaging would that be for Left organizations and movements?

My main issue with WOL’s statement, and its underlying strategy of relentless denunciation that is widely shared across the far left, is not that it takes a critical approach to Zohran’s bargains with ruling-class elites and institutions like the NYPD. It’s good for there to be pushback. But the real debate is over what kind of pushback. Unfortunately, the tactics used by these critics do not correspond to the amount of power we and our electeds currently have in relation to the NYPD.

This doesn’t mean giving up the fight. There are many ways to explicitly or implicitly criticize a mayor when our power on a given issue is still low. In such circumstances, our tactics should focus on winning over the public — our main source of power. And the intensity of our criticism of elected leftists should be tailored accordingly. When our power is low, it can be fine to start a public conversation by posting online or positively calling on a leftist elected to do something. But in that type of situation, we should avoid denunciations and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that social media agitation on its own does much to move the power needle.

Not Enough Power Against the NYPD

Critics of my argument will respond, “Wait a minute, it’s not true Zohran doesn’t have the power to fire Tisch.”

But how real is this power if it would prompt a police (and potential capital) strike to force Zohran to rehire her or to ignore the directives of a more progressive appointee? In Jonathan Ben-Menachem’s excellent article for The Nation, “If We Want Mamdani to Beat the NYPD, the Left Must Build Power,” he points to the strong historic precedent for this worry: “Bill de Blasio, whose campaign emphasized police reform more than Mamdani’s, also fought the police unions (and lost). Cops turned their backs on de Blasio and walked off the job — a classic police tactic, given that work slowdowns generate headlines reinforcing the myth that police pullbacks endanger residents.”

Whether we like it or not, firing Tisch at this moment risks sinking Zohran’s new administration in a losing battle before he’s even taken office — and before he’s cemented popular goodwill by delivering tangible improvements in their daily lives. And with everyone in the city and country looking at New York as a test case for socialist governance, the fate of all our bottom-up movements and organizations is tied to this administration.

A Left politician’s power to make a lasting change is quite limited if taking an unpopular step will create so much popular backlash that it all but guarantees that centrists or reactionaries will win the next election and reverse the progress made. Consider Mayor David Dinkins’ fight for police reform. He won the short-term policy fight to establish an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board, despite 10,000 cops who drunkenly rioted against this in 1992. But backlash against Dinkins’s push on policing fueled Rudy Giuliani’s narrow mayoral victory the following year, resulting in eight years of untrammelled police persecution of Black and Brown working-class communities.

The rise of Adams and Giuliani raises another point mostly overlooked by defenders of an intransigent approach: public opinion can play a major role in constraining the power of electeds and marginalizing movements. The main push to keep Tisch came from billionaires and establishment politicians. But public support for police and concerns about crime facilitated these elite efforts and constrained Zohran’s room for maneuver.

Online leftist echo-chambers provide a very skewed impression of where most people are at. If claims about police reform being an electorally “winning issue” were true, we’d see a clear reflection in election results, in polling, or in millions of people in the streets. Rather, mass protests dried up after 2020. Eric Adams was elected mayor in 2021 on an anti-defund, pro-public safety message that particularly resonated with Black and Latino working-class voters. And recent polls show that only 18% or 22% of New Yorkers have an unfavorable opinion of Tisch — and that this opposition is significantly higher among college-educated voters. Even Latinos, the racial demographic most opposed to Tisch, overall favor her more than they oppose her.

Polls, of course, can be wrong (though normally at the margins) and people’s views can change. If Tisch continues collaborating with Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and activists start doing concerted outreach to our neighbors about her role, her popularity could plummet and her ouster could become more feasible. But in the meantime, leftists should dial back the intensity of our criticisms of Zohran’s re-appointment decision and avoid misleading “betrayal” claims.

It’s good to push back against Tisch. But given how few people currently agree with us on this, the most appropriate and effective tactic would be something like a canvassing campaign to get hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to sign a petition calling for Tisch’s ouster. That would allow — and oblige — anti-Tisch activists to go out and persuade those who either currently support her, or who don’t yet have thoughts about her one way or the other. If we can’t commit to putting in the low-risk but high-effort legwork of winning over community members door by door, conversation by conversation, why should we expect Zohran to risk his administration and his affordability agenda — and, with it, the momentum of a resurgent nationwide Left — over a premature fight that we don’t yet have the power to win?

Beyond the Echo Chamber

Though there will be instances where Zohran is being unjustifiably compromising or risk-averse, it generally makes sense to look at both his strengths and limitations as reflections of the balance of class forces on a given issue. And the sobering reality is that our electoral reach has rocketed far past our on-the-ground organized power. All the openings and challenges of this moment are concentrated in that power gap.

The way to help Zohran overcome establishment and billionaire opposition will mostly be “organize bigger and deeper” rather than “criticize harder.” Posting denunciations online or passing unenforceable resolutions on accountability too often function as substitutes for the much harder, and much more impactful, work of changing the relationship of forces.

Our late comrade Jane McAlevey once told me that organizers “wake up every morning asking how to engage the people who don’t agree with us—or who think they don’t agree with us. These folks are definitely not part of our social media feeds and they’re not coming to our activist meetings, they’re not there.” In the fight for affordability and justice, we should always keep in mind Jane’s challenge: “Do you spend most of your day talking to people who don’t agree with you? If you’re serious about building class politics, the answer is yes.”

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• New York friends, please sign up for a canvassing shift this weekend (Dec 13-14) with Our Time and NYC-DSA’s Tax the Rich campaign to talk to our neighbors about how they can help win Zohran’s affordability agenda! Momentum is growing: we had a great Our Time launch call last week with over 700 participants and special guest speaker Lina Khan.

• The Starbucks workers’ strike — and consumer boycott — is going strong and growing. Don’t shop at Starbucks anywhere as long as workers are striking! And sign up here to find out how you can support.

• It’s been really heartening to see so many people subscribe to this newsletter over recent months. Please keep on sending me your thoughts about these pieces and please keep on sharing these articles online, it really helps get the word out. I appreciate all of you!

• In the spirit of fighting for roses (not just bread), here’s deep cut song from 1971 Brazil that I’ve been obsessed with all year, hope it brightens your day. And let me know if you want me to keep including a 1970s Brazilian song of the week in this newsletter :)

This experience is rich in lessons for Zohran Mamdani and contemporary Left activists looking to lean on City Hall to build a working-class alternative to Democratic neoliberalism and Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. But the history of Milwaukee’s so-called sewer socialists is much more than a story simply about local Left governance. The rise and effectiveness of the town’s socialist governments largely depended on a radical political organization rooted in Milwaukee’s trade unions and working class.

Nowhere in the US were socialists stronger than in Milwaukee. And Wisconsin was the state with the most elected socialist officials as well as the highest number of socialist legislators (see Figure 1). It was also the only state in America where socialists consistently led the entire union movement — indeed, it was primarily their roots in organized labor that made their electoral and policy success possible, including the passage of 295 socialist-authored bills statewide between 1919 and 1931.

Contrary to what much of the literature on sewer socialism has suggested, the party’s growth did not come at the cost of dropping radical politics. That they didn’t get closer to overthrowing capitalism was due to circumstances outside of their control, including relatively conservative public opinion. And the fact that they did achieve so much was because they flexibly concretized socialist politics for America’s uniquely challenging context.

The Rise of Sewer Socialism

Sewer socialism’s rise was far from automatic or rapid. Though Milwaukee’s largely German working class was perhaps somewhat more open to socialist ideas than some other ethnicities, a quantitative study of pre-war US immigrant voting found that Germans were negatively correlated with socialist votes nationwide.

Figure 2 captures the party’s slow-but-steady rise over many decades. Here’s how the party’s founder, Victor Berger, described this dynamic in a speech following their big 1910 mayoral election victory:

“It took forty years to get a Socialist Mayor and administration in Milwaukee since first a band of comrades joined together. … It didn’t come quickly or easily to us. It meant work. Drop by drop until the cup ran over. Vote by vote to victory. Work not only during the few weeks of the campaign, but every month, every week, every day. Work in the factories and from house to house.”

Milwaukee’s history is a useful natural experiment for testing the viability of competing socialist strategies in the US. Both moderate and intransigent variants of Marxism were present and the latter had nearly a two-decade-long head start. The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) was the only game in town from 1875 onwards until Berger, a former SLP member, founded a more moderate rival socialist newspaper, Vorwärts (Forward), in 1893.

By the early nineties, the SLP under the leadership of Daniel De Leon had crystallized its strategy: run electoral campaigns to propagate the fundamental tenets of Marxism and build industrial unions to displace the reformist, craft-based American Federation of Labor (AFL). Had American workers been more radically inclined, the SLP’s strategy could have caught on — indeed, something close to this approach guided the early German Social Democracy as well as revolutionary Marxists across imperial Russia. But by 1900, Berger’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) had clearly eclipsed its more-radical rivals.

Pragmatic Marxism

What were the politics of Berger’s new current? Berger and his comrades are usually depicted as “reformists” for whom “change would come through evolution and democracy, and not through revolution.” In reality, the sewer socialists were — and remained — committed Marxists who saw the fight for reforms as a necessary means not only to improve the lives of working people, but also to strengthen working-class consciousness, organization, and power in the direction of socialist revolution in the US and across the globe.

Here’s how Berger articulated this vision in the founding 1911 issue of The Milwaukee Leader, his new English-language socialist daily newspaper: “The distinguishing trait of Socialists is that they understand the class struggle” and that “they boldly aim at the revolution because they want a radical change from the present system.”

Reacting against De Leon’s doctrinaire rigidity and marginality, Berger consciously sought to Americanize scientific socialism. Berger argued that socialists in the US “must give up forever the slavish imitation of the ‘German’ form of organization and the ‘German’ methods of electioneering and agitation.” Since the specifics of what to do in the US were not self-evident, this strategic starting point facilitated a useful degree of political humility and empirical curiosity.

One of the things Berger learned was that socialist propaganda would not widely resonate as long as most American workers remained resigned to their fate. This, he explained, was the core flaw in the SLP’s assumption that patiently preaching socialism would eventually convince the whole working class:

The most formidable obstacle in the way of further progress—and especially in the propaganda of Socialism—is not that men are insufficiently versed in political economy or lacking in intelligence. It is that people are without hope. … Despair is the chief opponent of progress. Our greatest need is hope.

It was precisely to overcome widespread feelings of popular resignation that the sewer socialists came to focus so much on fights for immediate demands, both at work and within government. Since “labor learns in the school of experience,” successful struggles even around relatively minor issues would tend to raise workers’ confidence, expectations, and openness to socialist ideas.

It was easy to play with “revolutionary phrases,” but Berger noted that this did not do much to move workers closer to socialism. While it was important to continue propagating the big ideas of socialism, what America’s leftists needed above all was “concrete political achievements, not theoretical treatises ... less mouth-work, more footwork.” Armed with this orientation, Berger and his comrades set out to win over a popular majority — starting with Milwaukee’s trade union activists.

Rooting Socialism in the Unions

By the time Berger arrived on the scene, Milwaukee already had a rich tradition of workplace militancy and unionism. Crucially, Berger’s current sought to transform established unions rather than enter into competition with them by setting up new socialist-led unions, as was the practice of the SLP and, later on, the Wobblies.

Years of hard work within the unions paid off. In December 1899, Milwaukee’s Federated Trades Council elected an executive committee made up entirely of socialists, including Berger. For the next quarter century, the leadership of the party and the unions statewide formed an “interlocking directorate” of working-class socialists involved in both formations. Nowhere else in the US did socialists become so hegemonic in the labor movement as they did in Milwaukee and Wisconsin.

A historian of Milwaukee unions notes the “inheritance Socialists bequeathed to the labor movement”: democratic norms; support for industrial (rather than craft) unionism; the absence of corruption; support for workers’ education; and strong political advocacy. Wisconsin’s socialists could not have achieved much without their union base. And precisely because they had succeeded in transforming established AFL unions by “boring from within,” they fought a relentless two-front war nationally against the self-isolating dual unionist efforts of left-wing Socialists and the Wobblies, on the one hand, and the narrow-minded AFL leadership of Samuel Gompers, on the other.

Building the Party

The anti-Socialist Milwaukee Free Press ruefully noted in 1910 that “there would not today be such sweeping Social-Democratic victories in Milwaukee if that party did not possess a solidarity of organization and purpose which is unequaled by that of any other party in the county, or, for that matter, in the state.”

Building this machine took years of experimentation and refinement under the guidance of Edmund Melms, an affable factory worker. Such a focus on organizing, with its focus on developing new working-class leaders, was crucial for helping Milwaukee’s socialists avoid the constant turnover and churn that undermined so many other SPA chapters.

One of Melms’s organizational innovations was the party’s soon-to-be famous “bundle brigade.” During electoral campaigns, between 500 and 1,000 party members on Sunday mornings would pick up the SDP’s four-page electoral newspaper at 6 a.m. and deliver it to every home in town by 9 a.m. No other parties attempted anything this ambitious because they lacked sufficient volunteer capacity, not just for delivery but also for determining the language spoken in each house; party members would have to canvass their neighborhoods ahead of time to determine whether the house should receive literature in German, English, or Polish.

Melms’s second innovation was to hold a Socialist carnival every winter. These were massive events with over 10,000 participants, attracting (and raising funds from) community members well beyond the SDP’s ranks. In addition to these yearly carnivals, the party held all sorts of social activities which helped grow and cohere the movement. These included picnics, parades, card tournaments, dress balls, parties, concerts, baseball and basketball games, plays, and vaudeville shows. And some party branches were particularly proud of their singers. As one participant recalled, “Did you love song? Attend an affair of Branch 22.”

Whereas patronage and graft greased the wheels of other party machines, the socialists had to depend on selflessness derived from political commitment. While most people who voted for the SDP were interested primarily in winning immediate changes, there were also additional, loftier motivations undergirding the decision of so many working-class men, women, and teenagers to do thankless tasks like getting up early on cold Sunday mornings to distribute socialist literature. Historian-participant Elmer Beck is right that “the dreams, visions, and prophecies of the [Milwaukee] socialists … were an extremely vital factor in the rise of the socialist tide.”

Message and Demands

With its eyes planted on the goal of winning a majority of Milwaukeeans and Wisconsinites to socialism, the SDP was obsessed with spreading its message. Between 1893 and 1939, the party published twelve weekly newspapers, two dailies, one monthly magazine, as well as countless pamphlets and fliers.

Class consciousness was the central political point stressed in all the party’s agitation and publications — virtually everything was framed as a fight of workers against capitalists. Linked to this class analysis was a relentless focus on workers’ material needs: for instance, one of the SDP’s most impactful early leaflets was directed at working-class women: “Madam—how will you pay your bills?” This relentless focus on workers’ material needs was one of the key reasons the SDP was able to build such a deep base. Indeed, the party’s ability to recruit — and retain — so many workers depended on delivering tangible improvements to their lives (unlike so many other SPA chapters, who had to rely on ideological recruitment alone).

After 1904, immediate demands took on an increasingly central place in the SDP’s election campaigns. Had Milwaukee’s socialists lost sight of their socialist goals? Hardly. Up through its demise in the late 1930s, the party never ceased propagandizing for socialism and proposing ambitious but not-yet-winnable reforms. But Milwaukee’s sewer socialists believed that running to win in electoral contests — and seriously fighting to pass policy changes once in power — made it possible to recruit a larger, not smaller, number of workers to socialist politics.

The comparative data on party membership bears out this hypothesis. By 1912, roughly one out of every hundred people in Milwaukee was a member of the Social Democratic Party. No other city in America had anything close to this level of strength; in contrast, New York City, another socialist bastion, had one member for every thousand inhabitants. Had the Socialist Party of America been as strong as Milwaukee’s SDP, it would have had about one million members — roughly the same size as German Social Democracy, the world’s largest socialist party.

In a challenging American political context, Wisconsin’s socialists pushed as far as possible without losing their base. Rigorous comparative histories of US leftism have shown that all of the most successful instances of mass working-class politics in America have adopted some form of this kind of pragmatic radicalism, including Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, New York’s Jewish immigrant socialism, and the Popular Front Communists of the late 1930s.

Nevertheless, far left socialists elsewhere in the country — whose tactical rigidity was both a cause and consequence of their weaker roots in the class — frequently criticized their Wisconsin comrades’ supposed “opportunism.” In 1905, for example, the national leadership of the SPA expelled Berger from the body for suggesting in an article that Milwaukeeans vote against a right-wing judge in a non-partisan race that the party did not have the capacity to contest. Berger lambasted this “heresy hunt without a heresy” and he succeeded in winning back his post through an SPA membership referendum, the national (and local) party’s highest decision-making structure. Episodes such as these led the SDP to jealously guard its autonomy from national Socialist Party of America structures that periodically succumbed to leftist dogmatism.

Successfully Governing Milwaukee

It was a challenging task, requiring constant wagers and adjustments, to pull the mass of working people toward socialism without undermining this process by jumping too far ahead. “Never swing to the right or too far to the left,” advised Daniel Hoan, the party’s mayor from 1916 through 1940. But concretizing this axiom into practical politics was easier said than done — especially once the party had to govern.

Given the powerful forces arrayed against them, and the unique obstacles facing radical politics in the US, the remarkable thing about the sewer socialist administrations is how much they achieved. Under SDP rule, Milwaukee dramatically improved health and safety conditions for its citizens in their neighborhoods as well as on the job. Milwaukee built up the country’s first public housing cooperative and it pioneered city planning through comprehensive zoning codes. And though the SDP did not advance as far as it wanted in ending private contracts for all utilities, it succeeded in building a city-owned power plant and municipalizing the stone quarry, street lighting, sewage disposal, and water purification.

Another crown jewel of sewer socialism was its dramatic expansion of parks and playgrounds, as well as its creation of over 40 social centers across Milwaukee. The city leaned on school infrastructure to set up these centers, which provided billiards for teens, education classes and public events for adults, plus sports, games and entertainment for all. “During working hours, we make a living and during leisure hours, we make a life,” was the motto coined by Dorothy Enderis, who headed the parks and recreation department after 1919.

The city’s excellent provision of recreation, services, and material relief was, according to Mayor Hoan, responsible for it having one of the lowest crime rates of any big city in the nation. In his fascinating 1936 book City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment, Hoan writes that in “Milwaukee we have held that crime prevention [via attacking its social roots] is as important, if not more so, if a comparison is possible, than crime detection and punishment.” Comparing the cost of policing to the cost of social services, Hoan estimated that the city saved over $1,200,000 yearly via its robust parks and recreation department. This did not mean Milwaukee ever considered defunding its police. Sewer socialists in fact pushed for better wages and working conditions for cops, in a relatively successful attempt to win away rank-and-file police from their reactionary chief John Janssen.

After the first significant migration of Black workers arrived in World War I, Mayor Hoan led a hard fight against the Ku Klux Klan in the city, while Victor Berger (breaking from his earlier white supremacism) led a parallel, high-profile fight in Congress against lynching as well as against immigration restrictions. As historian Joe Trotter notes, Milwaukee’s Black workers responded by consistently voting Socialist and leaders of the town’s Garveyite Universal Negro Improvement Association joined the SDP and agitated for its candidates.

Ending graft and promoting governmental efficiency was another major focus. One of the first steps taken by Emil Seidel, the party’s mayor from 1910 through 1912, was to set up a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency — the nation’s first, tasked with streamlining governance. Despite the protestations of some party members, Socialist administrations did not prioritize giving posts to SDP members. Mayor Hoan defended the merit system on anti-capitalist grounds: “You must show the working people and the citizens of the city that the city is as good as and better an employer than private industry if you are to gain headway in convincing them that the municipality is a better owner of the public utilities and industries than private corporations.”

Boosting the public’s confidence in governmental initiatives eventually made it possible for Mayor Hoan to push the limits of acceptability regarding city incursions into the free market. Before and following World War I, Hoan — without city council approval — purchased train carloads of surplus foods and clothing from the US Army and sold them to the public far below market prices at city offices. The project’s scope was ambitious: in January 1920 alone, Hoan purchased 72,000 cans of peas, 33,600 cans of baked beans, 100,000 pounds of salt, 20,000 pairs of knit gloves and wool socks, among other items. Basking in the project’s success, the mayor noted that “the public sale of food by me has offered an opportunity of demonstrating the Socialist theory of operating a business. It should demonstrate once and for all that the Socialist theory in conducting many of our enterprises without profits can be worked out in a grand and beneficial manner if handled by those who believe in its success.”

In contrast with progressive city administrations nationwide, Milwaukee socialists believed that effective governmental change depended to a large degree on bottom-up organizing. A sense of this can be gleaned from the Milwaukee Free Press’s story about the SDP’s rally the night it won the mayoral race in 1910:

A full ten minutes the crowd stood up on its feet and cheered for Victor Berger; waved flags and tossed hats high in the air; cried and shouted and even wept, for very overflowing of joy. Then Mr. Berger stepped forward, and a hush fell upon the audience as he began to speak. “I want to ask every man and woman in this audience to stand up here and now enter a solemn pledge to do everything in our power to help the men whom the people have chosen to fulfill their duty,” said Mr. Berger. Like a mighty wave of humanity, the crowd surged to its feet, and in a shout that shook the building and echoed down the street to the thousands who waited there, gave the required pledge.

Grassroots pressure became increasingly urgent once the party lost its short-lived control over the city council. Given Mayor Hoan’s lack of a majority, historian Todd Fulda notes that he chose to “take a populist approach to governing, appealing directly to the citizens of Milwaukee to support his reforms and pressure the non-partisan aldermen to support them as well.” The same strategy informed the party’s approach on a statewide level, leading the SDP to power-map the legislature to figure out pressure points to flip movable office-holders.

Socialist administrations also did everything possible to boost union power. Union labor was used on all city construction and printing projects. With city backing, a unionization wave swept the city’s firemen, garbage collectors, coal passers, and elevator operators, among others. Mayor Seidel even threatened to swear in striking workers as police deputies if the police chief attempted to intimidate strikers.

And in 1935 the SDP succeeded in passing America’s strongest labor law: the “Boncel Ordinance,” which empowered the city administration to close the plants of any company that refused to collectively bargain and whose refusal resulted in crowds of over 200 people two days in a row. Employers who refused to comply would be fined or imprisoned. With support from governmental policy above and workplace organizing below, Milwaukee County’s union density grew tenfold from 1929 through 1939. By the end of the 1930s roughly 60 percent of its workers were in unions. In contrast, New York City at its peak only reached a union density of at most 33 percent.

Demise

Despite labor’s upsurge and the SDP’s continued efforts to educate the public about socialism, the movement’s forward advance was significantly constrained by employer opposition and public opinion, which as ever was shaped by America’s uniquely challenging terrain, as well as media scaremongering and the normal, expectations-lowering pull of capitalist social relations.

By the late 1930s, backlash against union militancy and governmental radicalism had begun to take an electoral toll in Wisconsin and nationwide. Incensed by Mayor Hoan’s refusal to impose an austerity budget, employers had waged a “war” to recall him in 1933. Though they lost that battle, Milwaukee’s bourgeois establishment succeeded in convincing a majority of voters to defeat the SDP’s subsequent referendum to municipalize the electric utility. In 1940, Hoan decisively lost the mayoral race to a handsome but politically vacuous centrist named Carl Zeidler. Sewer socialism’s reign was over. (Another Socialist, Frank Zeidler, became mayor of Milwaukee from 1948 through 1960, but by this time the party was a shell of its former self.)

The central obstacle to moving further toward social democracy and socialism in America was simple: the organized Left and its allied unions were not powerful enough to convince a majority of people to actively support such an advance. This is a sobering fact to acknowledge, since it runs contrary to radicals’ longtime assumption that misleadership and cooptation are our primary obstacles to success.

But given the many structural challenges facing US leftism, the most remarkable thing about sewer socialism — and the broader New Deal that it helped pioneer — was not its limitations but rather its remarkable advances, which provided an unprecedented degree of economic security and workplace freedom to countless Americans.

Relevance for Today

The history of sewer socialism provides a roadmap for radicals today aiming to build a viable alternative to Trumpism and Democratic centrism. Milwaukee’s experience shows that the Left not only can govern, but that it can do so considerably more effectively than either establishment politicians or progressive solo operators. That’s the real reason why defenders of the status quo are so worried about a democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani.

We have much to learn from Wisconsin’s successful efforts to root socialism in the American working class. Unlike uncompromising socialists to their left, the SDP consistently oriented its agitation to the broad mass of working people, rather than a small radicalized periphery; it combined union organizing and disruptive strikes with a hard-nosed focus on winning electoral contests and policy changes; it centered workers’ material needs; it made compromises when necessary; it based its tactics on concrete analyses of public opinion and the relationship of class forces rather than imported formulas or wishful thinking; it saw that fights for widely and deeply felt demands would do more than party propaganda to radicalize millions; and, eventually, it came to understand the need to balance political independence with broader alliances.

Today’s radicals would do well to adopt the basic political orientation of Berger’s current. But it would be contrary to the non-dogmatic spirit of the sewer socialists to try to simply copy and paste all of their tactics. Building a nationwide third party, for example, is not feasible in our contemporary context because of exceptionally high ideological polarization combined with the entrenchment of America’s unique party system over the past century.

As we search for the most effective ways to overcome an increasingly authoritarian and oligarchic status quo, on a terrain of widespread working-class atomization, it would serve us well to heed Berger’s reminder to his comrades: “We must learn a great deal.”

[This is a working paper, the final version of which will be a much longer essay for Catalyst, America’s best socialist journal. Subscribe today to Catalyst and you’ll get my upcoming piece as well as the magazine’s other excellent content. My final paper will take a deeper dive into all the topics touched on above, as well as other questions I didn’t have space here to address, such as the evolution of SDP electoral tactics, how it supported and disciplined its elected officials, its somewhat dogmatic approach initially to labor party and farmer movements, and tensions between grassroots mass organizing and Socialist administrations in Milwaukee.]

More

• Starbucks workers are on strike, don’t buy anything from the company anywhere in the US until the strike is over!

• It’s going to take each of us to rebuild a powerful Left and a powerful union movement. Join DSA. Unionize your workplace. Become a salt at a strategic company. Get involved in the fight to win Zohran’s agenda.

• Here’s some more work of mine related to sewer socialism: an article on Oklahoma’s remarkable socialist movement; an article on the early rise of labor politics in Britain; and and article on how socialists should relate to the Democratic Party today.

It raises health care premiums for over 20 million Americans by doubling, in some cases, tripling or quadrupling and it paves the way for 15 million people to be thrown off of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Studies show that some 50,000 Americans will die every year unnecessarily — and all that was done to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1%.

Countless Americans today are rightfully incensed not only at the senators who caved, but also at senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who let this capitulation happen.

But there’s one more group that deserves our anger today: top union leaders.

One of the dominoes that set off last night’s capitulation was the decision by the American Federation of Government Employees’s national leadership on October 27 to call on Democrats to end the shutdown on Trump’s terms — without any guarantees for tens of millions of Americans’ health care coverage.

The main rationale provided by AFGE president Everett Kelley was that his members were suffering economically from the shutdown. This hurt is very real, and I do not doubt the sincerity of Kelley’s commitment to his membership. But AFGE’s leadership could have decided to pressure Republicans rather than Democrats to end the shutdown. The fact that other unions representing federal employees like IFPTE and SEIU chose not to cave to Republicans puts into sharp relief that AFGE made a political choice.

Rank-and-file AFGE members this morning released an open letter calling on their national leadership to oppose the deal. As one AFGE member wrote to me last night, “Many of us are furious at AFGE leadership. … Even if AFGE leaders thought the shutdown had become too costly, they could‘ve put the blame squarely on the Republicans who can reopen the gov at any time by changing the senate rules.” And far from surrendering after putting up a hard fight, AFGE from day one of this shutdown has refused to provide any serious redlines for the Republicans and has refused to launch any real pressure campaigns against them.

AFGE leaders aren’t the only part of organized labor that paved the way for this debacle. Unsurprisingly, Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters played a very bad role. And both Democratic senators caved in Nevada, a state where the primarily immigrant and periodically militant Culinary Union, a UNITE-HERE affiliate, is the most powerful player in Democratic politics. It’s hard to imagine that Nevada’s senators would have made such a consequential decision without the tacit or explicit green light of Culinary leaders — indeed, there’s no mention of the shutdown fight in any of the union’s recent press releases (see below). The Culinary leadership was likely worried that continued air traffic delays would hurt their members by dampening tourism in Vegas, but this doesn’t justify refusing to put up a cross-union fight to force the Republicans to cave. Culinary workers have famously great health care; it’s sad that their union leaders still appear reluctant to fight for the same rights for every American. (In the 2020 presidential election, Culinary leaders similarly opposed Bernie Sanders and his demand for Medicare for All).

Part of the reason Democratic politicians don’t fight is that most union leaders don’t fight either — at least not in a way that meets the urgency of this authoritarian and oligarchic moment. AFGE, the Culinary union, and the rest of organized labor could have built a massive solidarity fund to support needy federal workers and other employees hurt by the shutdown. They could have held regular press conferences, rallies, and actions in front of the offices of both Republicans and Democrats who refused to commit to preserving Americans’ health care. And they could have pushed for nonviolent direct actions to pressure Trump to stop starving Americans by continuing to block SNAP benefits.

Instead, we saw pressure on Democrats to cave — and, unsurprisingly, Democratic capitulators like Tim Kaine of Virginia last night explained their decision primarily as a way to support federal workers.

It would be too generous to say AFGE and the Culinary leaders’ decisions reflect a prioritization of the interests of their members over the interests of the broader American working class. That would be bad enough. What makes their actions doubly tragic is that their own members will also be hurt by this capitulation, since it throws away the real possibility to deliver a decisive defeat against a Trump administration which remains dead set on terrorizing federal workers and immigrants across the country.

Republicans were rightfully getting blamed by Americans for the shutdown. Finally, we had real leverage over this authoritarian administration. After last Tuesday’s Democratic electoral sweep, after Trump’s politically suicidal push to cut off SNAP benefits, and with escalating air traffic delays and health care premium hikes looming, holding out longer would likely have forced the Republicans to blink, most likely by nuking the filibuster — a move, in itself, that would have been a boon for democracy.

But due to the weakness of Democratic and union leaders, the headline is now “Democrats cave because they are cowards,” rather than “Republicans cave because they want your health care costs to go up.” This puts Trump in a significantly better position to continue his war against federal employees, immigrants, and American democracy.

A share of responsibility for this falls on the labor movement as a whole. Most unions said the right thing in their press releases about the shutdown, but where was the big public fight to stop Democrats from caving? Last night wasn’t a surprise. For weeks now everybody has known that moderate Democrats were trying to broker a capitulatory “deal” with Republicans. It wouldn’t have been hard for the AFL-CIO and big progressive unions to have called on every senator to commit to hard red lines on health care — and to start protesting daily against those who refused to commit. In fights like these, good press releases are far from enough.

This shutdown fight was a “structure test” showing where we’re strong and where we’re weak. The results are in: most top union leaders are failing to meet the moment. Despite a widespread desire from below to fight, institutional inertia and risk-aversion up top remain the norm. As Bernie noted last night, what last Tuesday’s “election showed is that the American people want us to stand up to Trumpism, to his war against working-class people, to his authoritarianism — that is what the American people want us to do. But tonight that is not what happened.”

The struggle is far from over. Trump can be defeated and health care defended. Trump’s popularity is plummeting, Republicans were dealt a severe electoral blow last week, and there is still time for the movement against them to course correct by putting up a real fight against authoritarian rule by supporting walkouts against ICE invasions and by launching ambitious campaigns to pressure the regime’s pillars of support — businesses, media outlets, school administrations, and the rest — to break from Trump.

We still have the momentum. But what last night’s debacle made clear is that we can’t wait for our side’s top “leaders” to start leading. Winning a better country and democracy requires a new leadership in the Democratic Party and in organized labor. Anything short of that is a recipe for continued disaster.

More

• Rank and file AFGE workers have issued a press release calling on Democrats to vote against this bad deal. Here’s a press release, a form to sign on, and an IG and Facebook post.

• Fortunately, the US still has some fighting unions. One of the most important of these is Starbucks Workers United, which is about to launch a long strike and customer boycott to win a first contract, starting this Thursday November 13. A win at Starbucks would be a win for all working people — and a significant blow to authoritarianism in the company and in our country. Spread the word that nobody should shop at Starbucks as long as workers are striking! And be sure to attend one of the union's rallies this Thursday: RSVP here.

• The volunteer movement that drove Zohran Mamdani to victory in NYC is coalescing into a new campaign, Our Time, to organize over a million New Yorkers to pressure politicians to pass Zohran’s ambitious agenda and tax the rich. You can sign up for Our Time here. And please also join the Democratic Socialists of America — we need a long-term home for all of us fighting to win true economic and political democracy.

• Hopefully Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides to primary Chuck Schumer. And in the meantime, as Ro Khanna is right to argue, Democratic senators should boot Schumer from his post as senate minority leader.

Donald Trump’s election two weeks later cemented the mainstream consensus that New York City and the nation were turning decisively rightward. Pivoting to the “moderate center,” we were told, was the Democratic Party’s only chance at electoral survival. Even the most optimistic of Mamdani’s leftist supporters thought that the best-case scenario was a respectable loss in the mayoral primary.

Tonight’s historic win proves the skeptics wrong. Despite millions of dollars poured into billionaire-bought attack ads and despite Trump’s attempts to blackmail voters into backing Andrew Cuomo, New Yorkers are sending a thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist to Gracie Mansion with a strong mandate to make our city affordable again.

It turns out things don’t need to just keep getting worse and worse. At a moment of deepening authoritarian attacks, astronomical economic inequality, and Democratic Party disarray, the shock waves of Mamdani’s political earthquake will be felt nationwide. This campaign’s core message — up with affordability, down with billionaires — is no less relevant beyond New York.

Turning Zohran’s vision into a reality won’t be easy. Some of the most powerful people and institutions in the world are going to do everything to stop us. But transforming our city is possible, if large numbers of everyday New Yorkers join the fight. America’s oligarchs are right to be worried.

How He Won

How did Mamdani pull off one of the most improbable upsets in modern American politics? Pundits tied themselves into knots last night to downplay the political significance of this race, searching to highlight any takeaway other than the most obvious one: Zohran was an authentic voice for a platform that spoke to working-class anger at a broken status quo.

Yes, it’s true that Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams were flawed candidates. And yes, it’s true that Mamdani is charismatic and his team brilliantly leveraged social media. But the dynamism of this campaign can’t be separated from its politics.

Nor was the content of Mamdani’s campaign reducible to only talking about kitchen-table issues — a strategy that centrist Democratic consultants are now peddling as a panacea for the party’s ills. Yes, his focus was on bringing down the cost of living for working people. But Mamdani cut through the noise by relentlessly focusing on three unusually ambitious plans — free childcare, fast and free buses, frozen rent — to make New York affordable via governmental action, not free-market incentives. And crucially, he insisted that all this would be paid for by taxing the rich. Clintonism this was not.

No less important, Zohran was a credible messenger for this transformative vision because he wasn’t beholden to corporate cash or part of a decrepit Democratic establishment. The fact that Mamdani is a democratic socialist, and that he refused to throw Palestinians under the bus, signaled his authentic, outsider status to millions of New Yorkers who are used to mainstream politicians saying one thing and doing another.

Like Bernie Sanders before him — and very much unlike candidates like Kamala Harris — when Zohran talked about workers versus the billionaires, you knew he meant it. It was on the basis of that credibility that Zohran, with the help of countless Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) activists, built an unprecedented canvassing machine of well over 100,000 volunteers. You can’t have Zohranism without Zohran’s politics.

His excellently run campaign was a necessary condition for victory, but it couldn’t have gotten nearly this far had it not coincided with seismic popular opinion shifts. Zohran achieved what Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns envisioned but never quite managed to do: dramatically remake the electorate by inspiring new (mostly young) voters while also winning over large numbers of traditional Democrats disenchanted with the party establishment.

Wearing a Zohran pin or shirt over the last few months has been a surefire way to get a constant stream of thumbs up or cheers from complete strangers all across the city. Zohran not only dominated among college-educated millennials and Zoomers in the “Commie Corridor,” he also won in working-class neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York.

Early data suggests he won decisively among the demographics that the Democrats recently have most struggled with: young men and workers of all backgrounds. As one poster noted last night, “There is an anti-Zohran coalition, but it’s one that we want: Rich people and Republicans.” And he also did very well among the older, liberal middle-class “wine mom” demographics — crucial parts of the Democratic base that have radicalized in the face of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’s inability to put up a serious fight against Trump. This was a referendum on the future of the Democratic Party and the establishment lost badly.

Tonight’s victory shows that young people and workers are fed up with business as usual and looking for an alternative. Nevertheless, establishment figures on both sides of the aisle will surely dismiss today’s results as a deep-blue city outlier that is unreplicable because electorates elsewhere are “more moderate.” But three out of New York’s last four mayors (Eric Adams, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani) were hardly progressives. And this argument wrongly assumes that most Americans have coherent policy preferences and neatly fit on a very conservative to very liberal axis.

Americans are feeling the pinch everywhere, and overcoming MAGA requires us to point that anger upward — against corporate America — so that it doesn’t instead get channeled downward against immigrants and trans kids.

As research by the Center for Working-Class Politics shows, our best bet to electorally defeat Trumpism is the same in all corners of the country: economic populist campaigns around authentically anti-elite candidates. This might mean running as independents in parts of the country where the Democratic brand is toxic. And in red states like Nebraska, a blue-collar job or track record of union militancy may be a more effective anti-elite signal than a DSA membership card. But if the form taken by economic populism may differ by region, the fundamental political message will be the same: working-class people deserve economic security and dignity, and that’s why it’s time to make the billionaires pay. Tonight’s victory is sure to spark countless new efforts along these lines all across the country.

Get in the Fight

Because working-class politics has so much potential to displace Democratic centrism and Republican authoritarianism, a successful Mamdani administration poses a serious threat to establishment leaders in both parties, to say nothing of hysterical billionaires who see even modest tax hikes as the advent of communism. We should expect elites, starting with President Trump, to do everything possible to stop Zohran from implementing his agenda.

Electing a fighter to city hall is not enough to turn things around against such powerful opponents. Huge numbers of everyday people in the city and across the state have to get in the fight after tonight.

The fact that establishment politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani testifies to the strength of the movement behind him. But our veto-holding governor’s continued refusal to support taxing the rich illustrates just how far we still have to go. To push Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund transformative reforms — and to keep up Zohran’s popularity in the face of inevitable attacks and crises — that movement needs to grow wider and deeper.

After victories like tonight’s, it’s easy to overestimate the Left’s strength. But it’s clear the Democratic establishment’s decay has created space for left electoral influence to skyrocket well beyond our organized strength in working-class neighborhoods and workplaces. Most New Yorkers are not members of unions, most union members are not active, and much of the broader progressive ecosystem remains siloed into small, staff-driven nonprofits. And while it is great news that New York City DSA has grown to over 11,300 members, this is still a small fraction of the campaign’s over 100,000 and an even smaller fraction of the over one million who voted for Mamdani.

This imbalance between the Left’s electoral and nonelectoral strength is a relatively new phenomenon. In contrast, Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” won over the leadership of organized labor more than a decade before they won the mayor’s office in 1910 — an office they effectively wielded for most of the next fifty years. And New York’s greatest mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was able to push through such an ambitious populist agenda, and help lift our city out of the Depression, in part because he was backed by a vibrantly growing union movement in the 1930s.

The task ahead is to lean on the momentum of tonight’s victory, plus levers of city hall and the reach of Zohran’s massive platform, to reverse engineer a working-class movement powerful enough to transform New York. Many will do this by joining DSA, others by unionizing their workplaces — some by both.

Most urgently of all, huge numbers of New Yorkers need to plug into big, united-front campaigns to win free childcare, affordable housing, and free buses by taxing the rich — and to protect our undocumented neighbors from Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutality through nonviolent mass disruption like high-school walkouts. Changing the relationship of forces through outward-facing organizing will do far more to help make Zohran’s platform a reality than endless leftist criticisms of the administration’s inevitable limitations and compromises.

Nobody can predict what lies ahead. Trump is escalating his power grab nationwide, and billionaires in New York are not going to easily cede their power or profits. We are sure to confront all sorts of crises and setbacks over the months and years ahead.

Mamdani’s stunning victory has nevertheless provided working people and the Left with a strong shot of raised expectations, in a period when fear and resignation are otherwise the norm. This is no small thing. As Milwaukee sewer socialist Victor Berger noted in 1907, “Despair is the chief opponent of progress. Our greatest need is hope.”

Last night’s victory should inspire us all to organize harder than ever before for the city — and the world — that we know is possible. Like Zohran today, Berger understood that “the earth is large enough and wide enough to supply all the good things of life to every human being born on it. . . . [But] in order to get a better world we shall have to work for it and fight for it.” That battle has only just begun.

More

• Join DSA! What are you waiting for? It’s going to take all our active involvement to make NYC and America affordable again.

• Here’s my co-authored piece from August laying out a strategy to win Zohran’s agenda. Also check out this article on how Zohran can boost union density — and how NYC unions can seize this opening to organize the unorganized.

• Please share this article with your co-workers, friends, and family! It’s been great to see so much growing enthusiasm for this substack, everything you can do to continue boosting its audience is super appreciated!

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Our president’s sinking popularity numbers might not matter so much if his administration is either able to ignore electoral results or to distort the electoral map so badly that there’s almost no way to vote Republicans out.

Far too many Democrats and union leaders naively hoped that the courts would save us. But the Supreme Court has given a green light to Trump’s power grab, and it appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last major legal roadblock to prevent Republicans from disenfranchising millions of Democrats and Black voters across the South.

Are we cooked? Trump would certainly like us to believe he’s unstoppable. Faced with the administration’s relentless offensive against immigrants, free speech, public services, and majoritarian rule, it’s normal to sometimes succumb to despair. But there’s no need to throw in the towel — and there are concrete next steps we can all take to win back the country through nonviolent resistance. As Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Stacy Davis Gates reminds us, Trumpism “won’t be stopped just in the courts or at the ballot box.”

Reasons for Hope

Of the many good reasons why you shouldn’t give up hope, the first is that popular resistance is growing, as seen in the recent Indivisible-initiated No Kings day protests, the largest in US history. Second, Trump’s policies are unpopular, and large numbers of Americans are searching for a viable alternative. Third, if opposition to authoritarianism and economic mismanagement becomes wide enough, an anti-Trump electoral wave in 2026 and 2028 might still be large enough to swamp electoral machinations. Fourth, Trump is very old, and it’s not obvious that MAGA can survive its megalomaniac ringleader.

There’s also a fifth, less-discussed reason for avoiding despair: authoritarian episodes abroad have tended to fail. A recent research paper by Marina Nord and four co-authors analyzed all authoritarian episodes since 1900 and found that a surprisingly large number have been stopped and reversed within five years — a process they call “U-Turns.” Their paper found that “52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years.” (See Figure 1)

Autocratization can be defeated through peaceful resistance. And in 90% of the documented cases of U-Turns, democracy levels were either restored to their previous heights (70 out of 102 cases) or they improved (22 out of 102 cases).

Global precedent, in short, suggests that we still have a fighting shot to save American democracy. As the authors somewhat dryly note, their findings show “that authoritarian consolidation is perhaps more difficult than the existing literature sometimes posits. A second implication is that democratizing agents stand a decent chance of turning autocratization around.”

America has certainly entered a dark period when fifty-fifty odds to save democracy is the good news. But these chances should be more than enough to encourage us to push back rather than succumb to endless doomscrolling.

Time to Take Risks

Anti-Trump resistance is not futile. But it is risky. To meet this moment, more individuals and organizations are going to have to leave their comfort zones. We can’t just continue with business as usual.

Some individuals have already risen to the occasion. Look at the countless Chicago residents who are peacefully confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Look at federal workers like Ellen Mei and Paul Osadebe, who put their jobs on the line by becoming whistleblowers and exposing how the Trump administration is undermining pivotal services like anti-discriminatory housing enforcement and SNAP food benefits.

Unfortunately, most progressive groups, unions, and churches have not yet seriously pivoted to the new terrain of rapidly consolidating authoritarianism. With some notable exceptions like Indivisible, far too many progressive and left groups remain stuck in their siloed, small-scale ways. And most unions — with notable exceptions like the CTU — have kept their heads down due to institutional inertia, a fear of provoking Trump’s wrath, or worries about alienating pro-Trump members. This is not a minor limitation. “History shows us that when authoritarianism rears its head, whether it takes root depends on the labor movement’s response,” note Jackson Potter and Alex Caputo-Pearl in an important new piece on how labor can meet the moment.

After No Kings, people are rightly wondering what comes next. These marches have been great at showing large numbers, but defeating Trumpism will require even broader participation and more bottom-up disruption. That’s how we shift popular opinion enough — and how we create enough of a crisis for elites — to overcome MAGA’s electoral machinations in 2026 and 2028.

Our biggest obstacle remains a pervasive sense of fear and powerlessness, especially among working-class people. To turn that around, we should start experimenting with disruptive, nonviolent, attention-grabbing campaigns that are easily replicable and that can go viral nationwide — something in the same wide-scale grassroots spirit as the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, or Black Lives Matter in 2020. And because we have to sustain this energy beyond flash-in-the-pan mobilizations, we’ll have to lean on the momentum of these actions to build on-the-ground organization capable of further expanding and escalating the movement.

How could we spark such a mass nonviolent movement today? Here are two concrete tactics that may have the potential to galvanize a broad-based national upsurge against authoritarianism.

Freedom Fridays

Since most workers are currently too scared to strike, we’ll need a smaller group to get the ball rolling. A spark could come from anywhere, but it’s most likely to come from left-leaning layers who face relatively low retaliation risks and are deeply connected to the broader community. Top on this list are high-school students and teachers.

In towns where Trump has surged ICE or sent in troops, high school students, with the backing of their teachers, could start walking out on Friday afternoons, taking to the streets to peacefully confront Trump’s goons, to inhibit their attempts to kidnap our undocumented neighbors, and to demand an immediate end to Trump’s armed occupation of our cities. Teachers, students, and family members who for whatever reason can’t risk missing class or work can join in once they’re free.

Building on viral social media agitation and in-person organizing during the rest of the week, such walkouts and actions have the potential to snowball from one or two schools at first, to a whole school district, to family members and other workers and residents. And once one city shows it’s possible, there’s a good chance this tactic would quickly spread to other cities — a chain reaction similar to the “Fridays for Future” high-school-led climate strikes of 2018-19.

While Freedom Fridays are currently most likely to catch on in response to Trump’s kidnappings and urban invasions, this tactic could be used for any widely and deeply felt issue, including attacks on free speech, essential public services, LGBTQ rights, or voting rights in the South.

No Kings, No Business As Usual

Authoritarian rulers can only survive through the cooperation of key “pillars of support” in society like businesses, schools, the civil service, churches, and the media. That’s why our best bet to defeat the Trump regime is by pressuring such institutions to distance themselves from authoritarianism and to side, explicitly or de facto, with the mass movement for democracy. As scholars of effective anti-authoritarian tactics note, “if these organizations and institutions begin to withdraw their support from your opponent (and some may even start actively supporting your movement), your opponent will no longer be able to maintain control.”

Experience abroad suggests that the most powerful tactic for expressing this type of broad anti-authoritarian alliance is a broad-based general strike — sometimes called a civic shutdown — that includes not only workers, but also supportive local governments, churches, media institutions, professional associations, and even some businesses. Unfortunately, we’re not currently strong enough to launch such a stoppage. Our country’s main institutional pillars are currently bending the knee to Trump, there haven’t been any wildcat strikes from below, and most top union leaders remain exasperatingly risk-averse.

Fortunately, general strikes are not our side’s only powerful tactic. Our best bet might be to launch a concerted organizing campaign culminating in a “No Kings, No Business As Usual” day of action. On a chosen date — probably May 1, 2026 as the May Day Strong coalition is organizing towards — individuals, organizations, and institutions can participate in a wide range of peaceful but disruptive tactics to pressure pillars of support to move away from the Trump regime.

Depending on their risk tolerance, individuals could call in sick to work or school, refuse to shop, hold teach-ins at school or work, go on strike, or join nonviolent civil disobedience and marches with the goal of pulling away as many of Trump’s pillars of support as possible. Businesses could end their widespread collusions with the regime, sign on to pro-democracy pledges, voluntarily close on the day of action, post No Kings posters in their storefronts or on their webpages, or at least choose not to penalize those who walk out or call in sick. School districts could do some combination of school closures, mass teach-ins, and field trips to rallies. And churches and local elected officials could endorse the day of action and help drive turnout.

This wouldn’t be another No Kings one-off weekend march. It’d be far more disruptive, it’d be focused on pressuring pillars of support to break from Trump rather than just protesting in general, and, perhaps most important of all, it’d be based on months of sustained outwards-facing organizing. To build a powerful movement, it’s what happens between actions that’s most pivotal.

A big national launch call with high-profile guests could hype people up and explain the campaign game plan. In the months leading up to the action, everybody — workers, students, consumers, neighbors, congregants — could focus on pressuring key pillars of society to take a stand. We’d generate this pressure primarily through the time-tested heart of good organizing: talking with peers who aren’t yet on board and asking them to take a small action to show their support, like signing a petition to a CEO or showing up at a school board or PTA meeting.

Students would reach out to all their fellow students, workers to their co-workers, renters and home owners to their neighbors, church members to their religious leaders and fellow congregants, and so on. What this looks like on the ground will vary a lot by town and region, but national organizing trainings, distributed organizing structures, and joint tools — petitions, buttons, lawn and storefront signs, etc. — can help break down organizational silos and help generate a cohesive nationwide campaign of unprecedented scale and unity.

Crucially, in the process, we’d have to listen hard to what people outside our progressive bubbles believe, and we’d have to find concrete ways to show how Trump’s authoritarianism hurts ordinary Americans through higher prices, fewer good jobs, and less safety, security, and freedom. For working people on the losing side of pre-Trump politics, it’s not always obvious why they should care that much about preserving the democratic norms of a system that left them in the cold.

To every major American institution, one question will be posed over and over in a friendly but pointed manner: which side are you on, the people or the autocrats? This question would come with teeth, since big companies and other powerful institutions that refuse to take pro-democracy measures by a certain deadline would become disruption targets on the day of action and in its wake.

Though more than a few powerful bodies will refuse at first to break from the regime — many subsequent cycles of outreach and days of nonviolent disruption will surely be needed — a focus on peeling away Trump’s pillars of support is pivotal because ordinary people can see how their actions can realistically make a difference.

Part of what’s made it so hard to move beyond one-off protests against Trump is that we have so little direct leverage over him in between elections. People normally go to rallies, then go home without much to do in between. But it’s not hard for our peers to see how they can pressure employers, companies, churches, media, schools, and the like, including risk-averse unions. Nothing dissipates despair like a clear plan to win with easy, actionable steps for involving millions of ordinary people.

Courage Is Contagious

There’s no guarantee that these proposed campaigns will catch on or succeed. Sometimes even the best-planned tactics fall flat, sometimes even the most heroic movements lose. Resistance is always risky. But at a moment when the Trump administration is wielding a wrecking ball against all our futures, the riskiest option is to do nothing.

Trump wants us to believe he can’t be stopped, because those who believe they’re powerless don’t fight back. Ignore his lies. We can defeat his power grab, and we can build a country where all people, not just the ultra-rich, are able to prosper. Making that future a reality, however, will require a bit more bravery from many more people.

Once large numbers of ordinary Americans dare to flex their collective power, all bets are off. As my mom’s hand-made sign at last Saturday’s No Kings rally put it, “courage is contagious.”

More

• All New Yorkers should join a “Hands Off NYC” kickoff call tomorrow Wednesday October 29 at 7pm to hear how we can nonviolently resist Trump and ICE’s invasion of our city. RSVP here.

• Don’t assume Zohran Mamdani has the mayor’s race in the bag. Helped by a barrage of billionaire-bought attack ads, Cuomo is inching up in the polls and early voting turnout so far has had dangerously low shares of young people. Please sign up here to canvass for Zohran.