Socialism is alive and well, and it is growing, though maybe not in the way you expect.

The federal government provides more than $700 billion in contracts to private sector corporations. It also forgoes approximately $1.5 trillion in tax receipts to provide tax breaks for corporations to encourage job-creating investments, or so we are told. The net result is that corporations avoid paying their fair share while we, the taxpaying public, make up the difference.

As if that public support for private enterprise isn’t enough, now President Trump is taking it to the next level by acquiring 10 percent of Intel’s stock in exchange for the $8.9 billion the government is providing the company via the Chips and Science Act.

From one angle, this certainly is an improvement over the big bank bailouts, where the taxpayer took all the risk but received none of the upside once the banks became solvent again. But it also marks a new version of "too big to fail." After all, when Socialist Trump takes a stake in a corporation, he certainly can’t allow that corporation to fail and wipe out all that equity.

This transaction has sent alarm bells ringing in the executive suites of hundreds of corporations on the government dole. As one corporate lawyer put it, “Virtually every company I’ve talked to which is a regular recipient of subsidies or grants from the government is concerned right now.”

What are they so worried about? They are concerned that they will have to give something back to the taxpayer in exchange for our largess. But the frank admission of their fears also tells us quite a bit about how the corporate economy is actually structured. What Trump is laying bare are decades of corporate socialism—the use of taxpayer money to support and enrich private corporations and their stockholders (including the elected officials who continue to trade shares and profit while making laws and regulations that impact the companies in which they hold shares).

This is the real swamp that is siphoning wealth and stable jobs away from working people. This is the swamp that has caused so many voters to give up on government. This is the swamp full of quicksand, sucking politicians into the suffocating cycle of endless corporate donations. Draining the swamp means ending corporate socialism, dismantling the apparatus that rewards big corporate contributions and empowers lobbyists arguing for big business over the interests of working people, and neither of our two political parties is willing to do that.

By accident, Trump’s overt support for Intel creates an opportunity for the Democrats to help working people secure their jobs from corporate greed. If the Democrats had any guts—granted that’s a big “if”—they would offer legislation prohibiting any corporation receiving taxpayer funding or subsidies from implementing compulsory layoffs. Instead, all layoffs would be voluntary based on financial buyout packages, the kind that are often offered to upper-level white-collar employees. If you take taxpayer money, you can’t force taxpayers out of their jobs. That would certainly seem fair and just to working people, who are too often simply told to take a hike just to further enrich executives and Wall Street investors.

After all, what was the Chips and Science Act for? One big reason for this big investment, supposedly, was to bring thousands of new jobs to America. The Biden administration awarded Intel an $8.5 billion grant, plus $11 billion in favorable loans, based on Intel’s claim that it would create 20,000 temporary construction jobs and 10,000 more permanent manufacturing positions.

Meanwhile, since 1990, Intel has spent $152 billion on stock buybacks. It has chosen to use its revenues to buy up its own shares, rather than investing in the company’s future. Stock buybacks boost the prices of a company’s shares and enrich its top executives and major Wall Street investors. They do not increase the worth of the company. Hey, why not grab more taxpayer money, buy back more shares, and shove the gains in your pocket as fast as possible? Isn’t that what all those corporate donations are for?

And the jobs? Nothing is guaranteed. In fact, as the Chips Act was moving through Congress, Intel laid off 2,000 workers!

So, instead of giving 24-hour speeches that no one can remember, why don’t a few Democrats get up on the Senate floor and say something like this:

“Now that the United States taxpayers own 10 percent of Intel, let’s make our investment contingent on protecting the livelihoods of working people. Mr. President, tell Intel that during the life of our investment, the company will not be permitted to conduct compulsory layoffs. Only voluntary buyouts will be permitted. Join us in a bill that puts the protection of jobs of working people front and center.”

Shouldn’t all the Democrats and even the Josh Hawley Republicans get behind such job-protecting legislation?

But here’s what comes to mind after writing that sentence: Not a chance! Get real! What are you smoking? I can’t imagine the Democratic leadership embracing such a proposal. Their knees knock at any mention of policies that offend corporations and Wall Street.

That’s why we need a new party of working people. Not a third party, but a true alternative to the corporate-dominated Republicans and Democrats. That’s what 57 percent of the voters of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin really want. They want a party that is willing to put working people at the center of economic policy, rather than provide corporations with more taxpayer dollars.

Corporate sycophants will call that socialistic, as if enhancing the jobs and income of working people is a slur. Meanwhile, the super-rich have no problem building gold-plated castles of corporate socialism... to enrich themselves.

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The New York Times recently released a report showing what we already know—the Democrats are in decline as more voters now register as Republicans or Independents.

This is especially the case for young voters.

It’s not hard to figure out why. Just ask yourself this simple question: What is the Democratic Party vision for our country? What message of economic justice do they have for working people who have suffered mass layoffs and job insecurity in recent years and are finding themselves left behind?

What is their plan to help hard-working undocumented immigrants secure citizenship? How will they keep the wealth of the nation from gushing to the top one-tenth of the one percent?

Epstein!

That seems to be the current plan. The Democrats believe they can gain ground against Trump by forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Supposedly this will split Trump from his conspiratorial base.

But what’s the chance of that helping the Democrats attract more registrants and votes?

Zilch.

And how about those record-breaking congressional speeches? Can anyone recall anything Corey Booker said during his 24 hours and 18 minutes on the Senate floor, or what Hakeem Jeffries said during his 8 hours and 44 minutes on the House floor? I sure can’t, and I suspect neither can those leaving the Democratic Party. Historic marathon elocution is surely an improvement on Biden’s difficulties forming sentences, but does it even attempt to put forth a vision for secure jobs and incomes for working people?

It’s time for a real second party of working people willing to turn trickle-down economics on its head. Working people, not Wall Street, should be the center of all economic policy.

The Democratic Party establishment is so fearful of “moving to the left” (meaning they do not want to attack the interests of their wealthy donors) they are having a tough time supporting Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, who is breathing new life into the party with a progressive and popular appeal to regular people and their economic concerns. How can party elites not support the man who won the Democratic primary and is leading in the general election?

If the party isn’t rallying around a bright new face with a knack for pitching attractive economic policies, please tell me why new voters should register as Democrats?

The Democrats have become conservatives. They want to protect the way things were from the Trump wrecking ball. And in many cases, they are on point. There are good reasons to protect public programs from drastic cuts, protect badly needed public servants from wasteful layoffs, stop cruel and unlawful deportations of immigrants, and save critically important programs like Medicaid.

But the Democrats also want to preserve the financialized Wall Street-driven economy that has moved wealth from working people into the hands of the few. They want to attract, not repel, donations from the wealthy. As a result, they have little to say to the working people who have lost their jobs due to private equity buyouts, mergers, and stock buybacks. After all, stopping that Wall Street gravy train would certainly piss off their donors. In short, they have no vision for a world in which working people, rather than their bosses, are front and center.

It is particularly disheartening to watch the Democrats all but abandon hard-working immigrants who are being deported rather than being moved into citizenship. As I’ve written before here and here, 63 percent of the voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin support, “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of felony crimes.” Only 34 percent are opposed.

How did the multitude of millionaire Democratic pollsters and consultants miss this? Oh, they saw it, but it would be too risky to defy Trump on this, they have no doubt warned party leaders.

Many of my friends and colleagues, nevertheless, truly believe that the Democratic Party can come to its senses and once again appeal to the economic needs of working people. If only we show them enough data about how attractive progressive populism is, they will put out powerful messages about halting mass layoffs and curbing corporate power.

But that is unlikely to happen for two key reasons. First, most of the party leadership doesn’t believe in those messages. They don’t think we should interfere with corporate capitalism, and they don’t want to put out messages that will offend the donor class. In fact, they see nothing wrong with economic inequality and have no desire even to refrain from trading their stocks and bonds while in office.

The second reason is that even if they give up on the Epstein messaging and instead promote progressive populism, few voters will believe the Democrats are for real. It’s too late. Forty years of kissing Wall Street's ass cannot be undone by a PR campaign. As our Rust Belt survey will show when it is fully released, the vast majority of voters, including Democrats, don’t trust the Democratic Party to deliver, even when they say the right things.

So, I’m trying to convince my friends and colleagues that it’s time for a new party of working people totally independent of the Democrats. It’s precisely what Rust Belt voters want. These poll findings have already been released:

In our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in the Rust Belt States of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, 57 percent of the respondents supported a new political formation outside the two major parties. Only 19 percent opposed. This finding is especially notable because these voters were asked to support a very radical statement of anti-corporate populism.

Would you support a new organization, the Independent Workers Political Association, that would support working-class issues independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It would run and support independent political candidates committed to a platform that included

• Stop big companies that receive tax dollars from laying off workers who pay taxes.
• Guarantee everyone who wants to work has a decent-paying job, and if the private sector can’t provide it, the government will
• Raise the minimum wage so every family can lead a decent life
• Stop drug company price-gouging and put price controls on food cartels

Every demographic group supported this proposal, led by 71 percent of Rust Belt voters less than 30 years of age, and 74 percent of those who feel very insecure about losing their job.

How about a new second party instead of a third party?

I’m told repeatedly that third parties are impossible in America. The best they can do is spoil elections, as Ross Perot likely did for the Republicans in 1996, and Ralph Nader may have done for the Democrats in 2000.

The people who do the vital work of this country need decent wages, universal health care, and protection against incessant job destruction.

But we’re not talking about a third party. We’re talking about a second party. In more than 130 congressional districts the Republican in 2024 won by 25 percent or more. There is no viable second party in these one-party districts. An independent working-class candidate could hardly do worse. These one-party districts are the crucibles where a new political association of working people can cut its teeth.

But wait—don’t we need to elect a Democratic Congress to tame Trump’s rampage? Sure. There’s no contradiction between supporting Democrats and building a new independent party of working people. The two should function in entirely different Congressional districts. Independent worker candidates should not run in purple areas where elections are close. They should run in one-party Republican districts and states, just like the labor candidate Dan Osborn is doing in Nebraska.

But building a new independent worker political association will be a heavy lift, and it will take time. Most importantly it will take commitment and the energy of young people fighting for a new way, rather than those of us who are running our final laps.

It’s time for a real second party of working people willing to turn trickle-down economics on its head. Working people, not Wall Street, should be the center of all economic policy. The people who do the vital work of this country need decent wages, universal health care, and protection against incessant job destruction.

If that seems like too much to ask, it’s only because long ago the Democrats stopped asking.

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“This legislation will have a lasting impact on millions of Americans by protecting the hard-earned dollars of blue-collar workers, the very people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck. I urge my colleagues in the House to pass this important bill and send it to the President’s desk to be signed into law.” —Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

Ted Cruz? How could this labor-hating showboat get away with posturing as a defender of the working class – especially low-wage workers who live on tips? This is the same Ted Cruz who gets most of his campaign funds from those who got rich by exploiting low-wage workers. How did Cruz, of all people, take this issue away from the Democrats, the once so-called party of the working class?

It seems the Democrats didn’t care about this issue. It was viewed by the party policy makers as flawed and not worth the effort. They only got on board after Trump trumpeted the policy change, which they then noticed was wildly popular with the public.

What does it say when Ted Cruz appears to be considering the needs of working-class people before the Democrats get around to them?

Even today, after Cruz and Trump, my progressive colleagues disparage removing taxes on tips. They correctly point out it would be better to increase the federal minimum wage for all workers, which now stands at $7.50, and $2.13 for tip workers. $2.13? Further, they argue that low-wage workers would be better served with the passage of paid family leave, refundable tax credits, and extensive universal health care.

Those are all good ideas, but wouldn’t no tax on tips complement those policies?

The progressive Economic Policy Institute claims that no tax on tips “will harm more workers than it helps.” It will

1. “Help very few workers and undermine pay increases for many more.
2. Expand the use of tipped work—a system rife with discrimination and worker abuse— potentially leading to consumers being asked to tip on virtually every purchase.
3. Deplete state and federal budgets and create new avenues of tax avoidance, especially for high earners.”

EPI makes similar arguments for no tax on overtime, saying the policy will:

1. “Encourage excessive hours of work while exacerbating inequities between workers able to work long hours and those who cannot.
2. Put downward pressure on base wages.
3. Open up a tax loophole easily gamed by high earners that would drain public budgets while further complicating the tax system.”

I have enormous respect for my brothers and sisters at the EPI. They do excellent research on behalf of working people. But in this case, I fear they are missing or ignoring the bigger political picture. The Democrats and the left should never allow the Republicans to position themselves as working-class heroes. Helping low-wage workers should be what Democrats do and no tax on tips and no tax on overtime—done right—should have been part of the party’s package before it became part of Ted Cruz’s.

For those of us who have worked for tips and valued overtime pay, getting a tax break simply means more money in our pockets. It is an immediate pay raise, even if it may not be the best way to improve the standard of living for working people. I’m having trouble understanding why a direct good for some is not a good thing.

Most tipped workers earn low wages in the food industry and in gig services like Uber. They are grossly underpaid. So much so that many don’t work enough to pay income tax and so won’t benefit, but for those who make enough getting a tax break will help. That’s appealing, which is why about 75 percent of Americans support the idea, according to a 2024 Ipsos survey.

The same goes for overtime. Nearly two-thirds of all workers are forced to work overtime as a condition of their employment. Work weeks are often extended to 50 hours or more as employers seek to avoid hiring new workers and paying their benefits. It is cheaper to run the existing workforce into the ground. But those extra hours at time-and-half are taxed more heavily, workers know, making it feel like all that extra work is getting you nowhere. A tax break will be welcomed, not shunned, by those workers.

Trump filled the breach, making the proposal in a speech in Las Vegas in June 2024, and the Harris campaign chimed in half-heartedly in support of the proposal after she entered the race in July. The two Democratic senators from Nevada, the state with the most service workers per capita, fully supported Cruz’s effort.

After the bill passed unanimously in the Senate last week, Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, belatedly weighed in with: “Working Americans—from servers, to bartenders, delivery drivers, and everything in between—work hard for every dollar they earn and are the ones who deserve tax relief, not the ultra-rich.”

Nice words for the Ted Cruz-sponsored bill, but why wasn’t a Democrat proposing this appealing policy? And where was Chuck, years ago, when runaway inequality was decimating the lives of low-wage tip workers? He was celebrating a strategy that cast aside working people in favor of higher income, more educated Republican voters. As he infamously put it in 2016:

"For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio & Illinois & Wisconsin.”

In addition to picking up Republican votes, he wants those fat campaign donations especially from those “moderates” working on Wall Street.

If the Democrats ever hope again to be the party of the working class, they should never have allowed the Republicans to get credit for such a popular proposal. What does it say when Ted Cruz appears to be considering the needs of working-class people before the Democrats get around to them?

It didn’t happen because, I truly fear, that the Democrats really have no strategy and no desire to become again the party of the working class. They seem quite content to allow the Republicans fill the breach. Good riddance!

Meanwhile, the Republicans crush the government workers who protect our air and water, workplace safety, workers’ rights to organize, public health programs, and scores of programs and projects designed to make sure that working people aren’t exploited and damaged by corporate interests that treat them as fodder in a profit-making machine. No tax on tips is exquisite Republican pandering, and an effective one.

Which leaves us at a crossroads we can no longer avoid or pretend just isn’t there or view as too difficult to achieve. The billionaires indeed have two parties. We need one of our own.

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It’s such a tempting storyline: UPS announces that it will lay off 20,000 workers, citing “changes in the global trade policy and new or increased tariffs.”

There you have it. A perfect example of how Trump’s tariffs are screwing working people, many of whom voted for him.

Or is it?

UPS, like every major U.S. corporation, is in business to extract as much wealth as possible and shovel it to its shareholders and top executives in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. And like every major corporation, UPS will pay for that wealth extraction by laying off as many workers as possible. That may reduce the production of goods and services, but so be it, if it generates more money for shareholders and executives. In big business today, wealth extraction always comes first.

This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.

Let’s look at some of UPS’s numbers. In 2023, the company authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks, starting in 2024 with $500 million and another $5.5 billion in dividends. In 2025, UPS plans to spend another $1 billion on stock buybacks, as well as $5.5 billion more in dividends. In 2024, not incidentally, UPS posted $8.5 billion in profits. This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.

(Stock buybacks are when a corporation uses its own funds to repurchase shares and thereby raise the price of those shares, which greatly pleases its largest shareholders. Before deregulation in 1982, a company buying its own shares was considered illegal stock manipulation.)

To maintain this wealth pump for its investors and top officers, who are primarily compensated with stock incentives, cash needs to be generated and replenished. The simplest way to do that without acquiring more debt is to lay off workers.

Before the deregulation of Wall Street that came with the Reagan and Clinton administrations, no corporate manager would dare to lay off workers during profitable periods. To do so was a sign of poor management, a blemish on the CEO and his/her team. Workers and their communities were considered corporate stakeholders, right along with shareholders.

But after deregulation, the only stakeholder that mattered was the shareholder. The hell with workers and their communities. Companies began moving corporate headquarters to the sites of the highest governmental bidders, and in short order layoffs during good times became a symbol of smart management. Greed is good reigned supreme. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for the gory details.)

Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street.

The Teamsters union, which represents 300,000 UPS hourly workers, will fight these recently announced layoffs. Sean O’Brian, who spoke at the Republican national convention in 2024, sees any Teamsters layoffs as a violation of the contract:

United Parcel Service is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs under our current national master agreement. If UPS wants to continue to downsize corporate management, the Teamsters won’t stand in its way. But if the company intends to violate our contract or makes any attempt to go after hard-fought, good-paying Teamsters jobs, UPS will be in for a hell of a fight.

We can be sure that the Teamsters will be looking closely at UPS’s finances, especially the large amounts going to stock buybacks and dividends. They will not sacrifice their members’ jobs on the altar of obscene wealth extraction.

Will the Trump tariffs have a major impact on UPS jobs?

We just don’t know that yet. But one thing we know for sure: Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street. Their credo: The extent and consequences of the wealth extraction machine must never be revealed.

Blaming the Trump tariffs for every sin imaginable may be emotionally satisfying. But letting larger corporations and their Wall Street handlers off the hook when it comes to job destruction, which the Democrats have done for more than a generation, is in large part why we have Trump in the first place.

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Each day the Democrats are outraged about another outrage coming from Trump and his enablers—stomping on immigrants, undermining the courts, attacking Canada, claiming Ukraine started the war, violating campus free speech, destroying the EPA, firing forest rangers—and on and on and on.

But why the surprise? Did anyone doubt that Trump would act on his anger and his resentment, and then follow through executing the detailed plans laid out in Project 2025? Did anyone believe he would turn the other cheek at those who tried to impeach him and send him to jail? Surely every single elected Democrat knew that Trump’s election would be a disaster for everything the party claimed to stand for.

Nevertheless, the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter. They stuck with Biden—make that sucked up to Biden—until it was too late to run primaries and find the strongest Democratic candidate. (I’m not saying Kamala Harris necessarily was the weakest one, but four years earlier she flunked out before the first presidential primary. Just saying.)

Why the hell did they do that?

I’m no political genius, but nearing Biden’s 81st birthday, in November of 2023, I begged him not to run again. It was clear to me, based on polling, his lack of energy, and my own intuition, that he had no business running again.

I was alone, but not entirely so. Obama’s campaign maestro, David Axelrod was pounded for suggesting Biden wasn’t the best candidate. That so successfully quelled any dissent that it wasn’t until six months later (July 2, 2024) that Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) became the first sitting Democratic congressman to ask Biden to withdraw. Profiles in courage, the Democrats were not, including all the governors lining up for 2028.

If I could see the trainwreck coming why couldn’t the Democrats?

I think I know why. They didn’t get upset about it because they were blinded by power and wealth.

Biden represented power. You cross him and you lose access to that power even while his grip on reality is diminishing. You become a target for party loyalists, and risk losing credibility in the party if you call for him to step down. You become an outsider. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) didn’t want to lose their influence over Biden’s pro-worker agenda as they continued to support his candidacy until the bitter end.

The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it.

The attraction to wealth is an even bigger problem. Far too many Democrats are enamored by the rich and famous. They went to school with them. They lean on them for campaign funds. They plan to join them when they leave public office. The wizards on Wall Street and in corporate America form the class they see themselves as part of, or in the class they aspire to.

It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the Democratic Party has become the representatives of the managerial class. Too many party members with working-class roots tore them out long ago.

Many probably discounted their worries about Trump, thinking that the rich and powerful would tame him. Because that’s where the Democratic Party thinks real power lies. The financial class wouldn’t let Trump wreck the economy, would it? Surely, the corporate class wouldn’t back down on DEI programs or forgo their access to inexpensive immigrant labor. The wealthiest Democratic law firms aren’t going to cave, right? Wouldn’t the elites prevent Trump’s excesses the way they did last time? Hmmm.

Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism. Which is why many modern Democrats found it easy to cavalierly go along with the worst political decision since Nixon taped himself committing crimes during the Watergate scandal. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for why working people abandoned the Democrats, and visa vera.)

Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism.

Biden clearly did not have the capacity to run again. The Democrats knew that even before he proved it to the world during his disastrous June 2024 debate with Trump. But they didn’t care enough to oppose his decision, publicly, where it would matter. He told his advisors during the 2020 race that he wouldn’t run for a second term, he would be 82 years old by his second inauguration, but the party refused to hold him to it when he changed his mind.

The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it. They can’t be reformed into a working-class party, because that’s not who they are or what they want to be. From my perspective, reforming them is an utter waste of time and energy, an exercise in window dressing and spin. Instead, we need a new party, an Independence Party that comes with the slogan: The billionaires have two parties, we need one of our own!

Stop with the Spoiler Argument

All I hear from friend and foe is that third parties are impossible in America, that they only serve as spoilers and can never succeed.

Ralph Nader’s run, they tell me, elected Bush. We can argue about whether that’s true, it might be, but there’s very little argument against the idea that Biden’s run in 2024 elected Trump—for the second time!

So, we start with identifiable targets. There is nothing to spoil if we concentrate on running independent working-class candidates in one-party Congressional districts of which there are many!

In 2022, five out of every six races were decided by more than 10 percentage points, according to FairVote.org. One out of every 13 races went entirely uncontested! These districts are where the battle should be joined. The call for a new Independence Party is a call for a vibrant second party, not a third!

Dan Osborn, a former local labor leader, was surprisingly competitive in the 2024 Senate race in Nebraska, running against an unopposed Republican and far ahead of Kamala Harris. Bernie Sanders always runs as an independent as well, and he has now come out urging others to do the same.

The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent.

There’s a hunger out there for something new, but it will take courage and guts to create it. That can only happen when key labor unions decide to do what their membership has been telling them to do for a generation – get away from the corporate Democrats!

Private sector unions, diminished as they may be, are still the seat of worker power in the U.S. And they can galvanize the working class around an agenda that enhances the well-being of all working people. They are key to building a new political formation that protects us all from Wall Street-driven job destruction.

The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent. The opportunity is there staring us in the face, if only we have the nerve to grab it.

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Whether by design or instinct, candidate Donald Trump set a perfect trap for the Democrats when, in September 2024, he reacted to the John Deere and Company’s announcement that it would move a thousand jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. Trump said then:

I am just notifying John Deere right now that if you do that, we are putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States.

Trump saw Deere’s announcement as the perfect opportunity to jump on Deere’s job destruction, which the company used to finance 12.2 billion in stock buybacks to enrich its investors.

The Democrats? They sent billionaire Mark Cuban out to the media to complain that the tariffs were “insane.”

But threatening tariffs did not feel insane to the Deere workers who were about to lose their jobs. Nor did they feel insane to the millions of other workers who had lost their jobs due to “free trade” deals like NAFTA.

The Democrats now have a chance to turn the tables—but, alas, they probably won’t.

The Democrats stumbled into the Trump’s tariff trap and provided many workers with yet another reason to abandon a party that had failed to say anything at all about the needless job destruction caused by overt corporate greed.

After Trump won the presidency last November, I was sure he would set more tariff traps, provoking the Democrats to reflexively react as corporate shills.

But along the way something funny happened. Trump fell into his own tariff trap, and his public support has fallen somewhat. The Democrats now have a chance to turn the tables—but, alas, they probably won’t.

Why Does Trump Love Tariffs?

Even the most ardent MAGA apologist knows that Trump has dictatorial impulses. He wants to play Brando in “The Godfather” and make you an offer you can’t refuse.

But playing Don Corleone in domestic affairs doesn’t come easily. Trump can flood the zone with executive orders, but the courts are still functioning and often enforce the law. Even a pliable Congress has rules which can get in the way of the legislative results Trump is demanding.

But there are two areas where Trump really can act unilaterally—foreign affairs and tariff policy.

As president, Trump is free to bully Ukraine, kiss up to Putin, threaten to annex Greenland, Panama, and even Canada. No one in the U.S. can really stop him. He doesn’t need the blessing of Congress unless he wants a new treaty, which he doesn’t.

Similarly, he can use Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes the U.S. Trade Representative, a Trump toady, to impose tariffs in response to unfair trade practices, which are not defined.

There is no way a full-scale trade war with Canada will do anything but shatter jobs on both sides of the border, while raising prices as well.

Tariffs are a shiny new toy for Trump to play with. He can turn tariffs on and off, making entire countries jump to his tune. Each day he comes up with new reasons to justify them—fentanyl, immigrants, unfair subsidies, too much control of domestic banking (God forbid!). But these are just excuses for having fun by intimidating entire countries.

Trump can also combine his control of foreign policy with tariffs, as he is gleefully doing with Canada. What fun it is to threaten to take down the Canadian economy with tariffs while bullying them into becoming the 51st state. Clearly Trump wants to flex his dictatorial muscles, even as his real one’s sag with age.

But by playing dictator, he has abdicated the targeted use of tariffs to protect jobs. There is no way a full-scale trade war with Canada will do anything but shatter jobs on both sides of the border, while raising prices as well. Why? Because corporations like John Deere are not fleeing to Canada to find cheaper labor.

As a result, a tariff war with Canada is likely to kiss goodbye as many U.S. jobs as are protected. But Trump doesn’t seem to care because he’s all in on making Canada sweat. Damn the jobs! Damn inflation! He’s simply in love with his unilateral powers, which no one else in the world has. That’s a high that beats fentanyl.

The Trump Trap of Stagflation

Trump may not know it, but he is playing with fire. Tariffs are certain to raise U.S. prices. Why? Because when U.S. corporations see that their competition from Canada faces price increases caused by the 25 percent tariff, the companies will raise their own prices, especially in key industries with only a handful of large competitors.

A tariff war with Canada is likely to kiss goodbye as many U.S. jobs as are protected. But Trump doesn’t seem to care because he’s all in on making Canada sweat. Damn the jobs! Damn inflation! He’s simply in love with his unilateral powers...

Furthermore, by Trump turning his tariff toy on and off, he is causing economic uncertainty. That uncertainty has already had a drastic impact on the stock market.

But it will get much worse if corporations hold back on investment decisions until Trump stops fiddling with his toy.

It’s a very big deal when corporations delay investment decisions. Slower investment rollouts can lead to an economic slowdown and even a recession. And such a downturn can quickly get out of hand, because the Wall Steet derivative games, the kind of which that caused the 2008 crash, are up and running again, bigger than ever.

So, here’s the trap. Tariffs will cause inflation, forcing the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates to combat price increases. And higher interest rates will further reduce economic activity, leading to more unemployment. The Fed then will be unable to boost employment, because that requires decreasing interest rates, which are likely to further fuel inflation.

Bingo, stagflation. I wonder how Trump will feel if morphs into Jimmy Carter?

What Should the Democrats Do?

James Carville is telling the Democrats to do nothing. Play dead and let the guy implode.

But that’s a very dangerous game. Even with all the chaos Trump still has favorability ratings close to 50 percent. His supporters see him taking action, it’s why they voted for him, and they will give him time to make his plans work. Yes, there are protests, but they’re nothing like in Trump’s first term. The danger is, if the Democrats give him uncontested time and space, Trump might find a way to escape from his trap.

Instead, the Democrats should take a page from Trump and put job protection on the top of their agenda. As tariffs bite and cause job destruction, the Democrats should show up and support those laid-off workers. Instead of calling tariffs “insane,” they should call them job-killing tariffs. And as prices rise, they can blame Trump for that as well.

I wonder how Trump will feel if morphs into Jimmy Carter?

More importantly, they should go after any company that receives taxpayer money and is laying off taxpayers. They should slam stock buybacks that enrich Wall Street wealth extractors and CEOs. They should make it perfectly clear that protecting jobs from corporate greed is the number one priority of the Democratic Party.

Will they do this? Dream on.

There is little indication that the Democrats are willing to upset their Wall Street backers by interfering with private sector layoff decisions and stock buybacks. The Democrats are once again abdicating the jobs terrain to Trump, hoping instead that his tariff toy will blow up in his dictatorial hands.

Maybe it will, or maybe working people will see that the Democrats still don’t give a damn about their job security. At least Trump is trying, they may say.

Until the Democrats offer a compelling working-class vision, those living paycheck to paycheck have reasons to stick with Trump who, at the very least, has buried the free-trade mantra that working people know has destroyed so many jobs and damaged their communities.

NOW READ: The only way to hold Trump accountable

Trump and Musk are stirring up a resistance movement among liberals and the left. The protests are a righteous struggle against the authoritarian usurpation of lawful power, the reckless, illegal attacks on government agencies, the stripping of DEI programs and language, and the trampling over the rights of immigrants and transgender people.

But what are the goals of this resistance? And do voters outside the liberal bubble support them?

It's time to face up to the harsh reality: Trump’s flurry of activity, at least so far, has made him more popular, not less so, with the American public. Here’s the latest CBS poll:

• How would you describe Trump? 69 percent said “tough,” 63 percent said “energetic,” 60 percent said “focused,” and 58 percent said “effective.”
• Is Trump living up to his campaign promises? 70 percent said “yes.”
• Trump’s overall job rating is 53 percent. At this point in his first term it was only 40 percent.
• A hefty 59 percent approve of his program to “deport immigrants illegally in the U.S,” while 64 percent approve of sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. A smaller majority, 52 percent, oppose setting up large detention centers.
• How about Gaza? 54 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, though only 13 percent think it would be a good idea to for the U.S. to take over Gaza.
• Trump’s major vulnerability seems to be inflation. Two-thirds believe he is not focusing enough on lowering prices.

Progressives emphatically believe that Trump is destroying democracy, but doesn’t democracy have something to do with the will of the people? And what does it mean for democracy if Trump’s actions are broadening his base even beyond those who voted for him? It likely means that a majority of the public does not view Trump as the destroyer of democracy.

Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels.

Trump is broadening his base by doing what he said he would do and thinks he was elected to do. His support is growing because there is a hunger for action that is, at least symbolically, in the people’s interest. Will Trump’s approach improve the outcomes for the working class? That’s doubtful, but there is a desire for defiant action, and they are getting it.

Breaking Out of the Bubble

There’s a lesson there. Broadening the base is precisely what progressives must do.

That starts with a recognition that protests alone don’t signal action on behalf of working people. And such displays may be helping Trump increase, not undermine, his support. He may even want to provoke them, because he understands what liberals don’t—that most of the protests will be seen as resistance to change, as support for established elite institutions, and as obstacles to creating a better life for voters.

Think for a second about USAID. Most Americans are not strong supporters of spending billions to aid other countries while needs at home go unmet. As David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief advisor, put it:

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: ‘Cut foreign aid.’”

What then are the tests to evaluate resistance tactics?

• Do protests and resistance expand the progressive base?
• Do they engage with working people who have drifted away from the Democratic Party over the last generation?
• Do they win over those who support Trump’s efforts to dramatically change the federal government?

So far, probably not. That’s because progressive protests mostly, if not entirely, involve mobilizing and appealing to those who already agree with liberal positions. There are plenty of people who support these efforts, but not enough.

It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.

This is not to say that protests to protect the vulnerable are not important. Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.

Mobilizing for 2026?

If progressives want to halt Trump’s authoritarian actions, they will want the Democrats recapture at least one of the Congressional chambers. To do that the progressive base must expand in swing districts.

How should those battles be waged?

We know from the polling done by the Center for Working Class Politics that a strong populist economic message is far more effective than attacking Trump on democracy issues. We also know from the CBS poll that Trump is vulnerable on the high cost of living.

Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.

Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels. As I recently wrote, the Democrats also could put Trump on the defensive by demanding he implement an executive order that prevents government contractors (like Musk) from laying off workers involuntarily.

Progressive activists have the creativity to mobilize protests around price hikes and needless layoffs. But the move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.

In a fragmented society, this is a heavy lift. More affluent progressives and Trump working-class supporters do not often live in the same areas or share the same spaces. Inflation and job insecurity may not feel as pressing to them as they do to working people. It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.

The move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.

In our own small way, the Labor Institute has figured out how to build educational bridges between MAGA workers and others in our Reversing Runaway Inequality training for union members. The participants bring with them a wide range of political preferences, but after an 8-hour workshop they come together to design a common vision for what a society without runaway inequality should look like. It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.

Then what? That openness won’t translate into Democratic votes unless candidates are willing to put forth a powerful populist economic message that supports workers’ jobs and wages.

It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.

And there’s the rub: those candidates not only have to mouth the words, but also, they need to believe in the message. To build a bigger base, they must be willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class instead of trying to raise money from them.

The alternative? More marches, more chanting, and... more defeats.

NOW READ: Rachel Maddow is wrong

As the Trump-Musk administration takes an axe to the federal government’s budget and personnel, the Democrats have an opening to raise an issue that Musk will hate but Trump can’t ignore—private sector mass layoffs.

Right now, as Acting President Musk goes after agency after agency in the name of cost cutting, the Democrats are focused on public sector job cuts. As they should, tens of thousands of jobs are at risk.

But those numbers pale in comparison to the 1.8 million private sector workers who lost their jobs in December of 2024 due to involuntary layoffs. For the past several decades, more than 20 million jobs per year have been taken away from workers who did nothing wrong.

It won’t be easy to convince private sector workers that cutting federal government costs is a mistake. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you don’t want your tax dollars squandered, and USAID., to many, sounds like a money pit.

If the Democrats act forcefully to defend working-class jobs, they should have better chance to win back Congress from Trump in 2026.

But private sector workers do care about their own job insecurity, and Donald Trump knows it. He has spoken forcefully about keeping worker jobs from migrating to Mexico and elsewhere, and he could take actual action to make that happen with one simple Executive Order:

Corporations that receive taxpayer money via federal contracts and tax subsidies shall not lay off taxpayers involuntarily.

More than $750 billion in contracts for materials and services are made each year by the federal government. Many of the corporate recipients have had no qualms about laying off workers and using the savings to enrich their investors via stock buybacks, and there have been no effective rules to prevent this. (A stock buyback is when a corporation repurchases its own shares, thereby raising the price of the stock without improving the company in any material way.)

Taxpayers know there is a great deal of waste built into federal contracts, especially those massive purchases involving defense and advanced technologies.

It turns out that Musk’s companies, reportedly, have received $20 billion in federal contracts, with $15.4 billion coming to Tesla and Space X in the last decade. Last year, Tesla laid off more than 14,000 workers, and Space X has announced that this year it will lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, about 6,000 jobs. Imagine if Musk were not allowed to stuff himself with taxpayer money unless he refrained from involuntary layoffs?

To get there the Democrats, for the first time in memory, would need to care about greed-driven private sector layoffs.

That will be difficult because the Democrats are more in tune with highly educated, upper middle-class federal workers. These are the kind of voters who have been trending Democratic while the party has shed the working class. And the Democrats see the federal agencies in which these voters work as part of their legacy, often created and enhanced by legislation they spear-headed. Federal workers are their people, doing the work that the Democrats care most about.

Not so much the private sector, where voters have been drifting away from the Democrats in large numbers for decades, especially in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As I show in Wall Street’s War on Workers, since 1992, as a county’s mass layoff rate has gone up, the Democratic vote has gone down, even as these voters have grown more liberal on social issues.

The Democrats have been losing these working-class voters because they have failed to interfere in private sector layoff decisions, even when job destruction became a campaign issue.

For example, in the run up to the 2024 election, John Deere and Company announced they were shipping more than 1,000 jobs to Mexico while recording $10 billion in profits and conducting $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. Trump immediately called for a 200-percent tariff on all Deere imported goods if they didn’t rescind their layoffs.

The Democrats didn’t say a word about how to stop this needless job destruction and instead attacked the tariffs. Deere’s stock buybacks and profits proved the company had more than enough money to offer voluntary buyout packages for all their workers, not just the executives. But the Democrats did not speak up.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Democrats also remained silent when the Mylan Pharmaceutical plant in Morgantown, WV, moved to India. Workers there begged the Democrats to use the Defense Production Act to keep open the facility, which made generic drugs. If Biden could do it for baby formula, why not for badly needed pharmaceuticals?

But not one Democrat came out in support of these workers, and 1,500 jobs with an average wage of $70,000 per year were tossed away.

Clearly, the Democrats have been pulling away from the working class. Why help these workers, some are saying, when they’re more than likely to vote for Republicans? And why challenge corporate power when you’re trying to win over highly educated executives and financial leaders?

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is up and arms these days about the attacks on federal workers, was very honest about this switch in 2016. I’ve quoted him again and again because he tells us precisely what the Democratic strategy has been all about:

"For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio & Illinois & Wisconsin."

At the launch of a second Trump presidency, Schumer’s political acumen has not aged well.

Nor has Ken Martin’s, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, who has made it clear that billionaires are welcome.

“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money, but we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires,” Martin said recently.

It is doubtful that Martin ever gave one second’s thought to the fact that most, if not all, of these “good” billionaires that “share our values” have grown wealthy from, to some significant extent, stock buybacks funded through mass layoffs.

The country needs the Democrats to go from defense to offense. If the only activity is mounting a resistance movement to Trump, the odds are slim that enough new voters will be gained to win back the House or the Senate in 2026.

Every elected Democrat should be demanding that no taxpayer dollars go to corporations that lay off taxpayers involuntarily. They should put that message on social media, old media, even billboards all over the swing states. They should challenge every Republican candidate to take a stand on it. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer one dime, but it can protect the livelihoods of millions of working people every year. Or, at least, give them leverage while working out their severance.

Every day Democrats should be asking Trump to sign the order. Does he really want to be seen giving our tax dollars to corporations that lay off taxpayers and funnel the savings to the rich?

And wouldn’t it be good for our weary souls to see Musk squirm because he wouldn’t be able to sup at the federal trough while casually laying off his employees?

You have to wonder if the Democrats are capable of such a move, or anything remotely close to it. Only if they truly are willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class. They need to believe, not just mouth the words, that they will fight the wealthy to protect the livelihoods of working people.

If the Democrats act forcefully to defend working-class jobs, they should have better chance to win back Congress from Trump in 2026. But in the short term, pushing Trump to defend his populist flank might help put a wedge between Trump and his billionaire bros, and get some relief for workers from financialized layoffs.

But don’t hold your breath. All those “good” Democratic billionaires might get upset.

While some prominent Democrats are calling on party to reconnect with the working class by embracing economic populism, Fareed Zakaria, the host of a CNN news show and a Washington Post columnist, argues in a recent op-ed that it’s lost cause:

“[The Democrats] have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites. Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working-class Whites whom they lost decades ago.”

It's eerily reminiscent of what Senator Chuck Schumer infamously said eight years ago just before Hillary Clinton lost to Trump:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Zakaria, however, claims that Biden didn’t follow Schumer’s advice and instead enacted massive infrastructure investments that were intended to please the entire working class. Biden, he writes, “presided over the creation of almost 17 million jobs with inflation nearing the Fed’s 2 percent target….wage inequality is down…and wage growth is outpacing inflation.”

To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making.

But despite all this economic assistance, the working class increased its vote for Trump. For Zakaria, the Democrats’ electoral failure illustrates the futility of pandering to the working class.

We might better understand working-class alienation if we look at how Zakaria cherry picked his facts and ignored those that didn’t fit his story.

• He didn’t mention that most of those new jobs were a bounce-back after Covid -- the December 2024 employment level is 7.2 million higher, not 17 million higher, than the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020.
• Yes, inflation is down, thank goodness, but it soared to a 40-year high during the Biden years, soaring by 20 percent, and causing enormous financial stress for working-class families.
• He didn’t mention that the subhead for the link he cites on wage inequality reads, “But top 1% wages have skyrocketed 182% since 1979 while bottom 90% wages have seen just 44% growth.”
• It’s not at all clear that wage growth for the average worker is outpacing inflation. (See “Are Workers Just Too Stupid to Understand Inflation.”)
• And finally, Zakaria fails to mention the involuntary layoffs that hit millions of workers during the Biden administration. It’s hard to feel good about a party that fails to protect your job.

Zakaria loads the dice because he is sure that the White working-class cares more about race, immigration, gender, and sexual preference than it does about its own economic well-being. Hillary Clinton in 2016 ungracefully called half of the Trump voters “deplorables.” Zakaria means much the same when he writes that the Democratic Party “has been slowly losing the votes of the White working class, largely on issues related to race, identity and culture.”

The data from long-term voter surveys tell a different story. The White working-class has become more liberal, not more deplorable, on these issues. While researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, I identified 23 controversial questions put to tens of thousands of White working-class voters over the last several decades. In no case did the White working-class become more illiberal. On thirteen of those controversial questions workers became more liberal. Here are five examples:

www.commondreams.org

Zakaria’s laments the Democrats leftward shift, but the Democrats have not in recent years put forth a strong populist agenda. (See “Are You Still Wondering Why Workers Voted for Trump?”)

• Democrats have not eliminated Wall Street stock buybacks, which kill millions of jobs each year while enriching the richest.
• They have not limited the price gouging by food and drug cartels.
• They have not stopped the healthcare industry from profiting wildly at our expense.
• And their major infrastructure bills continue to pour money into corporate coffers without requiring job-creation guarantees.

Zakaria, nevertheless, has no trouble pushing these alienated workers into the MAGA movement. No big loss. But such abandonment is a loss for members of the working class. The MAGA oligarchs did not become billionaires by protecting the economic needs and interests of working people.

To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making. Although the process is extremely difficult in our two-party system, working people and labor unions may have no choice but to build a new political formation of and by working people, just like the Populists did at the end of the 19th century to battle the robber barons of that era.

Their party’s name is as appropriate today as it was then: The People’s Party.

I just had a chat with an ATT office manager, a young Black man who is very attentive to his customers. After he learned that I worked with labor unions, he said, “I’ve always wanted to be in a union. My dad was a bus driver, and his earnings and benefits really took care of us. Our healthcare was amazing, $5 co-pay and that was it, no matter what the medical procedure.”

His comments both made me sad and angry. He took me back a few decades, when working people still earned a decent living. That’s the period before runaway inequality and job destruction basically wiped out the American Dream for the working class.

It’s not like we can’t afford to pay people decently. The money is there and then some. In 1980, there were 13 billionaires in the U.S. In 2023 there were 801. The top one-tenth of 1% saw their collective wealth jump from $1.8 trillion in 1990, to $22.1 trillion in 2024. For some context, the U.S. federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion. Or consider that there are 1975,00 bus drivers in the U.S. One trillion dollars could pay them $100,000 a year for 57 years.

Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?

Meanwhile the average income after inflation of the average worker did not rise at all from 1980 to 2024. And as we all know, during that time healthcare costs have gone through the roof for nearly all of us.

To add to working-class misery there is never ending job insecurity. One in four employed workers fear they will lose their jobs within the next year, according to polling done by Colorado State University.

And there’s a very powerful connection between job loss and enriching the super-rich. In many, if not most, cases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash for companies to pour into stock buybacks—buying back the corporation’s own shares to artificially boost its price. This moves money into the pockets of the largest Wall Street stock-sellers and the companies’ CEOs, who are mostly paid with stock incentives. In a very real way workers are sacrificing their jobs to enrich the richest of the rich. (To see why mass layoffs have little or nothing to do with AI and other new technologies please see my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

In our capitalist economy there has always been a fierce struggle between corporate power and worker power. But when unions represented 25-35% of the private sector, during the post-WWII era, working people had sufficient clout, like that bus driver dad, to provide a good standard of living for their families. Today, with only 6% of the private sector workforce represented by labor unions, the balance has shifted strongly toward corporate power, and wages, benefits, and job security have gone backward.

The power imbalance is so great that our conventional wisdom has changed. Our minds have been warped by corporate power. When unions were strong, runaway inequality was viewed as out and out greed. Today, we are told it’s just the result of entrepreneurial brilliance, that we all benefit from the creation of more and more billionaires, that those left behind simply lack the skills to succeed in our modern economy.

But that bus driver still drives a bus, taking people to work and the doctor or shopping, using much the same skills as generations ago. The difference today is that instead of earning a living wage, as the bus driver once did, workers don’t have sufficient power to gain a decent standard of living. Relegated to gig work or jobs under threat of layoffs, the system is rigged against them.

Historically, working people saw the Democratic Party as the defender of the working-class. Not so today. Instead, they see politicians of both parties as just another group of elites feathering their own nests and protecting the establishment. Very few representatives are seen as willing to take on Wall Street and stop needless mass layoffs, because apart from some occasional rhetoric we don’t see politicians fighting for workers.

The frustration, the resentment, the anger about the rigged system was building long before Donald Trump came on the scene. But there he is, a giant wrecking ball, slamming away at the established order. For those left behind, smashing the establishment feels long overdue.

Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?

Looking at the Democrats’ post-election discussions, it could be a long wait until our ATT union-supporter gets a chance to join a union.

Let’s try to have a happy new year, but it is likely to be a tough one for the working class.

NOW READ: Jan. 6 was only the rehearsal — now they're in charge again

As GOP Congressman Jim Jordan tried (and failed for the third time) to claw his way up to Speaker of the House this week, he deployed the MAGA base to pressure those representatives who were reluctant to vote for him. Some extremist MAGA supporters even made death threats to fellow Republicans who didn’t support Jordan.

Who actually forms the backbone of this MAGA base that Jordan desperately turned to?

Media and social media enterprises have reinforced the idea that the MAGA base is composed of uneducated white working-class voters. Supposedly, these are the very voters who Hillary Clinton, as Democratic nominee for president in 2016, infamously described as a “basket of deplorables,” (racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist.) With the vivid images of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol burned into our national consciousness, if we’re honest, many of us now add ‘violent’ to Clinton’s picture of these working-class deplorables.

"These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves."

While researching Wall Street’s War on Workers, however, our Labor Institute team found compelling data that turns this image of the right-wing Republican base on its head. It is a destructive stereotype that doesn’t square with reality.

Let’s start with the Tea Party, which sprung to life in 2009. It is usually assumed that it was driven by disgruntled white working-class reactionaries who fundamentally resented intellectuals and the media. But a comprehensive study by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2012), provides an entirely different view of the socioeconomic status of Tea Party members:

“Tea Party supporters and activists are better-off economically and better educated than most Americans. . . . Most are not truly wealthy, however. Comfortable middle-class might be the best way to describe grassroots Tea Partiers.”

White? Yes, almost entirely so. Working class? Decidedly not, as defined by income, education, or occupation.

What about Republican primary voters? The 2018 Primaries Project at the Brookings Institution provides detailed profiles of Republican primary voters during the Trump presidency:

• They were disproportionately white compared to the rest of the country: 86.4 percent.
• They were better educated: Nearly 75% had a college degree, postgraduate study, or some college. Only 15% had finished high school or dropped out.
• They were richer: Republican primary voters were considerably richer than the rest of the population in their primary districts. For example, 26.9% of Republican primary voters (and 21.5% of the Democratic primary voters) had household incomes above $150,000 per year, compared to only 15.4% of the general population in the average district.
• They were also older than the general population.

How about the January 6th insurrectionists?

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago published demographic information on 656 of the 861 insurrectionists who, as of July 22,2022, had been charged with illegally entering the Capitol or Capitol grounds. The study found the following:

• 92% of the insurrectionists were white.
• 50% were white-collar employees or business owners.
• Only one-quarter were blue-collar (no college degree).
• And 25% had a college degree, slightly more than the 23.5% for the country as a whole.

The study does not say how many of the insurrectionists had graduate degrees, but we do know that the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes (sentenced to 18 years in prison for sedition and other charges for his January 6 activities), is a graduate of the ultra-elite Yale Law School, the same law school from which Bill and Hillary Clinton graduated.

January 6, 2021, was not a working-class riot.

To be sure, members of the working-class form a significant portion of the MAGA base, but not disproportionately so. Instead, we see that the true MAGA base is disproportionately higher-income, white-collar white people who are enthralled by MAGA politics. And when we step back a bit and look at the many conspiracists who organized, staffed, and drove the election lies, this makes sense. Nearly all are lawyers and businesspeople, many with advanced degrees, backed by a vast ultra-right media and social media ecosystem of highly educated influencers. You don’t find labor union activists leading the MAGA charge.

The real drivers of the MAGA base—the ones the Ohio Republican was calling on to support his ultimately failed bid to become Speaker of the House—are financially successful people who are hungry for more power and wealth. MAGA is their ticket to move up the political ladder, to amass greater influence, and to garner more resources for themselves.

These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves. And precisely because they are not burdened by ideological consistency or deeply held principles, they rely on one overriding trait—a formidable will to power.

So, as many of us do, let’s not lay blame on white working people for the decline of our democracy or today’s rise of Jim Jordan. The authoritarian, oligarchical—yes, even violent—impulses of political life today are really the responsibility of a basket full of highly-educated elites. And because they are so unencumbered by principle, they are really dangerous.