It’s happened again. With Trump’s second electoral victory, however, surprised outrage has seemingly mellowed into bleak resignation. The specificities of the electoral outcome and the path to this result have been (and will continue to be) quite thoroughly analyzed elsewhere.
In sum, a vacuous centrist campaign offering nothing but fumes and fear failed to prevent the electoral victory of a dangerous far right demagogue. Long before the election, the Democrats gaslit their own would-be supporters on the dismal state of lived economic realities and adopted much of Trump’s political program, opening the door to a period of intensified attacks on immigrants, trans folks, and all working people. The Democrats have now entrenched themselves as the preferred party of the rich, while the Republicans under Trump solidified their base and made surprising gains in every single state.
Far from unique to the US population, the pattern has played out across the world. From Argentina to India, from Brazil to the Philippines, and in almost all the countries of Western Europe, center left parties and their political associates have steadily lost credibility and support by participation in neoliberal governance projects that actively harm the people who put them in power in the first place. The resulting disaffection has allowed the far right to monopolize mass anti-establishment sentiment, presenting themselves as the only extra-systemic force and path out of the downward spiral. Behind both liberal conceit and right-wing ascendency lies the deeper truth, known well by the younger generation, that we are indeed living in “a dying empire led by bad people.”
The Morphing of the Far Right
As global politics shifts to the right on an institutional level, authoritarians and nationalists are coming out on top and more traditional conservatives of the previous era are falling in line behind them. Since 2016, the MAGA movement has been growing. It has taken over wider swathes of the Republican base as leading figures and institutions of the party have capitulated to Trump or have been unable to pose an effective, credible challenge to him. Former holdouts like some elements of the white evangelical movement have now been brought into the fold alongside figures like Steve Bannon, Nick Fuentes, and the conspiracy theorists. For those largely suburban conservative voters who remained somewhat skeptical, the logic of party loyalty and first-past-the-post elections meant they would fall in line behind Trump by election day, no matter how reluctantly. The Republican primary illustrated these dynamics first, and the election only amplified them.
In the absence of strategies based in solidarity to improve their lives, many people drop out of politics or gravitate to the ever louder forces of the right.
New layers have also been added to the MAGA coalition, including young people, Black and Latino men, and many more working people of various backgrounds. Why did so many vote or even campaign against their own interests? The short answer is probably: desperation. As inflation ate into living standards and the temporary relief during the pandemic dried up, working people were unable to defend their livelihoods through collective action. For the average working person, strategies of solidarity to improve their lives simply do not enter the frame. In their absence, many people become dejected and drop out of politics altogether, while others gravitate toward the ever louder forces of the right. As Naomi Klein points out in Doppelgänger, the knowledge of “unmasked plutocracy” has been widespread, even shamelessly flaunted, for years. But for working people who are completely impotent to do anything but wallow in it, these realities produce a desperate search for self-respect, and the seizing of right-wing ideologies and conspiracy theories as a morbid substitute for collective solidarity.
Although this economic context is key, we need to bear in mind that the link between financial immiseration and political action is complicated. “Economic experience,” as Richard Seymour recently writes, “far from feeding mechanically into a logical political expression, is always mediated by politics and ideology, and the emotional substratum of social life.” Compared to the barren wasteland of liberal values and total absence of a vision for the future, Trump’s message not only validated the experience of misery in current conditions—it provided a scapegoat and thereby a mirror-world version of reclaiming dignity.
But it didn’t have to be that way. The obvious alternative to both of these ghoulish paths is an ambitious left-wing vision with a plan of action to achieve it. However, developing such a vision, let alone the plan to achieve it, has been fraught of late.
The State of the Left
In 2016, the response to Trump’s election was widespread, rapid onset outrage, which yielded the massive women’s marches, mobilizations to stop Trump’s Muslim bans, and other upswells in organizing. In contrast, many organizers today are feeling a sense of defeat in the wake of the election. Trump won the popular vote this time handily, and combined with the completion of the Democratic Party’s transformation into the former Republican party, this moment has a lot of people feeling hopeless, burnt out, and without an urgent sense of purpose like in 2016.
It is an understatement to say that the current situation of the left does not lend itself to optimism. Union density remains at its lowest point ever. Membership organizations that span the national level are in various states of disarray, while organizations with some durability seem to inevitably be caught up in the web of the nonprofit industrial complex and its attendant donor dependency and risk aversion. Bright spots from the last few years like the Palestine solidarity movement and George Floyd uprisings have been incredibly inspiring, but have been unable to break out of the mode of spontaneous, defensive mobilizations.
At the same time, the relatively low level of organization built over the last ten years has not reflected a low level of struggle. Explosive social movements arose repeatedly to shape public consciousness, only to recede quickly, usually in conjunction with a turn to a national election. Some movement infrastructure has also survived the ebbing of the movement tides: growing national tenant unions, new worker organizing networks, periodic revivals of the leading edge of the labor movement, the Socialism Conference, and various local campaigns, mutual aid efforts, radical bookstores and community spaces.
Despite the bleakness of the left’s position, those who radicalized from 2016, 2020, or 2023 have retained new political outlooks, instincts, and some surviving movement infrastructure.
Through these waves there has been an accumulation of politics, but also a stratification between different parts of the broad left. On the one hand, a large layer of people joined electoral campaigns for Bernie in 2016 or 2020 out of a newly found hope that another world is possible. On the other hand, huge swathes of the US population radicalized first in 2020 against state violence, and then deepened that radicalization in the Palestine solidarity movement, extending it to a knee-jerk anti-imperialism and a shift against the bipartisan establishment as a whole. There is no way to neatly separate these two layers from each other, nor should they be set against one another. In both cases, participants often arrived at new political frameworks, or even lasting political commitments, coming to feel instinctively who is to blame for our current situation, what to expect from it, and who they can trust.
The existence of a latent layer of people with some politics and experience organizing means we can expect there to be resistance to Trump’s attacks. But an ideological radicalization, however necessary, cannot substitute for strategy, organized power, and the political will to implement it.
Beyond the Fatal Democratic Party Feedback Loop
Strategy is only possible with a vision, a plan, and a vehicle to carry it out. But the development of each of these has faced a staggering uphill battle in recent memory. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pinpoints the problem of chronic short-termism in the strategic thinking of much of the left:
There will be an onslaught of things that we will be forced to respond to. But what can’t happen is that the rapid response to the shock and awe of the Trump administration undermines these bigger political questions about organization, strategy, and tactics that have to take place. Because this is what always happens, right? It’s the expedient response to the immediate issue in front of us, and then it feels like the next step to stop having to respond to every single issue means “we gotta get the Democrat in.” So you already know that more likely than not [the Republicans] are going to get the House, so they are going to have the three wings of government for the first two years of the Trump administration. The pressure to stop every single thing anyone is doing to win back the House in 2026 is just going to be unbelievable.
And this is what happens. And then 2028 comes, and then we know if Trump’s not dead, there will be some Republican knuckle-dragger who will be the worst thing we have ever heard of, which means “all hands on deck,” everything must end now, to get Josh Shapiro or some other hack from the Democratic Party into office. So we know that’s the cycle. And everything we do gets put on hold, forever. Because there is never a good time when the Republicans are always lurking in the shadows, there is never a good time to do the work that we need to do. This is part of the political challenge.”
The pattern is not new. The movement against the Iraq War in the early 2000s was the largest movement since the 1960s in the US, but was effectively terminated by pressures on the left to line up behind John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. A different dynamic was at work in Obama’s first run for office, but by 2012, the Democratic electoral machine was able to suck all the remaining energy from the Occupy movement they had just crushed on a city level. The termination of Bernie’s campaign in 2016 came from the top, transferring email lists and campaign knowledge directly to the Democratic Party leadership and deflating the newly inspired hopes of millions. But in 2020, the largest protest movement in our country’s history was very effectively funneled into the tepid, restorationist campaign of Joe Biden. This year we saw the crushing of the student encampments for Palestine—the culmination of many months of protests and direct actions—coincide with the DNC and the desperate attempt to launch Kamala Harris’s hollow presidential campaign.
Each time, the interruption of the movement proved a mutilation from which it could not recover—and the cumulative effect has been a general undercutting of efforts to build an independent mass force adequate to the looming fascist threat. In short: the Democratic Party is a disorganizing and disorienting force that consistently demobilizes our side and emboldens the right.
We entangle ourselves in all kinds of desperate ploys, believe in all kinds of nonsense, just not in our own power to change things ourselves.
Still, it can seem reasonable to many serious organizers on the left to adopt a defeatist approach to building power under the coming administration. Even with the knowledge of the Democratic Party’s responsibility for our current predicament, the idea that the Democrats in positions of power could one day live up to their cynical populist rhetoric can seem more believable than the notion that working people could develop a systematic organizing vehicle and a tangible goal to unite around. Especially now in the face of catastrophe, it might seem that our only hope is to rely upon a corrupt political cartel run by our class enemies—yes, we’re talking about the Democratic Party—as the sole possible vehicle for resisting Trump. This reliance, no less than impotent screeds demanding a revolution materialize out of thin air, reflects a helpless appeal for a savior to swoop in from above and deliver us from evil. But in both cases, we entangle ourselves in all kinds of desperate ploys and indulge in all manner of nonsense—indeed, these strategies encourage us to believe in everything except our own power to change things ourselves.
Without viable independent organization, the powerful feedback loop described by Taylor inevitably funnels the precious time, resources, and energy of the left back into the Democratic Party—which, as we’ve seen, is a conservative, disorganizing force that ultimately prepares the ground for the growth of the right. Countless cases internationally show that when we rely on the neoliberal centrists to protect us, what happens is that the entire political spectrum gets dragged to the right. But if we stay on this path it will eventually drag us all over the cliff into war, fascism, and climate catastrophe. The alternative is not another poorly organized and politically muddled Green Party bid to assert sudden hegemony over the national scene. Instead, we need concrete models, built from local or regional efforts and rooted in the real relationships that even today are at the core of defending our communities.
Reforging the Left from Within the Grim Years
How do we move from a fragmentary and weakened left to the beginnings of a collective project that can make a difference in the lives of masses of people?
While there are many potential starting points, an obvious place to begin is in a deep blue city like Chicago. Before it mortgaged everything to put a mayor in office, the CTU-backed United Working Families used to have a principled vision of building an alternative to the Democratic Party power structure that runs the city (and the state) in the interests of our class enemies. That kind of rooted and radical project among today’s working class is even more necessary after the debacles of the Johnson administration. The coming period will be characterized by increasingly turbulent social and political crises, as well as the re-emergence of mass social movements like we have seen with increasing frequency since 2008. In this context, it is politically irresponsible to write off the project of building an alternative mass party, a vehicle to fight for working people from below, whether or not it immediately participates in elections.
The left has to prepare for the upsurges to come if we will have any hope of building a path toward a brighter future. That preparation will take a long-term vision compelling enough for working people to resist the fatal pull of short-term dissolution into the Democratic whirlpool every election cycle. Bread and butter improvements, though necessary, will not be enough to combat the ideological sway and psychological wage provided by the right in this moment. A practical strategy for building left power cannot succeed without an inspiring long-term vision that can fill people with a sense of purpose.
If the left cannot cultivate a deep faith in our collective capacities from below, the far right will once again fill the void, with disastrous consequences.
Defeating cynicism is a collective project, built from the courage to construct a new way of being and even a new worldview. As Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes wrote in Let This Radicalize You: “Imagining how the world ought to be, and then fighting and rehearsing for that world, demands a great deal of the human psyche. People need new, transformative stories to embrace in place of the false narratives they must let go—or that are being ripped out from under them. They may need to reimagine what the fulfillment of their values looks like—or even reimagine their values.” If the left cannot cultivate a deep faith in our collective capacities from below, the far right will once again fill the void, with disastrous consequences.
We also need to reckon with the real fear in our midst. Trump’s new administration will have profound and terrible consequences for all of our lives in the years to come. It will be much worse than the first administration, and it is not helpful to minimize the extent of what we face. Hundreds of thousands of people who marched in the streets in 2020 or visited a campus encampment in 2024 are feeling politically paralyzed—or at least shaken—without a sense of where to go next. To win them over from sympathy to commitment will require a left that can wrest responsibility for our collective future out of the bloodsoaked hands of the Democratic Party. But it will also take patience, intentional and goal-oriented discussions across political and organizing backgrounds.
The antidote to fascist fear and isolation is a sober, farsighted, and welcoming left.
The antidote to fascist fear and isolation is a sober, farsighted, and welcoming left. Rebuilding on that basis will have to be an intentional process. If at times it will lead to frustration, it is no less necessary. “To build community in a relational sense,” Kaba and Hayes tell us, “we must overcome the isolation imposed by this society—an isolation that stifles our problem-solving abilities and leaves us dependent upon structures that in times of crisis are inadequate at best, and at worst, plainly destructive.” Cultivating a sense of shared belonging is central to any leftward resolution to the moment we are entering.
Unity and trust are built through common tasks and joint action. They are cemented when we show up to defend each other against the attacks of the right, even when we disagree on many questions. We will only construct a real political counter-narrative by working together and being open to changing ourselves in the process. We can and must start right here in our neighborhoods, across our organizations, and in our workplaces.
