Almost As Bad As Rahm As DNC Chair Would Be Ritchie Torres As DCCC Chair
I have a strong stomach. Even when I was going through chemo and my doctor warned me to expect to be throwing up, I never did— not once. But yesterday, I felt nauseous and thought I really was going to puke. Someone in DCCC circles told me that Hakeem Jeffries is leaning towards appointing the top congressional Democratic shill for AIPAC and the crypto cartel, Ritchie Torres, to head the DCCC. No more elections for DCCC chair; it’s now just up to Jeffries. An appointment like that would kill the half dead DCCC once and for all— jsomaybe not such a bad idea.
When David Moscrop wrote last week that even David Brooks admits that Bernie “was on to something in his bid to mobilize the working class, bring them into the political process, and challenge a system that has excluded them for decades,” he wasn’t talking about Democratic careerists like Jeffries Brooks “concludes that Democrats must find a candidate who can reach out to and resonate with working-class voters.” That’s not Jeffries and it’s not Torres. Those two are trying to get as far away from the working class as they can get and as fast as lobbyist cash can carry them. Brooks admitted that the Democratic establishment “has entrenched itself in an elitist, insider, Rube Goldberg machine of incumbents, big donors, party officials, cozy pundits, cable news and consultants. For years, talking heads have been chattering, temporizing, and reinforcing the status quo while democratic socialists have been fighting to get the goods for people, and in doing so, prevent the rise of Trump and his cohort.” If the chattering class has come around, party nabobs sure haven’t.
“[T]he liberal consensus has for decades,” wrote Moscrop, “been utterly corporate, elitist, and narrow-minded to the exclusion of structural, nation-building policies that benefit working people, like Medicare for All or the return of American manufacturing from abroad… Liberal disdain has long manifested in skepticism of student loan forgiveness, hostility toward Medicare for All, and contempt for warnings that offshoring and dismantling manufacturing would create problems that no pair of $3 boxer shorts from Walmart could offset. It’s hard not to look askance at those whose moral principles and studied certainty bend only in the face of electoral vagaries— particularly when democratic socialists, among them Bernie Sanders, have been saying the same thing for decades. Liberals backing away from their preelection and election-time commitments have a touch of the wrong Marx— Groucho, not Karl. A quotation attributed to the comedian goes something like this: ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.’ And that’s the problem.”
“Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t college educated,” wrote Dana Milbank, “haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal coalition dissolved— decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the working class as much as anyone alive: Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said political analysts have been claiming that Democrats have just lost working people “every election for the last 50 years,” based on the “idiotic assumption” that all workers without college degrees, or nearly two-thirds of the adult labor force, can be lumped together into a single category— “working class”— with the expectation that they have a shared identity as workers and will vote accordingly.
“The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer notes. Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote, because Democrats emphasized the class conflict. But “in the current two-party structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations, there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”
They no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024— but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to them, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem— but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly a half century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of try workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” writes University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the last 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s edge elections,” Podhorzer tells me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New-Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free-market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, Tyranny Inc., that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted voters once again punish the incumbent party. [Trump is] already overreaching with outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada, Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake— for the party and, more importantly, for the country. We are, in some ways, back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Ahmari called for government to encourage “a labor market in which most sectors are unionized, while workers in those few industries that resist unionization enjoy higher minimum wages.” And this conservative thinker waxed nostalgic for the New Dealers: “Those leaders left behind a political map for building a better economy and a more authentically free society. They guided us, above all, to workers’ countervailing power: the indispensable lever for improving the lot of the asset-less and for stabilizing economies otherwise prone to turbulence and speculative chaos. The supreme challenge today is to forge a similar left-right consensus.”
Of course, that won’t be happening anytime soon. Trump channels populist anger, but he directs it at migrants and foreigners instead of corporations. The billionaire president-elect has chosen a billionaire commerce secretary, a billionaire interior secretary and a billionaire education secretary and has tapped the world’s wealthiest man to run his government-efficiency task force. This oligarchy is planning to impose more of the same policies that caused workers’ problems in the first place: extending tax breaks for the rich and further rolling back business regulation, employment law and union rights.
As Bernie Sanders can attest, Democrats, too, have long resisted a return to their populist roots, going back to when President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and his Democratic Leadership Council recruited corporate donors to fund the party. But this moment could be different. Gallup’s latest polling shows that approval of labor unions is at 70 percent, up from 48 percent 15 years ago, after the financial crash. Sixty-one percent say unions mostly help the economy, up from 39 percent in 2009. The favorable impression of unions has grown at the same time Americans’ confidence in most other institutions— business, church, the media, the presidency, Congress— has been going the other way.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) issued a memo last week with polling from his home state showing that 82 percent of people— including large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents— agree that one of the biggest problems facing the country is that corporations and economic elites hold too much power and government is doing too little about it. “Democrats have the opportunity to call Republicans on their bluff and prove to the American people that we are the ones on the side of the workers,” he wrote. “But that’s only possible if we have the courage to pick fights with powerful corporations and billionaires and fight against the status quo.”
That is a gigantic “if.”
The consumer advocate Ralph Nader, through his third-party presidential campaigns and his hectoring, has tried for years to push the Democrats toward a $15 minimum wage, a return to the progressive tax system of the 1960s, a revival of private pensions and the National Labor Relations Board, a hike in Social Security benefits paid for by higher payroll taxes on the wealthy, and much more. But at this point, he tells me, he has no optimism that the party can change itself: “They’ve drained it out of me.”
I understand the cynicism. For ages, Democratic leaders have tried to have it both ways, calling for marginal improvements to the tax code but shying away from anything that might repel the corporate interests that are also in their coalition. But, at some point, the worsening suffering of tens of millions of workers must convince them to take the risk.
And— who knows?— maybe if Democrats take that risk it will free them, and all of us, from the dreary cycle of the past two decades in which frustrated voters turn from one party to the other and then back again, never finding the change they are seeking. And then, for the first time in decades, maybe working people will again vote reliably Democratic, because Democrats will have restored their working-class identity.
Or maybe such an effort will fail. But isn’t it better to do the right thing for the country regardless of what it does to the party?
Hakeem Jeffries? Pete Aguilar? Ritchie Torres? Chuck Schumer? I don’t think so.
But he's the first trisexual Martian-born left handed table tennis star in congress. He MUST be progressive......... It's hard to think of a more disastorus thing for the Dems to do to themselves, but they never stop trying digging deeper.
As former President Shrub the Eloquent said, "Our enemies never stop thinking of ways to harm us, and neither do we." That should be the new DNC motto.