Let’s start with Trump getting elected twice. How did the Democrats lose to the most flawed candidate ever to run for president?

After decades of job destruction abetted by the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberal Wall Street policies and corporate trade deals, the party lost a lot of white working-class votes. Without them, the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin collapsed, and Clinton lost.

During the campaign, Hillary Clinton became the face of the corporatized Democratic Party. She supported, and was identified with, her husband’s push for NAFTA, which contributed to the destruction of industrial jobs during and after his presidency. Then, the Democrats cozied up to Wall Street before, during, and after the 2008 financial meltdown, which led to even more job loss.

Hillary Clinton saw nothing wrong when she unabashedly accepted $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three paid speeches in 2013, a nice payday, but also a thumb in the eye to industrial heartland voters who had suffered so much job destruction.

Trump, for his part, attacked Hillary’s coziness with Wall Street and trashed Bill’s business-friendly trade deals, attracting just enough working-class votes in swing states to give him a comfortable margin in the electoral college, even while losing the popular vote by three million votes.

Strategic Failures

After a chaotic and ineffective Trump presidency, Biden defeated him in 2020 and said he would serve one term as a bridge to a younger generation of leaders. Instead, despite widespread concerns about his age, he chose to run again. Even as most Democratic voters expressed doubts about a second Biden campaign, party leaders (including Bernie and AOC) closed ranks behind him. Only after his disastrous debate performance in June 2024 was he forced from the race.

The Democrats then anointed Vice President Kamala Harris, overlooking the fact that Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign collapsed before the first votes were cast and generated little enthusiasm among Democratic primary voters. But she was the standard bearer of the corporate Democrats and chosen without any input from Democratic voters.

Harris made little effort to separate herself from corporate interests and elite institutions. She was, after all, a supporter of the Democratic Party that wooed Wall St. and Hollywood. As a result, Trump, the man who had led a damn insurrection and got away with it, made big gains with Black and Hispanic working-class voters and waltzed back into office, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.

Because of this remarkable series of political miscalculations, we now are stuck with an unhinged president who is doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants. And while much of what Trump has done, from violent ICE raids to the war with Iran, is unpopular, Republican lawmakers have stayed blindly loyal, doing very little to rein him in.

With growing public dissatisfaction over Trump’s presidency, it should be a no-brainer for the Democrats to recapture the House and maybe, despite a tough map this time, even the Senate.

And it would be if the Democrats had not remained so closely tied to wealthy donors and corporate power. As a result, they have failed to formulate or express a national pro-working-class agenda and make it credible. As a party they are far more comfortable with the Epstein files than raising the minimum wage.

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In our survey last year of the Blue Wall states, 70 percent of the 3,000 voters offered negative comments about the Democratic Party. A survey by the Center for Working Class Politics showed that even though 20 percent of the working-class voters who voted for Trump are now backing away, they still are not likely to support Democrats. And a recent NYT-Siena poll reported that 43 percent of all voters are dissatisfied with both parties.

So yes, let’s vote for the Democrats in November in order to throw a spanner in the Trump machine. But let’s also not kid ourselves that the Democrats are now, or will become again, the party of working people.

More importantly, let’s not let the fear of fascism stop us from doing what we know must be done, which is to build a new party of our own, by and for working people.

If voting Democratic this year is necessary but not sufficient, what political strategy comes next? What must change to break this perpetual cycle?

Target Red America

There are vast areas of red America that not so long ago harbored progressive populists. From West Virginia to Idaho, working-class voters supported Democrats because the party delivered New Deal policies and protections workers valued. During the Reagan years 10 of the 18 Senators from Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho were Democrats. Now there are none.

Today, the Democrats don’t even field candidates in about 40 percent of the 1,400 legislative races in those states. If we are serious about thwarting fascism, we had better engage our working-class brothers and sisters in these red areas with an alternative to the increasingly absent Democrats and the extremist Republicans.

That alternative is a political movement that centers on working-class interests, including job security, fair pay, and affordable health and childcare. Getting such a political movement off the ground won’t be easy. It will require some large labor unions to fill the vacuum by fielding and funding new independent working-class candidates outside the two parties.

For decades, progressives have been told that independent candidates only serve as spoilers and help elect Republicans. That warning makes sense in competitive races where Democrats have a realistic chance of winning.

But what about the 130 congressional districts in which Democrats lose by 25 points or more? What about the many hundreds of legislative districts where they don’t even field candidates?

In those areas, there is nothing to spoil.

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There’s no ducking the fundamental question: How do we rebuild progressive populism in red America? Our survey found that even in rural conservative areas of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a majority of those voters would support a new independent working-class party that advocated a progressive populist platform, including a right to a job at a living wage with the federal government serving as the employer of last resort.

In sum, progressive populism is still popular in red rural areas that have suffered plant closings and experienced the rapaciousness of corporate power, but right now there is only MAGA, making promises it is incapable of keeping, and a political vacuum where no organization is able to hold power accountable. In much of working-class America, there is no political party that represents it.

Perhaps the best part of this red-area strategy is that it would encourage progressives to leave their blue bubbles and engage in discussions with those who live beyond liberal urban areas and university towns. Thousands of new face-to-face engagements would be politically healthy for a country that has grown comfortable with geographic and political polarization. A lot could be learned, new bridges could be built, and a new movement by and for working people could emerge.

If there’s a better strategy to reach red working-class America, I’d like to hear it. Let’s debate it. Let’s open up our imaginations to the possibility that something new and bold is needed and now is the time to build it.

If we’re serious about stopping authoritarian politics, we cannot afford to write off half the country and abandon working-class red America.

*****

The questions raised in this essay are explored in much greater depth in my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power.

The book examines why so many working people have abandoned the Democratic Party, why independents are now the largest political bloc in many states, what voters in the heartland actually want from politics, and whether a new working-class political organization can be built without acting as a spoiler.

Drawing on new polling and historical research, it argues that working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

If these arguments resonate with you, I hope you’ll take a look at the book.

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

The same logic could easily have been applied to the Great Plains.

Abandoned by the party they once considered their own, many Democrats turned to the Republicans to vent their anger at a system that was screwing them.

Rebuild the old or build something new?

Despite this fundamental ideological shift, it’s hard for progressives to move away from the Democratic Party, especially given the rise of MAGA. Don’t we have to do everything we can to support Democratic candidates in order to win back Congress and stop the fascist takeover of America?

Of course, defeating the MAGA Republicans is crucial. And the fortunes of the Democrats are a real concern in blue and marginal districts where new seats can be won and old seats can be held. Third-party candidates in those competitive districts would only serve as spoilers likely to help elect MAGA Republicans.

But that’s not the case in the ruby red states in which the Democrats have given up on 40 percent of the local races, and where they lose congressional seats by 25 percent or more.

In these areas there is nothing to spoil.

It is political malpractice to abdicate so much of America’s heartland. One strategy is for progressives to recapture the Democratic Party in the Great Plains and elsewhere, infuse it with new energy, change its neoliberal brand, and run new working-class candidates across the board.

But a new survey by the Center for Working Class Politics shows that many of those who have given up on Trump show little interest in voting for Democrats. And a recent New York Times/Siena survey reports 43 percent of registered voters nationally are dissatisfied with both parties. That’s a hell of a headwind to overcome, given how tarnished the Democratic Party brand has become.

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Something new that isn’t blue?

Dan Osborn’s race for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska points in another direction. This former local labor leader is running against both parties, what he calls “the two-party doom loop,” in an unabashed progressive populist campaign—the Nebraska Fairness Plan. As he says “It’s not a party’s platform or written by consultants. It’s written for the people who punch a clock and wonder why nobody in Washington is fighting for them.”

Osborn is appealing to independents, disaffected Democrats, and even disgruntled Republicans. So far, the race is a toss-up in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats by nearly two to one. The Democratic nominee, Cindy Burbank, has said she will avoid playing the spoiler by dropping out before ballots are printed if she doesn’t see a path to victory.

Osborn’s effort (and the polling we report on in The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own) strongly suggests that the best path forward in the Great Plains districts largely abanoned by the Democrats is to create a new organization by and for working people to run independent candidates.

That requires a break from the Democrats. Osborn says he will not caucus with either major party, and attacks both billionaire parties that have left so many working people high and dry. Independent working-class candidates will need to take strong progressive populist positions that protect jobs, create new ones, and save what’s left of family farming—positions with strong support across the Great Plains.

And progressive political activists will need to get comfortable with turning neoliberalism on its head—putting people instead of capital in the center of our economy. That means promoting real job creation, not public-private partnerships that enrich corporations and rarely produce new jobs.

We will need to promote strong policies like “the right to a job at a living wage, provided by the public sector if the private sector fails to do so.”

As radical as this policy seems, polling shows again and again that it is very popular. People want stable, secure jobs even if the government has to step in to provide them.

Rebuilding progressive populism in the Great Plains requires the kind of boldness that challenged corporate power from the 1880s onward. Those populists were able to grow their appeal nationally, and their efforts led to progressive reforms like the graduated income tax, anti-monopoly moves against the robber barons, the formation of public universities and colleges, and even a public bank in North Dakota, among other successes.

We must escape the corporatist framework that governs today’s Democratic Party, which appeals to wealthy donors, admires the billionaire class, and has given up on the working class it considers socially backward.

Can it be done? Not quickly. Not easily. But the Great Plains once produced some of the most powerful populist movements in American history that challenged concentrated wealth, built durable institutions, and won reforms that reshaped the country. We won’t know what is possible until we try again.

We need to leave our blue bubbles, talk face-to-face with alienated working people, and rebuild an independent politics rooted in work, community, and economic security.

And really, where better to spread populism than in America’s heartland, “where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.”

If we dare to act boldly, perhaps we can once again become the wind.

*****

The questions raised in this essay are explored in much greater depth in my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power.

The book examines why so many working people have abandoned the Democratic Party, why independents are now the largest political bloc in many states, what voters in the heartland actually want from politics, and whether a new working-class political organization can be built without acting as a spoiler.

Drawing on new polling and historical research, it argues that working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

If these arguments resonate with you, I hope you’ll take a look at the book.

All book proceeds support our Reversing Runaway Inequality educational programs for working people.

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By Mark Dudzic.

Mark is a labor activist who has spent a lifetime building a transformative labor movement. He served as a local union president, the national coordinator of the Labor Party, and coordinates Labor Campaign for Single Payer. He has thought long and hard about how to build a new party of working people, and although he finds my approach promising, he sees it as incomplete. Here is his review.

******

Launching a “party of our own” is the great unfinished task of the U.S. working class. Without a political party to defend and advance worker interests, labor is fighting capital with one hand tied behind their backs.

In Les Leopold’s important and provocative book, (The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own) the veteran labor educator wrestles with the reasons why the U.S. is the only advanced industrial country that has never successfully launched a mass working-class political party, and he evaluates the prospects for doing so in the current political context.

He draws on his decades-long experiences working with diverse groups of unionized workers and he takes a look at some interesting contemporary polling data from four midwestern swing states, to show that working-class Americans are experiencing intense job and social insecurity and are desperate for relief. They are not the social issue reactionaries they’re often painted as, but they are deeply distrustful of a Democratic party that has moved away from its pro-worker New Deal roots and embraced neoliberalism.

Leopold also discusses the experiences of those who attempted to launch a working-class party called The Labor Party in the 1990s and examines the Working Families Party’s more recent attempts to promote a working-class agenda within the Democratic Party. He comes up with some interesting policy proposals which appear to test well within the polling groups that he used for his studies.

The book is strongest in its critique of the “two parties of the billionaires” and in its diagnosis of what ails American workers and what moves them to action. Leopold could have spent more time situating the political/electoral issues within the broader forces shaping working-class consciousness and activism, including the rise and fall (and attempts to rise again) of the institutional labor movement, and the mechanics of forging an anti-fascist front to confront Trumpism and its hold on significant sections of the working class.

He makes a strong case for running working class candidates as independents in red districts where Democrats are no longer serious contenders, such as Nebraska where former union leader Dan Osborn is mounting a strong independent campaign for the Senate. While this is an interesting (and, as of now, untested) tactic in building independent working-class politics without “playing the spoiler” in important swing districts, it is not, on its own, a broad enough base from which to launch a viable national party. Nor does it address the reasons why other working-class champions, such as Graham Platner in Maine (not to mention Bernie Sanders!), choose to run as insurgents inside the Democratic Party.

In the end, Leopold concedes that the working-class movement is not currently in a position to launch a serious party of our own. He urges an increased emphasis on grassroots education and organizing to bring together the forces who could credibly build such a party as part of the program of a revitalized working-class movement. As that movement develops and grows, it will grapple with and develop solutions to the very problems that Leopold identifies.

This book is an important contribution to that debate and should be read and discussed by everyone who wants to defeat fascism and build a world run by and for the vast majority of people who have to work for a living.

Les Leopold’s response:

First of all, I want to thank Mark for helping me think through the difficult issues involved in building a new political movement among working people. He understands the project perfectly when he writes that without a party of their own, “workers are reduced to fighting capital with one hand tied behind their backs.”

But I struggle with his claim that the red state strategy that I put forward “is not, on its own, a broad enough base from which to launch a viable national party.” Aren’t there enough red areas to form a broad foundation for a new party of working people?

Let’s take a look once again at West Virginia, a state that after WWII was solidly blue and then went ruby red after the Democrats were blamed for the decimation of coal industry jobs. Today, the Democrats hold only 11 of the state’s 134 legislative seats, and they don’t even run candidates in 49 of them. As one of the poorest states in the nation, it is ripe for a new working-class political formation,

Reforming the West Virginia Democratic Party via DSA or the Working Families Party is almost impossible to envision. That’s because any association with the Democratic brand is the kiss of death. That kiss of death is why something new needs to be built, and there are countless other areas around the country that have sizable working-class populations that have given up on the Democratic Party. Those areas, our survey suggests, would welcome a new independent party of working people.

It doesn’t have to be a national party at first, or even for a long time. It just has to take hold and provide a new independent political path for working people in their local and congressional elections. We need new areas of hope.

Why haven’t Grahm Platner and Bernie Sanders taken this path?

Well, when Bernie was running in Vermont he did. He was a bold independent social democrat, and everyone knew it. In half of his runs for the U.S. House of Representatives he ran as an independent against the Democratic and Republican nominees. In the other half he ran as an independent without a Democratic opponent. In 2006 he won the Democratic primary for Senate, then dropped the Democratic label and ran and won as an independent. It was his run for president that put him into squarely within the Democratic Party’s primary system. He didn’t think he could build a successful new national independent run for president without becoming a spoiler and thereby electing a Republican president. But in Vermont, he had no such fear.

So why isn’t Grahm Platner running as independent in Maine, especially since Senator Angus King runs as an independent there? I asked Platner’s campaign manager that question and he said that Platner always has been a Democrat and he wants to stay true to his identity since authenticity is his hallmark. Maybe that also was a strategic choice, but I believe he could win as an independent just as King has done.

But so much of this is unknown and theoretical at this time. We have a long way to go before there is anything that looks like an independent working-class party. All we can do now is raise the issue, have the debate, and involve as many working people as possible in the discussion. We need many more critiques like Dudzic’s.

That sure beats having one hand tied behind our backs in the fight against billionaire domination.

Thank you Mark for engaging in this badly needed dialogue.

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For white working-class voters the answer is clearly yes. They have shifted steadily toward the Republicans: from 50 percent for Bill Clinton in 1996 to 66 percent for Donald Trump in 2024.

I’ve argued that this shift was driven primarily by economic dislocation—especially job destruction caused by trade deals championed by Clinton and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

But my astute friend Matt Rinaldi challenged that argument. After all, didn’t Ronald Reagan launch the modern assault on organized labor when he fired 11,345 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)? Given Reagan’s attacks on labor and support for corporations, if economic dislocation was the issue why didn’t workers abandon the Republicans?

Well, they did for a time, once Reagan left the stage:

Many in the mainstream media reject the economic explanation. They argue that working-class voters rebelled against the Democrats’ increasingly liberal cultural positions on issues such as guns, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, affirmative action, and immigration.

Still others point to the collapse of labor unions themselves. As unions weakened, the union hall disappeared as the social and political glue connecting working-class communities to the Democratic Party.

These explanations can’t be disregarded, but I think the economic explanation remains compelling.

Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, captured it well:

“The resentment and movement away from the Democrats began long before they were for nongendered bathrooms. It was because their lives were becoming more precarious, their kids were leaving town, the pensions they expected were evaporating, and that took a toll.”

We have strong evidence that “wokeness” does not explain the shift. White working-class voters have become substantially more liberal on many social issues in recent years. (Source data is here.)

• In 2000, only 38 percent of white working-class voters supported allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children. By 2020, support had risen to 76 percent.

• In 1996, 60 percent believed that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex was “always wrong.” By 2021, that number had fallen to 29 percent.

• In 2010, only 32 percent supported granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who had worked, paid taxes, and committed no felonies. By 2020, support for legalization had risen to 62 percent.

Democratic pollster Mike Lux reached a similar conclusion after conducting focus groups in the Midwest in 2023:

“Based on the evidence I have seen, these voters wouldn’t care all that much about the cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about the economic challenges they face deeply and daily.”

We also found similar results in our April 2025 YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. When asked open-ended questions about the Democratic Party, 70 percent expressed negative views. But only tiny percentages mentioned ideological extremism or “wokeness”:

• Democrats — 3%

• Independents — 11%

• Republicans — 19%

False Promises

Beginning with Bill Clinton, the Democratic establishment promoted a new economic vision based on globalization, the knowledge economy, and financial deregulation. These forces were supposed to create prosperity for everyone by lowering consumer prices and unleashing economic growth.

Clinton and his advisers understood that many workers would lose manufacturing jobs because of this new direction, specifically the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. That’s why they also advocated for transition programs that would ease the shift of workers into new sectors of the economy, programs that were discussed but never funded in any significant way.

Manufacturing jobs crashed and working-class communities were left to decay.

In 1993, NAFTA passed the House with 132 Republican votes and 102 Democratic votes. In the Senate, 27 Democrats joined 34 Republicans to pass the bill. Although more Republicans than Democrats supported NAFTA, Clinton ran a public-facing PR campaign in support of the program and became its public face. Clinton’s promotion of NAFTA led to the immediate loss of manufacturing jobs. And in the minds of millions of working people this fused corporate globalization and job destruction into the soul of the Democratic Party.

Former Senator Sherrod Brown still hears about it today:

“The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA… I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, during the campaign, about NAFTA.”

The ideological transformation of the Democrats

But the problem is not just about votes about trade deals. Clinton’s adoption of a neoliberal framework, echoing Reagan’s, reflects a profound ideological change inside the Democratic Party.

For the most part, New Deal Democrats placed working people at the center of economic life. If private corporations failed to provide enough jobs as happened during the Great Depression, then government had a responsibility to step in and create them directly.

The new Democrats of Clinton’s time reversed that logic. Corporations became the center of the economic universe. The government’s role was no longer to create jobs if needed, but to create favorable conditions for corporations to generate profits—and, ideally, jobs too, (and, of course, generous donations to Democratic political campaigns.)

When Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” he effectively announced the end of large-scale public job creation as a Democratic priority.

For workers in deindustrialized regions, this was devastating. They needed government to fight for them—not to pass the buck to the corporations that had shuttered factories, outsourced jobs, and abandoned entire communities.

Think about how few Democrats—not named Bernie Sanders—regularly attack corporate power over jobs loss. Think about how few—not named Elizabeth Warren—seriously confront Wall Street’s obscene wealth extraction. Think about how few Democrats today support the idea that government should serve as the employer of last resort.

No one expected Republicans to champion direct public job creation. But many working people once believed Democrats would if the situation called for it.

And for decades, they did.

Even the centrist Jimmy Carter created more than 700,000 public service jobs in 1978 to fight recession and unemployment.

We sometimes forget that Democrats controlled the House of Representatives continuously from 1954 to 1994 and controlled the Senate for most of the period from 1954 to 1980.

That dominance was not accidental. It rested on a durable bond between working people and a party that placed jobs—not corporations—at the center of economic life.

When the Republicans won the House during Clinton’s first term for the first time in 50 years, it became clear that working-class loyalty had faded away from the corporate-oriented Democrats. Many working people felt they had been pushed away.

What Comes Next?

That question—what happens when a party that once represented working people becomes identified with corporate globalization—is at the heart of my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.

The book argues that the crisis runs deeper than messaging or candidate quality. Working people increasingly feel politically homeless because neither major party is organized around their economic needs.

The central challenge is no longer simply reforming the Democratic Party, though running many more working-class candidates would certainly help. The real challenge is building independent working-class political power that is capable of confronting corporate dominance directly—especially in red America, where the Democrats have largely abandoned the field.

So, what’s the strategy for changing that?

That question—and why so many of us seem unable or unwilling to answer it—is at the heart of my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.

There are only two options. The first is to dramatically reform the Democratic Party so that it once again speaks to and for working people. The second is to build a new independent party of working people, distinct from the two major parties.

Neither path is easy. But which one actually has a chance?

The road to reforming the Democratic Party is long—and incredibly steep

Take West Virginia. From 1948 to 1964, the state sat safely in the Democratic column. From 1968 through 1992, it swung back and forth. Bill Clinton still won 52 percent there in 1996. But after that, the Democratic vote collapsed—to 30 percent for Biden and 28 percent for Harris.

The decline in state politics has been even worse. In 2024, Republicans held all but 11 of the 134 seats in the state legislature. In 49 races, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate.

What happened?

The Democrats came to be seen as the enemy of coal—and therefore the enemy of jobs. Worse still, they offered no serious replacement. Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” which meant the government would no longer create jobs directly. The era of New Deal-style public job creation was over too.

Into that vacuum stepped the private sector, helping turn West Virginia into the opioid capital of America, with the highest overdose death rate in the nation.

So how exactly is anyone supposed to reform the Democratic Party in West Virginia—or in any other deeply red state? It’s not happening. In these places there is no Mamdani movement, no Working Families Party, no Democratic Socialists of America rebuilding the party from the ground up. The reality is that red America is being written off. The progressive strategy now is to win primaries in blue and purple districts.

Build a New Working-Class Independent Movement?

Dan Osborn in Nebraska offers another path.

A former local union president who led a strike against Kellogg, Osborn is now running for Senate for the second time against what he calls the “two-party doom loop.” He lost by six points in 2024 but ran 15 points ahead of Harris. The Democrats did not run a candidate. Now, according to recent polls, he’s in a neck-and-neck race.

It will be an enormous battle. Because he’s running for Senate rather than the House, huge sums of money will pour in to defeat him. But he is still likely to perform far better than Nebraska Democrats—and that tells us something important about how to challenge power in ruby-red America.

Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states?

There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.

In a YouGov survey we conducted of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we asked whether they would support a new “Independent Workers Political Association” (a name we invented) that would back independent candidates outside the two major parties.

We paired the question with a short but strongly progressive platform:

• The right to a job at a living wage, provided by the government if the private sector can’t

• No layoffs at corporations receiving government money

• Raising the minimum wage to a living wage

• Stopping price gouging by pharmaceutical and food companies

Overall, an astonishing 57 percent supported the fictional organization—including 40 percent of Trump voters and 70 percent of voters under 30.

When we isolated the most rural voters, we found:

Support for the Independent Workers Political Association

• Rural Republicans — 50%

• Rural Independents — 50%

• Rural Democrats — 77%

None of this guarantees success. Building a new political organization takes time, money, discipline, and enormous commitment. Right now, all we have are a handful of independents running here and there.

What we really need is for major labor unions to test this path seriously.

Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.

These are exactly the questions I take up in The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: why the Democrats collapsed across much of working-class America, why independent working-class politics keeps reemerging, and what it would actually take to build durable political power outside the two-party system. If we are serious about progressives competing in red America, we need more than protest votes and nostalgia. We need a strategy.

But what if we fail?

Let the late Tony Mazzocchi, founder of the Labor Party in the 1990s, faced up to that question:

“I just look at building the Labor Party as something that has got to be done. I think the chances of defeat are greater than the chances of success—appreciably greater… And not to have tried would have been more tragic than to have tried and been defeated.”

The question is no longer whether working people are angry. The question is how best they can build a political home of their own.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to see this unintended confirmation and unsolicited support from The Boss of the central theme of my book and immediately added it to the book’s opening paragraph, commenting “The Boss is right, and the goal of this book is to get readers to both consider the need for a new workers’ party and assess its feasibility.”

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It also got me to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if Springsteen contributed a short preface to the book, setting out in more detail why he thought an alternative party was necessary, or at least why we needed “someone who can speak to the majority of the nation.” Of course, it would. And so, I thought again, why not ask him?

The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. In fact, Springsteen has been deeply committed to workers and their struggles for decades and our paths have crossed before. (He contributed a back-cover blurb to my first book, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi.

If he were to write a preface to the new book, it would neither be the first time he stood up for the right of working people to have a say over the conditions that affect their lives; nor the first time he did so in a struggle in which I was deeply involved and to which I was deeply committed.

I made the ask! And, truth be told, I don’t yet know if a preface or an endorsement will appear. But here is the story of “The Boss and Me!” and why I won’t be surprised if one or the other or both of them do appear, sooner or later.

My Hometown

It began 40 years ago. In late 1985, the 3M Corporation announced a shutdown of its audio tape facility in Freehold, N.J., Springsteen’s hometown. Stanley Fischer, the gifted local union president, was determined to do all he could to fight that plant closing, including reaching out to Springsteen, who the year before had released his best-selling album, “Born in the USA,” which included not only the title song but also the moving ballad, “My Hometown.”

The lyrics of “My Hometown” are a perfect match to the pain and sorrow that these 3M workers were experiencing:

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says, “These jobs are going boys, and they ain’t coming back

So, Stanley, who has no shortage of moxie, asked me to write a letter to Springsteen’s management operation, hoping to gain his support. Low and behold, we did. Next thing I knew Stanley and I were in the offices of Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager, and after a few meetings they agreed to pay for an ad in the New York Times that showed Springsteen’s support for the 3M workers. News of Springsteen’s ad then spread all over the country, (and internationally as well) reaching thousands of media outlets.

Nor was that the end of it. A few months later Springsteen showed up at a benefit concert for the workers at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ, which we hired a crew to tape for ABC news.

In the end, we weren’t able to save the jobs, but the campaign did make a lot more people aware of the issue and kicked up quite a fuss. Most notably, because Stanley came up with the idea of linking the mostly white 3M workers in New Jersey with Black South African 3M workers. They responded by turning the “U.S Aid to Africa” movement on its head by leading a walkout in South Africa in support of the NJ workers, much to the displeasure of the apartheid authorities and 3M’s management.

A film of the strike was smuggled out to us and became part of a 40-minute segment on ABC’s “20-20” with the South African trade unionists singing and chanting their own struggle songs (izingoma zo mzabalazo), while wearing t-shirts emblazoned with lyrics from two Springsteen songs, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” and “Don’t Abandon My Hometown.”

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Almost a writer

The whole effort also probably did as much as anything to make me a writer. To stay sane during this 24-7 campaign, I started noting what I saw happening as I ventured deeper into the Springsteen team. Next thing I knew I was hanging around with Steven VanZandt, (Little Steven.) I was on the inside, and I had a story to tell, or so I had hoped.

When I shared what I was doing with Landau’s staff they asked me to show it to their publicity agent. The agent really liked what I had put together and said I was a good writer. But she then added, I would not be allowed to publish it! It was too revealing about how they operated.

I was crestfallen. I thought the world should know all about this campaign and how Springsteen got involved. The 3M workers in New Jersey and their leaders, Stanley Fischer in the U.S. and Amon Msane in South Africa—who was thrown into jail twice under apartheid for supporting the American workers and their “Hometowns Against Shutdowns” campaign—were the heroes of the story. But Springsteen’s role was also pivotal. He was the hook whose celebrity spread the campaign across the country.

We all went on to other struggles and campaigns, but for the last 40 years, Stanley has maintained a connection to Springsteen and his team. So when I read Springsteen’s remarks about how the American people needed a party that spoke their language, I reached out to Stanley about the idea of Bruce writing a preface to the book.

In late November 2025, Stanley sent along a draft to one of Landau’s assistants. Two months later he got a response: They wanted to know the timing. By when did we need his preface?

I was shocked to say the least. This could make a real difference. Book sales would probably double or triple and we might come closer to achieving our stated goal: starting a national discussion on the need for a new workers’ political organization.

But I am not holding my breath. Every day brings new, even more pressing events from the fault lines of our collapsing society. ICE storm troopers have invaded Minneapolis and murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti for all to see. Bruce quickly wrote a new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” and performed at an anti-ICE benefit concert in the Twin Cities and now is on tour to support these issues. The civil war raging between ICE and the public cannot be ignored and the Boss has joined with so many on those streets. Needless to say, he is busy!

My book is important to me, and I believe it speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of all working people, immigrant and non-immigrant alike. However, at this political moment the fight against ICE urgently needs support. And a rock star, no matter how big, can only stretch so far.

Waiting for the call

It all became crystal clear the other night as I was watching “The Beatles Anthology” on TV. There were Ringo, George and Paul talking about their lives at the very top of the musical food chain and I realized that I was waiting for someone about as famous as each of them to find the time to reach out and give our little boat a push. (“Hey, Ringo, give me a call!”)

What are the odds of that, really? About the same as winning the lottery? Maybe even less. I’m more like a screaming fan in 1964 hoping that one of the Beatles will notice me.

We’ve held up the publishing process of the first edition as long as we could, hoping Springsteen could stretch this far. No word so far and we have published the first edition. This is yet another lesson that there is no shortcut to building a new political movement. When I took on this task it was on me to make the case as best as I could and then share it as widely as possible.

It’s still on me. But The Boss is always welcome! As is everyone else.

Call me!

And please take a look at the book.

Many thanks.

^[1] Springsteen’s full comment is “We’re desperately in need of an effective alternative party, or for the Democratic Party to find someone who can speak to the majority of the nation.” This book builds on the first part of his statement.

But when the sacrifice comes, the price paid is far from equal. You, along with hundreds of other workers, are laid off and are replaced with low-wage sub-contractors.

How would you feel?

I found out when a similar scenario was foisted on 114 food service and maintenance workers at Oberlin College in 2020. Many of them had been there longer than any of the administrators and most of the faculty. Their work for the college was their life, their identity. They cared for the students. They were proud to be associated with this elite liberal institution, wokeness and all. It was by far the best employer in northeastern Ohio, which has had its industrial base decimated over the last four decades.

In 2018 Oberlin’s administration had come up with a PR program called “One Oberlin” to secure the school’s finances, upgrade facilities, and prepare for the college’s third century. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic the Oberlin community was asked to pull together to make ends meet. But while the financial stress was real, it turned out “One Oberlin” was not: It failed to include the college’s unionized blue-collar workers. They were summarily dismissed, dispatched with a little severance and little else. They were devastated.

We know how they felt because a group of Oberlin student interns interviewed many of the laid off workers. These workers were hurt and they were angry. They saw this very liberal institution as hypocritical, as betraying its values, and as uncaring and cruel.

As an Oberlin alumnus, this was a wake-up call. Although a group of us did all we could to call out the college’s hypocrisy and compel it to save these jobs. we couldn’t get them to consider the workers as part of “One Oberlin.” (We were able to raise about $180,000 from alumni for these workers to cushion the blow.)

That led me to conduct a larger study of the impact of mass layoffs on politics. It didn’t take much of a leap to see that Oberlin’s liberal establishment was very similar to that of the Democratic Party. A declared ethos of caring and positive social values seemed always to stop when budgetary restraints forced a choice between the interests of workers and those of the party’s elites and their wealthy allies.

That turned out to be the case throughout the Midwest, where the Democratic Party’s fortunes have flagged over the past few decades as their “Blue Wall” crumbled. We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party.

Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio who is trying to reclaim his job this year, found that the Democrats are still being blamed for the job destruction caused by NAFTA. After his loss in the 2024 campaign, he said:

The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA. My first term in the House [was] when NAFTA was voted on. I led the freshman class of 160 Democrats, and 40 Republicans, give or take, in opposition to NAFTA. I was in all the strategy meetings, all the vote counts. So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign, about NAFTA.

I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party…

Our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 70 percent of the respondents have negative opinions of the Democrats. That’s what happens when the Democrats, like Oberlin, bastions of liberal good will, become so cavalier about job destruction.

Can the Democrats Recover?

Everyone who wants to stop MAGA this coming fall, as well as in 2028, sure hopes so. But in the 130 congressional districts where the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more, the odds are slim. In those districts the Democratic Party’s presence is so diminished it might as well not even exist. And it’s in those districts we need something new, starting with working-class candidates like Dan Osborn, who is running as an independent in Nebraska for the U.S Senate.

Are voters in red areas ready for working-class independents? Our YouGov survey shows they are. Looking only at rural county data in those four states (the reddest areas), there is strong support for a new party, independent of the two parties, that would run on a progressive populist working-class platform:

Voter Support for the New Independent Workers’ Political Association

Rural Republicans: 50%

Rural Independents: 50%

Rural Democrats” 77%

(For more data and analysis please see The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.)

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A Policy Hail Mary?

If the Democrats want to reconnect with working people, they need to put job security front and center. They need to stop relying on public-private partnerships, which use public funds to encourage corporate job creation that too often fails to materialize. And the Dems need to purge vacuous language, like the phrase “the opportunity society,” which promotes corporate-first thinking that adds to, rather than reduces, job precarity. In fact, they should replace their corporate-first thinking, with people-first thinking.

To do so the Democrats should call for federal job guarantees. They would do well to read Jared Abbot’s review of a compendium of poll data that shows massive support for the government serving as the employer of last resort. People don’t want handouts; they want a chance to earn a fair living. (Even the new “Working Families Guarantee” agenda, put forward by the Working Families Party, guarantees just about everything but stops short of a federal job guarantee.)

But a shift to ensuring people-first job security will not come easily to a party dominated by wealthy donors, millionaire politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and consultants. Corporate leaders will rail against the prospect of workers having access to federal jobs and thereby forcing the company to bid up wages and benefits to retain and attract employees. Heaven forbid that direct government support go to workers instead of corporations!

Until the party supports job guarantees and runs hundreds of working-class candidates, we can expect more working people to reject the Democratic establishment (and the liberal college administrators) who care so little about working-class job security.

That leaves us with a dangerous political vacuum that is pulling the working class both away from politics and towards demagogues who claim they will trash a system that has neglected so many for so long. But most working people know that genuine positive change is better than destructive change and they would welcome a new working-class party, especially in red areas. They have told us so.

They know that billionaires are in control of both parties, and that they really do need a party of their own.

Les Leopold’s latest book is The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One Of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power. All royalties go to the Labor Institute’s Reversing Runaway Inequality educational programs by and for workers.

Since WWII we have been constantly at war. It is shocking when you list them all:

Major Wars & Large-Scale Conflicts

• Korean War — 1950–1953

• Vietnam War — U.S. escalation 1965–1973 (overall 1955–1975)

• Gulf War — 1990–1991

• War in Afghanistan — 2001–2021

• Iraq War — 2003–2011 (follow-on operations 2011–present)

Medium-Scale Wars & Sustained Campaigns

• Lebanon Crisis — 1958

• Lebanon Civil War intervention — 1982–1984

• Invasion of Grenada — 1983

• Invasion of Panama — 1989–1990

• Bosnian War NATO intervention — 1995

• Kosovo War — 1999

• Libya intervention — 2011

• War against ISIS — 2014–present

Covert Wars, Proxy Wars & Major Support

• CIA operations in Guatemala — 1954

• Bay of Pigs Invasion — 1961

• Laotian Civil War — 1960–1975

• Cambodian Campaign — 1970–1973

• Angolan Civil War — 1975–1991

• Nicaraguan Contra War — 1981–1990

• Salvadoran Civil War — 1980–1992

• Soviet-Afghan War US involvement — 1979–1989

Smaller Interventions & Military Actions

• Dominican Republic intervention — 1965–1966

• Mayaguez incident — 1975

• Operation El Dorado Canyon — 1986

• Tanker War — 1987–1988

• Somalia intervention — 1992–1994

• Haiti intervention — 1994–1995

• Afghanistan missile strikes — 1998

• Yemen drone campaign — 2002–present

• Pakistan drone strikes — 2004–2018

• Syria intervention — 2014–present

Ongoing Military Presence (with Combat Risk)

• Afghanistan (NATO/ISAF follow-on) — 2001–2021

• Sinai Peninsula (Multinational Force & Observers) — 1982–present

• Horn of Africa / Sahel operations — 2000s–present

All these wars have meant that over the years the U.S. military has hired many, mostly working class, men and women to be the human side of the fighting machine and to staff the operations necessary to support it. With an ongoing force of 1.3M working for the military in recent years, that has meant that today there are a lot of U.S. veterans (about 15.8 million), and a lot of programs that serve them. Veterans are everywhere and Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, in Courage or Complicity: How Veterans are Responding to the Assault on Democracy, describe the ways their experiences shape our democracy, and how they might help decide if we will even have one that can endure.

On the one hand they see a conservative drift, as many veterans transition from military service to the police, to ICE, and to security services. About 60 percent of veterans who voted in 2016 voted for Donald Trump, while 54 percent backed him in 2020, a decline the authors note, triggered by female and gay soldiers rejecting MAGA. On the other, they note, that many of our strongest working-class political candidates and labor leaders are former vets. Will these more progressive leaders help shape our future? Or will conservative vets? Probably, it will be both.

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Early and Gordon, both of whom have backgrounds in health policy, show how veterans of all political stripes are generally ignored by our government leaders. Their past sacrifices are conveniently pushed aside or forgotten when other matters press for attention. This has put the Veterans Administration under continual assault, plagued, despite its customary high customer satisfaction scores, by threats to its funding and staffing shortages. Recent Republican aspirations to privatize the VA are, the authors say, an important wake-up call for vets to stand up and fight for their model single-payer system.

Many veterans suffer in civilian life, facing severe medical problems after leaving the services, with others suffering mentally from PTSD and other chronic issues. Veteran suicide rates are much higher than for those who didn’t serve. Too many vets end up in jail or on the street. Early and Gordon cover a wealth of the issues facing veterans and discuss the groups and programs designed to provide services and coordinate help for them. They point out that these issues have no ideology, and the shared experiences of veterans, like the shared work experiences of union members, offers an opportunity to muster political support for solutions that are not partisan.

With progressive groups trying to organize and mobilize more rebellious veterans, and MAGA with veteran leaders like J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, competing to be the next Trump, there are no lack of conflicting opinions among vets. But Early and Gordon offer many ways for the progressives to organize while improving the lives of vets no matter their political color.

They also do us a great service by resurrecting the remarkable right-to-left transformation of Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940), the son of a U.S. congressman who spent his miliary career as a fighter for U.S. imperialism. To preserve and enhance U.S. corporate interests, he led invasions of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Mexico, and China. As he put it:

“I spend thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile miliary force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

Do any of today’s soldiers see Trump’s oil grab in Venezuela, threats to Greenland and Cuba, and the assault on Iran through a similar lens?

Even if most do not, Early and Gordon note that the military has at least one value that is key to progressive change: solidarity. Soldiers can’t succeed without watching out for each other. Solidarity does not mean the coming together of those who agree. Rather it is all about overcoming the differences that divide us so that powerful collective activity can take place. They also point out the staff of the Veterans Administration “fosters a unique institutional culture of empathy and solidarity between patients and providers that has no counterpart anywhere else in the US healthcare system.”

Perhaps this partially explains why many veterans are drawn to labor unions, where solidarity is the core value.

I wish that Early/Gordon had written a little more about how best to mobilize veterans politically. While their ideas about abolishing the Electoral College and expanding voting rights while limiting the power of big money in elections are all on point, I suspect that veterans as a whole are much like working people: many have given up on the Democratic Party and have no political home, and no path to enduring political power. Or have they embraced MAGA and realized it isn’t for them either?

Can the Democrats be sufficiently reformed to overcome that alienation? Can they give up their commitment to the war machine and again become fighters for working-class justice and fairness, which includes policies that adequately support veterans while preventing the never-ending march to war? Or does something new need to be constructed outside of the two parties, as veteran Dan Osborn is doing in Nebraska?

That difficult question may decide whether veterans end up defending democracy or going along with those who are undermining it.

Early and Gordon have written an important book that is well worth reading for their stories about all manner of life and policies involving veterans, how they’ve fought for better lives for their families and how the government has sometimes worked with them, but often worked against them. Most importantly, it will get you thinking deeply about those who have served our country and how their experiences inform who we are and what we can be.

Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler echoes in their minds as this year’s make-or-break November elections approach. Won’t talk of third parties encourage defections from the Democrats and risk helping MAGA? Better, it is thought by the worriers, to bury all such discussion.

Even my friend Bob Kuttner, the astute political commentator, knocks me down with the age-old observation that the “American constitutional system, with its lack of proportional representation for minor parties, makes it almost impossible for new parties to gain a lasting foothold.”

That’s certainly the case when the focus is on presidential races. The story, however, is entirely different at the state and local level, where independent third parties have won thousands of offices and have helped to reshape America. The Populists did it in the 1880s and 1890s, the Socialist Party did it in the early 20^th century, and the Minnesota Farm-Labor Party did it in the 1920s. These third parties led the charge to stop child labor, legalize labor unions, and rein in the corporate robber barons. They, not the Democrats, constructed the foundation of the New Deal that elevated the lives of working people.

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I would like third party skeptics to take a four-step cure:

Step one: Close your eyes and recall what happens on just about every election night. What do you see about five seconds after the polls close? Half the voting districts in the country flash red. They are immediately lost to the Democrats again and again and again. That sad truth is that in 130 congressional districts there is, in reality, only one party, and the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more time after time, IF they even run a candidate at all.

Step two: Admit that in those districts the Democratic Party is ineffectual and therefore the spoiler issue isn’t an issue. Repeat once a day: The spoiler problem does not exist in the 130 congressional districts that the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more.

Step three: Take a strong dose of Dan Osborn, the working-class candidate who is running for Senate in Nebraska as an independent and is doing better than any Democrat has done in decades. Why? In deep red America the Democratic brand is poison, but progressive populism can take hold and grow when contested by independent working-class candidates. Run as a Democrat and you’re defeated before you start.

Step four: Think more carefully about what works. While progressive groups like the Working Families Party do admirable work reforming the Democrats in blue and purple districts, their identity as progressive Democrats makes it almost impossible for them to have any impact in red America. (See Chapter 6 of my book.)

I hope that these four steps make it easier for the worriers to hear the central argument of my book:

Working people are alienated from the Democratic Party and need a political home of their own, especially in red America.

We need to understand the causes of that alienation and how a new political home can be built outside the two major parties without becoming a spoiler in any shape or form.

It’s time to put aside the spoiler canard. In fact, it’s time to get used to the fact that more and more independents are running in red America, attacking both billionaire parties. The Democrats, not the independents, are becoming the new spoilers as they realize that they are now the third party. (See Montana right now.)

You may find other points of contention in my new book, and I’m happy to talk about them all, but the third-party spoiler problem isn’t one of them. Take a look and decide for yourself.

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The Labor Institute, where I work, and the Center for Working Class Politics had put together a survey through YouGov of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. We found that in this representative sampling from these states, many respondents, especially the working-class voters, wanted a radical populist platform as well as a new political party.

What?

We had the respondents evaluate 25 policy proposals ranging from conservative to mainstream to progressive populist. And then we threw into the mix two radical ones.

The first was: “The right to a job at a living wage. If the private sector can’t provide one, the public sector shall.”

This proposal, advocated for years by my colleague Mike Merrill, and by Bernie Sanders as well, would turn neoliberalism on its head by protecting working people instead of Wall Street. A popular talking point in the 1960s, it’s been way outside the policy debate during the last several decades.

The second radical proposal was: “All corporations that receive taxpayer money shall not be permitted to conduct involuntary layoffs of taxpayers. All layoffs would be voluntary.” That proposal came from me, and no one else in the country has ever advocated for it or even mentioned it.

To our great surprise, these two proposal were tied for fifth in the ranking of the 25 proposals.

We even put the no-layoff proposal to the test in the survey by attacking it as socialistic and economically unsound, which dinged support some, but when we countered the attacks, the proposal regained strong support.

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How about a new political organization and agenda?

Then we tossed in one more question, just for the hell of it:

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 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

I figured that given all the negative press about third parties, especially after Ralph Nader’s 2000 run, the idea of a new party might garner fringe support at best.

I was very wrong. It turned out that a whopping 57 percent wanted this new organization, which no one had ever before heard of because it didn’t yet exist! And 40 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 it as well.

What’s going on here?

Why are working people so hungry for something new? Is that why so many abandoned the Democrats and voted for Trump? And most importantly, could something be constructed that fulfilled what working people really want or would they again be abandoned for the next demagogue?

I knew this story had to be told, and with its telling I explored new paths and associated issues. The book just about wrote itself as I worked on problems like:

• Can a new party be built without it becoming a spoiler than only serves to elect Republicans?

• If a new party is really desired, why did the Labor Party of the 1990s fail?

• Why isn’t the Working Families Party the answer?

• And why isn’t it just better to reform the Democratic Party by bringing in more working-class candidates?

I tackle all of these issues in the book. Here’ a preview of just one.

The spoiler problem is no more. There are 130 congressional districts where the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more. That’s where to try out new independent working-class candidates running on a progressive populist platform. That’s where the Dems have long ago given up the ghost.

So please check out The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power. And please review it on Amazon or elsewhere.

(All royalties go to the Labor Institute’s Reversing Runaway Inequality programs for working people.)

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INTRODUCTION:

LISTEN TO THE BOSS

“We are desperately in need of an effective alternative party…”

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, INSTAGRAM, 9/26/25

The Boss is right and the goal of this book is to get readers to both consider the need for a new workers’ party and assess its feasibility. It is aimed especially at concerned union, faith, and community leaders who have seen more and more of their members, congregants, and constituents abandon the Democrats and align with MAGA.

This book aims to open up a positive, substantive discussion with working people2 of all shades and stripes to encourage a new political path.

It will show why….

• Working people have been abandoning the Democratic Party

  as the party has been abandoning them.

• The Democratic brand is so tarnished that Democrats face a severe electoral penalty even before starting their campaigns.

• Working people are ready to support a new political organization with a very progressive economic platform that respects basic human rights and freedoms. New surveys prove it.

• Progressive economic populism matters much more to the working class than “wokeness.” Working people care less about who sleeps with whom than they do about whether everyone has a place to sleep.

• They also believe deeply in the basic rights and freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution that everyone in America should be able to take for granted.

• A new political party of the working class would strengthen rather than undermine the two-party system. (Many states and districts have become one-party fortresses because of gerrymandering and legislated restrictions on the size of Congress.)

• This new party can field working-class candidates in otherwise non-competitive districts where the needs and interests of working people have been too long taken for granted.

• It can also grow through advocacy and direct democracy by sponsoring ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage, expand healthcare, fund childcare, build homes, prohibit mass layoffs, and assure a job to everyone who wants to work.

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What’s in This Book?

In the chapters to come, we’ll explore these questions one by one:

Chapter 1: What do working people really want? Which issues are most important to them, and how do they rank them?

Chapter 2: What do voters think about the Democratic Party? What is the first thing that comes to their mind about the party? Is there a penalty for running for office as a Democrat?

Chapter 3: Would voters support, oppose, or be indifferent to a new policy that would prevent mass layoffs at large corporations receiving government money? Would they support ballot initiatives to impose that requirement statewide? How would they respond to corporate attacks on such a policy?

Chapter 4: To what degree would people support a new, independent workers’ political alliance that would fight for a very progressive economic populist platform?

Chapter 5: Didn’t the Labor Party, founded in 1996, fail to take hold? Why would a new party of working people be any different?

Chapter 6: What about the Working Families Party? Isn’t it already the established party of working people? Why build another one?

Chapter 7: Wouldn’t a new workers’ party become a spoiler party, enabling Republicans to win elections more easily?

Chapter 8: Why give up on reforming the Democratic Party? Couldn’t a new charismatic progressive leader do the trick?

Chapter 9: How do we deal with the tensions between class and social justice issues?

Chapter 10: If a new party is both possible and necessary, how would it be built, and where? What would be its goals?

Chapter 11: How do we get this going? What are the initial steps, who takes them, and where?

Conclusion: Should a new workers’ organization start by forming coalitions with other working-class-oriented candidates, no matter what the party affiliation? Or must the new party first take root and grow? And finally, what have we learned from our exploration?

• Corporations in America are free to shut down facilities, whether profitable or unprofitable, with devastating effects on workers, their families, and their communities.

• Corporations are also free to use their cash to repurchase their own stock shares, driving up their price without increasing the company’s value—a pure and simple case of stock manipulation that enriches top corporate executives and Wall Street investors.

• And corporations in the U.S. enjoy the benefits that come from receiving taxpayer-funded government contracts, while retaining the right to destroy the jobs of taxpayers, if they see fit.

Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent senatorial candidate, knows all this. It’s a good part of the reason he’s running for office, and he needs a plan. He knows this is a travesty, a disaster, a case of the rich and powerful trashing working people. As he puts it, “This isn’t left and right anymore, this is big versus little,” and he wants to do all he can to stop Tyson from killing 3,200 jobs in Lexington, Nebraska.

Osborn has called for the enforcement of the 1921 federal Packers and Stockyards Act, which was designed to promote competitiveness in the livestock, meat, and poultry industries and prohibit deception and fraud. He claims Tyson broke the law by closing its Lexington, Nebraska, plant instead of selling the facility to a competitor. The closure was “destroying 5 percent of America’s beef processing capacity,” Osborn argued, which will drive up prices instead of maintaining a competitive market.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined the fight by demanding that Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollings use the authority she has under the Act to block the Lexington closure. But, on January 21, 2026, the plant shut down anyway. In fact, no plant closing has ever been stopped by this act.

If the law is not enough to protect these devastated workers and communities, where can Osborn find leverage to help them?

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It is really hard to stop a plant closing in the U.S. Of the millions of mass layoffs over the past three decades, I’m having trouble finding any that have been reversed (although my friends at the Teamsters Union say they have been successful on occasion.) There have been at least a handful of worker buyouts of facilities scheduled for shutdowns that kept them open for a time, but all I know about soon went under.

There is one point of leverage, however, that has yet to be used—federal contracts

Large corporations love to dine at the federal trough, gobbling up as much taxpayer money as they can through federal grants and contracts. Tyson is no exception. It’s got its hands all over our tax dollars. In 2025, it received 170 federal awards for a total of $234 million. It also received, from 2018 to 2020, $727 million from the Pentagon to supply beef to the military. And those contracts have been renewed through today.

What if Osborn promised that as senator, he would fight for a new federal regulation like this:

All corporations of 500 or more employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts shall not be permitted to conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All layoffs must be voluntary based on financial incentives.

Wouldn’t that be fair and just? After all, voluntary financial incentives to leave a job are commonplace for executives. And it’s not just severance. The idea is that no one should be forced to leave. The financial incentive would need to be high enough to attract voluntary departures.

Is this proposal too radical for Nebraska?

No doubt, corporations and their political handmaidens would vigorously attack the proposal. Isn’t the key to a free society the right of business owners, large and small, to manage their own enterprises as they see fit? When the government intervenes to control hiring and firing, isn’t it stepping towards socialism, which history has shown is both a failure economically and a path towards totalitarianism? Wouldn’t such a proposal harm jobs, our economy, and democracy?

Osborn’s response could be simple: Corporations would be totally free to hire and fire at will—but not if they are taking taxpayer money. If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!

We tested this idea and the corporate attacks in our survey of 3,000 Midwestern voters across Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. About half of those voters supported the idea, with very low percentages opposed, even after corporate attacks.

Where would the money come from?

That’s where stock buybacks come in. In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers. They chose to pad the bonuses of Tyson executives and the portfolios of large Wall Street shareholders. It might have made instead a nice start on a worker buyout fund.

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The proposal may sound radical, but nothing about this is pie in the sky. The Siemens Corporation in Germany agreed to a no-compulsory layoff proposal with its union, IG Metall, after it announced the layoff of 3,000 workers. As the result of a negotiated settlement with the union, the workers could take voluntary financial buyout packages. But, none of the workers were forced to leave. And instead of the scheduled shutdown of five facilities, the company agreed to put in new products to keep the plants open.

Large corporations like Siemens and Tyson have enormous flexibility. They can rearrange production in countless ways. Unless pressured by the workers through their labor unions, they serve corporate needs first and subordinate those of workers. Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities. These companies have the financial power to fulfill the needs and interests of their employees, but they choose not to. But for Tyson, and so many companies today, all that matters is shoveling as much money as possible into the pockets of their wealthy executives and Wall Street investors. The workers be damned!

At this point, the Tyson workers and Dan Osborn know that the plant is not going to be reopened. But Osborn’s campaign could commemorate those workers by becoming the first politician in the nation to offer a realistic and potentially popular solution to this recuring nightmare:

NO COMPUSORY LAYOFFS AT CORPORATIONS THAT RECEIVE TAXPAYER MONEY.

Let’s start with the No Kings mobilizations. The theory of change behind No Kings is to rally as many people as possible against Trump and inspire a huge turnout in November to take the House and Senate away from the Republicans. Control of Congress would at least slow down Trump’s attacks against immigrants and his assault on democratic norms. The No Kings theory of change is simple: Mass mobilization in the streets and at the polls = curtailing the Trump assault.

If successful, these efforts would provide critical relief to hard-working immigrants and put up some guard rails to protect democracy. But No Kings doesn’t directly deal with the broader problems that impact working people, especially job instability and the high costs of housing, health care and education.

What theory of change would build a better economy for working people?

Every theory of change has two major components: One is the substance of the change and the other is the political vehicle needed to achieve it.

For me the the key substantive issue today is job instability. You’re nothing in our society if you can’t hold a job. Yet, over the last several decades we have allowed, as a society, tens of millions of workers to be tossed out of work due to no fault of their own. Stock buybacks, private equity, hedge funds, globalization, and new technologies have been destroying jobs at profitable and unprofitable companies alike. AI is likely to make it all worse.

Breaking away from Corporate America’s framework

To find solutions worthy of promotion we need to distinguish between people-centered and capital-centered frameworks. Right now, nearly all the discussion about the problems facing working people flow from a capital-centered perspective. That has led to reliance on financial incentives to encourage corporate job creation, as in the Inflation Reduction Act.

It also has led to thousands of subsidies costing billions of dollars provided by state and local governments to attract and maintain corporate investments to create more job opportunities.

Encouraging job creation in the private sector by subsidies and tax breaks leaves employment decisions to the corporation (unless constrained by strong collective bargaining agreements.) Hiring and firing are seen as sacrosanct corporate rights essential to a free society.

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What about a right to a job?

A people-centered perspective, is very different. Consider:

Everyone who is willing and able to work should have the right to a job at a living wage. And if the private sector is unable to provide it, the public sector should.

This idea is so far outside of today’s corporate-centered framework, that it is dismissed out of hand. Won’t job guarantees lead to a bloated public sector causing taxes to rise through the roof? And what would these workers do?

To follow this path we have to change how we value public goods. Right now public infrastructure is starved for investment. Our roads, our bridges, our schools need repair. Our public transit systems are hobbled, the internet in many parts of the country is slow or non-existent. We need more childcare workers, more teachers, more health care providers, and more workers to remediate our deteriorating environment. Sit down with any group of workers and they could make a list of all the work that needs doing. Clearly, the richest society in the history of the world can afford it.

But these public needs have been undermined by a pervasive corporate dogma that government is incapable of good works and that the private sector (which has been churning jobs) is the epitome of efficiency and productivity. Yet Social Security runs well and Medicare is far more efficient than private insurance. Charter schools have yet to prove to be more effective than public schools, and many public universities are every bit as good as private ones. Our libraries work efficiently and so do our emergency services.

Government can work well if we shift our framework from capital-first, which abhors public funding, to people first.

A call for secure jobs at living wages also could lead to a reattachment of working people to politics – to a belief that building a better, more secure society is possible. Add in Medicare for All, affordable housing, help with child care costs, and free higher and vocational education, and we have the makings of a compelling people-first political platform.

How do we get there?

For most progressives, the Democratic Party is the one and only vehicle. The goal is to reform it (realignment) by running more candidates like Bernie, AOC, the Squad and Mandami, as well as a new crop of working-class oriented candidates like Graham Platner in Maine, and James Talerico in Texas.

It’s heartening to see so many working-class candidates take up the reins and run this year. Realignment through working-class candidates has been badly needed. These efforts, we hope, will prove to the party apparatus that waitresses, union leaders, electricians, flight attendants, and even oystermen can run and win. The goal would be to have these worker-oriented candidates become the future leaders of the Democratic Party, forming a bloc that is powerful enough to return the Democrats to their working-class roots.

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Going independent?

But in this difficult moment, realignment is not enough -- we also need an outside/independent strategy to credibly compete in places the Democratic Party has abandoned, and where working people have abandoned the Party.

As we found in our survey of 3,000 midwestern voters, 70 percent had negative views of the Democrats, and from the git-go a Democratic candidate faces an eight percent deficit in voter support when running against an independent while saying exactly the same things.

To reach these working people, we need independent working-class candidates running on a people-first platform like Dan Osborn is doing in Nebraska. The only way he can win against a wealthy Republican incumbent is to distance himself from both parties -- escaping what he calls “the two-party doom loop.”

If independent working-class candidates can win, there should be a knock-on effect for reforming the Democratic Party. The outside competition, free from party labels and corporate money, could pressure Democrats to field more working-class candidates.

But say the word “independent” to many union members and they often say something like, “We have to back those who back us—the Dems.” Or as another labor leader told me, “They’re the only friends we have.”

Some also equate “independent” with “spoiler” – a fringe counter-productive effort that takes votes away from the Democrats and elects Republicans.

But, the union political director who prompted this article hit the nail on the head:

This strategy, whether they like it or not, is oriented on realigning the Democratic Party, not acting entirely outside of it. This is a needed one, but not wholly sufficient for the scale of the political crisis in front of us. And the reality is that an increasing number of working-class people do not feel at home in either version of two-party duopoly. But the losses Dems have faced in the industrial Midwest, the South, etc. require both realignment AND independent brute force in order to reclaim our values. It has to be both/and!

A closer look at the country’s political landscape shows 130 U.S. House districts in which the Democrats consistently lose by 25 percent of more. In those districts there is no Democratic Party to spoil. Instead, these areas could become the proving ground for developing independent working-class candidates under the banner of “Not Red, Not Blue: I’m a Working-Class Independent!”

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The baked-in ideological resistance

Why does the Democratic Party need so much pushing and cajoling? Why isn’t it already recruiting hundreds of working-class candidates?

It’s their mindset. The Democrats, from the high officials to the funders, from the consultants to the pollsters, from the candidates to their PR firms—all are stuck in the capital-first framework. Yes, they want to raise taxes on the billionaires and stop the ICE attacks on immigrants. And yes, they would like to add resources to Obamacare, protect women’s rights, promote better climate policies. All that’s to the good.

But when it comes to challenging the job-destructive behavior of corporate America, their knees knock. Some, but not all the corporate-friendly attitudes come from the need for campaign funds and from having an eye out for future lucrative jobs for themselves, their families and friends once out of office.

But corporate Democrats also believe that private capital is the engine of prosperity and employment. They see no inherent conflict between labor and capital. Grow the pie and all can prosper. Make sure that everyone has the opportunity to succeed, without discrimination, and that’s fair enough—the procedural essence of equality.

If we dig down deeper, I think most Democratic officials believe that the super-rich deserve what they have earned, reaping the rewards of their hard work and talents. In their eyes it is simply insane to suggest that every worker should have a right to a job at a living wage—provided by government if necessary. Make that argument and they will look at you with pity, thinking you are a lost soul living in a fantasy world.

The Populists of the 19^th century

That fantasy world looked very real during the 1880s and 1890s when the Populist movement—the progressive kind—developed a vision that captured the imagination of millions of workers and farmers. Robber barons had control of the shipping, finance, farm machinery and crop storage, at the time, driving farmers and industrial workers deeper and deeper into peonage.

The Populists responded with a new vision of a cooperative commonwealth with public ownership of railroads, banks, and grain elevators. And they didn’t just dream about it; they formed hundreds of cooperatives that bound these working people together in common enterprises to improve their lives. They also took their crusade into politics, changing the country for decades to come. Depending on their location they ran as Democrats, as Republicans, and as third-party independents, winning thousands of elections.

Although the movement was eventually defeated as a national party, its state and local victories paved the way for the regulation of corporate America during the Progressive era, the establishment of the progressive income tax, and for the economic enhancement of farmers and workers during the New Deal.

We have a long way to go to catch up with the theory of change that gave the Populists so much influence.

But that theory of change is still alive. It starts with believing in what seems impossible now: that workers should have significant power in our government and in our economy.

There’s no way around it. Real change that empowers working people requires an independent electoral strategy that challenges the Democratic Party establishment, even if doing so makes people uncomfortable.

On June 4-5, The Rutgers University Labor Education Center will hold a centennial conference in Mazzocchi’s honor to celebrate his work and to promote his radical vision for America. All are invited.

Tony Mazzocchi, born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was a ninth-grade drop-out who lied about his age and enlisted in WWII at age 16. After the war he used the GI Bill of Rights to go to dental school to learn to make teeth. He soon gave that up to work as a labor activist, quickly becoming a local union president in New York and Long Island. He eventually ended up a national leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers and spearheaded a new occupational safety and health movement that led to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Here’s a sample of the passion he brought to that fight:

“I wanted the whole country to know in detail what had happened at that factory, and to understand that what had gone on there—the fruitless Bureau of Occupational Safety and Health Inspections, the lack of enforcement by the Department of Labor, the whole long, lousy history of neglect, deceit, and stupidity—was happening in dozens of other ways, in hundreds of other factories, to thousands of other men across the land. I wanted people to know that thousands upon thousands of their fellow citizens were being assaulted daily, and that the police—in this case, the federal government—had done nothing to remedy the situation. In short I wanted them to know that murder was being committed in the workplace, and that no one was bothering about it.”

Mazzocchi, the drop-out, had a gift for science. That combined with his radicalness attracted hundreds of young scientific and medical professionals to work with unions to improve occupational safety and health. He also built labor alliances with environmental groups, anticipating that a safer and healthier planet would lead to a loss of fossil fuel and toxic-related jobs. That’s why he invented “just transition,” a policy designed to protect the livelihoods of those displaced workers. He was also active in opposing nuclear testing and the Vietnam War.

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Mazzocchi’s goal was to build a radical labor movement that would transform capitalism so that every person had a right to a job at a living wage, access to free higher education, and cradle to the grave health coverage. He created a multitude of educational programs and cultural events, including new plays and a labor film series, so that working people would have access to the humanities and the arts.

But none of this could be sustained, he believed, unless working people had their own political party. He saw as early as the 1980s that working people were abandoning the Democrats, which they saw as just another party of their bosses. They wanted something new and Mazzocchi was determined to build it.

By the mid-1990s this turned into the Labor Party, which for a few years looked like it might catch on. But that didn’t work out for many reasons that will be discussed at the Rutgers conference.

Back then, Tony warned anyone who would listen that unless a new party was formed, and soon, working people were likely to gravitate to the first demagogue who promised them more secure livelihoods. They were sick and tired of the massive job destruction that was ripping through their communities, and they were looking for someone who was willing to challenge the system that was screwing them. In short, Mazzocchi saw a Trump coming, and he tried to warn us that something new for disaffected working people had to be built.

Mazzocchi was a live wire who didn’t just think outside the box. He lived there. With a self-deprecating sense of humor, and a gift for cooking meals for his friends and colleagues, he fought for working people until he could fight no more.

Given the mess we’re in today, now is the perfect time to celebrate his life and, perhaps, get our batteries recharged with the optimism he exuded from every pore. He never gave up. He never gave in. He didn’t know the meaning of pessimism and didn’t tolerate squabbling and in-fighting. He worked each day to transform our unjust and unequal world into something far more humane.

Please join us in this celebration of hope to help find a path out of the morass we are slogging through. And if you can’t make it, know that the best way to celebrate the life of Mazzocchi is to keep on fighting for a fairer and more just world.

****

Rutgers is also setting up the Tony Mazzocchi archive. Please consider a donation to fund the archive.

For more information on Mazzocchi see The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi. All conference registrants will get a free copy of the book.

But neither are these waverers planning to return to the Democrats. According to the study:

Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.

That poses a severe problem for anyone who believes that our political system should better represent the needs and interests of working people. And it should scare the hell out anyone who fears the rise of more authoritarians in the future.

These workers clearly are telling us that they don’t have a home. We’d better figure out how to help build one.

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Run more working-class candidates in the Democratic Party?

That’s what most progressives argue for. They believe that such candidates can attract these disgruntled workers back into the Party. As one campaign operative said to me, “Our goal is to once again make the Democratic Party the party of the working-class.” That’s also what the League of Labor Voters and the Working Families Party are trying to do.

But it’s an uphill struggle. According to the Guardian:

“Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.”

For every former bartender like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there are thousands of ambitious candidates who are well-off members of the bar.

The Democratic Party brand is in big trouble. In the study the Labor Institute conducted with the Center for Working-Class Politics (again with Jared Abbot, that boy gets around), 70 percent of the 3,000 voters surveyed in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had negative things to say about the Democrats. And a hypothetical Democratic candidate ran 8 percent behind an independent candidate even when they said exactly the same things.

That makes it next to impossible to launch Democratic working-class candidates in the 130 congressional districts in which the Democrats already lose by more than 25 percent. In those areas, the Democratic Party is not just dying, it is dead.

What are the odds, really, of the Democrats changing their stripes? Do the reformers really believe that a trickle of working-class candidates can turn into a torrent of new working-class candidates, if only we pushed harder?

Never say never, but that would be more likely if Democrats faced a real threat from the outside—from new working-class candidates running as independents. Should those independents gain traction, we can be sure the Democrats will take notice.

Independent working-class candidates in red areas

If you are tired of seeing nearly all of rural America flash bright red on your screen a few seconds after the polls close, there has to be a new approach outside of the Democratic Party. Dan Osborn, a mechanic and former local union president, is doing just that in his Senate run in Nebraska. In 2024 he ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris though still lost by six points. He’s running again in 2026, and so far the race is a toss-up.

Osborn knows that his only chance is to run against both parties as an independent. He calls it the “two-party doom loop.” He is directly taking on the wealthy in both parties, including the scion of a billionaire against whom he is running for Senate in 2026.

At a recent United Steelworkers conference I ran into a young miner who is running for the state legislature in Wyoming, also as an independent in this deep read state, and he thinks he will win in a landslide.

The point is that these working-class candidates with union credentials understand that voters in these red areas, including their fellow union members, have little use for the Democrats, and the only way to run is by running against both parties. Their slogan seems to be: “Not Blue, Not Red: I’m a working-class independent!”

If more and more working-class independents run against the two parties, and succeed, then maybe the Democrats will realize that they too should run working-class candidates in red areas.

But I’m not holding my breath. I truly believe that it will be much harder to wean the Democratic Party from its wealthy donors and consultants than it will be to run independent working-class candidates in red areas. But that prediction won’t matter until more working people, and their allies, jump into the fray as independents.

Then and only then will those disaffected MAGA voters have a place to go, and candidates they are willing to vote for. If we keep playing pattycake with the Democrats we may be delivering these disaffected working-class voters to Cruella de Vance, or worse, next time around.

I disagree. I think the problem is that Democrats, even progressive Democrats, are not radical enough.

We have only to look at FDR’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address to be reminded of what our politics could be and should be. The “Four Freedoms” (of speech and religion, from want and fear) are properly the best remembered parts of the address. But just before these “four essential human freedoms,” Roosevelt listed “the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and complexity of our modern world.” They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

What did he want? He thought we “should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance,” which (thankfully!) has been done, although the support should be increased.

He believed we should “widen the opportunities for adequate medical care,” which has been done in part, with much more to do.

And he called for the nation to “plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it,” which we have pretty much stopped talking about altogether, except to mouth empty phrases about economic growth and job creation.

And this is where, in particular, progressive Democrats are not radical enough, at least not for the thousands of workers I have talked to, worked with, and taught. The economic plans offered by the Democratic Party, even those from left Democrats, fail to offer “a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.” And until they do, Democrats will continue to lose traction with working people, who live with job fear each and every day.

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Why are Democrats not talking about guaranteeing a job at a living wage for everyone who wants to work?

The government guarantees everyone with money to spare a safe place to put it to earn a fair market rate-of-return. It is called a US Treasury bond. Why doesn’t the government also guarantee everyone with labor to spare—everyone who wants to work but can’t find a job—with a place to work at a fair market rate?

There are no voices, except for Bernie Sanders, who proclaim loudly and clearly that all working people should be guaranteed a job at a living wage. Why not? Members of the monied class are able to protect themselves from financial risk by easily diversifying their investments. But the working class’s most critical investment—their job—is always at risk.

The jobs of working people are increasingly precarious as corporations lay off workers whenever they please, whether for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons at all. Today we see millions of layoffs taking place to finance mergers (watch out Hollywood!), leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks to enrich the richest of the rich. And who knows what AI holds in store?

A government-backed guarantee of a job at a living wage would end the wholesale immiseration of families and communities hit by mass layoffs. It would end the kind of job blackmail that makes it difficult for workers to form unions to seek higher wages and better working conditions. This is what counter-balancing corporate power really looks like!

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How would it work? Corporations would remain free to reduce their workforces. But every laid-off worker who wants to keep working would be able immediately to find equally remunerative work nearby in the public sector if private sector jobs are not available.

Also, just as employers are able to lay off anyone for business reasons, workers would be free to quit any job they no longer want and easily find another. This kind of “employment assurance” is the worker equivalent of the portfolio diversification and hedging that the wealthy use to protect and enhance their wealth. (And as we all know, when this financial system crashes, the federal government always protects the assets of the wealthy, but not the jobs of working people.)

Is there sufficient public sector work to support such a program? Of course there is, especially if the country commits to rebuilding its physical and human infrastructure. Surely every municipality and state agency needs more workers right now to meet their current goals, let alone new ones to enhance the public’s interests. There’s no shortage of public goods that need to be produced.

Could we afford it? Yes, it would be costly. But the money would be well spent to build better communities. Just ask any group of workers what their communities need and they will quickly rattle off how to improve them.

And if we all share the costs in proportion to our wealth, we can certainly afford it. Warren Buffett’s tax rate should not be lower than his secretary’s! A small tax on the trade of stocks, bonds and derivatives might even cover it.

Working-class empowerment

Funding and practicality are not the only things holding progressive Democrats back. I worry that power of capital has, if just unconsciously, narrowed their vision. Too many Democrats of all stripes seem to believe that corporate control over employment is an unalterable fact of economic life. Therefore, they don’t go for the jugular—employment guarantees.

The millions of workers in rural America who have suffered one mass layoff after another need the power that comes from employment security—jobs that don’t just depend on the profit-maximization strategies of corporate America.

Until left Democrats are willing and able to support meaningful job guarantees, they have little chance of reaching the working people they have lost over the past 40 years of wholesale job destruction. Massaging the messages is no match for saying loudly and clearly that if you want to work, there is an acceptable job waiting for you.

Many left Democrats believe that we need to shift from a profit-first to a people-first economy. All to the good. But that has little meaning unless working people are assured of a decent paying job if they are looking for work. And also, able to leave a bad job without suffering economic annihilation!

It’s time for the left to become economic radicals again!

(Many thanks to labor historian Mike Merrill for his assistance on this piece.)

What is common to all these strikes is that the target was weak. Note that Trump is not trying to topple North Korea, or force Russia out of Ukraine, or threaten China’s economic domination. His targets can’t do much harm to the U.S., at least in the short run, which makes it easy to score what he calls “victories.”

It’s obvious that Trump loves the feel of power. It no doubt gives him a rush more intoxicating than any drug. He is the ruler of the strongest nation in the history of the world, but he doesn’t have the freedom to unilaterally act on domestic affairs, although he constantly tries. The courts are in the way, as is popular dissent. Judges and citizens are preventing him from exerting his will, even making him change course by removing troops and immigration forces. And it will, he surely knows, get even worse if the Democrats gain control of either house of Congress.

But he has a free hand in foreign affairs. The Supreme Court won’t stop him and there is no international court that the U.S. recognizes, nor does he believe he is morally bound by international law. He couldn’t care less about the U.N., and he hopes that military engagement against the weak makes him look strong to the American public. Also, in Iran’s case, a war with a quick victory has the added benefit of possibly improving his paltry approval ratings by diverting public attention away from “affordability” and the Epstein files. Already the joke is that they should have called the Iran adventure, “Operation Epic Epstein.”

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Just think what the total freedom to attack means for Trump. For starters he gets to deploy his toys—the trillion-dollar arsenal of U.S. ships and planes. It’s the ultimate video game for power-hungry adults. And no one can stop him abroad, and while the Republicans in Congress could, they certainly won’t.

Trump seems to believe that these military attacks will secure his place in history as the greatest president of all time. He and only he had the guts to get rid of the Iranian theocracy that has bedeviled the U.S. since the 1979 hostage crisis. And only he will end communism in Cuba, that pesky island of resistance only 90 miles from shore. Most importantly, he is remaking the Middle East into a U.S.-Israeli safe zone. He is showing the world that the U.S. means business and that whatever it wants, it should get—of course in the name of protecting the U.S. and securing world peace.

As Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Steven Miller put it, “We live in a world , in the real world…that is governed by strength, this governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

Before claiming all this aggression demonstrates Trump truly is a Hitler-like dictator, we should recall that he is not the first Commander-in-Chief to follow these “iron laws of the world.” Truman sent troops to fight in Korea (1950), Eisenhower sent them to Lebanon (1958), Kennedy to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (1961), Johnson to Vietnam (1964), Nixon bombed Cambodia (1969), Reagan invaded Grenada (1983), George H. Bush invaded Panama (1989), Clinton bombed Kosovo (1999), Obama bombed Libya (2011), Trump sent missiles to Syria (2017,2018), and Biden ordered airstrikes in Syria (2021), and Yemen (2024)—all without a declaration of war by Congress.

This is what U.S. presidents do because they can. But no president has been quite as overtly aggressive as Trump. Even when he tries, he can’t hide his desire to dominate. He doesn’t spend time building alliances or forming a consensus at home. He just acts as if the weaker countries of the world are his playthings. He can push them around at will, first with tariffs then with bombs, and his sycophantic enablers will cheer him on. From Trump’s perspective, what’s not to like?

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Nothing, unless it doesn’t end well. And there are dozens of ways his current path in Iran could lead to his own destruction. The American public is not likely to approve of these adventures, especially if prices rise because global trade is severely disrupted. More ominously, it’s possible that a war with Iran could spiral out of control, sucking the U.S. in with ground troops and leading to yet another forever war and U.S casualties. That’s why MAGA isolationists also are having trouble with Trump’s foreign interventions.

And there is a question of whether the Iranians who want regime change will trust the Americans. They are certainly aware that the Afghanis who assisted US forces and the CIA in their (failed) war of liberation were awkwardly abandoned during our troop withdrawal, and those who were given safe haven have in many cases been unceremoniously kicked back to their dangerous homeland by Trump.

The upshot of all this adventurism is that we may again witness a moment in history when the universe actually bends towards justice. Debilitating hubris has a way of striking down the mighty: LBJ was driven from office by his Vietnam debacle and Nixon had to resign because of his secret dictatorial actions. Will Trump blow himself up as well?

Maybe, but let’s pray, with the nuclear button close at hand, he doesn’t take us all with him.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any [part] of Government [—including its political parties—] becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new [parties], laying [their] foundation on such principles and organizing [their] powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

It’s not a secret: About 45 percent of labor union members voted for Trump in 2024. In unions with fewer minority workers the percentage was substantially higher. More importantly, most union members no longer identify with the Democratic Party. In fact, they are downright hostile to it. In our YouGov poll of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 70 percent held negative views of the Democrats.

Why so much hostility? Very few respondents said anything about wokeness or immigration. Much of the bitterness was related to the Democrats failing to live up to their promises and losing touch with everyday people. My research also shows that mass layoffs, especially those caused by trade with China and Mexico after NAFTA, have soured voters on the Democrats.

That leaves progressive union leaders with the difficult task of lining up their members for the candidates they think will represent the political interests of their members – which because of the Republicans’ overwhelming antipathy to organized labor, almost always better aligns with the Democrats. Despite, it should be said, their failings. For the fall mid-terms this year, union leaders will be 100 percent in support of the Democrats, as they hope to check the power of Trumpism. How can they do that effectively given all this negativity?

The usual approach involves various procedures that eventually lead the membership to the Democrats. One union, for example, holds meetings during which the rank-and-file defines an agenda. The leadership then uses that agenda to evaluate candidates, which conveniently all turn out to be Democrats. Another union conducts educational programs that are, one way or another, designed to help the membership understand why the Democrats are more favorable to the working-class than Republicans. This isn’t hard or even that manipulative, but rarely do these methods effectively appeal to those who disdain the Dems.

The preferred option for many unions is to avoid political discussions entirely for fear the ensuing debate might tear the union apart – pitting MAGA and non-MAGA members against each other. Better to duck and cover, hold onto the solidarity you have, and hope the storm will soon pass.

A different and I think more promising approach is to open up a discussion about alternative politics and seriously explore the prospects of building a new political party of working people. Union leadership can easily justify such an undertaking as a long-term project necessary to mobilize working-class political power and find solidarity around the issues that matter most to all working people.

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The Hunger for Independence

Polling shows that such an effort would be well received. Overall, 57 percent of the respondents in our YouGov survey support the idea of an independent political organization for workers. Here are the results for union-oriented voters:

Support Oppose Not Sure

Currently a Union Member 58% 16% 25%

Former Union Member 59% 21% 19%

Not a union member but would support efforts to form a union at my workplace:

80% 8% 12%

(The overwhelming support from those who want to join a union should get the attention of union leaders for whom organizing new members is of the highest priority.)

The idea is even attractive to 2024 Trump voters: 40 percent support a new party, as do 42 percent of those who identify as Republicans.

No matter how you slice the demographics, aside from Democratic and Republican Party operatives, a new political party independent of the Democrats and Republicans is really popular.

That’s why opening up a discussion about how to build a new working-class party stands a decent chance of increasing solidarity among the various political groups in the union rank-and-file. It allows leadership to respond to what the workers really want – a party that puts their needs and interests at its center rather than adopting watered-down policies designed to please billionaire donors.

And it makes room for some very frank discussions:

“Look, I understand that many of you no longer want to vote for Democrats. You want a new party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. But until we build that new party, there are some solid pro-labor candidates that we need to support if we’re to have any chance of passing labor law reform and protecting jobs. We are pressuring the Democrats and the Republicans to run more working-class candidates. Meanwhile, let’s start the process of building a new working-class party. We can do both right now.”

If unions seriously committed resources to building, or at least exploring, an independent political formation, the political credibility of union leaders would likely increase. It also would create a plausible, easy to understand political argument: Long term, we want a working-class party that represents our interests and needs. Short-term, we support candidates who represent our interests and needs!

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I see three main problems with charting this new course. The first is that many union leaders are deeply entwined with the Democratic Party leadership. They have personal ties. They attend common events. They see the world similarly. The idea of a new party feels like a betrayal. As one labor leader told me, “These are the only political friends we have.”

The second obstacle is one of resources and bandwidth. Union leaders have their hands full. They are always dealing with difficult employers, complex contracts, union organizing drives, and internal union problems. Adding a new alternative politics project is likely to be seen as beyond their capacities.

The third issue is the fear of being a spoiler --- that criticizing Democrats, let alone starting a new party for workers, would take votes away from the Democrats and elect Republicans. That’s what most labor leaders believe happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader ran for president. They hold him accountable for taking enough votes away from Al Gore in Florida to throw the state and the election to George Bush.

While the spoiler issue may be valid in presidential contests and in closely contested races for Congress, it is not relevant in the 130 congressional districts in which the Republicans usually win by 25 percent or more. In these districts there is effectively no Democratic Party to spoil. And it’s in those districts that a new working-class party is most needed. It would only take a handful of congressional victories for working-class candidates to gain the controlling votes in a closely divided House of Representatives.

Of course, running 130 congressional campaigns is no small task, but there are smaller, more doable first steps that could help union leaders with their political dilemma. They could start by holding workshops with their local leaders and rank-and-file to discuss the need for a new independent political organization for union members and indeed all working people. Such discussions would allow members to air their grievances while signaling that the leadership is willing to listen and forge a new independent path.

Such workshops will be part of a new National Worker Educational Campaign for Independent Politics that my colleagues and I are launching this spring.

Many say that forging a new party is unrealistic and that we are stuck with the Democrats. But to me that seems likely to further alienate much of the union membership.

Wouldn’t it be better to rekindle political hope by opening up discussion?

Wouldn’t it be better to let memberships discuss their needs and aspirations and how they would like to relate to politics?

Wouldn’t it be better to build with the membership a vision that puts working people in the center of the economy rather than as an afterthought of trickle-down two-party politics?

It sure beats hoping that the MAGA membership just fades away.

Dr. David Michaels, the former head of OSHA, points us to California’s tearless Silicosis Surveillance Dashboard: 511 cases of silicosis have been diagnosed among these workers; 29 have died (average age 46); 54 underwent lung transplants; and 98 percent of these workers are Latino.

In 2021, there were only two diagnosed silicosis cases in California. In 2025 there were 214. “The number of cases is rising rapidly,” Dr. Michaels wrote to me, “That’s the important point.”

Here’s the more tearful description form Dr. Michaels January 14 testimony before the House:

“The hallmarks of the disease: shortness of breath and diminished exercise capacity that progresses to an inability to climb even one flight of stairs. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Working is difficult or impossible. People cough incessantly. They can’t sleep because it is difficult to breathe and they are kept awake coughing. Over time, people with more advanced silicosis require supplemental oxygen and can’t leave home without an oxygen tank. And they are at increased risk of dying from lung cancer.”

The crime behind this slaughter is that safer, profitable substitutes are available. As Micheals testified:

“There are substitute products that are comparable in use and cost, but which do not kill workers. Many substitutes are made from amorphous silica – a different and a safer material than crystalline silica. Since Australia banned countertops containing crystalline silica, countertops are fabricated from alternative products that look and cost the same but are safer for workers.”

But switching to safer products involves costs that the manufacturers would prefer to avoid. Why lose any profits at all? Why go through the disruptions involved in producing new products? Better to be shielded by your political allies.

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The counter-top manufacturing industry doesn’t want to protect workers from harm; it wants protection from the workers it harms.

It worries this could become another asbestos epidemic that has cost asbestos manufacturers billions of dollars in payments to the victims. This time around, the industry is in position to nip it in the bud, given that the Republicans are in full control of all three branches of government.

What the industry dreads are third-party suits. Workers are not permitted, in nearly all circumstances, to sue their own employers for illnesses and exposures at work. Those claims are covered by state workers’ compensation programs. But harmed workers can and do sue manufacturers of equipment or substances that cause them harm. And if the harm can be proved to a jury, the compensation can be steep. It doesn’t make up for the damage to the exposed workers, but it provides some support to their families and pressures the industry to find safer substitutes for its harmful products.

The solution preferred by the countertop industry is simple: get a free pass, which is what this killer legislation would do. It would shield the entire industry from “persons who claim personal injuries as a result of exposure to silica dust produced during the alteration of such products in the course of their employment by third-party fabricators.”

Nice. No change needed, no interruption of profitable production, no switching to new products. No nothing except a few political donations to grease the skids. And that grease comes from millionaire Marty Davis, the CEO of Cambria, a large counter manufacturer, who has donated more than $800,000 to Republicans, and encouraged Trump to challenged the outcome of the 2020.

On this piece of legislation, the Democrats are saying the right things. The ranking Democrat on the House Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet Subcommittee committee, which is pushing this legislation, said it as clearly as could be said:

“The bill behind today’s hearing would give blanket immunity to artificial stone manufacturers and suppliers, preventing injured workers from seeking justice in court. It would dismiss the hundreds of cases pending against these manufacturers.

…Our courts determine liability all the time. People petition the court, have their grievances heard, a judge and jury consider the evidence, and a judgment is rendered.

Manufacturers are asking for a different scenario – one where the deep pockets go to Congress, Congress makes a snap judgment, and the big businesses never have to go to court again. That’s not how our justice system is supposed to work, and I condemn the blatant misuse of this committee to shield corporations at the expense of the American worker.”

If only more Democrats would speak like this more often, millions of working people might hear them.

[*] Attributed to journalist Paul Brodeur, author of Expendable Americans.

During his first term, however, his cruel policies of separating families at the border and his BS about Mexico paying for the wall contributed to his defeat in 2020. But the Biden administration had no answer for the flood of immigrants who then crossed the border, which Trump used as a cudgel during the 2024 campaign. Once again the issue was Trump’s and in his second term he’s decided to play hardball by, in effect, totally shutting down the border and deporting record numbers of immigrants.

And it was working. While his handling of the economy tanked his poll numbers, immigration enforcement remained strong, until Minneapolis.

There, he overplayed his hand and did not stick to his argument to deport undocumented felons. Instead, he allowed the psychotic Steven Miller to round up undocumented immigrants, non-felons and felons alike, with even some darker-skinned documented citizens (literally) tossed into the ICE detention centers.

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Not only is this a cruel and inhumane policy, but it’s also not what the American people, including the white working-class, want.

For different reasons Trump and the Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that nearly two-thirds of the American people support “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and committed no felony crimes.”

Trump doesn’t give a damn about these hard-working immigrants. He’s quite happy to support the MAGA “replacement theory” that calls for the protection of a white America from people of color.

For Democrats, a pathway to citizenship is too hot to handle, making them look as if they support “illegals,” even if these undocumented immigrants are not felons. They fear Trump’s cudgel and ignore what the American people want.

According to our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 63 percent support the “granting legal status” statement and only 37 percent oppose it.

In urban areas in these four states the support is massive:

Democrats: 91 percent

Independents: 73 percent

Republicans: 47 percent

Looking at urban and non-urban areas combined, 36 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 supported this path to citizenship. And 81 percent of Hispanic voters supported it.

We also have 2020 data on the support of the white working class throughout the country, which shows that 62 percent supported this same exact “granting legal status” statement, up from 32 percent in 2010.

It’s as if Trump and the Democrats are stuck in 2010 and don’t realize that the working-class has great sympathy for hard working undocumented immigrants, especially in urban areas where day-to-day contact is greatest. That’s where nearly everyone comes into contact with immigrants who do so much of the hard labor that makes our economy function. Just 20 metro areas account for 60 percent of all undocumented immigrants.

It is politically explosive to send thousands of ICE and border agents into urban areas to randomly round up undocumented workers. Unless you are trying to foment an urban rebellion so you can send in troops to crush it in the name of law and order and cancel the midterms.

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What about the dangerous felons?

The Trump administration has deported each month approximately 1,100 undocumented immigrants with prior violent convictions, according the New York Times. I have no doubt that many Americans support their deportation if it is done in a reasonable way. But at the same time Miller’s shock troops have deported 2,100 immigrants with no criminal records per month. Per month!

That’s what happens when thousands of heavily armed mask-wearing troops invade an urban area, stopping people on the street and raiding houses of worship, businesses, and hospitals without court-approved search warrants. That’s not how you catch felons, that’s how you round up undocumented non-felons. That’s how you get away with stopping people based solely on their skin tone, not on any investigative information about criminal activity. And it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s not OK with much of the American people, something Trump slowly is realizing.

Will the Democrats Come to the Defense of Undocumented Workers?

You couldn’t ask for a better political moment given that Miller’s goons have killed two protesters in the last two weeks. This would be the perfect time to demand that ICE be prohibited from conducting any and all random stops throughout the country, and refrain from arresting any undocumented immigrants who have not committed a felony crime. And this is the time to call for a clear path to citizenship for hard working, non-felonious, undocumented workers.

But there’s little indication that the Democratic Party is willing to go there. The political calculous is obvious: let Trump overplay his hand and hope the anger against him crests into a massive blue wave flooding the midterms. Why risk supporting a path to citizenship, which only will be thrown back at the Democrats declaring they are weak-kneed on immigration? Stopping Trump, the thinking goes, is more important than grandstanding about paths to citizenship given that the Democrats don’t have the votes to deliver. And besides, undocumented workers can’t vote, angry protestors can and will.

But here are two problems with this strategy. The first is that Trump will adjust the ICE invasions between now and November. He has to realize that rounding up felons requires a different, less visible approach that refrains from random searches and street brawls in urban areas. It should be obvious to Trump that Miller’s masked goons will cost the Republicans the midterms if the shock troops continue to roam the streets. White House border czar Tom Homans already is in Minneapolis saying that the shock troops will stand down, in some way, soon.

The second problem is that undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness, something that working people of all shades can connect with.

The anti-ICE protestors are leading the charge with the backing of a few state and local Democrats. But nationally the Democrats seem more comfortable talking about Epstein than protecting terrorized immigrants.

The Democrats may not have the nerve, but Dan Osborn, a working-class independent in Nebraska running for the U.S. Senate sure does. Here’s how he put it.

I believe that undocumented workers, there should be a clear path for them to become documented or become legal status.

We need some meaningful immigration reform. These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already. There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for.

Did that kill his chances in his 2024 race? He lost by six points but ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris and he’s running again in 2026. He deserves our support.

And, as Bruce Springsteen sings in his a song he wrote last weekend, so do the people who are protecting “the stranger in our midst.”

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ‘26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

(from Streets of Minneapolis)