Bill Fletcher Jr. and José Alejandro La Luz
Donald Trump is a symptom of an underlying disease: the development of right-wing populism in the United States as a nationalist and irrationalist response to the confluence of multiple crises. To the extent that organized labor has refused to address the rising tide of right-wing populism specifically, and larger issues of race, gender, the environment, and the economy more generally, it has lacked the capacity to confront this existential threat to its own existence. This chapter makes this argument and then delineates approaches that we believe can and must be undertaken in order to not only combat right-wing populism but lay the foundations for a renaissance of organized labor.
The election of Donald Trump as president in November 2016 took place in the context of an almost palpable sense of anxiety within the United States. It was an anxiety brought about by the convergence of three major, and interrelated, crises.
The first, which gained the greatest amount of attention in the November 2016 elections, was the deepening economic crisis. In the Western capitalist world, the result was the slow but steady jettisoning of so-called Keynesian economics, to be replaced by what we now understand to be neoliberal economics. Neoliberal economics has emphasized the removal of all obstacles to the accumulation of profit, and the elimination of the public space in favor of greater privatization.
It is noteworthy that the totality of neoliberal economics was not addressed in the 2016 election cycle. The focus was primarily on one part of it: free trade. The historic failure of most of organized labor to develop an appropriate analysis of neoliberal globalization, and their narrow focus on trade instead, opened up a tremendous space for Trump and the right-wing populists to drive through.
The second major crisis is one of mass migrations and demographic changes. The United Nations estimates that there are 244 million migrants globally, roughly 3 percent of the world’s population (United Nations 2016). In the United States, demographic changes—including but not limited to migration—are expected to alter the population from majority white to no one group in the majority by the middle of the twenty-first century. This reality challenges the foundation myth of the United States and has become a rallying cry for that element of the political Right that frets about what they see as the coming “white genocide.” Third and finally, the environmental crisis poses the question of whether humanity can make it out of the twenty-first century in civilized fashion or at all.
In sum, the collision of these three crises has resulted in anxiety about the capacity of the established so-called democratic capitalist states to operate. Though the nation-state remains essential to capitalism, it is not focused on the needs of the nation but rather serves principally as the enforcement mechanism for global capitalism. To the extent that the capitalist nation-state serves the interests of global capitalism, it loses credibility in the eyes of the population, opening up terrain for challenges from both the Right and the Left. The capitalist nation-state can no longer deliver on the social contract that supposedly existed, thereby laying the foundation for frustration and anger, and possibly much more. It is on that terrain that right-wing populism is able to grow, particularly when not challenged by a dynamic Left.
Populism is a political movement without a firm ideology but nevertheless counterpoises “the people” versus “the elites.” Establishment ideologues frequently disparage populism and associate it with demagoguery. Populism in general is better understood to be a framework or an impulse rather than an ideology. Our focus will be on right-wing populism.
Right-wing populism generally has certain defining characteristics:
In order to appreciate the question of right-wing populism and the current crisis, one must situate it in the specific unsettling that resulted from neoliberal globalization. In the United States, discussion of the growing economic divide—which received a great deal of attention first with the Occupy movement and more recently with the 2016 election—focused largely on the impact of neoliberal globalization on the white worker specifically or the white workforce more generally. What this fails to appreciate is that the reconstruction of capitalism originated in the late 1950s and early 1960s and fell principally on African American and Latino workers (MacLean 2008), but for whites as a whole, there was little perception of a crisis until it hit them. By the mid-1970s, this is precisely what transpired, in what was then the worst recession to have hit the United States since the Great Depression. When the shock waves of the reconstruction of global capitalism began to be felt more broadly in the United States, a far-right movement began to gain traction, guided by theorists who referred to themselves as the New Right, such as Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich. This right-wing movement was multifaceted and included both secular and religious conservatives as well as right-wing populists (Berlet and Lyons 2000). Sometimes these forces collaborated, whereas in other cases they were in competition. But they became very visible with the rise of several reactionary mass movements, including those that were antitax; antiabortion; focused on gun rights; antibusing; anti–Panama Canal treaty; and, increasingly, anti–racialized immigrant—racialized because there is no mass movement in the United States, for example, mobilized against immigrants from Ireland or Russia. The term “immigrant,” when used in a derogatory fashion, is almost exclusively reserved for those from the Global South (e.g., Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia). What often goes by the name “anti-immigrant” in the contemporary United States is actually opposed to immigrants from the Global South. These right-wing populists’ objections to the welfare state were rooted in racial and ideological objections to the provision of services to the so-called undeserving. Right-wing populism has been a movement that bases itself largely among whites who feel that they are losing out on the so-called American Dream and are being eclipsed by people of color.
The other contributing factor to the right-wing movements has been neoliberal economics. Neoliberals saw the welfare state as an obstacle to the accumulation of profits. The interests of these two sections of the right—neoliberal capitalists and right-wing populists—could and did converge. That was true even when those representing neoliberal capital did not see themselves on the right (e.g., Democrats in New York City during its infamous 1975 fiscal crisis).
As neoliberal economics spread from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party—ultimately becoming the dominant framework—it had a significant impact on the base of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party went through a monumental change, experiencing demographic expansion, especially bringing in more women and people of color, while embracing neoliberal economics and distancing itself from many of the basic demands of the trade union movement. This has been—incorrectly—described as the rise of “identity politics.” It was more a reflection of contradictory tendencies rooted in very different struggles. The Democratic Party’s ultimate embrace of civil rights and expansion of the social safety net to include people of color was itself considered a betrayal by many whites, who saw this as providing services and benefits to illegitimate and undeserving populations. Identity politics was a major point of contention within the Democratic Party in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory. Senator Bernie Sanders saw the 2016 election as a white worker populist revolt rather than understanding that what had unfolded was a white nationalist revolt driven by right-wing populism. In fact, one can argue that the Trump victory was a victory for identity politics, though in this case meaning a white identity.
Complementing the transformation of the Democratic Party is the ambiguous role of the mainstream of organized labor when it came to these changes in the Democratic Party specifically and civil rights in general. With the advent of the Cold War, unions, which tended to have the best records on civil rights, were subject to allegations of being communists and, in many cases, expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and, after 1955, exclusion from the AFL-CIO, the organization that resulted from the merger of the CIO with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Those unions that remained held a broad spectrum of views on race, gender, and civil rights. Though there were unions that addressed race, such as the Packinghouse Workers, 1199: the National Health Care Workers’ Union, the Distributive Workers of America, and, in contradictory fashion, the United Auto Workers, there were also unions that had white-male-only clauses as a condition of membership, and an even broader assortment that were otherwise blind and intransigent on matters of race, gender, and civil rights (Spero and Harris 1968). In some cases, there were local unions that served as “base areas” for reactionary activities, a phenomenon not just reserved for the South but also found in such places as Boston in the 1970s during the height of the school desegregation battle. Thus, white union members often saw no contradiction between militant trade unionism on the one hand and racism and sexism on the other.
Furthermore, neoliberalism introduced a growing authoritarianism at the level of the democratic capitalist state, creating what Nicos Poulantzas (2014) called the “neoliberal authoritarian state.” The parameters of democracy have been shrinking since the 1970s. The acceptable discourse has become increasingly limited, while the so-called national security state has been strengthened. This is not fascism. There are various forms of right-wing authoritarianism, including fascism, coup regimes, and conservative dictatorships. Neoliberal authoritarianism appears to be a preemptive assault on the popular classes in anticipation of resistance to the continued impact of global capitalist restructuring and the global environmental crisis. At the risk of speculation, we suggest that this authoritarianism may extend beyond neoliberalism, particularly if neoliberalism itself collapses. The transnational capitalist class would face a challenge with regard to methods of accumulation if neoliberalism were abandoned, but in either case, the pressures of the environment, along with the overaccumulation crisis within capitalism, may continue the tendency toward authoritarian solutions.
The fact that neoliberalism and forms of the neoliberal authoritarian state have been introduced by both politically conservative and politically liberal administrations should not lead one to the conclusion that this is all a grand conspiracy or that all these politicians are the same. If anything, this process appears to be driven by the strengthening of the transnational capitalist class, though in each case the specific features of the development of neoliberalism and the neoliberal authoritarian state are unique to the given nation-state. It should be added that there continue to be struggles between the domestic capitalist class and the representatives of the transnational capitalist class that play out in the political arena. To some extent, one sees this in the contradictory signals sent by the Trump administration when it comes to economic policy, as in debates concerning tariffs and over which segments of capital benefit and which are harmed, but it can also be seen in struggles in connection with free-trade agreements.
Right-wing populism poses a challenge, but to what? It quite ironically has emerged as an inconsistent, disingenuous, and nationalist opponent of neoliberal globalization. It is true that neoliberalism has destroyed the dream of white Americans, but discussions of the alleged “white working class” and the November 2016 election frequently miss the point. If November 2016 was a revolt against neoliberal globalization, why did workers of color not jump in? Indeed, why were they not recognized as its first victims? Right-wing populism builds itself on populations that are feeling displaced by neoliberal globalization, but it does not necessarily challenge neoliberalism. Authoritarian at its core, though right-wing populism may rhetorically challenge both neoliberalism and globalization, it does so on the basis of an authoritarian nationalist welfare statism that privileges the so-called native population over the “outsider,” whether the outsider is an immigrant or a member of a domestic “enemy” population. Although much of white America has reacted with a vengeance, this has led to a bizarre, ahistorical scenario in which right-wing populism suggests that the white working population has been the principal victim of neoliberalism (however defined) rather than recognizing that the domestic effects of neoliberal globalization have fallen disproportionately on African Americans and Latinos. Similarly, the current regime in Poland is taking an extreme right-wing nationalist, though welfarist, approach. Thus, one cannot look for consistency on economics within right-wing populist movements. The critical question revolves much more around who the right-wing populists define as the legitimate population.
It is here that matters relative to race generally and to the Obama era in particular become relevant. The central feature of the Republican assault on the Obama administration revolved around race and the racialization by the political Right of what remains of the welfare state. Obama’s victory in 2008, and to a lesser extent his reelection in 2012, seemed to be—for many people—the harbinger of a new era. Too many liberal and progressive people saw in Obama what they wanted to see. Obama, however, was a neoliberal when taking office and remained committed to that vision, albeit with elements of a more progressive stance on certain basic social issues and in favor of a social safety net, but he was not committed to the old Rooseveltian welfare state or to Keynesian economics. He was committed to stabilizing capitalism, which his administration largely did in the context of the 2008 financial collapse. Examples of this include the failure to penalize Wall Street for the collapse, the insufficient funds put into the stabilization process (for fear of a political backlash), and the anemic support for the Employee Free Choice Act (which would have opened up new paths for the growth of organized labor).
Most progressive social movements misread the Obama administration and made a series of mistakes—some strategic, others tactical. The most basic mistake was strategic.
In November 2008, a hole was blown in the defense system of the conservative forces led by the Republican Party. The explosion was devastating and led to a massive retreat by Republicans, in part because they could not explain what had happened, but the retreating conservatives were not pursued; the pro-Obama forces did not follow through on their initial victory.
The Obama administration promoted the demobilization of the progressive base and in doing so laid the foundation for the reemergence of right-wing populist movements, including the Tea Party and, later, the Trump presidential campaign. This demobilization began almost immediately after the 2008 election, when Obama collapsed “Obama for America” into the Democratic Party, thereby undermining the possibility of an independent progressive organization that could have embraced a much broader agenda. The Obama administration did just enough in its policies—and in its very existence—to infuriate the right wing but at the same time not enough to inspire progressive social movements. At every turn, it seemed prepared to compromise with the forces of evil, as if doing so proved it was a mature political actor or prove again and again that this was not the administration of an “angry black man.”
The Tea Party and the birther movement filled the void. Organized labor did little but complain about what the Obama administration was not doing, and the black freedom movement was badly divided over how to respond, in part because masses of African Americans saw hope in Obama and saw in his attackers the faces of evil.
The leadership of organized labor expected that the Obama administration would deliver on promises in connection with the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), legislation aimed at making it easier for workers to join or form labor unions. Major divisions in the Democratic Party, along with a central focus on health care reform, tabled this for the Obama administration, but more importantly, organized labor treated its concerns, including the EFCA, as matters that were to be the focus of lobbying rather than a focus of mass organizing. This monumental error by the leaders of organized labor took place in the middle of the greatest recession since the Great Depression, when the trade union movement was well positioned to link the demand for the EFCA with the demand for comprehensive economic justice. Instead, the leaders just groused.
Anyone who claims to have expected Trump to win is being less than honest. That said, there were sufficient historical and contemporary reasons to believe that it was at least possible. Trump tapped into a sentiment among many white Americans that had rarely—at least in the past three decades—been so openly expressed by mainstream politicians. Until Trump, political racism played out through what many people called “dog whistle politics.” With Trump, however, we had the full emergence of what one might call “bugle politics.” This bugle politics reflected a sense within much of white America that Trump was needed in order to correct what they believed to have been the greatest mistake in the history of the United States: the election of a black president.
The white rage went deep. It was expressed in a wave of revanchism. This anger, which was organized within right-wing populism, served as one wing of what one might call a “united right front,” whose principal objective has been and remains the overturning of the progressive victories of the twentieth century. Despite Trump’s protests to the contrary, his movement fit well within the framework set by the united right front.
So, why did Trump win? It is urgent that we step away from many of the myths that were elaborated almost from the moment that Trump was declared the victor on November 8. The main factors were (1) that this was an Electoral College victory, since Clinton won the majority of the popular vote; (2) the Republican base “returned home” and did not splinter; (3) voter suppression, particularly against the African American and Latino electorate; (4) a small but significant voter reversal in key states (in part influenced by a major strategic miscalculation by the Clinton campaign that simply assumed she would win in the Rust Belt); (5) that race and gender were key motivators for the Trump voter, much more than concerns about the economy (or, to put it differently, race and gender were the lenses through which the economy was viewed); (6) and the demobilization of the Obama base, in part resulting from an uninspiring Democratic candidate and disappointment with the Obama administration.
To this list we must add the failure of organized labor to educate its base against right-wing populism. This problem existed on many levels, including a fear of addressing race and gender, and a manner of presenting the challenges facing working people as largely grounded in onerous trade agreements. The failure to offer a comprehensive analysis of neoliberal globalization came back to bite organized labor in the rear when Trump made opposition to free-trade agreements one of his central rhetorical points. For many union members, it all sounded familiar. This was equally a challenge for the Sanders campaign. Its economic message sometimes sounded as if it were Trump’s right-wing populist message. The absence of a racial justice analysis and an antixenophobic framework allowed many voters to perceive incorrectly that Sanders and Trump were speaking to the same issue.
In reviewing this list, there are two points that we wish to highlight. The first is that there was no mandate for Trump. In losing the popular vote, in effect he lost the election. The second point concerns the Russians. While we are absolutely convinced of Russian meddling, just as there has been US meddling in many foreign elections, and we believe that the influence of “black propaganda,” or “fake news,” is important, it would be incorrect to look at those points as game changers. They were contributing factors that might not have been in place had the Clinton campaign had a better strategy; had Clinton herself been a convincing populist candidate; had FBI director James Comey not issued his statement two weeks prior to the election on e-mails supposedly pertinent to an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server; and had the other factors noted not been in play, with voter suppression probably the most underrated factor.
So, what has all of this meant for organized labor in the United States? It is first important to situate the crisis facing organized labor (Fletcher and Gapasin 2009). This crisis started in the late 1940s with Cold War witch hunts against leftists within union ranks and the impact that these had on everything from organizing strategy to member education, leading to a collapse of any semblance of progressive internationalism and an abandonment of the antiracist struggle. Organized labor, with certain exceptions, missed the emergence of key social movements, including the black freedom movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano and the Puerto Rican freedom movements, and the anti–Vietnam War movement.
Missing these movements was not simply a matter of corrupted morals and politics but also one of missing the strategic opportunity to create the sort of social and economic justice bloc that could very well have transformed politics in the United States. This failure meant that organized labor evolved in the direction of a so-called special interest rather than as a broad and inclusive social movement.
A second factor in understanding the crisis of organized labor is to appreciate the failure of the reform movement that swept much of organized labor in the 1990s. This movement, which emerged slowly out of the late 1980s, was an effort at altering the practices of the existing trade union movement in the absence of fundamental restructuring and reorientation. The focus of the reform effort was largely on organizing the unorganized and by October 1995 had led to the victory of a reform slate in the national AFL-CIO election, headed by then Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president John Sweeney, United Mine Workers of America president Richard Trumka, and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees leader Linda Chavez-Thompson and known as the New Voices slate.
Despite the cautious optimism of the moment, the reform effort, largely directed from the top, was unable to exercise its potential. Significant accomplishments took place, including the massive victory of public-sector organizing in Puerto Rico; the large-scale organizing of new sectors, such as home care; invigorated central labor councils; and the campaign in defense of the Charleston Five, when five longshore workers in South Carolina were arrested for a peaceful protest against nonunion labor on the docks.
Yet, there were real constraints within which the reform movement operated, some of which were self-imposed. In some cases, this harkened back to the Cold War and the fear of left-wing unionism. The main challenge remained the ideological paradigm within which most of organized labor operated (i.e., the framework developed by Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor). This paradigm of so-called pure and simple trade unionism restricted the ability of organized labor to see itself as truly part of a classwide movement. Though the reformers of the 1990s emphasized member mobilizations and new organizing efforts, as well as building coalitions, they limited the extent and depth of member education and, at the end of the day, continued to assert the possibility of a return to the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism, during which many of the leaders of organized labor believed that peaceful coexistence had reigned supreme. This misassessment was grounded in a fundamental misreading of the labor movement’s actual history (particularly the virulent racism and antiunionism in the South and Southwest during this Golden Age), of neoliberal globalization, and of the growing authoritarian tendency within so-called democratic capitalism. These factors contributed to blindness to the danger inherent in right-wing populism and to its potential to have an impact on labor union members.
We noted earlier the impact of the Cold War. Worker education specifically was both marginalized and minimized (in form and content). Touching on issues of race, class, and a basic framework for understanding the political economy, including the corporate-driven US foreign policy, was deemed dangerous in that it might lead one to be branded as a communist. The “safer” route was to avoid these issues entirely and instead become cheerleaders for the so-called American Dream and focus primarily on training union leaders to develop the skills and knowledge to perform their duties more efficiently. Among other things, such an approach weakened the ability of organized labor to correctly identify the right-wing populism and prepare its own members to resist it.
A third factor in the crisis was the failure of Richard Trumka’s administration of the AFL-CIO to build a governing, transformative coalition after his election in 2009. Trumka, an outstanding leader out of the United Mine Workers of America, had been the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer under its president John Sweeney. In ways that have never been revealed, he was caught up in a scandal that brought down the reform administration of Ron Carey in the Teamsters Union. For several years after that, Trumka was virtually out of sight; he reemerged slowly to become heir apparent to Sweeney.
Trumka is a visionary himself, but he failed to create a governing coalition that supported not only his agenda but also the transformation of organized labor. Instead, there has been more of an atmosphere of tolerance of his administration on the part of the organization’s affiliates. One of his boldest ventures was the creation of the AFL-CIO Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice in the aftermath of a rash of police killings of African Americans. Though this commission had the endorsement of others in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, it was highly controversial in that it explicitly examined the question of race and the role of organized labor in economic and racial disparities and institutional biases. (Important as this commission was, there were limitations, including focusing more on the black/white racial binary rather than expanding to examine the construction of race in a broader framework.) Unfortunately, after the November 2016 election, the commission’s work largely came to a halt.
Trumka’s elevation to the presidency contrasted with the October 1995 victory of the New Voices slate in the AFL-CIO, in which there was a formidable coalition of unions that backed the platform of the New Voices ticket. Though their support was ultimately ephemeral, their existence as a bloc did have an impact on the profile of organized labor.
By contrast, Trumka’s election was not viewed as a fundamental shift, though many progressives expected or hoped that he would deepen reform efforts. To a great extent, his administration did not depart dramatically from his predecessor’s. The Trumka administration seemed to be, more than anything else, Trumka.
A fourth factor in the current situation has been seen in splits within organized labor on both the environment and trade. With regard to trade, beginning during the Sweeney administration, there was rising discontent with what some of the unions based in manufacturing believed had been relative silence in the face of industry relocation and so-called deindustrialization. This anger was focused on matters of trade agreements, including the expansion of free-trade agreements after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
As we noted earlier, the deeper problem was a narrow analysis of the economic crisis facing the US working class specifically and the global working classes generally. While free-trade agreements contributed to the situation, the larger factor was the comprehensive nature of neoliberal globalization. Neoliberal globalization is not the result of an evolutionary process but rather has been orchestrated through political and economic agreements and expedited by developments in technology. Free-trade agreements are the component that reflects the need of global capitalism for economic integration.
To the extent that organized labor focused almost exclusively on trade agreements, it advanced a narrow, nationalist framework that could be—and was—taken advantage of by right-wing populists, including Donald Trump. The desperation of much of organized labor in the face of the economic crisis seems to have led many in the union movement to see the overturning of free-trade agreements as the whole solution rather than as one part of the answer. Furthermore, the elimination of free trade raises the question of what sort of trade needs to be proposed by the trade union movement in the United States. It also raises the question of the relationship of the US working class to working classes in other parts of the world, which are regularly crushed not only by trade agreements but also by the practice of predatory capitalist penetration in their countries.
The trade union movement has also been torn by conflicting approaches to the environmental crisis. This became evident in the context of the battles over oil pipelines, including the Keystone and Dakota pipelines. Organized labor was split, with several building trades unions, such as the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC), adamantly supporting pipeline construction while others, such as the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and National Nurses United (NNU), spoke out in opposition to it—frequently in alliance with community-based organizations. The extent of this tension was displayed in heated exchanges between LIUNA and the CWA, but the split was much deeper.
In the aftermath of the November 2016 presidential election, several building trades unions welcomed Trump’s commitment to move forward with environmentally threatening projects. The AFL-CIO found itself unable or unwilling to develop a coherent pro-worker, pro-environment policy, apparently concluding that the building trades unions, or some segment of them, might split off on their own if it did.
The divide on the environment was a display of the narrowness of the trade unionism practiced by much of organized labor. While the progressive segments of organized labor recognized that attention must be focused on reorganizing the economy in an environmentally friendly manner—in which quite literally millions of jobs could be produced—those forces that are more conservative appear to believe that the jobs that the fossil-fuel industry promises should be grabbed, in a case of better the devil you know than the devil you do not. Such a view, which we would argue is a capitulation, is consistent with the notion of labor as a special interest rather than a representative of the broad interests of working-class people.
A fifth factor in the current moment is the emergence of left/progressive leadership in some key unions, including the American Postal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Transit Union, the CWA, NNU, and, in a different location, the SEIU and the United Steel Workers of America. The first four of these unions backed the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders and have positioned themselves to conceptualize a legacy for this movement within organized labor. It is too early to ascertain the longevity of this effort. The question, however, is whether this left/progressive leadership grouping is prepared to push the envelope on the limits of trade unionism. Specifically, it is one thing to endorse a progressive presidential candidate but another thing to transform the very nature of trade unionism.
The final development was referenced earlier but should be identified explicitly: the rise of an openly collaborationist wing within organized labor. Meeting with Trump immediately after his inauguration, this element, which included the presidents of the UBC and the LIUNA, went far beyond the already unacceptable argument of finding common ground with conservatives. These leaders offered praise to Trump, including with regard to his “America First” platform. Rather than recognizing the danger presented by Trump and his right-wing populist movement, they have been prepared to view Trump as someone advancing the interests of US workers. The racial blindness of these leaders has been nothing short of spectacular.
In the aftermath of the November 2016 election, the AFL-CIO issued a statement attempting to explain the results (Trumka 2016; Hiatt 2016). Though preliminary, it was still anemic. In fact, one of the striking features of the postelection environment was the lack of a comprehensive analysis of the election results by organized labor. In fact, the relative silence has been deafening.
What are we to make of this? Among other things, the failure of most of organized labor to engage in open internal debate has come back at the unions. Many union leaders are fearful of their own members, not really knowing which of them voted for Trump. As a result, we are witnessing paralysis, and part of that paralysis is a failure of analysis.
The existence of Trump supporters within the ranks of organized labor should not have come as a surprise to labor’s leadership. In general, somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of union households tend to vote Republican. This is a significant minority. The difference in 2016 was that this minority was quite vocal, and their anger with the Democrats overlapped with the frustration that many non-Republicans had with the neoliberal policies advanced by most Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton.
If organized labor is to be a full component of the resistance, it must rethink its relationship to electoral politics, but more importantly, its relationship to its own membership. Our suggestions are as follows. In order to defeat right-wing populism, the leadership of organized labor must engage in a discussion with its own membership about right-wing populism but also about race, gender, and the role of the United States in international politics and economics. This is far from a new conclusion. In 1995, the AFL-CIO commissioned a study by Peter Hart Research that indicated, among other things, that “most members have no ideological framework for organizing information about politics and public policy … and some even have a rough economic analysis that includes the global economy, trade, weakened unions, and growing inequality.… [H]owever, these members generally have little or no ideological orientation that would link economics, government, and politics … and few can articulate any explanation for what has gone wrong, who is responsible, or what should be done about it.… [L]acking such an orientation, their substantial economic grievances do not lead them to the progressive political conclusions we might expect” (Garin and Molyneux 1995, emphasis added). The study also concluded that “labor’s long-term strategic mission is to develop an ideological framework among the membership” in order to “tell a compelling story about the economy, corporate irresponsibility, and the conservative policies that have helped shift even more bargaining power to capital over labor” (Garin and Molyneux 1995, emphasis added). The nature of this engagement must be such that it encourages the kind of education and debate that would allow union members to grasp the complexity of the changing political economy and how the rise of right-wing populism is fueled not only by economic insecurity but also by racism and xenophobia. The efforts promoted by the national AFL-CIO, for instance, through its Race Commission, or the work of the Washington State Labor Council to advance a racial justice education project, are positive cases in point of what is desperately needed.
Anti–right-wing populist education in the trade union movement must be democratic and centered on workers. Historically, worker education in certain of the more progressive and Left-led CIO unions included the study of democracy and the meaning of democratic values and democratic rights, as well as the role of social movements. A lot of that took place in collaboration with labor education centers such as the Brookwood Labor College and the Highlander Center.
Now more than ever, unions need to reshape their leadership development programs to engage leaders at all levels in discussions and reflection about the political economy. Such discussions need to address the meaning and implications of neoliberalism for their standard of living and their rights not only as workers but also as citizens and residents of the larger society. In our view, this also must include a discussion of the ascendancy of populism, most specifically of right-wing populism, and of its appeal to certain groups of workers and union members, including the role that racism and xenophobia play in this whole process.
We must think about an all-around education process. In union apprenticeship programs, for instance, it is not enough to teach basic union history; it is also critical to have an examination of capitalism as a system, as well as discussions of the nature and shape of various reactionary social movements. In stewards’ training, participants should be encouraged to come forward with challenges that they receive from conservative and ultraright members that they may have found difficult to answer. This can become part of the learning process. New educational materials should be offered, ranging from illustrated books to online programs, that encourage deeper education and provide the opportunity to explore matters in greater scope. Education that challenges right-wing populism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other views is not a one-shot experience. Union institutions should make this a regular part of their programs.
In addressing right-wing populism, not only educational campaigns are necessary at all levels but so are organizing and mobilizing campaigns that are explicitly targeted at institutions and issues that are utilized by right-wing populists and other enemies of workers. Thus, unions must advance campaigns that challenge the economic devastation carried out by multinational corporations—both in the United States and overseas—with regard to everything from the environment to the implications of corporate abandonment of geographic areas (such as plant closures). The union must be seen as the entity that is fighting for consistent democracy and consistent economic justice, and not fighting only for the interests of its current members.
It is important that we note the question of internationalism, or the lack thereof. Organized labor has paid precious little attention to educating its membership regarding international affairs, the role of the United States in foreign regimes, and the global class struggle. As we mentioned earlier, the approach of much of the US trade union movement in its opposition to trade agreements has been protectionist and, in the worst cases, has demonized foreign workers as though they are the source of the problem rather than being victims of neoliberal capitalism along with US workers. Opposition to NAFTA, for example, necessitates a united effort of Mexican, US, and Canadian workers and their organizations. A transnational labor movement needs to be elaborating an approach reflecting the standpoint of workers rather than the standpoint of capital.
Opposition to right-wing populism is directly linked to a revitalization of organized labor, and the revitalization of organized labor necessitates a political Left. A great portion of the weakness of the union reform efforts in the 1990s was the attempt to resolve the contradictions labor was facing within a failed paradigm. This means that revitalization must tackle the specific realities of neoliberal globalization, growing authoritarianism, and the convergence of crises related to the economy, the environment, and the state. In that sense, organized labor must begin to advance not only a critique of contemporary capitalism but also an alternative approach to the economy that bases itself on the needs of working-class people. Indeed, such an approach must truly be internationalist in order to address the reorganization of global capitalism. As demonstrated in the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World and, in the 1930s, the growth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, labor needs a dedicated and invigorated Left in order to be reborn. Tactical innovation and provocative ideas are insufficient. The Left, when it is at its best, challenges progressive social movements to go beyond the “acceptable” and to confront power. This can be uncomfortable for the pragmatists within organized labor, but it is essential if the movement is to be emancipatory in its practice and objectives.
Organized labor must engage with community-based allies in progressive electoral challenges, state by state and territory by territory. Organized labor’s approach to electoral politics must shift fundamentally not only toward engaging their members democratically and pedagogically but also building alliances with strategic allies on a state-by-state and territory-by-territory basis in an effort to build progressive electoral blocs that are prepared to operate both inside and outside the Democratic Party and, in some cases, within the Republican Party. This is beginning to happen, as in the work of the Washington State Labor Council, but it has not been advanced as a comprehensive strategy by the movement. Independent working-class politics begins with an independent working-class analysis and program.
History demonstrates that timing is everything. History is very unforgiving, and it reminds us that once an opportunity is lost, it may be lost for decades, if not longer. Organized labor is in a race against time with right-wing populism. The inability of organized labor to respond to the reconfiguration of capitalism and its skittishness in addressing race and gender have placed it in a decidedly weakened position and made it more difficult to capture the imagination of the working class.
Addressing what amounts to a strategic defeat of the working class in no way means that the war is over, however. Consider those in France who in early summer 1940 could only look in despair at a country that had collapsed in weeks under the treads of the German invasion and the gutlessness of its own generals. It took time, but the battle cry of resistance was heard and a spirit emerged: a spirit of resistance, represented by the outgunned but never dispirited Maquis resistance fighters, who had to employ strategies, tactics, and organization in circumstances that only a few short months earlier could never have been conceived of—an asymmetric situation, to borrow a term from the current era. In our opinion, this is the hour of the Maquis!