Mass Protests & Working-Class Action Can
The US election results confirm that a smile, nice words and middle-of-the-road policies are no answer to anger and alienation. Between 2020 and 2022, the controlled the Presidency, the House and the Senate but did little with this. If they had enacted: a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all and legislation to protect abortion they would have won the 2022 and this election.
Trump’s shocking blowout victory is an enormous and upsetting setback for the working class, the poor, and marginalized people, not just in the US but the world over. At the time of writing, Trump has not only decisively won the electoral college, but is also winning the popular vote—the first time a Republican has done so since 2004.
Republicans have also swept the Senate, and still control the Supreme Court. Trump’s right-wing, dystopian agenda will have few obstacles in the halls of political power.
We are now faced with the threat of mass deportations and the authoritarian aspirations of Project 2025. Trump’s more dangerous regime will efficiently set about carrying out attacks on the most vulnerable people. He will give full-throated support to the Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza, and will continue to escalate imperialist conflict with China, edging us ever closer to wider military conflict.
Trump was aided by an unprecedented number of ads from wealthy donors like Elon Musk. The fact that Musk, the richest man in the world, will likely be part of Trump’s government shows who Trump’s government will represent: not the ordinary Americans as they claim, but the billionaires. Musk will eagerly help Trump to slash billions from already meager government programs that poor families rely on, and go after the “trans woke mind virus” as a way of distracting from the real source of our problems: the unequal and exploitative system of capitalism.
Contrary to what the Democrats said at the time, the right wing was not defeated when Trump lost in 2020, in fact it grew under Biden. This is exactly what socialists warned would happen. The Democrats can’t stop the right, but mass protests and working-class action can.
How Did We Get Here?
Abortion rights were more popular than Kamala Harris in every state that voted on them. Missouri went to Trump, but voters there also passed a $15 minimum wage increase and codified abortion rights into the state constitution overriding the existing abortion ban. Florida went for Trump but a majority voted to legalize marijuana, something “law and order” Republicans have staunchly opposed for decades.
While both the abortion and marijuana measures in Florida failed because of the anti-democratic law requiring 60% to pass, the abortion rights referendum got 57%—1.4 million more votes than for Harris. Had the Democrats done more than just talk about abortion, they could have won the votes of millions of working-class people, especially women, who want to see real action to defend reproductive rights.
After four disastrous years under Biden and Harris, people didn’t trust the Democrats to fight for their interests. Democrats are bankrolling the massacre in Gaza and endless war in Ukraine, and inflation is eating into workers’ wallets. Biden blocked a potential rail strike, failed to fight for a $15 minimum wage or the PRO Act on labor rights, didn’t codify Roe v. Wade, walked back pledges for police reform, continued Trump’s border policies, and abandoned promises to take serious action on climate change. This was while Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first two years of Biden’s term.
Trump took advantage of the very real economic anxieties of millions of Americans, many of whom are financially worse off now than they were four years ago at the end of Trump’s first presidency. Trump posed—completely falsely—as an anti-establishment figure at a time when the majority of people are understandably and correctly disgusted with the establishment.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and Kamala Harris clung to their establishment reputation as tightly as ever. In the final month of her campaign, Harris de-emphasized her more popular economic policies under pressure from big business. Harris presented herself as a reliable administrator of US capitalism, which is failing millions of people.
As always, establishment pundits will try to blame uneducated workers who don’t know what’s good for them, but this is misleading and condescending. Earlier on Election Day, workers at Boeing announced they had passed a contract that included major pay increases, after a historic seven week strike against one of the most powerful corporations in the US. They voted down two bad offers before the victory, yet many also unfortunately voted for Trump, an anti-union billionaire. Workers are fighting to make their lives better every day, but understandably, many didn’t see Harris as an avenue to do that.
After decades of voting for Democrats as the “lesser evil” to stop the Republicans, we are now seeing signs of the opposite phenomenon: millions of ordinary people “holding their nose” to vote for Trump out of a greater dislike for the corporate, out-of-touch Democrats.
Biden blamed Trump supporters for his unpopularity, calling them “garbage” days before the election, and Harris completely failed to distance herself in any meaningful way from this condescending narrative. What started with a wave of enthusiasm and unprecedented small-donor fundraising numbers turned into campaigning with imperialists like Dick and Liz Cheney, boasting of being “tougher on immigration” than Trump, promising to build “the most lethal military in the world,” and emphatically pledging to support fracking.
The Democrats’ effort to peel away Trump supporters by moving to the right themselves has definitively failed. What we need is a working-class alternative to both major parties.
The Fightback Starts Now
We need mass, organized protests to show that Trump’s pro-corporate agenda is in reality deeply unpopular. This can only be done on the basis of uniting working-class people around popular policies like raising the minimum wage, Medicare for All, expanding abortion access, ending wars, and a green jobs program, which of course the Democrats won’t reliably do.
Bullies like Trump only understand power, and mass resistance was the only thing that got him to back down in his first term. Tens of thousands of people showed up to protests called by Socialist Alternative right after Trump’s election in 2016. These set the tone for the early anti-Trump movement, starting with the massive Women’s Marches around his inauguration, which damaged Trump’s popular mandate in the first days of his administration.
Mere days later, large parts of the economy were threatened by airport occupations and striking New York City taxi drivers stopped his racist “Muslim Ban,” and in 2019 the threat of mass strikes among airport workers ended his anti-immigrant government shutdown. In his first administration, Trump only backed down when the profits of corporations and billionaires were threatened.
Trump is a liar. He must be exposed as a pro-corporate hack and many of his attacks will be deeply unpopular. Polls showing historic support for unions, including recent strikes, and access to abortion highlight the space that exists for a genuinely working class political force that can beat back Trump’s attacks, and Trumpism once and for all. Building this means once and for all breaking with the Democratic Party, who’s billionaire backers will be just as threatened by working class unity as Trump is.
Socialist Alternative supported a protest vote for Jill Stein, but as we warned, her campaign was woefully inadequate for what’s at stake. While the labor movement is still recovering from decades of retreat, it still represents tens of millions of workers and has more than enough resources to launch a new anti-war, pro-working class party fully independent of corporate interests. Unfortunately, most labor leaders squandered their power campaigning for Harris. Others like Teamster president Sean O’Brien made the opposite mistake of pandering to Trump’s nationalist, “America First” rhetoric designed to divide workers further.
Trump is a Symptom, Capitalism is the Disease
What’s needed is an international, working-class movement that can actually solve the crises caused by the sick capitalist system. As the inter-imperialist rivalry between US and Chinese capitalism increasingly shapes world events, right-wing nationalists are gaining momentum. With protectionist trade wars causing inflation and wars, and climate change displacing millions of people, politicians are happy to scapegoat immigrants to deflect away from anger at billionaire elites who keep getting richer.
Mass protests are the best way to show Trump has no mandate to move forward with his reactionary agenda. This needs to be linked with the threat to shut down business as usual for Trump and the billionaire class. We need to protest, occupy, organize, and strike.
We must unite working-class people with a program that unapologetically fights for our interests, and can win over people who voted for Trump but also supported abortion in places like Florida. On the basis of mass working-class resistance, Trump can be defeated once and for all. To defeat Trumpism and the far right for good, we need to take on the system as a whole. Trump is a symptom, capitalism is the disease. We need revolutionary change to fight for a socialist society, organized democratically based on the needs of working people and the planet, not the billionaires.
Socialist Alternative members around the country are already hard at work organizing protests against Trump and his reactionary agenda. Join us to help us build an international resistance to the far right and capitalism.
