As Warren puts it, “Our ultimate goal at Saddleback is to turn an audience into an army.” This is where the Left is weakest. Radical and progressive organizations generally lose most people we bring in and develop only a fraction of the rest into organizers able and willing to recruit those around them.

Survey data shows a dramatic difference between how today’s evangelicals and leftists recruit. Whereas 82% of megachurch attendees first heard of their church via a personal invitation from a co-worker, friend, or family member, the same was true for only 21% of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members. This reliance on media rather than personal invitations is also the norm among progressives in the US and abroad.

What would it take for the Left to turn this around? Many answers can be found in The Purpose Driven Church. More than a collection of organizing tips, it offers a model for how to generate self-reinforcing growth: belonging fosters commitment; commitment opens the door to training; training and responsibility develop leaders; and those leaders bring in new people who repeat the process.

In an era when community is far less likely to arise organically from daily life, moving toward a similarly systematic model is indispensable. Of course, leftists’ opponents are more powerful, and our organizations must be more democratic. But if we’re going to move beyond relying on social media and news headlines to recruit self-selecting, college-educated activists, we need to learn how to consistently develop supporters into leaders and recruiters. Warren’s model offers ten lessons for making that shift.

1. Get smaller to get bigger

“Our church must always be growing larger and smaller at the same time,” Warren likes to say. Each size does a different job. “Large group celebrations give people the feeling that they are a part of something significant.” Small groups, on the other hand, “are perfect for creating a sense of intimacy and close fellowship. It’s there that everybody knows your name. When you are absent, people notice.”

At Saddleback, small groups consist of about a dozen people who meet weekly to collectively study, volunteer, break bread, and lend support to each other. They meet in homes because homes are free, relaxed, quicker to get to in sprawled-out Orange County, and “infinitely expandable.” Volunteer leaders run the small groups, with trained lay pastors overseeing group clusters.

Warren warns that when church is all lecture (“Sit still while I instill”), people can attend for a year without making a friend. He urges including some relational activity in every gathering and swears by weekend retreats: “The amount of time a person spends with other members at a single forty-eight-hour retreat is greater than the time they will spend together on Sundays over a year.”

Behind all this is a simple finding about why people stay. As Warren writes, “Relationships are the glue that holds a church together.” National surveys find that about 40-60% of megachurch Sunday attendees participate in at least one small group.

Apart from strong union organizing committees, most of our organizations have no equivalent to evangelicals’ weekly small groups or the Belgian Workers’ Party’s analogous groupes de base.

2. Build a robust ladder of commitment

Warren explains that people sit at different levels of commitment and that an organization’s job is to move them up the ladder, step by step. Saddleback pictured this as five concentric circles, with the following mid-1990s figures:

• Community: 31,000 people who had visited at least four times in a year

• Crowd: 10,000 regular weekend attenders

• Congregation: 5,000 official members

• Committed: 3,500 members who had signed a covenant to pray daily, tithe, and join a small group

• Core: 1,500 lay ministers who ran the church’s work

The point is to systematically move them inward. “A crowd is not a church—but a crowd can be turned into a church,” he writes. And the process doesn’t end at the center: “What happens when people finally get to the core? We move them back out into the community for ministry!”

To make the ladder concrete, Saddleback used a baseball diamond. At each base, newcomers completed a class and signed a covenant: membership (101), maturity (201), ministry (301), and evangelism (401).

In most churches, members stall halfway around. To avoid this, Warren insists that the organization, not just the newcomer, is responsible for making the climb happen. “Many churches mistakenly assume that once a person has received Christ, the sale has been consummated, and it is now up to the new believer to follow through with his commitment and join the church. This is nonsense.” Instead, “It is the church’s responsibility to take the initiative in assimilating new people into the congregation.”

Many progressive and leftist chapters have some form of ladder of engagement, but few groups have made it anywhere near as visible and systematic as Saddleback. Too often, the ladder collapses into two rungs: a mass event (a rally, a canvass shift, an email list) and a small, burnt-out staff or volunteer cadre who do everything else, with few clearly laid-out steps in between.

As exciting as it is that DSA is now 130,000 strong, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that roughly two-thirds of members who joined during our first big surge after 2016 left within five years and that almost half of all former members left after just one year. As was explained earlier this year in Democratic Left, “overall, member retention rates are basically unchanged since 2020.” Imagine, instead, a clear path from event attendee to dues-paying member to small-group member to trained organizer who recruits others, with a short class and a clear commitment at each step. And not just in big electoral campaigns, but year-round.

3. Instill ideology via organizing

Megachurches are often dismissed as superficial spectacles consisting of little more than charismatic preachers, self-help fluff, and smart marketing techniques. That’s true enough for some fringe Prosperity Gospel-type churches, but such a critique misses the mark when it comes to Warren’s theory or Saddleback’s practice.

Community and appealing services help get people in the door, but ideology is also indispensable to the model, especially because it inspires the conviction needed to sustain members’ commitment. “No one stays with a difficult task unless they are convinced there is a good reason for doing so,” he notes. During Saddleback’s early years, when volunteers had to set up and tear down everything each Sunday, Warren found himself exhausted, lugging equipment after half the crew failed to show. His lesson: “You must know why you do what you do or else you’ll be defeated by discouragement.”

But Warren didn’t rely on sermons to spread conviction. “Conviction is contagious: People acquire it by being around other people who have it.” Proximity to conviction, Warren notes, is a major reason Saddleback emphasizes small groups.

Nor does Warren think recruitment can depend on big ideas alone; immediate needs are normally the main motivating factor: “While most unbelievers aren’t looking for truth, they are looking for relief. This gives us the opportunity to interest them in truth.” Once people were inside, Saddleback emphasized systematic ideological education, offering nine-month Bible study courses and a theology course covering twelve foundational Christian doctrines, taught twice weekly over twenty-seven weeks.

Progressive activists feel strongly about many issues, but often lack an overarching way to make sense of the world and give meaning to individuals’ efforts within it. Socialists do have such an ideology — and a mass membership organization through which to cultivate it. But unlike the relatively small, self-selecting, college-educated layer currently drawn to DSA and progressive causes, most people won’t be attracted by ideas alone.

As with churches, the initial draw for millions of working people will be relief from immediate problems. Once people join an organization, form relationships, and take on meaningful responsibilities, their convictions and views can deepen. Yet too many liberals and radicals remain captive to a particularly college-educated faith in the transformative power of ideas alone. Organizing normally requires a different sequence: bringing people together around immediate needs, deepening their convictions through participation, and helping them expand their understanding through collective study.

4. Ask for big commitments

Many activists assume that asking too much will scare people off, but Warren argues the opposite is often the case. “I’ve discovered that challenging people to a serious commitment actually attracts people rather than repels them,” he writes. The reason is that people are hungry for meaning: “Many unbelievers are fed up and bored with what the world offers. They are looking for something greater than themselves, something worth giving their lives to.”

Not everybody can make big commitments; some will stay in the crowd, and that’s fine. But if you don’t regularly make big asks, you don’t provide others with the opportunity to step up.

Apart from a few fringe sects, most American Left and progressive organizations set a low bar for formal entry (though their insider culture often undermines mass recruitment and retention) but rarely help members take on more. Warren’s approach shows how to pair big asks with manageable steps. Saddleback’s maturity covenant, renewed annually, asked for three concrete habits (a daily devotional time, a tithe of 10 percent of income, and weekly small-group attendance), and members carried laminated covenant cards in their wallets.

This approach has financial implications. Whereas the vast majority of the nonprofit industrial complex is funded by wealthy foundations, 91% of the annual income of megachurches comes from tithes and dues. If your organization can’t rely on self-funding from below, that should raise major red flags about whether you are building meaningful stakes and ownership.

Warren observes that membership in many organizations and churches today is thin to the point of being almost meaningless. He tells of preaching at one church that “had over a thousand members on its roll but had less than two hundred people attending services! What is the value of having that kind of membership?”

Saddleback took the opposite approach. To join, you had to take Class 101, a four-hour class taught in a single day, with a quiz at the end on the church’s purposes. Then you signed a membership covenant, which included a pledge to invite the unchurched and to welcome visitors. Warren explains the logic: “I believe the most important class in a church is the membership class because it sets the tone and expectation level for everything else that follows. The very best time to elicit a strong commitment from your members is at the moment they join. If little is required to join, very little can be expected from your members later on.”

Membership also came with warmth. For years, Warren and his wife hosted a monthly “Pastor’s Chat” for new members and visitors in their home, and older members paid for the meals at quarterly banquets for new members. His test of whether assimilation is working is a nice one for any organization: “The community talks about ‘that church,’ the crowd talks about ‘this church,’ but the congregation talks about ‘our church.’ Members have a sense of ownership. They are contributors, not just consumers.”

Warren cites a Gallup finding that only 10 percent of church members were active in any ministry (i.e., volunteering within the church or through its community service). He adds that the “encouraging news that Gallup uncovered is this: 40 percent of all members have expressed an interest in having a ministry, but they have never been asked or they don’t know how. This group is an untapped gold mine!”

Warren learned this the hard way. In Saddleback’s early years, he and his wife Kay did nearly everything: setting up, taking down, printing bulletins, cleaning bathrooms, storing equipment in their garage. After a few years, he was burning out. So, at a midweek service, he confessed that he couldn’t do it all and offered the congregation a trade. “I’ll make you a deal. If you agree to do the ministry of this church, I’ll make sure you’re well fed!” Delegating responsibility worked. “After making this decision, Saddleback exploded with growth.” Today, 30% of megachurch members volunteer regularly.

Once people step up, trust them. “At Saddleback, the implementers are the decision makers. The people who do the ministry get to make their own decisions about that ministry. We do not separate authority from responsibility, but trust people with both.”

His favorite example: “One time a woman came to me and said, ‘We need a prayer ministry.’ I said, ‘I agree! You’re it!’” She asked whether she needed to be elected or approved first. He told her to just announce a meeting in the bulletin and start it. As he puts it, “You bring out the best in people by giving them a challenge, giving them control, and giving them the credit.”

Delegation and decision-making are trickier in democratic unions and political organizations, where individual initiative should remain consistent with agreed-upon goals. But within that framework, scaling up depends largely on empowering members to take on work and leadership responsibilities. As with all the lessons laid out here, we should experiment and see what works.

5. Treat organizing as a skill

Warren rejects the idea that dedication is enough to grow, writing that “it takes more than dedication to lead a church to grow; it takes skill.” He even goes after prayer: “Somebody needs to boldly state the obvious: Prayer alone will not grow a church. Some of the greatest prayer warriors I know are pastors and members of dying churches.”

So Saddleback trained people constantly. Members attended one-day Life Skills Seminars covering specific skills, including how to get along with other people. “People must be taught how to develop relationships. Although this seems obvious, very few churches take time to teach their members how to relate to each other.” And Warren warns leaders never to demand something without showing people how to do it: “Exhortation without explanation leads to frustration.”

The Left has its own versions of “just pray harder.” One is “just stick with it, things will eventually turn around.” Another is “just have the right politics.” Dedication matters, and organizational solutions can’t solve bad politics. But especially in our hyper-atomized society, organizing is a skill that must be learned, and even building relationships requires deliberate cultivation. The best unions already treat organizing this way, with regular trainings and mentoring that follow a learn-one, do-one, teach-one model. But beyond such progressive pockets, sustained training is rare.

It’s hard to see how the Left could recruit widely beyond self-selecting college-educated radicals until we give our members the skills and confidence to actively recruit their neighbors and until we make our organizations more welcoming, as laid out in Part One and in the work of Hahrie Han. A 2021 national survey shows that over 80% of DSA members have a bachelor’s degree or higher—compared with 44% of nondenominational evangelicals.

6. Focus on external work

“Jesus did not say, ‘I have come that you might have meetings.’” Warren argues that the average church would be healthier if it cut half its meetings, since “[o]ne of the reasons church members don’t witness to their neighbors is because they don’t know them! They are always at church, attending meetings.” People’s time is scarce. So if a member offered four hours a week, “the last thing I would do would be to put him on some committee.”

Saddleback had no committees at all, relying instead on seventy-nine lay ministries. “Committees discuss it, but ministries do it.” Warren also notes who complains the most: “In a war, you always find the highest morale and sense of camaraderie among those serving on the front line. … The biggest complainers in any church are usually committee members with nothing else to do.”

Milwaukee’s “sewer socialist” leader Victor Berger made the same observation a century ago: “when people are constantly absorbed in doing things, and in preparing for still greater things, the petty jealousies and small causes for strife and dissension disappear.” Leftists should try to focus as much of our energy as possible on external work, not interminable factionalism and internal bureaucracy. Focusing outward, however, is challenging not just because democratic deliberation is essential, but because many of us prefer talking to each other, which is more comfortable than going out and trying to win over skeptics.

7. Combat individualism

Warren is blunt about the cultural enemy: “Our culture’s preoccupation with individualism and independence must be replaced with the biblical concepts of interdependence and mutuality.” And he admits that changing this is hard: “Believe me, it is an incredibly difficult task to lead people from self-centered consumerism to being servant-hearted Christians.”

Warren defines fellowship as mutual obligation: “In our church we define koinonia (fellowship) as ‘being as committed to each other as we are to Jesus Christ.’”

Leftist theory agrees that none of us are islands. But too often, we don’t build that belief into our culture. Instead, we often reproduce individualism by focusing on online posting and self-expression over pragmatically building collective power. Putting organization and collective goals ahead of individual egos and moral self-satisfaction should become our cultural norm.

8. Put your money where your mission is

“The way we spend our time and the way we spend our money show what is really important to us, regardless of what we claim to believe,” writes Warren. This principle was evident from the start: before Saddleback’s first service, members of his tiny Bible study went about $6,500 into debt on their personal credit cards to pay for outreach. Warren describes the spending as an investment and warns that “[w]hen finances get tight in a church, often the first thing cut is the evangelism and advertising budget. That is the last thing you should cut. It is the source of new blood and life for your church.”

On the Left, how much money goes to reaching new people, and how much goes to maintaining existing operations? Solid numbers are hard to come by, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of nonprofit and progressive funding goes toward external growth. And the labor movement certainly fails this test badly. Unions are sitting on over $35 billion in assets, yet most spend only a small share of their budgets on organizing the unorganized.

9. Develop strong leaders

Warren is a big believer in strong leadership. “The most critical factor in a new ministry isn’t the idea, but the leadership,” he writes. In 1979, as a seminary student, he surveyed the 100 largest churches in America and found that many had long-serving pastors. For Warren, the lesson was that leadership continuity allows people to build the trust and relationships needed for lasting growth. But he also emphasizes that “healthy churches are built on a process, not on personalities.”

Much of the Left is still averse to leadership, or at least to strong leaders. That’s a mistake. We need to identify, develop, and empower people with the experience and skills to guide large numbers of people through struggle. And one of the most important tasks of strong leaders is to develop new leaders at all levels.

Of course, there are dangers: leaders can ossify or become detached from the membership. But the answer is robust democratic accountability, not a culture of horizontalism or musical chairs at the top.

10. Test, measure, and adjust

Warren’s most important lesson may be his method. Saddleback treated retention and development with the same experimental spirit it applied to recruitment. Every month, the staff reviewed a six-page “Saddleback Snapshot” tracking how many people sat on each rung of the ladder. “The Snapshot forces us to take an honest look each month at how well our church is fulfilling its purposes. Bottlenecks in the system become easy to spot.”

Saddleback also ran three continuous feedback loops: first-impression cards from visitors, feedback cards from regular attenders (processing them took two full-time secretaries and a dozen volunteers), and staff evaluation sheets covering everything from parking to the sermon. Warren compares this to NFL players reviewing game film every Monday. “Growing churches should always be asking, ‘How can we do it better?’ They are ruthless in evaluating their services and ministries.”

He’s equally skeptical of easy success stories. “Anytime you hear a pastor attribute the growth of his church to one single factor, realize that he is either oversimplifying what has occurred, or he may not be recognizing the real reason his church is growing.”

Saddleback was also part of a much larger ecosystem of learning. The Church Growth Movement, built on the research of Donald McGavran and others, spent decades studying what made congregations grow or die. Over the years, countless pastors have compared notes at seminars, and hundreds of reports have been published detailing what’s working and what’s not. Beyond exchanging lessons, evangelical networks and denominations raised funds, trained organizers, and provided seed funding to launch new churches and initiatives.

In Left organizations, by contrast, we tend to cherry-pick our wins, blame our losses on external factors, avoid honest postmortems, and stick with siloed routines instead of scaling up successful initiatives. If we want to build durable mass organizations, that should change.

Our Challenge

None of this means copying evangelical churches wholesale. Not every practice will work for us, especially since Left organizations should operate democratically and confront oligarchic power.

Rebuilding connection and purpose in atomized America ultimately requires challenging big business, whose increased dominance over our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our political system has left us alienated and alone. But taking on that power requires structures that can do more than recruit the already convinced: they must build lasting relationships among disconnected people, develop them into organizers, and equip them to recruit and lead others.

Three decades ago, evangelicals figured out how to build community in a disconnected society. Our challenge is to turn community-building into the collective power to change society itself.

Co-published with What’s Going On?

You can read Pt. 1 of this series here.

More

• If you’re in NYC, please come to this rally tomorrow (Thursday 10/22) at noon to support nurse practitioner Sarah Dowd, who is facing vicious retaliation from management for her workplace activism.

  

• NYC friends, please join me and many lovely comrades tomorrow (Thursday 10/22) in Queens to support the socialist takeover of Providence, RI — one of the most exciting developments in the country. RSVP here.

  

Warren founded Saddleback Church in suburban Orange County in 1980, starting with a Bible study in his home. Fifteen years later, more than 10,000 people were attending its services each weekend, and Saddleback had planted twenty-six other churches. The Purpose Driven Church was Warren’s attempt to explain how he’d done it, so that other pastors could do the same. It became a founding manual of “seeker-sensitive” evangelicalism, which designs churches around the people who don’t yet attend one. By 2004, Warren’s book had sold more than a million copies, and it has since been translated into over thirty languages.

Evangelical megachurches are among the few American membership institutions to grow during the past half-century of community collapse. Just compare the growth of evangelical megachurch weekly participation since 1970 to the decline in yearly attendance at union meetings.

Roughly three decades ago, evangelicals like Warren systematized and scaled up organizing for our atomized era. The Left, by contrast, is still searching for a model. With a few partial exceptions, contemporary American liberals and radicals haven’t yet figured out how to build durable membership organizations capable of recruiting, retaining, and developing large numbers of people, beyond a small core of paid staff or self-selecting activists. We’re good at big moments like marches, viral campaigns, rallies, and the occasional electoral upset. We’re much worse at turning those moments into organizations that last—and grow.

Warren’s book is a field manual, born from relentless trial and error, full of specific tips about greeters, parking spots, name tags, surveys, and membership classes. “Like a research and development center, we’ve experimented with all kinds of approaches to reaching, teaching, training, and sending out God’s people,” Warren notes.

Of course, there are significant ideological differences between today’s evangelical churches and Left organizations; we face distinct structural challenges to succeed, and our organizations require a higher level of deliberative democracy. But what’s striking about Warren’s book is how familiar the problems he discusses are to our movements—and how useful his solutions are. Good labor and community organizers already use some of the following practices, but none of our organizations in the U.S. bring all of them together, much less as systematically as evangelicals. Those who doubt that we can replicate something like Warren’s systematic model need only look abroad to examples like the Belgian Workers’ Party, which has leaned on similar methods to build thick organization in our socially thin era.

Part 1 looks at what Warren teaches about recruitment. Part 2, which I’ll publish next week, turns to what happens once they’re inside the door: how to retain and develop members to build an increasingly robust organizing machine.

Here, then, are The Purpose Driven Church’s top 14 recruitment lessons for the Left.

1. Build the belonging that used to grow organically

Warren’s starting point was that the old social glue was gone. For generations, churches (like unions and political parties) could count on people showing up out of habit and social pressure, since neighborhood communities were so tightly knit. “Instead, membership is now an act of commitment,” he writes.

Organizing in hyper-sprawled Southern California, Warren saw that Americans had become mobile, lonely, isolated, and easily distracted by screens. “We’re experiencing an epidemic of loneliness in society,” he warns. But rather than simply mourn this, he spotted an opening: “This ‘longing for belonging’ provides the church with a timely opportunity. Positioning the church as an extended family, as ‘a place where you are cared for,’ will strike a sensitive chord in many lonely hearts.”

Evangelicals like Warren grasped the organizing consequences of community collapse long before the Left did. Much of the progressive movement and the Left still organize as if community already exists and just needs to be mobilized or represented. In today’s atomized conditions, Warren convincingly explains, belonging has to be built deliberately, by design.

2. Let people belong before they believe

Belonging before belief is one of the core strategic insights of the seeker-sensitive evangelical movement. Warren’s approach starts from a fishing metaphor. “If your church is serious about reaching the unchurched, you must be willing to put up with people who have a lot of problems. Fishing is often messy and smelly. Many churches want the fish they catch to be already scaled, gutted, cleaned, and cooked. That is why they never reach anyone.”

At Saddleback, newcomers were invited to “Come and see!” and weren’t expected to have their lives in order. “At Saddleback Church we do not expect unbelievers to act like believers until they are.” Warren would “rather have a southern California pagan attend our crowd service in shorts and a Budweiser® T-shirt than stay home or go to the beach.” He writes that he lost count of the unmarried couples who started attending while living together and then asked him to marry them once they converted; one pair had been living together for seventeen years.

Nor did Warren care much why people first walked in the door. “It doesn’t matter why people initially come to Jesus, what matters is that they come. He can work on their motives, values, and priorities once they enter his presence.”

While seeker-sensitive evangelicals let people belong before they believe, liberals and leftists tend to ask people to believe before they belong.

This has major organizational repercussions. Warren sets a low bar at the door and a high bar for membership at the same time. “We expect very little from the seeker who is investigating the claims of Christ. … On the other hand, we require a major commitment from those who want to join our church.”

Most of our organizations do the reverse. The bar at the door is high: you’re expected to know the right vocabulary and hold the right positions. Yet the bar for engagement is actually quite low: click a button, sign up for an email list, or, at most, pay modest dues. Nothing else is expected of you.

3. Study your terrain

Warren repeatedly warns readers not to copy him. “To artificially plant a Saddleback clone in a different environment is a formula for failure,” he writes. “Even I wouldn’t do everything we do at Saddleback if I were in another part of the country. You must figure out what works best to reach seekers in your local context.” It’s a method, not a formula.

Before holding a single service, Warren spent twelve weeks going door-to-door with five survey questions, starting with “What do you think is the greatest need in this area?” Reflecting on the responses he received to the question “If you were to look for a church to attend, what kind of things would you look for?” he recalls: “This single question taught me more about thinking like an unbeliever than my entire seminary training.”

What he heard became Saddleback’s blueprint. Locals said sermons were boring, members were cliquish, churches only wanted their money, and the childcare was bad. So Warren rebuilt his preaching, trained greeters, announced every week that visitors weren’t expected to give money, and published strict childcare guidelines.

Organizers know this as a listening campaign. The best unions do it before they pick their fights. But most activist groups decide their positions and messaging first, and only then go looking for an audience. Warren’s rule is blunt: “No book or demographic report can replace actually talking with the people in your community.” Asking questions is not just how you find out more; it’s also one of the best ways to get people to eventually open up to whatever you might have to offer. As Warren puts it, “I’ve learned that most people can’t hear until they’ve first been heard.”

4. Treat recruitment as a science

Unlike much of the Left, Warren realized that just being “right” would not automatically translate into effective recruitment. Getting people through the door had to be treated like a science, full of experiments, rigorous assessments, and readjustments.

Warren is refreshingly honest about how much failed. “The truth is, we’ve tried more things that didn’t work at Saddleback than did. We’ve never been afraid of failure; we just call everything an ‘experiment.’” He jokes that he could write another book called 1000 Ways to NOT Grow a Church.

The Purpose Driven Church is mercilessly critical of self-flattering metrics. Warren recalls a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown is practicing archery. “Instead of aiming at a target, he would shoot an arrow at his fence and then walk over and draw a target around wherever the arrow stuck.” Too many churches, he says, do the same: “We just draw a bull’s-eye around whomever we reach and settle for that.”

Nonprofits and Left organizations do this constantly. Instead of questioning our priors, we declare success no matter what, based on whoever happened to show up. And we often count activity (doors knocked, emails sent, events held) or political righteousness instead of results. Warren insists on judging growth relative to what’s ambitiously possible: “To be realistic, you need to focus on the percentage of population being reached, not the actual numbers.”

Above all, Warren refuses to let being correct serve as an excuse for being ineffective. He mocks congregations that treat their marginality as a badge of honor: “Some churches point to their lack of a crowd as proof that they are biblical, orthodox, or Spirit-filled.” Anyone who has spent time in small activist circles will recognize the type.

5. Win hearts, not just heads

Warren, a Southern Baptist preacher who believes in biblical truth, is emphatic that arguments aren’t what win people over. “More people are won to Christ by feeling God’s presence than by all of our apologetic arguments combined. Few people, if any, are converted to Christ on purely intellectual grounds.”

His biggest regret from his church’s early years was not taking this seriously enough. “In the first years of Saddleback, I made the mistake of underestimating the power of music so I minimized the use of music in our services.” Why does it matter so much? “A song can often touch people in a way that a sermon can’t. Music can bypass intellectual barriers and take the message straight to the heart.”

True to form, Warren figured out what music to play by asking people. He handed out 3x5 cards at a service and asked everyone to write down the call letters of the radio station they listened to. Saddleback soon stopped singing hymns in its services oriented to newcomers, and within a year attendance took off. The press took to calling it “the flock that likes to rock.” Warren admits the switch cost him hundreds of potential members, but he says it won thousands more.

“Too many church services resemble a funeral more than a festival,” he writes. On the Left, too many of our meetings resemble a graduate seminar or a wake. It wasn’t always this way: the labor and civil rights movements sang, socialized, and celebrated. Zohran’s campaign and NYC DSA soccer leagues have offered glimpses of that tradition’s revival. The challenge now is to make participatory joy the norm, not the exception.

6. Think like an outsider

“The problem is, the longer you are a believer, the less you think like an unbeliever.” Warren saw two reasons for this. First, insiders stop spending time with outsiders. “One of the greatest barriers to evangelism is that most believers spend all their time with other Christians. They don’t have any non-believing friends. If you don’t spend any time with unbelievers, you won’t understand what they’re thinking.” Second, they start talking in code. Of such pastors, Warren quips: “Every Sunday they speak in an unknown tongue without being charismatic!”

Warren warns against “developing such a close-knit fellowship that newcomers are afraid or unable to break into it.” He adds that “[t]he problem with most small churches is that they are all core and nothing else. The same fifty people come to everything the church does.” Whether in church or on the Left, tight bonds are good; tight bonds that nobody new can penetrate are fatal.

It’s easy for insiders to conclude that outsiders just aren’t interested, but what Warren saw in the survey results suggested otherwise. None of the complaints were theological, and he didn’t meet many who said they skipped church because they didn’t believe in God. “Most of the unchurched aren’t atheists: They are misinformed, turned off, or too busy.” His conclusion: “Churches need to stop saying people are closed to the Gospel and start finding out how to communicate on the unbeliever’s wavelength.”

All of this translates directly. Progressive and Left activists often have few apolitical friends, our rhetoric is thick with jargon, and when our efforts fall flat, we’re tempted to blame external conditions or the people we failed to reach. “They’re just not yet ready for our message,” we tell ourselves. “They’ll come around eventually.” But what if the problem is our less-than-effective organizing?

7. Orient to the unorganized

From day one, Warren focused on what we in the labor movement call organizing the unorganized. In his membership class, Warren told transfers from other churches bluntly that “if all you intend to do is attend services, we’d rather save your seat for someone who is an unbeliever.” Being a member of Saddleback meant you were expected to spread the gospel.

Ten days before Saddleback’s first Easter service in 1980, Warren and his tiny group hand-addressed and hand-stamped 15,000 invitation letters to local homes. The letter opened: “AT LAST! A new church designed for those who’ve given up on traditional church services!” It didn’t mention Jesus or the Bible, and this didn’t go over well with the faithful: “In fact, all of the critical and angry letters I received in response to this first letter came from Christians who questioned why I had not mentioned Jesus or the Bible.” Some even questioned whether Warren himself was saved.

But 205 people showed up for that first service, and eighty-two of them converted over the next ten weeks. Warren’s takeaway: “You have to decide who you want to impress.”

Leftists face the same choice, and we usually choose wrong. Progressive organizations and nonprofits spend much of their time building coalitions with other existing organizations, most of which are similarly small and/or staff-heavy. Socialist groups tend to orient toward the small existing milieus of the already radicalized, and we struggle to recruit broadly, in part because we’re so focused on looking over our left shoulder.

The overwhelming majority of Americans of all racial backgrounds remain unorganized. We have to decide whether our main concern is recruiting those millions or orienting to the thousands of existing leftists and nonprofits.

8. Love the people you’re trying to organize

For Warren, the most important ingredient in church growth isn’t a technique at all. “Loving unbelievers the way Jesus did is the most overlooked key to growing a church. Without his passion for the lost, we will be unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to reach them.” Recalling what new converts told him had drawn them to Saddleback, Warren writes, “I’ve never had anyone say, ‘It was because of the Reformation theology you believe’ … Instead, the most common response was, ‘I felt an incredible spirit of love toward me that drew me in.’” The catch is that it’s easy to love those who already come week after week. “Of course, every congregation thinks their church is loving. That’s because the people who think it is unloving aren’t there!”

At Saddleback, love for unbelievers was measured above all in the consistent focus placed on bringing in new people. But it also took the form of small sacrifices made for newcomers. Members stood through packed services so visitors could sit. On cold days in the church’s tent, they offered visitors their coats.

Progressives and leftists often profess love for the marginalized and the working class in the abstract. Actual people, however, are another matter. Those who disagree with us too often face condescension or outright contempt. People can feel that from a mile away, just as Warren’s visitors could tell whether a church wanted them. In Warren’s words, “There is no method, no program, and no technology that can make up for a lack of love for unbelievers.”

The uncomfortable truth behind many nonprofits and socialist organizations is the one Warren saw in small churches: on some unconscious level, we don’t want a crowd—or at least we don’t want it enough to shake up our routines and assumptions. A tight circle of the already convinced is comfortable, as is being a big fish in a small sea.

9. Make every member a recruiter

For Warren, growth ran through members’ own relationships. “The fruit of a believer is another believer,” he writes. Saddleback needed advertising only at the start. “Today, with thousands of members inviting friends to our church, advertising is unnecessary.”

Warren offers a simple metric: a church should have at least 25 percent more regular attenders than members. If it doesn’t, “it means almost no one in your church is inviting unbelievers to come with them.” At Saddleback, twice as many people attended as were members. And if members don’t bring friends, that should worry leaders: “If most of our members never invite anyone to come to our church, what are they saying (by their actions) about the quality of what our church offers?” Very few liberal or Left groups even track whether their members are bringing anybody in.

Warren is just as clear about what doesn’t bring in newcomers: “By making members feel guilty for not inviting friends? No. By putting up a big sign that says ‘Visitors Welcome’? No. By cold-calling on homes in your community? Probably not.”

That last line should give us pause. Even a big success like Zohran’s campaign relied mostly on volunteers knocking on the doors of strangers, rather than recruiting their coworkers, neighbors, or fellow congregants. Knocking on strangers’ doors can win an election. It’s a much weaker way to build a deep, lasting organization.

10. Build a front door for newcomers

As a kid, Warren would sometimes bring non-Christian friends to his father’s church. Inevitably, that would be the Sunday his dad preached on tithing or a visiting missionary showed slides. Eventually he gave up inviting anyone: “I wouldn’t think of inviting my unchurched friends from the office because the service wouldn’t make any sense to them. The messages are for me, the songs are for me, the prayers are prayed in terms I understand, and even the announcements are for me.”

The root problem, Warren explains, is that “[i]n every church there is constant tension between the concepts of ‘service’ and ‘serve-us.’ Most churches end up tipping the scales toward meeting members’ needs because the members pay the bills.” His solution: “Create a service that is intentionally designed for your members to bring their friends to.” Saddleback’s weekend services were built for newcomers, while a separate midweek service fed the committed. He also urges churches to keep their internal business far away from visitors.

Many of our organizations don’t have a front door at all. There’s often no regular, in-person gathering designed for visitors, and very little serious onboarding. A newcomer’s first experience is often a digital mass call where they make no human connections, or a general meeting run for insiders: committee reports, points of order, or faction fights over resolutions they’ve never heard of. That’s a believers’ service, being used as a seeker service. No wonder that so many never come back—or that so few of our members are inclined to invite their friends, family, and neighbors to join in.

11. Engineer warmth, don’t assume it

Warren knew that warmth doesn’t happen by accident: “While some relationships will spontaneously develop, the friendship factor in assimilation is too crucial to leave to chance. You can’t just hope members will make friends in the church. You must encourage it, plan for it, structure for it, and facilitate it.”

So Saddleback engineered it. The best parking spots were reserved for visitors, and pastors and staff parked on the dirt. There were four distinct types of welcome ministers: parking attendants, greeters, hosts, and ushers. Greeters wore no badges, so newcomers would feel welcomed by friendly members rather than officials. Warren made flashcards to memorize names and knew everyone in his church by name until the church grew past about 3,000 people.

My favorite of Warren’s practices is the simplest. “In the early years of Saddleback, the members practiced what we called the ‘three-minute rule.’ We all agreed that for the first three minutes after the service was over, members would talk only to people they’d never met.”

And Saddleback measured whether it was working. Every first-time visitor got a postcard asking what they noticed first, liked best, and liked least. Nearly 90 percent said the first thing they noticed was the warmth and friendliness of the people. “That response is not an accident. It is the result of an intentional strategy to express love to visitors in a manner that they can comprehend.”

But a warm welcome at a big event is not enough for people to belong. Getting newcomers into small groups of about a dozen people that meet up weekly is what keeps them. At Saddleback, such groups brought members together, usually at someone’s home (and often with good food), to study the Bible, forge friendships, support one another, and work on shared projects. “We tell people, ‘You won’t really feel a part of this church family until you join a small group.’” And it paid off. “Small groups are the most effective way of closing the back door of your church. We never worry about losing people who are connected to a small group.”

12. Offer good news

“A lot of preaching is what I call ‘Ain’t it awful!’ preaching. It just complains about our society and makes judgments about people in general. It is long on diagnosis and short on remedy.” Sound familiar? Warren’s point is that people already know things are bad. “They are looking for solutions, not a scolding.” That’s why, he argues, “What people need today are fewer ‘ought-to’ sermons and more ‘how-to’ sermons.”

Much of the Left specializes in “Ain’t it awful!” politics: doom-posting, moralizing, and endless exposés of how terrible things are. Though diagnosis matters, people join organizations that offer hope and a practical path forward.

This positive vision also shapes how you motivate members. “Never use guilt or pressure to motivate people for ministry. It’s vision that motivates; guilt and pressure only discourage people.” The same goes for money. Warren notes that “people give to vision, not to need,” and concludes that “Churches with money problems often actually have a vision problem.” As Warren puts it, “People want to join a church that knows where it’s going.”

13. Repeat your most important points

Routine, repetition, and ritual are how we absorb important truths. Referencing the Book of Nehemiah, Warren coined what he calls the Nehemiah Principle: “Vision and purpose must be restated every twenty-six days to keep the church moving in the right direction.”

Saddleback repeated its five purposes everywhere: in every membership class, on banners and brochures, and in songs. They were even etched into the glass of the worship center’s foyer. Warren preached the same “state of the church” sermon every January, updating only the illustrations. “Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself, because nobody gets it the first time. I call repeating things over and over in fresh ways ‘creative redundancy.’” He also invested in catchy phrases like “Every member is a minister,” reasoning that “Slogans, maxims, mottoes, and pithy phrases are remembered long after sermons are forgotten.”

14. Build structures that last

Warren closes his recruitment case with a tale of two preachers. George Whitefield preached over 18,000 sermons, once addressed nearly 100,000 people near Glasgow, and helped spark the Great Awakening in the 1730s. But “Whitefield often left his converts without any organization so the results of his work were of short duration. Today, very few Christians would recognize George Whitefield’s name.” John Wesley preached to huge crowds, too. “But Wesley was also an organizer. He created an organizational structure to fulfill his purpose that far outlasted his lifetime.” That structure is called the Methodist church.

The lesson: “For any renewal to last in a church, there must be a structure to nurture and support it.”

The American Left has been in its Whitefield era for a generation. Since the giant protests against the Iraq War in 2003, we’ve seen one ephemeral explosion after another: the immigrant rights marches of 2006, Occupy, the Women’s March, the 2020 uprising after George Floyd’s murder. Each drew millions. Few built or strengthened lasting institutional power.

Warren saw where that road leads. “If you don’t have a system and a structure to assimilate and keep the people you reach, they won’t stay with your church. You’ll have as many people going out the back door of your church as are coming in the front door.”

The deeper lesson is that recruitment is not a one-way funnel but a cycle: recruit, assimilate, develop, deploy, recruit again. The people who come through the front door have to be absorbed into relationships, developed into committed members, and given meaningful work. Then they become the people bringing in and building the next wave. That’s how to turn growth into self-sustaining growth. And it’s where Part 2—on developing an organizing machine—begins.

[Co-published with What’s Going On?]

You can read Pt. 2 of this series here

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• Please check out, and share, this important article from Andrea Dehlendorf on AI employee organizing!

• RSVP here for a webinar this Friday October 16th on how unions can defend immigrants, hosted by the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).

Defeats become deeper and more prolonged when we misunderstand what caused them, avoid correcting course, and embrace “solutions” that only compound our mistakes. Lula’s government and the Brazilian left suffered a disaster in Sunday’s first round presidential election. Contrary to every poll, the president finished the first round 2.2 million votes behind Flávio Bolsonaro—and, more significantly, 3.4 million votes below his total four years ago, when the machinery of the state was working against him and in favor of his opponent. His vote share declined in 98 percent of Brazil’s municipalities.

The PL, the main party of the far right, elected 121 deputies and 28 senators, becoming the largest caucus in both houses of Congress. The parties aligned with the Centrão—Brazil’s bloc of transactional center-right parties—were somewhat diminished, but will still hold roughly 250 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 35 in the Senate. That will make it easier to assemble the majorities needed to amend the Constitution or impeach Supreme Federal Court justices. If elected, Flávio Bolsonaro could appoint four members of the Court, substantially altering its internal balance of power.

What produced these results? How can the far right be prevented from consolidating them into a prolonged political hegemony? And what is the essential change of direction the left now needs?

Explaining the Disaster

Across the commercial media and the exuberant chaos of digital platforms, interpretations are multiplying. Some focus on specific episodes: Lula’s absence from the Globo debate, his very close relationship with Alexandre de Moraes, or his emphasis on issues supposedly remote from most people’s everyday concerns, such as rare earth minerals.

Among the more systemic interpretations, three seem especially questionable.

One argues that the principal defeat was not the left’s, since its congressional representation declined only slightly. The decisive movement captured at the ballot box, according to this view, was a shift within the right itself—from the more moderate and transactional forces of the Centrão toward the more ideological and radicalized forces of the PL and Novo.

A second interpretation holds that the nature of electoral and political processes has changed. The material interests and aspirations of society, it argues, no longer play the central role they once did; they have given way to forms of subjective self-identification that the left has yet to understand.

And a third concludes that, because of these two developments, we should expect a political winter: a prolonged period in which the far right and the broader right dominate Brazilian political life.

There are important elements in all three interpretations. The problem lies in what they deny or leave out: Lula’s third government was a small-bore government. It offered the majorities that elected it neither a clearly better life nor reasons to believe again in politics and its power to transform society.

These failures flowed from two fatal accommodations, which I will examine below. As a result, the government suffered a slow but steady erosion of support. And, as has happened in so many Western countries, it gave the far right the opportunity to present itself as anti-system and to benefit from popular frustration and distress.

The interpretation that emphasizes the migration of votes from the center-right and traditional right toward the far right has been advanced, among others, by the courageous journalist Leonardo Sakamoto. In his UOL column on Monday, October 5, he highlights the miserable behavior of the traditional conservative parties.

Over the past four years, they repeatedly joined forces with the “neo”-fascists, helping to “normalize” them—a criticism that could equally be directed at almost the entire corporate media. Believing they could use the far right as a stepping stone, they instead ended up partly devoured by it. This was especially true in the Senate, where the PL’s gain of 13 senators and Novo’s gain of two came at the expense of the PSD, which lost nine; the MDB, which lost two; the PSDB, which lost two; and the PP, which lost one.

Sakamoto’s observation is accurate and necessary, but it leaves uncomfortable questions unanswered. Why did the erosion of the Centrão benefit the far right rather than, for example, producing growth for the left—as has happened so many times before, both in Brazil and elsewhere?

The answer is not difficult. Throughout its four years in office, Lula’s third government was almost invariably associated with the Centrão. Here lies its first accommodation: accepting the limits imposed by conservative institutions; avoiding, as much as possible, any attempt to strain those limits through popular pressure; and believing only in the modest changes that could be squeezed through openings in Congress.

The failure of the campaign to end the six-day workweek is emblematic. Lula could have electrified the presidential race by pairing it with a popular campaign for passage of the measure. Instead, he chose to place his hopes in the hands of Senate president Rodrigo Alcolumbre. He generated no mass mobilization, did not force his opponents onto an uncomfortable defensive, and won no victory.

In September 2025, the government squandered the greatest of its many opportunities to shake up conservative power in Congress. Popular opposition to the so-called Shielding Amendment—which, if approved, would have restricted criminal proceedings against members of Congress—brought crowds into the streets, mobilized primarily by artists and social movements.

This opened the possibility for a broader political education: a campaign that could begin exposing the limits and dysfunctions of Brazil’s political system while putting Bolsonaro’s movement on the defensive for its predictable support of political privilege.

The amendment was defeated. But the executive branch then backed away from the fight. It remained associated with an institutional world widely seen as corrupt, elitist, and indifferent to regular people’s struggles. In doing so, it forfeited its credibility as a vehicle for the protest vote.

On Sunday, it reaped the bitter fruits.

Are We Doomed?

Taking a different approach from Sakamoto, the philosopher Moysés Pinto Neto and other writers have drawn attention, in their first analyses of October 4, to the fragmentation of the public sphere produced by Big Tech platforms. Through their algorithms, these platforms present each person with a different view of social reality.

As a consequence, it becomes much harder to identify common material problems and demands—for example, the fight for labor rights or for a properly funded public health system. Voters no longer embrace such demands, these authors argue, because they no longer see themselves as part of a collective. Instead, they tend to value the identities assigned to them by neoliberal subjectivity—the role of the entrepreneur, for example. On this interpretation, the left’s possible error lies in clinging to outdated illusions.

Moysés’s warning is highly relevant and resonates with arguments such as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s “Apocalyptic Fascism and the Billionaires’ Bet.” Unlike a century ago, the far right no longer promises a radiant future. It concentrates instead on resentment—especially that of young men.

“They belong to a generation that fears it may never own a home, but compensates with the pleasure it gets from constantly provoking progressives online. Convinced their future has been stolen, they share memes romanticizing historical authoritarian regimes,” the authors write.

But Moysés seems to confuse this danger with inevitability. He fails to see that the left’s answer cannot be adaptation. On the contrary, it must strengthen the possibility of politics as collective action.

Nor does he recognize that precisely such a reversal is already becoming possible in some of the most promising mobilizations of the twenty-first century: the election, at the end of 2025, of the young Muslim Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, on a platform centered on the intensely material fight for an affordable city; the Left Party’s victory in Berlin two weeks ago, built around the demand to expropriate private real-estate corporations; and the very recent wave of demonstrations in Spain—including an occupation of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol—in which tens of thousands of young people mobilized by the Tenants’ Union have demanded limits on rents.

By putting itself in the straitjacket of the “fiscal framework” in the first months of 2022, Lula’s third government adopted the second fatal accommodation of its term.

Faced with conservative institutions and a country devastated by four years of Bolsonaro, increased public investment was the government’s remaining weapon for offering a more dignified life to the majority and forging an anti-conservative pact with them.

The same state that disburses 1 trillion reais a year to enrich a small class of rentiers could instead spend money to extend the Family Health Strategy to every Brazilian, at a cost of 30 billion reais; provide full-day public schooling and childcare to all adolescents and children—and, especially, relief to their mothers; achieve universal sanitation while cleaning up polluted urban rivers; multiply metro systems; begin transforming the urban peripheries; and undertake many other urgently needed projects.

In April 2023, an article in Outras Palavras warned that the fiscal framework could “shrink the Lula government and preserve the forces that condemn the country to inequality and regression.” A year later, another article showed that restraints on public spending were strangling policies vital to working people and undermining the president’s popularity.

In November 2024 came a reality check, in the form of the government’s humiliating defeat in the municipal elections. Even then, the fiscal lock was neither removed nor loosened. On the contrary: throughout the government’s four years, fiscal restraint remained central to its political narrative. The administration proudly proclaimed that it had “put the state’s accounts in order,” without grasping either how misleading that phrase was—given the payment of 1 trillion reais in interest—or how badly the message was hurting it politically.

Lula finally woke up in September 2026. The increase in Bolsa Família benefits, after four years of being frozen; the announcement that anti-obesity drugs would be offered through Brazil’s public health system; and the ban on online betting showed that the state has the power to act decisively on behalf of the majority when those in government are willing to confront obstacles.

The huge marches that closed the campaign in Fortaleza, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo on the eve of October 4 showed how such initiatives can mobilize activists and the broader public.

But it was too late—and too little to change the outcome of the first round.

History Hasn’t Ended

The possibility of a turnaround in the three weeks leading up to October 25 cannot be ruled out. It will not be simple or easy. Lula must not only make up a deficit of 2.2 million votes; he must also offset the movement of voters who backed other right-wing candidates in the first round, most of whom are likely to move toward Flávio Bolsonaro.

Pulling that off will require a broad, grassroots effort to win over voters, potentially reinforced by new initiatives from Lula. The coming hours and days will be decisive.

If Bolsonaro’s movement also wins the presidency, the result will create a high-risk situation for Brazilian sovereignty and democracy. The enormous challenges posed by such an outcome would require the left to reexamine, in depth and with a genuine willingness to engage in self-criticism, its political projects—or its lack of them—and its practices.

But would that mean we are condemned to the long winter of far-right hegemony that some analyses are beginning to forecast?

It is far too early to say, suggests a recent text by Álvaro García Linera, the thinker who served as vice president of Bolivia under Evo Morales.

His central hypothesis is that this political current will prove short-lived. At a moment when the entire world is once again talking about sovereignty and protecting national economies, the far right offers a stale, recolonizing neoliberalism. Its submission to the United States is as blatant and pathetic as Flávio and Eduardo Bolsonaro’s overtures to Donald Trump.

Its project amounts to something like every man for himself: greater inequality, capitalism without limits, devastation, and supremacism.

Will it work?

In the United States, just two years into his second term, Trump himself is reaching record levels of unpopularity and may be on the verge of losing Republican control of both the House and Senate in November.

Every new beginning is difficult. Whatever the outcome of the second round, the defeats of October 4 show how profoundly the Brazilian left will have to rethink and rebuild.

But just as it would be foolish to underestimate the seriousness of its mistakes, it would be equally foolish to conclude that rebuilding a political project is no longer possible.

History has not ended. The times are moving faster than ever.

Originally published in Portuguese by Outras Palavras. English translation by Eric Blanc; I’ve added the subtitles and title. (CC BY-SA)

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• We can’t stop the far right at home or abroad without a revitalized labor movement, which is yet another reason why you should become a sustaining supporter of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) — one of US labor’s pivotal bright spots.

• Relatedly, Jacobin published a short piece of mine reflecting on a decade of Bernie Sanders inspiring a whole new generation of young worker organizers.

• A few readers tell me Labor Politics has started going to spam. If you find today’s email there, please mark it ‘Not spam’ and add laborpolitics@substack.com

I’ve got a piece in The New York Times today about how collective joy — participatory, youthful, anti-corporate — can defeat Trumpism and transform our lives.

The basic argument is that politics used to be embedded in community: dances, sports leagues, union halls. As that infrastructure disappeared — and more of everyday life was atomized and privatized — politics became something broadcast at people rather than something they did together. NYC-DSA and Zohran provide another model, where socials and face-to-face organizing are tied to a fight vs the corporations that fenced off so much of the good life. Rebuilding that kind of collective fun, I argue, could help bring young people back into politics and, by redistributing America’s wealth, make our lives more joyful.

I would super appreciate it if you’d read the piece, share it, or post comments on it. Thank you!

p.s. FYI, Opinion writers don’t get any say over their headlines!

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• Take action to support the fight of licensed deck officers at Alaska Tanker Company and Overseas Shipholding Group to win a first union contract. This is one of the most important, and underreported, unionization campaigns in America: these workers have a huge amount of power over domestic energy distribution and maritime supply chains, and they’re still without a contract two years after having voted overwhelmingly to unionize.

  Please sign the public petition here, and if you’re an academic you can sign this support letter.

  

Eric Blanc: What is the overall state of tech worker organizing under Trump 2.0? It seems like lots of people must be angry with their companies’ capitulation to Trump but I imagine the fear factor is also a lot higher today.

JS Tan: Yes, we’re hearing from fellow organizers and tech workers that there are many people, especially at the larger tech companies, who are upset with their employer cozying up with Trump. This is related to the perhaps more salient change in the industry since about 2022, which is that tech employers have, as a whole, also adopted a far more anti-worker posture. Previously, tech workers had a lot of individual bargaining power because they were in such demand. If a job didn’t treat them well, they could just leave for another one. So to make sure workers stayed, employers showered us with perks, gave us a lot of discretion in our jobs, and, importantly, frequently lived up to the progressive values that many employees expected.

But in 2022, two things changed. First, interest rates shot up (a response by the Fed to cool COVID-induced inflation) which made employers far less willing to spend lavishly on tech worker salaries or perks. Second, many tech employers shifted to the right and cozied up to Trump because of their own employees’ unrest—which they saw as being fueled by progressive politics, or, as one newly minted trillionaire would put it, the woke mind virus. These two things meant that tech companies weren’t just all of a sudden laying off employees to cut costs, but explicitly targeting DEI folks, AI ethics teams, content moderation roles, and the like—all in an effort to reset the balance of power between workers and management. This is, we think, what many workers are upset about—not just that their employers are now capitulating to Trump, but that many have embraced a kind of conservatism in an effort to stave off the progressive politics that existed previously and underpinned worker resistance.

Clarissa Redwine: What all this means for organizing is that workers are more proletarianized. Compared to the late 2010s when many of our organizing conversations were about trying to convince tech employees that they were in fact workers, this is more or less no longer an issue. Now instead the problem is whether workers are willing to organize in this much more risky environment and in a labor market that no longer favors them. Since about 2022, this chilling of the industry’s labor relations has resulted in far less organizing—reaching perhaps its lowest point in 2024 and early 2025. But now what we’re seeing is new organizing emerge, this time based mostly on issues of AI.

EB: In your new book Against Tech Oligarchy you argue that the traditional model of unionization didn’t work in tech. Can you explain what the obstacles were and what strategic takeaways you draw from that experience/impasse?

JST: At its core, we think that the traditional union organizing playbook isn’t designed for the particularities of the tech labor process—and we say this as people who for many years believed in and tried to push this playbook onto the tech industry. The traditional playbook assumes that workers know beforehand where their leverage is; and in most workplaces, certainly in a factory or a school or a hospital, that leverage is very clear, alongside what might threaten or alter this leverage. When factory workers walk off the assembly line, nothing gets built, profit halts. But tech is quite different.

The value of a day’s work can, on one day, be worth nothing, and on another generate fabulous profits, all depending on factors outside the immediate control of the worker. This is perhaps most clear in the strike: a powerful, high-participation strike in tech would do little to stop a tech company from continuing to make money. That’s in fact exactly what we saw when the New York Times tech workers went on strike for their contract. They were a super militant shop, planned their strike on the most important day of the year—the day of the presidential election—and secured high participation in their strike pledge, only growing support day after day on the picket line. Yet, when they struck, nothing (major) broke and the pressure that they had banked on failed.

CR: That is why organizing in tech requires a different approach—one that allows and even encourages workers to explore their leverage. And in fact, because tech workers are such a heterogeneous bunch and do such different work on a day-to-day basis, we’d even expect that different teams, different roles, and employees at different companies would all hold different kinds of leverage, and that is something that needs to be interrogated.

EB: Which sectors and campaigns do you think are most strategic for tech worker organizing, around both material and political (anti-ICE, anti-authoritarianism, anti-Trump, etc.) demands? Are there any employees in particular whose structural power can be more readily leveraged?

CR: We’d argue that the movement never really cracked the code on how we organize the most powerful companies in the sector. The cloud hyperscalers, for instance, are a critical chokepoint in the AI stack and also in the industry as a whole. These are behemoth companies with hundreds of thousands of workers, and thus an example of why the traditional union playbook won’t work. The issues you mentioned—anti-ICE organizing, anti-authoritarianism—are issues that we need to take on today, yet it’ll take a decade or more to organize such a large and spread-out company for union recognition.

JST: The problem with structural power when it comes to tech work, however, is that a large portion of workers sit under the firm’s R&D division. And so this means that they are inherently future-oriented—building a new feature, or incubating a new product, and the like. Yes, maintaining these products/features is also a big job, but that’s not the majority of how these workers spend their time. This future-orientation means that withholding labor won’t hurt present profits. And so, we need to think strategically about who within each company, within each business model, has immediate power. That’s not something we have a generic answer for—and it’s in fact something that every campaign across every company needs to be thinking about depending on their business model, where they sit in the tech-ecosystem, what their firm’s competitive advantage is, etc.

EB: One less traditional approach to unionizing in tech is via pre-majority unionism (“minority unionism”), an approach I’m sympathetic to but which I’ve heard in practice in tech has sometimes resulted in unions being cliquey pockets of self-selecting leftists. What’s your impression on the balance and prospects for pre-majority unionism in tech?

JST: Pre-majority unionism is the reality for many workers in tech, especially those working at larger companies. That’s what the workers at Google have gone with. Any major tech company, with tens or hundreds of thousands of workers would likely have to go this approach because winning recognition for such a large unit would take years.

CR: From our perspective, we’re actually agnostic about whether a union is NLRB recognized (i.e., majority union) or a minority union, as long as it is a fighting union. And in fact the solidarity, pre-majority union at Google is a good example of this. They aren’t recognized, but that hasn’t stopped them from fighting and winning their demands with a minority of workers. In fact, acting as a union, where workers aim to win material gains from the boss, is critical at every stage in training militant organizers who can wield collective power at each stage of growth. The goal is not to stop growing and fight for only a minority of workers but rather to fight with the people you have in service of growth, demonstrating the value of collective action to workers who are new to the fight and practicing the mechanics of forcing concessions from management.

EB: One thing I loved about your book is that you were very sober about the strengths and limitations of all efforts done to date, and you don’t assume there is a proven model or path yet for how to organize this sector. On the other hand, at the end of the book I was hoping to read a bit more about what your hypotheses are about potential ways forward. My impression is that maybe the sweet spot for the foreseeable future is to organize and mobilize tech workers around widely held and deeply felt issue-based campaigns, without framing these as necessarily steps to unionization from the start.

JST: At the start of the tech worker movement, demands were concrete. When workers wanted their company to disengage from the military, they took collective action to push for that specific thing. And the experience of taking collective action together, and seeing how the boss responded, was a radicalizing event for many tech workers. When organizers shifted to building toward recognized unions, putting off clashes with the boss to fuel growth, demands became more abstract, complex, and distant.

Asking a coworker to stand with you against systemic sexism or brutal on-call policies is a much easier task than asking if they believe in unions. The experience of fighting for material change together is a far more powerful tool for building pro-union sentiment in your coworkers than any one-on-one conversation about what might be possible to win in a contract or the history of the labor movement. In short, organizing shifted from concrete, familiar demands to more abstract and distant goals, aiming to reach the largest number of supporters possible before taking action. And for many tech workers, this new approach to organizing, what we call in our book the Recognition Playbook, ended up delaying the critical experience of taking part in direct class conflict. This not only reduced the number of workers who saw the mask drop when they pressured the boss, it also atrophied organizers’ ability to find and embrace effective leverage.

CR: The hurdle right now in tech organizing is that workers haven’t discovered where their leverage is. To find out, we think, workers need to engage in class conflict and find opportunities to experiment with exercising leverage. That is in fact what we think is one of the big issues with the traditional union playbook: that it intentionally delays or avoids class conflict. In your typical campaign, organizers are always trying to bring new workers into the fold of the union drive, but the drive is all along meant to remain secret. And so what organizers do is have these one-on-one conversations with their coworkers until everyone is bought into the union, at which point you vote for the union and become recognized.

Sometimes international unions will suggest running a shop-wide issue campaign where the goal is to sign on more union members (not to win material gains), but besides that, workers never actually engage in any direct conflict with the bosses through this whole process. Only in the end, when they go on strike while bargaining their contract, do workers finally get to experience class conflict—but by that point it is too late: workers in tech will never have had the chance to practice exercising their leverage, or get a glimpse of the boss’s counteroffensive.

JST: Workers need to organize with a conflict-forward mindset. They need to encourage class conflict so that workers can start to figure out how to organize in a way that can actually threaten their employers’ bottom line.

EB: What do you think about the prospect of recruiting young people to salt tech? It seems clear to me that tech is an extremely strategic industry, I’m not sure why we wouldn’t want to orient to getting salts in there, even if primarily to boost issue-based campaigns at first.

CR: I actually salted at my first tech job after the Kickstarter union drive and that was an incredible experience. Tech workers are hungry for autonomy, social good, and security. The challenge is showing coworkers what a fighting union is in practice before ever bringing up the U-word, which can divide workers who would have otherwise been united behind a specific demand. Salting is going to be crucial in tech moving forward and there is an organic movement of tech workers who’ve left or been pushed out of their union drives who go on to salt independently, joining the next company with an intent to unionize. However, salting in a more traditional way where an international targets a specific company is extremely difficult because of the nature of tech work where jobs are highly specialized.

JST: The tech industry is extremely heterogeneous and that means not all companies are going to have the same kind of importance in the industry as a whole. Organizers should move towards the critical chokepoints or otherwise key campaigns to support them. However, proactive, targeted salting is not always possible. Because of this challenge, many tech workers have adopted the perspective that they will organize wherever they land. And that is a very exciting cultural shift in labor, where workers are salting whether they are backed by an international or all on their own.

EB: Do you think the introduction of AI into tech workers’ workflows and their companies will potentially create openings for larger numbers of workers seeing themselves as expendable and precarious workers in need of organization, like skilled factory workers did a century ago when Taylorist attacks on their autonomy pushed them into unionizing?

JST: For many workers, yes—agentic coding systems have in many ways made it impossible for workers to really see coding as this artisanal craft, as many did previously. But there is also a group who see themselves as “high-agency” workers and hope to use these agentic coding systems to accelerate their careers. And in fact, these two wolves can exist in one person. For instance, a worker can feel proletarianized by these new AI developments in the field, yet may be motivated to double down on using them because they are worried these tools will narrow the window for future job/career mobility (i.e., the permanent underclass)—and so, they may embrace grind culture and 996, largely for individualistic reasons.

CR: The feeling among many tech workers is that AI is a reserve army that will do your job for zero salary and never sleeps. You can either adapt, or be replaced. But when your company is no longer pretending to be stewards of public good, and they are actively trying to force you down and out, then workers naturally start to question why they should be building this tech in the first place. So although there is increased precarity, workers still hold the keys to their employers’ bid in the AI race, and that is an opportunity that can revitalize the tech worker movement and shift the ground under the tech oligarchy as we know it.

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• Join the authors virtually at 3:30pm ET this Monday September 14 and be gifted a FREE hardcover copy of Against Tech Oligarchy

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• I did a long interview with The Jacobin Show about the lessons and relevance of Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialists: video here, transcript here.

• Who Moves America, a fantastic new film about the struggle of UPS drivers, is now out in theaters. Here’s a list of upcoming screenings, including opening night Monday September 14 in NYC

The polling backs this up. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that opposition to local data centers jumped twelve points in four months this year – from 49% in March to 61% in July. And an August Heatmap Pro poll pushed the number to 75%, with more than six in ten Americans strongly opposed – the most negative result since the outlet began tracking the question a year ago.

Americans are wary of AI data centers, and politicians have taken note (much faster than they usually do). In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul imposed the country’s first statewide moratorium. Weeks later, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott – a longtime data center recruiter – paused new grid connections pending an audit. And just this month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro – who celebrated Amazon’s data center investment as recently as last year – signed an executive order marketed as the nation’s strictest guardrails on the industry.

But while opposition to data centers grows, the labor movement remains divided, for obvious reasons. The data centers are creating jobs (at least, right now), while AI threatens to eliminate jobs in the future. And those jobs largely belong to different sets of people.

The Building Trades

So far, the building trades have been supportive. In May, IBEW urged its members to lobby Congress against any ban on data center construction. Several weeks ago, Don Slaiman of IBEW Local 26 took to the New York Times to argue that data centers have delivered tens of thousands of well-paid blue-collar careers, and that communities should be welcoming them. It’s not hard to see why. Data centers now account for 2.3% of all US construction spending, and spending has more than quadrupled since 2020.

Believe it or not, tech companies often use union labor on their projects (despite their best efforts not to; I wrote recently about Meta’s attempts to skirt union labor in data center construction). An Associated General Contractors survey estimates that data center construction is about one-third union, which is three times the construction industry’s overall union rate. And according to reports from the trades (so take it with a grain of salt), this is growing. Union locals report doubling apprentice classes and expanding training centers to keep up with demand, and North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) hit record membership in 2025. In March, NABTU announced partnerships with OpenAI, BlackRock, and Meta; in April, NABTU signed a labor agreement with OpenAI and Oracle to build the multibillion-dollar Stargate campus. Roughly 700 union tradespeople are already working on the site in Michigan, with thousands more expected to join.

The leaders themselves aren’t shy about praising the job opportunities proffered by data centers. Robert Wilson of IBEW Local 7 in western Massachusetts described a proposed hyperscale facility as “a generational type project for our geographical area.” “At a time when educators are asking young people to consider the building trades over college,” he told me, jobs like these “could enable many young workers the ability to save for a down payment on their first home.”

Rob Bair, president of the Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council, made the same case: data center work “has allowed members steady employment with overtime work which allows them to live the middle-class lifestyle,” plus union-managed healthcare and a real pension waiting at the end. And Dan McConnell, business manager of the Minneapolis Building and Construction Trades Council, told me his members “take pride in building the infrastructure that keeps Minneapolis competitive.”

Unions Against Data Centers?

And still, there is another wing of the labor movement that wants to pump the brakes. National Nurses United formally endorsed the Sanders-AOC AI Data Center Moratorium Act. NNU co-president Jamie Brown called the unchecked growth of data centers “a public health crisis, an environmental crisis, and a workers’ rights crisis.” The American Association of University Professors endorsed the bill too. And the opposition runs deeper than national endorsements. Thomas Meyer – deputy political director of Food & Water Watch, which organizes against data center projects – rattled off local examples: a teachers union and UNITE HERE local in Seattle (UAW 4121 later joined), CWA locals in New Jersey, UNITE HERE in Philadelphia.

Caught in the middle are some of the labor movement’s most prominent leaders. Association of Flight Attendants-CWA president Sara Nelson stood with Sanders and expressed support for a slowdown, but AFA hasn’t formally endorsed the moratorium bill. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten stood at the same Sanders press conference, and then announced that her union does not officially support the moratorium. Two of the most recognizable leaders in American labor were willing to stand behind Bernie Sanders at a podium, but not behind his bill.

Colorado state senator Cathy Kipp has had a front-row seat to this divide. She recently proposed a bill regulating data center construction. The bill drew opposition from construction unions like the pipefitters and the IBEW; some derided it as the “Wyoming Jobs Act.” As in, the jobs would flee 40 miles north to Cheyenne. The state AFL-CIO opposed the bill too – though Kipp says the federation had factions pulling in different directions.

Her bill died several months ago. Since then, she told me, the conversation has shifted. At a conference earlier this summer in which local leaders were expressing support for new data center construction, Kipp stood up and cited a poll showing 91% of Coloradans want guardrails on data centers. “You guys cannot put me in the position of: is it you or my constituents?” she recalls telling the room. Several other legislators echoed her. Afterward, several labor leaders came up to thank her. Privately. “Some of them might be more nervous about saying it publicly, but it’s changing. A lot of people understand that their jobs are potentially going to be replaced,” she says.

To be clear, this has not turned into any kind of inter-labor war. At least, not publicly. Even Meyer – who professionally organizes against data center projects – told me he has “no quarrels with a union or any other organization working on behalf of their members.” McConnell, from the other side, expressed a similar sentiment: he respects the unions that support moratoria. In his words: “this should not be framed as one group of unions against another.”

In fairness to McConnell, when I began this research, I wondered if that’s what I might find. But I didn’t. The union leaders who support data center construction are about as wary of AI as the rest of us. But they’re also up against cratering public opinion, combined with some misinformation.

Consider the belief that AI data centers consume inordinate amounts of water – an idea so memed it made its way into a Jason Kelce ad. Wilson described a city council meeting in Westfield, Massachusetts, where a city councilor gave a presentation arguing that a proposed facility would destroy the aquifer beneath the city. The facility in question would be cooled by a closed loop of glycol – the same fluid, recirculating indefinitely – and wouldn’t draw water from the aquifer. When the public was invited to comment, “the developer for the proposed data center tried to address the concerns with water but the council president immediately shut him off and said the discussion could only be about the moratorium,” Wilson told me. “As an observer at the meeting it appeared the one year moratorium was going to be pushed through without allowing any debate.”

Wilson is correct: the concerns about water consumption are often overstated, though not negligible. The most widely cited estimate, from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, puts data centers’ total water consumption at roughly 230 billion gallons in 2023 – a figure that includes the water consumed by the power plants feeding them, which is most of it. This amounts to less than 1% of national water consumption. As Robin Gaster of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation wrote in July: “there is no universal national water problem.” The concern, of course, is that the number is growing, and that some areas are higher risk than others. We certainly cannot write off the concerns about AI’s water usage. Still, given how far the water consumption idea has spread, it’s understandable why a union head in an area that’s not at risk for drought would be frustrated.

Wilson also called worries about bright lights and heat islands “nonsense” (data centers, he noted, are windowless warehouses full of servers). McConnell made the same point: many of the impacts people fear – water consumption, noise, higher utility rates – are design choices, not inevitabilities, which is exactly why he wants enforceable standards. In his words: “Strong rules do not block good projects. They help us identify which projects are actually good.”

Several leaders also noted that data centers face an unfair critique about their impermanence. Construction work is, by nature, temporary. Nobody faults a hospital because the people who built it were eventually out of a job. As McConnell told me: “Lawyers, consultants and many other professionals build stable careers by moving from project to project; the building trades are no different.”

Support for Regulation

At the same time, the labor leaders I spoke with were hardly AI cheerleaders. Bair’s working groups in Pennsylvania are negotiating agreements to limit AI in call centers, hospitals, and classrooms. In his words: “We realize there is a time and place for AI but not at the expense of employees. AI is accelerating the displacement, but we’ve seen it coming in many shapes and forms.” McConnell told me his members raise concerns about AI, but that he doesn’t think moratoria are the solution. “Stopping construction by itself does not create an AI policy or protect workers from automation.” Even his members’ support for the buildout has limits, he was careful to add: “enthusiasm does not mean blind support.”

It’s important to mention that their skepticism collides with a lack of options. The federal government has spent decades declining to seriously invest in our country. Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was a partial step, but it was nowhere near enough: even after it passed, the American Society of Civil Engineers still projected a $3.7 trillion gap over the next ten years between planned investment and “a state of good repair.” And that assumes current funding levels hold; the law’s authorizations expire in 2026. There is no New Deal on offer to employ the trades for a generation.

And so, the trades are stuck in an impossible position, one they’ve been in before. In a sense, none of this is new. Emergent technology often requires a significant upfront labor investment while threatening jobs in the long run. In the words of Todd Vachon, a labor studies professor at Rutgers: “Any legislation that phases out one form of technology in favor of another is going to draw opposition from the union supporting the technology being eliminated while the union representing workers manufacturing the new technology will be supportive of it.” Anne Lofaso – a law professor at the University of Cincinnati – cited coal as “a very tight analogy.” The well-paid union mining jobs were always partly myth: many weren’t union, many weren’t safe, and the jobs disappeared as the technology improved. “Data centers are similar,” she told me: a promise of good union jobs, hazards for the workers, environmental costs for the communities making the greatest sacrifices.

But there’s only so far historical analogies can go. In Vachon’s words: “What feels different with AI is that this friction is pretty broadly felt and breaks labor into two distinct categories of who is and who isn’t threatened by AI and it mostly falls along the line of blue-collar vs white-collar workers.”

Vachon hit upon something that’s always bothered me about the data center backlash. Technology – almost by definition – has always replaced jobs. And for centuries, the professional class largely filed it under progress. Inevitable, even. But now that the automation is coming for people who went to college, pausing it has become a mainstream idea. If lawyers were asked to give up a decade of work to protect electricians’ jobs, would they? History suggests probably not.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need a pause. But construction isn’t the root of the problem. The root of the problem is AI. People don’t like it, don’t trust it, and don’t know what it’s going to do to our society. Data centers have existed for decades; we don’t see widespread protests outside a hospital’s server room (the erroneous conflation of all data centers with AI data centers was cited by multiple union leaders). In the same Annenberg survey, 68% of Americans said the government has done “too little” to regulate AI. A July Emerson College poll found 63% of voters concerned about AI, versus 14% excited. For Meyer, the reason so many workers oppose data centers – including, per one recent poll, a majority of union households in New York – comes down to AI itself. Specifically, who gains and who pays. “The benefits are so concentrated and the costs are so massive,” he told me. “People don’t like big tech billionaires trying to bully or bribe to get what they want.” The people he talks to “feel like AI is being forced on all of society,” and see fighting data centers locally as “the best way to make an impact and exert some agency.”

People are scared of AI, and we’re so far away from even the most basic regulation. In July – just days after OpenAI disclosed that two of its models escaped a testing environment and hacked another AI company (cool!) – Congressmen Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act, which is exactly what it sounds like: a requirement that the most powerful AI systems be built with an off switch. Imagine Ford trying to sell a car without a brake. I generally hate the term “common-sense regulation” (who doesn’t think their own ideas are common sense?), but come on. This is common sense. A month later, the bill has gone nowhere. It’s challenging to even talk about AI without answers to basic questions like “How do you turn it off?” “Is it a bubble?” “Will it tank the economy?” “Will it channel wealth exclusively to the top 1% while everyone else suffers?” “Will it kill us all?” AI regulation is about far more than just the existential threat: it’s also about whether it will perpetuate America’s destructive and expanding economic inequality.

There is no mystery about why we haven’t yet regulated the AI companies directly. In what I believe will be remembered as the most iconic image of Trump’s second term, tech CEOs lined the second row of his inauguration, ahead of his own incoming cabinet. They had paid for the view, a million dollars apiece to the inaugural fund, and the corruption has only continued since then. The return on investment has been excellent. Republicans tried twice to attach a ten-year moratorium on state AI laws to must-pass legislation; when Congress wouldn’t cooperate, Trump signed an executive order directing the DOJ to challenge state AI laws and threatened to withhold federal broadband money from states that regulate the technology. The federal government is not merely declining to put guardrails on AI; it is actively dismantling the ones states try to build.

We are a country understandably scared of AI, with a federal government unwilling to regulate it. And so, we’ve found the only available option: halting the AI data centers. It’s a smart strategy: stopping construction is famously easy in America, just ask Ezra Klein. Unlike regulating Trump’s buddies, it’s working: in the first quarter of this year alone, community opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects worth roughly $130 billion, about as much as all of last year combined. The industry is expanding fast enough that record construction and record obstruction are happening simultaneously. And public opposition keeps climbing, as support for a moratorium grows.

But it’s worth getting specific about what a moratorium entails. The Sanders-AOC bill would freeze construction of new large AI data centers until the government passes federal AI guardrails. And I definitely support those guardrails (I would go so far as to call them “common sense”), but we should be honest: realistically, that isn’t happening before January 2029. Under the proposed moratorium, existing facilities would keep running, and the white-collar workers at Anthropic and OpenAI would carry on. The pause lands entirely on the people who build. In short: construction workers are being asked to pay for the sins of Sam Altman, because the government is too corrupt to regulate him directly. McConnell calls the moratorium “a very blunt instrument,” and he’s right. The question is whether anything sharper is available.

A Kill Switch

I’m torn myself. I understand the building trades’ position, and I understand what a national moratorium would mean for their members. But I’m also very uneasy about AI, and I see the argument for using anything in our toolkit to slow it down, blunt or not. In Lofaso’s words: “As someone who likes to see scientific progress, I would like to see unions negotiate job retraining, social assistance, etc. But AI feels different and potentially more dangerous. I wish we could have a moratorium just to think through the ramifications of AI and how to create safe AI and protect workers and their jobs.”

Still, I found cause for hope. The version of the fight that ends well is already underway. The trades are asking for guardrails themselves. Bair’s council backed the principles behind PA Governor Josh Shapiro’s order regulating data center construction. Wilson wants rates and water regulated by law, not by promise. McConnell wants project labor agreements, ratepayer safeguards, and enforceable community benefits. The tech companies had a better chance of skirting union labor before their popularity cratered: our AI overlords are now on their back foot, scrambling to get communities and elected officials to support data center construction, which means it’s the ideal time for the labor unions to make demands – about safety, job protection, profit distribution, and more.

Vachon suggested something similar: that labor exchange its support for guardrails. In his words, they would say: “We’ll only build these if we can be reasonably assured they won’t kill us.” That sounds good to me; I would prefer AI not kill us all. I don’t want to suggest that communities should stop fighting unwelcome data centers. But union leadership can be an important ally in this battle, even leaders who don’t support a moratorium. This Congress appears unwilling to pass a bill requiring AI to come with an off switch. But the trades control something the industry can’t route around: whether the infrastructure gets built. Right now, that’s the closest thing to a kill switch this country has.

Ginny Hogan is an NYC-based writer. Her new book, "Obey in Advance," co-written with Carlos Greaves, is out in September.

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• Please share widely! And if you republish somewhere, please make sure to attribute the original to Labor Politics, thanks.

• If you’re a worker, writer, or labor organizer interested in submitting a piece like this to Labor Politics, please shoot me a DM. Keep in mind that this blog is mostly interested in articles that deal with big strategic questions for unions or Left politics (not just reporting) and that unfortunately I have to decline many pieces because of a lack of fit or lack of space. But I’d love to make this a platform that labor folks and labor-inclined lefties can continue to periodically intervene and debate. And many thanks to Ginny for submitting such a well-researched and thoughtful piece!

Brian Lehrer: Even as DSA politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others rise in prominence and influence, the DSA is engaged in determining exactly what it wants to be as it tries to actually win elections — and then to actually govern, rather than just be a kind of left-wing think tank or activist group. The New York Times this month had a story about the DSA National Summit in Chicago, where members debated whether socialist candidates should be free to distance themselves from goals like abolishing prisons as they chase more seats this fall. And maybe you’ve heard this 45-second clip of DSA National Co-Chair Megan Romer, being widely shared on social media after her appearance on Fox.

Shannon Bream (Fox, in clip): We’re going to put up on the screen a few of the things that are part of your platform, and I want to ask you to just give me sort of a true/false on these. Abolish the Senate.

Megan Romer (in clip): True.

Bream: Okay. Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them.

Romer: Yep.

Bream: Abolish ICE.

Romer: Absolutely.

Bream: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally.

Romer: As a long-term plan, yep.

Bream: Defund the Pentagon.

Romer: Absolutely.

Bream: Abolish prisons, at least in large part.

Romer: Yeah — again, as part of a long-term program.

Bream: Okay, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations.

Romer: Yeah, absolutely.

Lehrer: Megan Romer, DSA National Co-Chair, with Fox’s Shannon Bream. Certainly you haven’t heard words like most of those from Mamdani or Ocasio-Cortez, for example.

So let’s explore the dialogue taking place within the DSA right now with Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers. He writes the Substack newsletter Labor Politics and is a member of DSA’s Bread and Roses caucus. Eric, always good to have you on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Eric Blanc: Thanks so much for having me on. And as a disclaimer, I should say that I’m not speaking in the name of Bread and Roses here, but in an individual capacity.

Lehrer: Fair enough. Can we establish first where you are within the organization? I see you’re a member of the Bread and Roses caucus — you acknowledge that. Would you describe what that is, and its role in DSA as you see it?

Blanc: Sure. I think the most useful way to frame the divisions in DSA is that there’s, broadly speaking, a right wing and a left wing — and this is within the context of DSA, so these are very relative terms. Overall, I would consider myself mostly sympathetic to the right wing. Bread and Roses is a center current, but I’m on the right wing of Bread and Roses — so this gives you a sense of how complicated it is.

Broadly speaking, people on DSA’s right would self-identify more with mass politics — trying to reach out as broadly as possible, in a way that makes us more legible and attractive to bigger numbers of people. And on DSA’s left, they see themselves as more consistently revolutionary and less prone to co-optation. The big divide is between that left and right, and the internal nuances are a little bit secondary to that.

Lehrer: For all your appearances on this show, one thing I never thought I’d hear was you referring to yourself as right wing, but I understand the context. So what did you think of that Megan Romer clip? How much does it represent you? Or should people take it as representing where DSA candidates in the midterms, as a group, want to take the country?

Blanc: I’d put it this way: DSA has this amazing opportunity at this moment to give a voice to and organize literally hundreds of thousands of people, potentially millions. That’s the kind of scale that socialist parties in the rest of the world — or in the U.S. in the past — have aspired to and oftentimes achieved. And my criticism of that Megan Romer clip, and some of the similar things that have been said from the left wing of DSA, is that I think it’s falling into a trap being set by the establishment — both conservatives and liberals — which is to try to paint DSA as extreme.

We can go into the specifics of which of those points she made I agree with or not — I’m happy to talk about the particulars. But the basic point is that when we go on national news, whether it’s Fox or the New Yorker or whatever, that’s an opportunity to stress to millions: democratic socialists are the only political current that has a solution to the crises that ordinary working people are facing — the affordability crisis, the crisis of political democracy, all of these things that are felt immediately. When we get into the terrain of distant debates about what could happen way down the road, that’s the terrain the Democratic establishment wants us fighting on. That’s the terrain the Republican establishment wants us fighting on.

What we need to do, if we’re going on Fox, is to pivot very consistently to saying: look at what Zohran has done, we’re making people’s lives better, we’re fighting for the interests of working-class people. It’s very pragmatic — we’re winning free expanded childcare, we’re winning a rent freeze. If you can’t pivot to the ways we’re going to make a difference in people’s lives, then you’re only going to appeal to the radical activists. And right now we have an opportunity to speak much more widely — we’re seeing that in the votes we’re getting for our candidates. But I don’t think we’re seeing that articulated as consistently as possible by some of our national DSA leaders.

Lehrer: It sounds like you’re saying Megan Romer blew it on Fox.

Blanc: I certainly would not have argued in the way that she did. I don’t think that’s an approach that’s going to be able to build the type of power we need to win the types of changes that the American people and working-class people deserve.

Lehrer: Here’s an example, I think, of the position that statements like that put some of the actual candidates for office in. This is an exchange I had with Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi, who represents a swing district in Queens and Long Island. He’s been making a point of calling himself a “democratic capitalist,” and he made his point in an exchange with me, partly like this.

Tom Suozzi (in clip): It’s important to look at what the democratic socialists include in their platform. When they tell you what they believe in, we should believe them.

Lehrer (in clip): But that’s the premise of my question. There’s a national DSA that has these policies on paper — the platform specifics. Then there’s Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, others in real-life politics, who I think it’s fair to say are not advocating the most extreme things you were just citing.

Suozzi (in clip): I don’t think it’s fair to say that, because they need to be asked those questions. How do they feel about, for example, the Chinese Communist Party? I’m the founder and co-chair of the Uyghur Caucus — the Uyghurs are Muslim minorities held in forced labor camps in China. Why don’t we ask Mayor Mamdani: does he support what the Chinese are doing with the Muslim minority in China? Does he support the idea of abolishing the Senate, or abolishing the presidency, or defunding the police, or getting rid of the Department of Defense?

Lehrer (in clip): He’s in office, governing now for six months, and I don’t think I’ve heard him talk about any of those things.

Suozzi (in clip): Well, why don’t you ask him specifically the next time you have him on your show? Does he want to get rid of prisons altogether? That’s part of the platform. I’ve been in politics for a long time. I’ve been on your show many times. I’m held accountable for the things that I stand for. I’m held accountable for the platform of the party that I represent.

Lehrer (in clip): Well, does it say something to you that he just declined to defund the police? In fact, he ran on keeping NYPD headcount steady.

Lehrer: That went on for a while more with Congressman Suozzi and me last month. But you see his argument, Eric, right? That every DSA candidate has to have a position on those positions, because they’re on paper in the platform. And that was before Megan Romer went on Fox — so now we have that too. So: are purity tests taking place within the organization, or just abstract debates about how socialist is socialist enough in 2026 America?

Blanc: The first thing I would say is that in the chapters of DSA that are electing people across the country — or electing mayors, as with New York City DSA — there’s actually not so much division. So some of these attacks are really quite bad faith, because there’s not a lot of light between the politics of Zohran Mamdani and New York City DSA and its leadership.

These internal DSA divisions we’re talking about, in many ways, are between the caucuses and chapters that I would consider to have proven themselves able to do mass politics — by electing large numbers of people, but also by growing in large numbers — and caucuses and chapters in other parts of the country that as far as I’ve seen haven’t yet been achieving that same degree of success, which reflects and contributes to some doctrinaire positions. So I don’t think there’s so much division between DSA’s elected politicians and the chapters who helped elect them. It’s an understatement to say that DSA is not a very centralized organization. It’s a very decentralized organization.

I would say, though, that the concern you flag is a very real one. I think it’s frankly just a mistake that national DSA took certain positions that are both marginalizing for us in the short term and just politically wrong even in the long term. To give a concrete example: I don’t think it’s strategic to say that we’re for abolishing the police or prisons, even in the long term. Even in the distant socialist future, you can imagine there’ll be some sort of apparatus for that. And particularly at this moment — when taking a position on that is going to provide so much fuel to all of those trying to discredit our elected officials and our candidates and our organization — why take such a stance? In what world does it make sense, if our goal is to organize millions of people and to overcome the Democratic establishment and to defeat Trumpism, to take a position that you know is just going to give fuel to your opponents, and for which there’s no practical upshot right now? Taking that sort of doctrinaire ideological position seems to me a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.

If you’re a person relatively new to socialism — oftentimes you were a liberal not very long ago, and you got radicalized because Obama didn’t do what he said he was going to do, Hillary Clinton lost, or Schumer refuses to fight — so you flip your position. And you then kind of go too far in the other extreme. I had lots of those positions and limitations when I was new to socialist politics too. There’s a learning curve — you have to learn mass politics through experience; it’s not the type of thing that you can pick up just from reading or even just through small-scale activism.

So basically, Brian, you’re right. But my nuance with your concern is that those aren’t positions being taken, for the most part, by the actual chapters that are electing these candidates and that are recruiting the largest numbers. There’s a far-left wing of DSA that has pushed to adopt those stances on a national level, oftentimes against the will of the chapters that are actually electing these candidates. So I think it’s disingenuous, frankly, for the opponents of DSA to try to pick and choose this or that controversial position when it’s not actually the reality of what our candidates and our most powerful chapters are saying or doing.

But I do want to also give a defense of DSA as a whole, including of people on the left of DSA with whom I have serious disagreements. There are very few spaces in national or local politics today where people can debate and engage in democratic decision making. Where else can you join an organization that can have real and substantive differences like this? That’s to DSA’s credit. If you think DSA has limitations — we all do — then you can get involved and help make it better.

Lehrer: Sally in Manhattan, you’re on WNYC with Eric Blanc.

Sally (caller): I think it’s naive to say that there are two sides to the democratic socialist group. I have always been a Bernie Sanders supporter. AOC, they go for FDR, they go for Scandinavian socialism, which includes capitalism and socialism together. Whole different group. Megan Romer is an avowed Marxist — which is why Trump is now saying that communists are on the left side. She wants production to be in the hands of the people. She wants to get rid of capitalism. I think she’s actually trying to split the social democrats — that’s her purpose, to minimize the movement. And I think we have to not be naive about this, and call her out — her and the group that is doing this — as opposed to the Bernie Sanders, AOC kind of social democrat. This is a very serious thing. And thank God you’re bringing up this issue, because they’re not all the same people, and it’s not all one movement right now. She is seriously trying to split the movement.

Lehrer: Sally, thank you very much. Eric, do you agree with her analysis that Megan Romer is intentionally trying to split the movement?

Blanc: No, I don’t think it’s intentional. I think that in practice some of the DSA left’s approaches do undermine the movement, and it does in practice lead to all sorts of excessive divisions. One of the things I’ve found particularly counterproductive is that the left of DSA has spent a disproportionate amount of time criticizing our candidates and our elected officials. So I do think there’s some level of factionalism in that.

But the way they look at it is: people are disenchanted with politics as usual. The reason they think people are coming to DSA — and there’s a lot of truth to this — is that we stand for something different than what’s been on offer for decades, and that we don’t make the same compromises the Democratic establishment constantly does. And so the left of DSA is concerned that if we start going down that slippery slope of compromise, then we’re just going to demoralize our base and become like any other Democrat.

Now, I think the conclusions they draw from that analysis are wrong — they go too far. But there’s a kernel of truth to it. So you don’t have to assume people are acting in bad faith, or trying to split, to say that in practice their politics and the way they’re going about it is making it harder to grow democratic socialism — which to my mind means fighting centrally, in the short term and mid-range, for social democracy. We’re never going to get to economic democracy or socialism without first winning something like Scandinavia.

Lehrer: The caller cited that term, social democrats, and I want to play a clip of DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier from an appearance on this show. This is after she won her primary, and I asked her what country, if any, she sees as a model of democratic socialism that the U.S. could emulate if DSA gains enough influence. Here’s 30 seconds of her answer.

Avila Chevalier (in clip): There’s a lot we can learn from many parts of the world — I think places in Europe, like Sweden and Norway, for example. But I think looking specifically at the programs themselves — what are the models of the programs, and how can we implement them here — is how I envision this. And I think the other thing that gets lost is the democratic part of this phrase, democratic socialism: that we are making decisions in a democratic way about how we use the wealth that we have produced in this society, because the people who are producing the wealth are the people who produce the labor — the workers.

Lehrer: Are you surprised she cited the Scandinavian model? We know that in her old tweets — which she has mostly disavowed now, she says she’s grown — she sounded more like Megan Romer on some points. But my understanding is DSA says there’s a difference between social democracy — you and the caller and Ms. Avila Chevalier all used that term — and democratic socialism. That democratic socialism goes further than European-style social democracy. Can you explain how true that is, and how much you think it should matter in the current context?

Blanc: I don’t think in our current context it matters so much what labels you use. But for what it’s worth, the parties that won the most robust welfare states (what many people refer to as social democracy): Sweden, Norway, a lot of Western Europe — they were, for the most part, socialists. They were what we’d call democratic socialists today, in that their horizon was not limited to just making capitalism less bad. They did make capitalism less bad, and they did that very effectively. But in part they were able to do that so effectively because they had a compelling vision of spreading democracy to all spheres of life.

So I do think that is a difference between democratic socialism and somebody who just believes that the most human beings can aspire to, for as long as human civilization exists, is some sort of capitalism. If you believe in democracy, I don’t think there’s any reason to preclude the possibility of democracy expanding to the economic sphere — even unions are steps in that direction.

The way to look at it is: yes, in the immediate and mid-range, we’re fighting for something like Sweden in the 1970s — a very robust universal welfare state. That would be so much better than what we have. It would alleviate so much suffering. And part of the problem I have with the way Megan Romer articulated it, particularly in the New Yorker interview, was to counterpose these two things, saying “we’re not fighting for a kinder, gentler capitalism.” But, actually, you don’t have to counterpose that to socialism. You’re never going to get to economic democracy if you can’t first win a robust welfare state, if you can’t rebuild a mass workers’ movement, in other words, if you can’t make capitalism kinder and gentler.

And this is the crucial point: the reason so many people think transformative change is impossible today — including just social democracy — is that they’ve lost hope. They don’t think things can get better, they don’t think government can work for them, and they’ve lost confidence that things improve through collective action or the public sector.

So we have to fight hard even for things like Medicare for All, even though this is something most of the rest of the industrialized world already has. Until we can start showing people in practice that the government can work better — that’s why what Zohran is doing is so important — and until we can give them confidence in their own strength, and in the strength of solidarity and working-class struggle, you’re never going to be able to get to the long-term socialist future. So anything socialists do that counterposes the long-term goal to the immediate fights is very detrimental to the cause, both short-term and long-term.

Lehrer: One more call. Judith in Saugerties, you’re on WNYC.

Judith (caller): Why doesn’t DSA ever explain its positions? For example, “defund the police” — which is a really bad statement. But it really was not defunding the police; it was taking part of the money that’s going to police departments and moving it to other services, like mental health. That’s what I understood it to be. But I haven’t heard a single person say that — and especially not Megan Romer. By the way, I agree with you, she is not a good spokesperson. Or “end the Senate” — I mean, the Senate is probably the least democratic, small-d, governing body in the Western world.

Lehrer: We could definitely do a whole segment, of all the things on that list, on the Senate as a violation of the one-person-one-vote principle — when people in Wyoming, with a few hundred thousand people, get the same number of senators as people in California, with 40 million. But on defunding the police, Eric — there are differences of opinion within DSA on this too, right? Some people do talk about police abolition, they use that word, whereas others, like Judith is saying, mean by “defund the police” something more like reweighting where public money goes.

Blanc: I think the slogan “defund the police” is very confusing, and it’s good that DSA candidates and most DSA chapters aren’t using it — because it makes it sound like you don’t think any money should go toward the police in the short term. But I think it’s entirely the case that we should be funding social services and public services much more than we’re funding incarceration and repression. That’s a message we have to make, and we are making it. And I think it’s possible to do that without using a slogan that gives our opponents an ability to marginalize us.

Lehrer: Eric Blanc from Rutgers and The Nation, and sometimes Jacobin, and his book We Are the Union. Thank you so much for having this conversation with us.

Blanc: Thanks so much for having me on.

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• NYC friends, you should attend the launch for a great new book, Against Tech Oligarchy, by JS Tan & Clarissa Redwine. The event is 6:30pm tonight (Monday August 17) at 207 32nd Street, RSVP here.

• Please share this interview with folks inside and outside of DSA. And if you haven’t yet, please join DSA! We’re over 125,000 members now, and need everybody’s help to seize this moment.

The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC).

Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle.

Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess.

If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea.

A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028

Run a union worker

Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly.

If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect.

This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers.

The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it.

If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit.

Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel”

Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors.

Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government.

A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars?

Our candidate can agitate around a clear message:

I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result.

For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case:

It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel.

How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies:

I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway.

In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government.

Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up.

Objections and Responses

There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here.

Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win.

This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity.

In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November.

We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel.

I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid.

Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker.

If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention).

We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead.

I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt).

This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles.

It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process.

If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support.

We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control.

For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence.

More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks.

Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for!

Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands).

Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run.

It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly.

The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum.

This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring.

What’s Your Plan B?

The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible.

A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see.

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• As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you!

• I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend.

• 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵

In the city’s two marquee congressional primaries, candidates backed by labor’s biggest names — 32BJ, 1199SEIU, DC37, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the United Federation of Teachers, and others — went down to defeat. In the first, Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat, a corporate Democrat who racked up some fourteen union endorsements, lost his Upper Manhattan and Bronx seat to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a thirty-two-year-old democratic socialist insurgent backed by Zohran Mamdani, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), and Justice Democrats.

Delivering Avila Chevalier the biggest Congressional upset since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win in 2018, a majority of District 13 primary voters showed that they no longer trust a Democratic establishment unable or unwilling to seriously challenge Trump and an oligarchic status quo. Yet most union leaders haven’t yet followed their lead. And it’s a sign of serious internal decay that these organizations, so powerful on paper, can now deliver so little in the way of actual votes. Far too often, union members have become disconnected from our organizations.

We saw this same movie play out in early 2025, when most of the city’s union leadership lined up behind Andrew Cuomo — a serial harasser they’d demanded resign four years earlier — and watched Mamdani beat him anyway. (And in another, no less troubling form, we’ve seen how many unions across the country have struggled to convince their members to vote against Trump.)

Faced with an era of crisis and anger at the status quo, voters of all backgrounds are increasingly tired of old-guard politics, particularly in its corporate Democratic variety. It’s hard to take seriously the shallow identity-based appeals of establishment leaders like Espaillat when they are all too eager to cash donor checks from the real estate interests responsible for pushing working-class communities of color out of the city.

Union leaders need to come to terms with the fact that backing old-guard politicians like Espaillat or Cuomo is no longer a risk-averse, pragmatic wager. Even on purely self-interested grounds, savvy union operators should start reading the room. With a possible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run looming, the stakes are high.

The race in Brooklyn’s District 7 was also significant, though for different reasons. It was a battle for the senior partner of New York City left politics, with the race pitting Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso — a genuine progressive backed by a nearly identical union roster, the Working Families Party (WFP), and the city’s main progressive non-profits — against union activist and DSA cadre Claire Valdez. Unlike with Espaillat, this was a race between two anti-establishment candidates, whose immediate programs are not too far apart. And very much to its credit, the WFP played a central role in Tuesday’s exciting ousting of centrist incumbent Dan Goldman by Zohran-backed progressive Brad Lander; no less noteworthy, the WFP last year built a broad an anti-Cuomo alliance and eventually endorsed Zohran #1 in the ranked–choice primary.

But District 7 was an important test case for the relative strength of DSA’s organized base versus that of non-profits, the WFP, and allied unions. Once the results were tallied, DSA came out on top in a surprisingly decisive victory: Valdez swamped Reynoso 56 percent to 36 percent.

That’s a very good thing, because having a democratic socialist cadre like Valdez in Congress opens up important new opportunities for going on the offensive against the Democratic establishment and for recruiting large numbers of people nationwide into a radical, democratic membership organization like DSA. While progressives and socialists should always search for ways to collaborate, the weakness of the latter has for decades been a particularly crucial obstacle to transforming the Democratic Party and organized labor.

Only a tiny handful of unions had the political courage and conviction to stand up for Valdez’s bold vision of transformational change. United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, led by director Brandon Mancilla, should be commended for fighting so hard for both Valdez and Avila Chevalier. As UAW president Shawn Fain put it at Valdez’s January 9 campaign launch event: “This is exactly how the labor movement can fight back against corporate greed and inequality: by electing more of our own.” (Claire was also endorsed by IFPTE and AFGE as well as by the left-led, South-Asian non-profit DRUM Beats.)

And while Tuesday’s election results are exciting for democratic socialists, it’s important to be sober about the still-serious challenges and limitations facing us. While Tuesday shows that large numbers of working people are now willing to vote for our candidates, DSA’s electoral base — and especially our activist base — remains disproportionately college educated and young. In New York, as in the country as a whole, education and generational polarization remain the most important divides within the left-of-center coalition.

It’s important to push back when union and non-profit leaders claim to be the only legitimate political spokespeople for the multiracial working class; if that were true, Tuesday’s elections would not have gone the way they did. But we should all be honest: none of our organizations, from the unions to the non-profits to DSA, are anywhere close to being as deeply rooted in the class as we need to (or aspire to) be. After five decades of neoliberal atomization, union busting, and the fraying of working people’s social fabric, this should be no great surprise. Structural obstacles like these are not easily or quickly overcome.

It’s true that Zohran and democratic socialist ideas are very popular. And it’s true that DSA meetings (especially over the past 18 months) are much more racially diverse than smears against us would suggest. But democratic socialism’s organized roots in workplaces and working-class neighborhoods do remain alarmingly thin. Getting votes and building sustainable on-the-ground power are not the same thing.

The big upshot from Tuesday’s election is that all progressives and leftists need to be far more ambitious about going out and organizing working people of all backgrounds. For NYC-DSA in the Zohran era, the openings for recruiting and developing large numbers of young black and Latino New Yorkers are immense, but we’ll have to make a serious turn towards building an organizing culture better capable of absorbing and developing new leaders beyond the self-selecting activist types who normally join. (Learning from the organizational methods of mega-churches would be one useful place to start.)

The relative narrowness of all our organized bases also means that DSA, non-profits, unions, and the WFP can’t afford to get stuck in narrow faction fights or turf wars. Since it’ll take all of us to overcome our corporate enemies and their political enablers, we can’t let our strategic differences prevent us from uniting tactically on campaigns we can agree on, whether in electoral politics or on policy fights. As I wrote in an article written exactly one year ago about Zohran’s victory in the mayoral primary:

It took a liberal-Left alliance to defeat Cuomo. A huge amount of credit is due to Brad Lander for being a man of principle who refused to punch Left. At the same time, Zohran smartly rejected a widespread leftist tendency to treat liberals and liberalism only as ideological competitors to be fought. Look at how he adopted the best parts of the “abundance agenda,” how he cross-endorsed Lander, and how he framed his criticisms of Israel in the language of liberal equal rights. Leftists can’t defeat the old establishment — let alone overcome the Right — on their own. And mutuality cuts both ways: we can’t ally with liberals only when we’re in the lead.

That being said, there are strong moral and political reasons why unions, progressive non-profits, and the WFP should try to be bolder electorally and more collaborative when it comes to DSA. Only transformative working-class politics can deliver the type of change working people desperately need and, in so doing, provide a viable alternative to Trumpism. Working people are angry and the old establishment is discredited. Now is a moment for raised expectations and bold initiatives, not business as usual or narrow maneuvers to protect one’s organizational turf.

Tuesday’s election shows that voters are hungry for change. It’s time we get organized together to deliver it.

More

• As mentioned above, this is a significantly revised version of an earlier, way-too-polemical and way-too-quickly-written assessment of Tuesday’s election. When it comes to debate within the movement, it’s always better to err on the side of political generosity; politics is hard, and none of us have all the answers to what it’ll take to win. I already knew this, but making this week’s mistake was a useful reminder. Mea culpa.

• Please, as always, share this post widely! THANK YOU.

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

• My output for Labor Politics is going to be a bit less frequent than normal for the next year—expect about one post a month. I have a good excuse: in addition to helping set up a new student to labor pipeline, I’m deep into a new book project on what we can learn from evangelicals about organizing and community building. I just spent a fascinating week embedded in a multiracial, Trump-leaning mega-church in the Midwest; can’t wait to share with you all these stories and lessons. We’re so far behind evangelical churches when it comes to building mass belonging, developing leaders, and recruiting working people via music, ritual, community, and big ideas that give life purpose and meaning. Lots more to come.

We have a lot to learn from the Waldoboro Republicans’ recent “Great American Picnic” in Maine:

For children, there will be a “Bouncy House” as well as assorted games to play. For those who want to “take a whack” at something, there will be a “High Striker” available for those looking to try and ring the bell. There will also be some young rabbits available to purchase, as well as a chance to win door prizes.

The scarcity of similar social events on the left is a big political mistake, reflecting and worsening our weak roots among working people. It’s also a relatively new problem.

Put the Social Back

When activists today look back at the mass working-class parties of the early 20th century, it’s often assumed they grew because the political-economic context was more favorable, because these parties centered workers’ material needs, or because they did the ABCs of organizing we’re trained in today, like one-on-one conversations and escalating campaigns.

Those theories capture parts of the picture, but they all overlook one thing: social events were key to recruiting and retaining working-class people. Fun, community-building social activities weren’t an afterthought to “real politics,” but a central mechanism for organizational growth.

Working people joined and stayed in the old US Socialist Party via picnics, choirs, volunteer orchestras, Sunday schools, weekend campouts, and baseball leagues. One hundred years before megachurches and Turning Point USA insisted on the same point, American Socialists in a typical 1913 article stressed that you can’t recruit most people to a boring movement:

Few young people will come to a dry business meeting; it is difficult to get older people out. Very few more will attend a lecture or similar affair. Other methods must first be used to interest them in the work of the movement. They must be reached by interesting them in something in which they naturally delight. Every young heart wants the joy that comes from an evening of merriment—a dance, a party, an entertainment. Young folks like to gather at places where they can meet their associates. Churches have long served this purpose, many of them depending upon this desire for association for their very existence.

These organizers understood that the feeling and culture of a movement mattered just as much as its program. Here’s how a 1913 piece, “Sociability and Socialism,” described the importance of reaching out warmly to any newcomer who found their way to a social:

It is the little things which people notice most in life. Grasping a person by the hand and speaking a friendly word may seem a small thing, but it may be the means of bringing a person into the Socialist movement, who may prove an exceedingly valuable worker. As the Young People’s Socialist League of Rochester says, “Let us put ‘social’ in Socialism.”

Sports and physical fitness activities were another pivotal way to make socialism more social. When asked what work young socialists should initially do locally, organizers replied—in addition to obvious things like educational classes—with the following activities: “form baseball and other athletic teams; run excursions; […] take cross-country walks, distributing literature on the way.”

Crucially, these events were open to anybody, not just socialists (or the feuding factions thereof). An advertising poster for the week-long “MAMMOTH TENTH ANNUAL SOCIALIST ENCAMPMENT” in rural Grand Saline, Texas during the summer of 1913 thus concluded: “Grand Saline is the place. August 18 to 23 the dates. Everybody Invited. Tell Everybody. Come Join the Mammoth Merry Throng and Have Your Part of the Fun.”

These events had plenty of political speakers, but what attracted people was community and fun for the whole family. One Socialist instruction manual from that year stressed the importance of preparing “lemonade stands, hamburger stands, doll racks, pounding machines, merry-go-rounds, shows.” Socialist agitator Oscar Ameringer recalls that the whole morning of the first day of camp in Oklahoma was dedicated to a “singing school” where “a mixed chorus was organized and rehearsed in Socialist songs, usually of Populist origin, sung to familiar melodies.” And after a full day of camaraderie, music, and politics, “discussions around the glowing campfire continued on into the small hours.”

“The shortest road to the [socialist] understanding of the majority is via brass band and vaudeville,” concluded one report on a 1910 Socialist camp in Klamath Falls:

What impressed even the most casual observer at the Encampment was the Spirit of Comradeship that was so plainly manifested, the atmosphere of equality and freedom from conventionality that prevailed. There was utter absence of inharmony and discord, a striking illustration of the familiar quotation: ‘Where all govern nobody serves; where all serve nobody governs.’

Having an in-person recreational space was no less crucial in the cities. Los Angeles Socialism’s resurgence was credited partly to the new social dynamism it had created after fixing up a decrepit downtown building and turning it into a welcoming headquarters/social club. They depended on the volunteer labor of their members to make this happen, since they didn’t have money for repairs or furnishings.

Half of the space was dedicated to the dance hall, with the rest put toward an organizational office, billiard room, library and reading room, music room, check room, and rest rooms. “Pool and billiards can be played at any time and tourneys are arranged occasionally. The girls have their own club, which gives a dinner once a month for twenty-five cents a plate.” Every Tuesday, business meetings were held, which started with a short political talk from an outside speaker. Clearly much of the appeal of these meetings was social, since “after the business has been transacted the rest of the evening is given to dancing.”

Across the whole country, music was the organizers’ universal hook. Ameringer recalls that after initially struggling one day to catch the attention of working-class passersby, he pulled out his old clarinet:

I found myself on a soap box dispersing such classics as ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ ‘Arkansas Traveler,’ and ‘Everybody Works but Father.’ Gradually an audience assembled—a few white men, some Negroes, two or three Indians and a respectable number of mongrel dogs thirsting for knowledge and water. By sandwiching my discourse between slices of melody, I built the crowd.

Like all mass movements, these were singing movements. Songs like The Internationale and adaptations of traditional church songs were standards. And at an encampment in Sebastian County, Arkansas—coal country—the highlight was a 100-person chorus singing the French revolutionary anthem the Marseillaise, with the backing of a socialist orchestra.

Because they placed so much importance on social activities, radicals viewed their preparation as an important skill to be acquired, not a secondary afterthought. A 1913 article, “Conducting Socialist Encampments,” laid out some of the hard-won lessons on how to do these right, including “don’t allow the sale of any noise-makers, as they interrupt the speakers. Don’t allow stands, or the merry-go-round, near the speaker’s stand.”

Encampments, sports leagues, and dances were important beyond recruitment. Just as importantly, they helped union members and socialist activists avoid burnout. Garment worker organizer Rose Pesotta recalls that “apart from my own need of relaxation, recreation proved a vital element in holding our dressmaker members together. In play we could forget our daily struggle, catch our breath, and be made whole again.”

Eugene V. Debs similarly saw that socialist socials had a healing property. Through these, comrades could “wend their way homeward … feeling that they had refreshed themselves at a fountain of enthusiasm,” again full of energy to deliver to their co-workers and neighbors “the glad tidings of the coming day.”

None of this is a political shortcut or a substitute: you still need winnable campaigns, lots of one-on-one conversations, and a compelling vision for anti-billionaire transformation. But you can’t scale up without socials.

Make the Left Fun Again

Compared to this vibrant legacy, and compared to right-wing events today, the culture of our contemporary left is anemic. There are, of course, exceptions: Zohran and NYC-DSA’s mayoral campaign was a blast, a lively picket line still packs an emotional punch, and comrades from Malmö, Sweden, sent me this picture of their May Day bouncy castle this year.

These exceptions, however, prove the rule. Until we can make the left more fun, more full of song, and more welcoming for working families, we’ll likely continue to primarily recruit self-selecting activists from college-educated backgrounds, many of whom are more comfortable posting online than inviting their neighbors to a barbecue.

Potlucks and karaoke nights might seem like a distraction in the face of the world’s horrors. But they’re not. To grow big and deep enough to win, we need to provide the joyful community most people lack in our lonely, phone-addicted era. As long as the left cedes that ground, the right will keep filling it.

If Debs were alive today, he’d be the first to put his five bucks in the hat to rent a bouncy castle for our next event.

More

• Some initiatives in the right direction: NYC-DSA has a range of social-cultural events to join, including a choir, a socialist soccer league, and a running club.

• Please share this article widely! As always, I depend on you lovely comrades to spread the word.

• Happy to report that the Drop ICE movement on campuses has already gotten four big wins this semester, including getting University of Michigan, Cal-Poly, and Foothill-De Anza Community College District to break their contracts with corporations propping up ICE. We’ve got some big in-person student trainings planned for August, to hit the ground running in the fall semester. Sign up here to get involved.

• My friend, comrade, and brilliant labor organizer Claire Valdez has a strong shot at getting elected to Congress — if we all step up our canvassing efforts. Anybody in the NYC area, please sign up ASAP to canvass for Claire.

• Better than Coachella:

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.

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• 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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• Wars abroad are inseparable from ICE’s war at home. Sign up here to get involved in the Schools Drop ICE campaign to force our colleges to break their contracts with the corporations propping up ICE.

• Do you have organizing experience? Please sign up here to become a volunteer organizing coach for Schools Drop ICE! Over a thousand students and faculty have already signed up, so it’s all hands on deck to help them launch powerful campaigns.

• If you have any research experience and would like to volunteer for Schools Drop ICE, please send an email to schoolsdropice@gmail.com .

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.

More

• Want to Drop ICE from Your Campus? Join an Organizing Training & Campus Meet-Up Tuesday Feb 24, 8pm ET/5pm PT

  

  Our schools contract with companies that help ICE deport our neighbors. We have the power to end those contracts.

  Check out this event Tuesday evening for a 30 minute organizing training about how to launch pressure campaigns on your campus to kick out ICE’s corporate collaborators, followed by a 30 minute meet up where you’ll meet with and discuss with other students, faculty, staff and community allies on your campus how to start organizing. All are welcome! Please invite your fellow students and colleagues to the call. Register here:

  
  https://tinyurl.com/schoolorganizingcall

• Are you an experienced organizer interested in becoming a volunteer organizing coach for the Schools Drop ICE campaign, to support campuses scale up their campaigns? You can sign up here.

• Do you have experiencing with research and want to volunteer your skills to the Schools Drop ICE campaign to help campuses determine which corporate targets are on their campuses? If so, please email schoolsdropice [at] gmail [dot] com

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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• Are you a student, professor, or staff worker on a university? Want to take concrete action to stop ICE? Sign up here to get involved in the Schools Drop ICE campaign to kick ICE’s corporate collaborators off campus. And if you are an experienced organizer interested in supporting the campaign by becoming a campus coach, please sign up here.

• 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.