Note to Democrats: Organizing Matters

December 12, 2024

Organizing meeting in Somerville, MA. Source: Somerville Community Corporation

The final count for the House of Representatives appears to be in. The Republicans will have a majority of 220 - 215. With three expected vacancies for the GOP, that gives them the slimmest margin possible for a majority: 217-215. If Democrats can stay united, they will only have to peel off one Republican to prevent whatever damage the fascists have in store for us in January. It won’t last forever, but even the five seat margin only needs three defections to prevent Republicans from doing their worst. Are there three Republicans in this Congress willing to buck the fascists? Hell, I am not even sure if there is one who isn’t all-in with them. But from issue to issue, there will be some who cannot stick with whatever nonsense Johnson and Trump are ripping from Project 2025.

It could have been different. The Republicans picked up three seats in North Carolina because of an explicitly partisan gerrymander, which the state Supreme Court upheld after ruling against it the year before. What happened between those two court decisions? Republicans won two seats from Democrats in an off-year election which changed the composition of the court from 4-3 Democrat to 5-2 Republican. If the Democrat had won those seats, the gerrymander would have remained struck down. If that had happened, there is a good chance that Democrats would have won all three seats. And if that had happened, Democrats would have won the House majority this year. If this doesn’t underscore the importance of year-round organizing for Democrats, nothing will.

American political parties are ill-equipped to do anything but contest elections. But that is because that is how they are organized. Minor parties like the Greens and Working Families Party have done local organizing to build power in the community during non-election periods. Although these parties have limited capacity, Democrats have quite a bit. If the minor parties can do it at smaller scales, why can’t Democrats?

There are two reasons that prevent this, as I see it. And they are related to one another. Democrats have no class analysis in their political program. It’s arguable that they have a political program at all, but they have no critique of capitalism. Instead, the party has been a champion on neoliberalism since at least the 1990s. Neoliberalism does not mean what some people assume it does. It is not political liberalism in the American sense (although it is pretty similar in the classic economic sense). Neoliberalism refers to heavily deregulated industries, unfettered free trade, and prioritizing protecting the property interests of investors and capital. In many ways, it has more in common with political conservatism in the American sense rather than political liberalism. In any case, neoliberalism is unsurprisingly a favorite economic argument made by Republicans throughout the 1970s and 1980s, only to be embraced by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in the late 80s and early 90s. I have written more about this here.

The other reason Democrats can’t seem to do year-round organizing is because of the party’s donor base, which is by now solidly as rich as the Republicans’ ever was. Wall Street funds both parties. They are, of course, different types of Wall Streeters. There are wealthy people who think we should have some more environmental protections and that cops should stop killing Black and Brown kids. These are the political liberals on Wall Street. Nevertheless, their class interests align with neoliberalism and political conservatives.

And it is not just the donors, Democratic Party leaders are more likely to be rich than middle class, let alone have ever worked a day in their life. I know John Kerry is a good guy who means well, but when he got up in front of Ohio workers who were getting killed by neoliberal economics in 2004 and told them not to worry because he was going to go after off-shore tax cheats he might as well have said, “I can’t understand what you are going through.” He might have lost Ohio that day, which cost him the presidency and perhaps damaged the party’s reputation among working people in ways that are now baked into how they view it. It did not help that when the shit hit the fan in 2008, instead of demanding the heads of the people who crashed the economy for their own greed, Obama decided to rely on Clinton’s neoliberal economic team. That further solidified the message that Wall Street mattered more to the “party of working people” than Main Street did.

Unfair? I don’t think so. We are talking about a foundational problem here. If we had a system that allowed for multiparty representation, then Democrats could be the centrist, politically-liberal, economically-conservative party its leaders have wanted it to be for decades because then we would have room for a truly social democratic party to the left to advocate for working people and the poor. But this country is trapped into a two-party system right now.

Here is the interesting thing about the apparent restructuring of the parties right now: Trumpism is making the same kind of appeals to blue collar workers across the Rust Belt (and elsewhere, to be sure) that many labor unions made to Democrats before Clinton: Protectionism. It is a bad idea - economically, politically, morally - but it has a historical resonance with working people who have no class analysis, and is borne out of desperation. The labor movement jettisoned most of its leftists in the 1950s to make a deal with government and business. They would abandon class politics and focus on contract administration for their members. In exchange, business would grudgingly accept them as necessary partners. Labor would also embrace anticommunism enthusiastically. In exchange, government would support their right to conduct this particular brand of unionism: business unionism.

When business and government both began to tacitly renege on that agreement into the 1970s by embracing a macroeconomics of neoliberalism, labor - with notable exceptions - did not resort to class politics, but instead demanded bandaids put on the system: tariffs and immigration controls. The idea was to stop giving low-wage countries incentives to take jobs from the US and to create disincentives for workers from other countries to come to the US and undercut union wages.

What we have by now is a Democratic Party that embraces an economic system that workers (and others struggling to get by) believe, correctly, doesn’t work for them. Of course, Trumpism absolutely supports the same system. It just doesn’t want any guardrails to help people who fall through its very large cracks. Democrats do. This is why so many Democrats think that they really do offer up a party for working people; they want to help those who fall through. But it is the system that is the problem, and most people are only going to hear their support for it rather than feel any solutions actually working for them. Trumpism proclaims it is against the system, but it is against the political system, not the economic system.¹ This danger alone requires us to support Democrats, but just because I know that does not mean that that is persuasive to millions of people trying to get by in crappy jobs or without support at all.

This is the challenge for Democrats. The party’s reputation is in shambles, and we know that once ruined a reputation takes more work than it should to recover (if it even can recover). It is not enough for them to say they are doing more than Republicans or they care more. Even if it is true, it is not enough. Democrats have to demonstrate that they care enough to dismantle the systems and institutions that create misery for the people they claim to represent, regardless if big donors oppose it. Maybe especially because big donors will oppose it.

To regain its reputation as the party of working people, the party will have to stop balking at bold solutions that Wall Street donors and corporate interests oppose. And it will have to organize in communities on an ongoing basis to build power. Showing up matters. Democrats don’t show up very often. Listening to communities matters. Democrats don’t score well on this either. This must change.

1. This is an important point which is beyond the scope of this post. Trump has convinced people that their grievances with the economic system are actually about the political system. So, he has successfully misdirected rage away from economic institutions and toward political ones. While the distinctions are surely blurred at times, it is much better for capitalists that people complain about elections officials dealing with nonexistent voter fraud than corporations overseeing very real health insurance claim denials.