Anti-Working Class Democrats Should Not Be Eligible For Party Nominations— Take Shaheen & Coons

They Crapped On The Party Brand

Yesterday, Bernie released this video clip about his and other Democrats’ efforts 2 years ago to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15.00 an hour. “We got zero… not one Republican supported it. We ended up with 42 votes.” But wait! The math doesn’t make sense. No Republican votes but just 42 votes in total…? That means 8 unaccounted for Democratic votes. Were they all absent? Actually, they weren’t. The 8 unaccounted for Democrats were very much accounted for… voting with the republicans and against American workers. 

So it wasn’t just Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), neither of whom had quit the party yet. The other reactionary Democrats who voted with Manchin and Sinema in favor of starvation wages were 

• Jeanne Shaheen (NH)

• Maggie Hassan (NH)

• Jon Tester (MT)

• Tom Carper (DE)

• Chris Coons (DE)

• Angus King (I-ME)

Manchin, Sinema, Carper and Tester were since forced out of the Senate— at least in part because of that vote. This cycle, Coons and Shaheen will have to face the voters for the first time since that betrayal. Neither has said whether or not they plan to run for reelection, although Shaheen has already filed her paperwork and has recently gotten into a screeching fit over her support for low tax rates on billionaires. There is no primary challenger on the horizon which means a Republican may well win her seat.

Yesterday, Bernie reminded his followers that “the defining issue of our time is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic and authoritarian society in which billionaires not only dominate our economic life, but the information we consume and our politics as well.”

• Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had.

• Today, we have more concentration of ownership than we’ve ever had.

• Today, we have more corporate control of the media than we’ve ever had.

• Today, we have more billionaire money buying elections than ever before.

• Today, we have a president-elect who is a pathological liar, who has little regard for the rule of law, who is suing media outlets that criticize him and threatening to jail his political opponents.

A manifestation of the current moment is the rise of Elon Musk, and all that he stands for.

Within the last two years alone Musk, the richest man in the world, has used his wealth to purchase the largest media platform on the internet, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect a president and give Republicans control of the House and Senate, was nominated to fill an unelected, non-confirmable position in charge of making huge budget cuts, succeeded in getting Congress to abandon a bill he didn't like, and then threatened to unseat elected officials if they did not follow his orders to shut down the government during the holidays. He is also forging alliances with autocrats throughout the world, and supporting a far-right party in the coming German elections.

But it’s not just Musk. Billionaire owners of two major newspapers overrode their editorial boards decisions to endorse Kamala Harris, while many others are kissing Trump’s ring by making large donations to his inauguration committee slush fund.

In the midst of all this, a simple question must be asked. What do Musk, Bezos and the other billionaires want? What is motivating them? What kind of nation and world are they trying to create? While it would take a book to answer that question, let me jot down a few obvious observations.

They do not believe in democracy— the right of ordinary people to control their own futures. They firmly believe that the rich and powerful should determine the future. Left alone, they will dominate both major political parties and, through their media ownership, control the flow of information.

They do not accept what most major religions, in one form or another, have historically taught us to be ethical behavior: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They believe that greed, and the accumulation of wealth and power is a virtue, and that the strong should dominate the weak.

Their vision is one where the government serves the rich at the expense of working families and the poor. It is a vision where breaking unions and exploiting workers is good, making huge profits off human illness is good, monopolization of the economy and the media is good, racism, sexism and xenophobia is good, producing carbon emissions and destroying our planet is good, providing tax cuts for the richest Americans is good, making money by putting poor people into prisons is good, and on and on it goes...

That is what the oligarchs want.

We, as progressives, have a vision that is radically different.

Can we create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.

Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.

Can we make health care a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life-expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.

Can we, in the wealthiest country on earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from child care to graduate school? Yes, we can.

Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.

Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.

And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is important that vision be maintained and we continue to fight for it.

As part of that effort, we’ve got a lot of strategizing and work in front of us. For example, how do we effectively communicate our ideas to the vast majority of Americans who are with us, even while the billionaire class of this country controls so much of the media.

How do we leverage our collective power to elect progressives to local, state and federal positions while a small number of billionaires and their super-PACs are buying elections.

How do we mobilize the working class around the day to day issues which impact their lives: building the trade union movement, health care, housing, education, family based agriculture and so much more.

How do we fight back, on a day to day basis, against the reactionary policies of he Trump administration?

Will this effort be easy? No, of course it will not.

Can it be done? We have no choice.

If there was ever a moment when progressives needed to communicate our vision to the people of our country, this is that time. Despair is not an option. We are fighting not only for ourselves. We are fighting for our kids and future generations, and for the well-being of the planet.

And that brings us to Annie Lowrey’s essay in yesterday’s Atlantic, The Rise of Union Right. Though Trump “has supported ‘right to work’ laws, attempted to gut federal worker protections, and named union busters to lead the Department of Labor and the NLRB… supported firing workers on strike, stiffed contractors for his campaigns and businesses, described American wages as ’too high,’ and bragged that he denied his own workers overtime pay… nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43% in 2016 and 37% in 2000… Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters. These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class… Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.”

Why? Let’s start with Bill Clinton who make a conscious decision to pursue this realignment. He “signed NAFTA, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the heartland and suppressed wages.”

“Beginning with Jimmy Carter, there was an increasing effort to see unions and labor as a special interest, rather than a foundational part of the party,” Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “There hasn’t been a political party in this country with working people at the table for decades. This is the bed the Democrats made for themselves, and it obviously has not paid off in the way they anticipated.”

…History suggests that things will get easier for Democrats, in some ways. If past trends hold, the party will pick up five or more points in the midterms without doing anything. The Republicans will start passing policies and instantly become less popular in the eyes of voters, left and right. And in the next presidential campaign, the Democrats will benefit from being able to run unencumbered by incumbency, against Trumpism, if not Trump himself.

Still, pollsters and political scientists told me, the party needs to change. The “Brahmin left”— meaning the educated elite that now makes up the Democratic Party’s base— is not a big enough bloc to defeat Republicans going forward. Democrats have to get back at least some members of the middle class, the working poor, and the unions.

In terms of kitchen-table policies, well, the Democrats need to have some. Just a few. Big ones. Popular ones that are easy to understand. A bill that caps the price of all prescription drugs at $25 a month, say, rather than a 19-point policy white paper.

The content of such proposals matters too. The Brahmin left tends to be more supportive of redistribution than the working class, which tends to prefer something that economists call “predistribution”: high minimum wages rather than welfare payments, pro-union policies rather than refundable tax credits, antitrust measures rather than food stamps. Moderate families also give higher marks to social spending that feels like infrastructure: universal pre-K, guaranteed jobs programs, and public internet.

The cultural drift of the party will be harder to change, political analysts told me. Tacking to the center would mean repudiating activists on immigration, the environment, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and abortion— the same activists who have marched in the streets, raised money, and knocked on doors for Democrats, and have become its most loyal voters. It would mean ignoring many of Washington’s most powerful nonprofits and interest groups. “I’m a progressive,” Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, told me. “I’m not even sure it would work, because the reputation of the party is so set in.”