Les Leopold Substack
How the hell did we get to a place where we are worrying about fascism taking control in America?
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.
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?
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.