Photo: Joseph Prezioso/Anadolu/Getty Images
Every Democratic loss now triggers a new round of debate over one of the most well-worn questions of contemporary electoral politics: Would Bernie have won? The original debate, of course, was literal: Immediately following Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss in 2016 to Donald Trump, the insurgent left insisted that their favored Democratic primary candidate would have clinched a general election victory where the nominee herself could not.
The argument went something like this: Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-neoliberalism, and anti-status quo orientation easily catapulted him to the top of the Republican Party and popular appeal in the swing states that determine the American presidency. However dubious his credibility as a working-class hero (and you may recall he’s a billionaire real-estate titan whose penthouse has a golden elevator), Clinton was a walking avatar for the exact elite political class that Trump so effectively demonized.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, had spent his entire career making arguments against the ruling class that precisely mirrored Trump’s: Where Donald blamed immigrants and demanded mass deportation for American woes, Sanders rightfully lambasted the rich and powerful for causing working-class discontent and demanded social welfare as a response.
Sanders’s narrative — “yes, the system IS fucked, you ARE getting screwed, now let’s take on the fat cats who are doing it and get everyone what they deserve” — offers an answer, and a positive alternative, to Trump’s pitch. Clinton’s narrative was something closer to, “no, the system IS NOT fucked, you AREN’T getting screwed, now please vote for the fat cats’ favorite politician.”
There’s no way to beat Trumpism without class struggle and a promise of change for working people.
Eight years later, Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump has resurrected another back and forth between camps pinning Democratic Party decline on class issues versus cultural ones: Did racism and bigotry deliver a crushing Trump victory, or did “economic anxiety”? Setting aside the obvious problems with presuming only one can be at play or that they’re wholly distinct, these discussions miss all that “Bernie would’ve won” really means: There’s no way to beat Trumpism without class struggle and a promise of change for working people, and waging it requires multiracial working-class solidarity and a party that represents that coalition’s interests. Until those things happen, both within and outside of electoral politics, get ready for Trump after Trump after Trump.
Let’s start with what skeptics of class-based politics get right: Trump and his allies across the broader right have often stoked racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia as a political strategy, which resonates with voters in ways that can be downright appalling to watch. The right-wing digital media ecosystem has gotten rapidly uglier in its rhetoric since 2016, and broad swaths of Trumpland will proudly brag that “triggering the libs” is their political lodestar. Backlash against movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or fights for reproductive justice or trans rights has coalesced around a politics of nostalgia for ultratraditional patriarchs. And while Biden’s presidency did deliver some working-class gains, Democrats were still unable to credibly acknowledge or respond to voters’ pain when inflation offset those incremental improvements.
Taking all of these dismaying forces into account, it’s obtuse to suggest that Harris could have precluded 10-plus-point swings in crucial counties toward Trump among working-class voters simply by dropping a few more white papers on tax credits. As Crooked Media’s Julia Claire put it on X, “some ppl would like to believe that we can Economic Populism our way out of this … But that’s not what Republicans did to win. We need to address the national cultural reactionary moment we’re in, starting with men.” Commentator Jill Filipovic made a similar point: “[T]his election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.”
Even if you accept this premise — which veers awfully close to an argument that Trump voters have uniquely wicked souls — what theory of change could it possibly inspire? Calling Trump voters a “basket of deplorables” certainly didn’t work in 2016, and it hasn’t since. And if the plan is to redeem wicked souls one by one, you quickly run up against the fact that Republican and Democratic voters are becoming more socially stratified than ever. Our social universes drive our beliefs and behaviors, and we increasingly spend our lives within different ones. Put bluntly, what the hell standing could I possibly have to scold, lecture, or persuade people living in deindustrialized towns in the Rust Belt of anything at all?
Notoriously, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had an answer for the dilemma of working class exodus from the Democratic Party “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and we can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” This calculus largely guided Harris too, who campaigned hard for upscale anti-Trump moderates with Liz Cheney at her side. But this tack has obvious shortcomings, both mathematically and politically: There are way, way more blue-collar voters than there are white-collar Cheney fans. And the more a party’s base depends on the latter, the less it can deliver for the former, and the more its survival depends on preserving a status quo that’s pissed so many people off to begin with. Most importantly, it doesn’t work; Trump is returning to the White House.
The solution here, then, lies in building a coalition around a narrative that competes with Trump’s — one that forges new social ties and draws on shared material interests. That narrative has to come from someone who can shape and deliver it in a way that resonates, which was something a Sanders-esque figure could do that most Democrats, given their donor base and political trajectories, cannot.
For all his monstrousness, Trump tapped into a justified sense of disillusionment with the system and managed to convince some of its biggest victims — nearly half of the poorest voting bracket picked him — that he was on their side. Of course he isn’t! But only Sanders has built the credibility to claim as much from the broader left, by spending decades consistently fighting doggedly for the working class. Here’s hoping others can run through his playbook a little faster.
As impossible and abstract as it seems to realign the Democratic base by shared class interests, it’s still much a more concrete plan than “reduce bigotry in strangers” — the labor movement offers a clear blueprint for how to put it into practice.
Throughout U.S. history and across the world, class-based organizing that unites people across racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines has been among the most powerful mechanisms for building more equal and just societies, but they have to take on the rich and powerful to get there. The idea that the Republican Party can ever be the vehicle for doing so is a farce. We deserve an opposition party that can step up and side with its own base.
