Portside

It’s not a lot of laughs being a Congressional Democrat these days. Their party is a mess. Partisan loathing is on high boil. If you’re a veteran liberal like Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Second District), every day brings the dismantling of something you spent years building.

So when McGovern showed up for an interview the other day, it wasn’t surprising to find him in an epic funk about the potential impact of the Trump/Musk tsunami of horror. The recent freeze in the National Institutes of Health budget “sent chills up the spine of everybody here in Massachusetts that cares about medical research,” says McGovern. Federal aid accounts for more than 20% of our state revenues, and the implications for our healthcare system of potential cuts in Medicaid and other related line-items are catastrophic, he notes. Straws to grasp at are few and thin: “I’m grateful to Attorney General Campbell for leading other attorney generals and filing suit and stopping those cuts, at least for now,” he says.

The courts have slowed down the oncoming freight train. But we wondered: what happens if, as Trump world is already suggesting, they just ignore the courts and keep the wrecking ball swinging?

“Then we have a full-blown constitutional crisis, and I think it requires some dramatic action in response,” says McGovern. “We can’t just sit back and let our democracy just fall apart. What we need to think about are things like maybe a national strike across this country.”

A national strike? Better buckle your seat belts.

That tactic –- shutting down a wide swath of the economy to force change in government policies –- is not unknown abroad. There’s one on tap this week in Greece, where public and private sector unions are banding together in protest of alleged government malfeasance. Mention May 1968 in Europe and they’ll recall the massive strike in France which led to President Charles de Gaulle fleeing the country as his government collapsed.

There hasn’t been anything approaching that here in the U.S. since 65,000 union workers and sympathizers in Seattle staged a five-day work stoppage over wage issues in 1919. But the groundwork for one is already underway.

After he brought the Big Three automakers to heel in the 2023 United Auto Workers strike, UAW chief Shawn Fain urged other unions to time their contract expiration dates for April 30, 2028 in anticipation of a May Day general strike demanding Medicare for All and other social reforms. “A successful general strike is going to take time, mass coordination, and a whole lot of work by the labor movement,” wrote Fain. “If we are serious about building enough collective power to win universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity, then we need to spend the next four years getting prepared.”

All of a sudden, it seems that timetable might have to be dramatically accelerated. Could it work?

After all, the election demonstrated Trumpism’s appeal to many union workers, minorities and young people, all potential lynchpins of a general strike. Then again, Fain credits right-leaning Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who famously abandoned the Democrats during the campaign, as a key player in the UAW strike by halting Teamster-driven truck deliveries to Big Three plants. If enough major unions get on board, what union boss is going to want to play scab?

A national U.S. strike would be a first, but the way McGovern sees it, desperate times call for desperate measures. “We’re going to have to be thinking out of the box, because if we have a constitutional crisis, it’s not going to be fixed by an amendment,” he says. “It’s going  to be fixed by the people. Institutions will not protect our democracy. People will protect our democracy.”