Democrats Abandoned the Working Class: Robin D.G. Kelley on Trump’s Win & Need for Class Solidarity
We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have “abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board,” Kelley says of the Harris campaign. He says the highly individualistic, neoliberal culture of the United States makes it difficult to organize along class lines and reject the appeal of authoritarians like Trump. “Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, have to protect each other.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Kamala Harris has conceded to Donald Trump after the former president pulled off an overwhelming victory Tuesday to send him back to the White House. On Wednesday, Harris spoke at Howard University.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their government telling them what to do. We will never give up the fight to protect our schools and our streets from gun violence. And, America, we will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Kamala Harris giving her concession speech on Wednesday.
The Democratic Party is in a state of crisis after Trump expanded his support across the country and Republicans also regained control of the Senate. Republicans may also keep control of the House.
AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, independent Senator Bernie Sanders blasted the Democratic Party. In a statement, Sanders said, quote, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” Sanders said.
To talk more about Tuesday’s election, we’re joined by Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, who studies social movements. He’s author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Professor Kelley, it’s great to have you back with us. If you can start off by talking about Donald Trump’s major victory, I mean, sweeping the country, actually winning the popular vote, as well as what looks like the Electoral College vote, Harris winning far fewer millions of votes than President Biden did in 2020? Though some Democrats, for example, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, polled much higher and won, she did not get those same votes. And end by talking about what Democratic Senator Sanders is saying, that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. Let’s begin with Senator Sanders. He’s absolutely right. The Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Kamala Harris ran on a ticket of moving toward the right, you know, shifting, pivoting toward the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is endorsing her. And so, there was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board. That’s true.
Now, when we think about 2024 compared to 2020, I’m not sure that Trump’s victory is so historic. Trump would have won in 2020 had it not been for the uprisings that emerged out of the George Floyd murder. The wind was behind the Democratic Party, even though the Democratic Party didn’t earn that wind. And so, I think that’s a factor.
The other factor is that the country is moving toward the right, and the working class, or working classes, feel really disaffected and abandoned. They feel abandoned, I believe, for a couple of reasons. One, because whatever the numbers said about the shifting economy, the fact of the matter is that people are still dealing with inflation, with joblessness, with insecurity. But the second thing — and this goes back to an article I published back in 2016 — we also have, you know, a deeply racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic nation. And that runs through. I mean, when you look at the demographics, white men consistently vote for Trump. White women, of course, it was a slight shift, but the shift wasn’t that radical. I mean, I don’t trust exit polls, but it’s amazing how many white women supported Trump. It’s amazing how much of the message of fascism actually did tap into a deep insecurity, a deep fear, and the fact that deportation is the dominant message that has drawn working people.
So I really want to talk about the question of class, which I think is most important. We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t have a class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that thought of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We refuse deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,” because that’s what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, you know, have to protect each other. Trump is seen as the person who can fix things, the person who represents the CEO who could step in and solve problems in a culture in which the only solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity, is coming from the capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that there’s such a radical shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a failure of the Democratic Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic Party actually pivoted a little bit toward labor, in a way that the Harris campaign did not.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to go to former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, who we spoke to last week. She served as co-chair of independent Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
NINA TURNER: I think, over time, the Democratic Party lost its way in terms of just talking to working-class voters. And I mean from all identities, because sometimes when we say “working class,” people assume we’re just talking about white men. I’m talking about working-class people from all walks of life. And my state, you know, CAFTA, NAFTA, this happened over time. It didn’t just happen in one fell swoop. It happened over decade after decade after decade. But those trade deals definitely decimated Midwestern states like mine and really hurt a lot of workers.
And then working-class people from all backgrounds do not necessarily see themselves. They feel like elitism has taken over for both parties, but especially in the Democratic Party. And so, when you don’t see yourself in a party, you decide that you want to go another way.
And then, more recently — when I say “recently,” certainly over the almost four years — as people were suffering the effects of COVID, trying to — we were all trying to break out of it, inflation very high, the cost of groceries high, the cost of gas high, all of those material condition elements. The Democratic Party denied that, and they trotted out Bidenomics, and they turned their backs on people and made it seem as though the pain points that the big mamas and big papas were feeling were not necessarily real. You cannot do that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Robin Kelley, that was Ohio state Senator Nina Turner. If you could respond to what she said and put it in the context of what you mentioned earlier, namely the absence of working-class cohesion, and what that meant for this election? And why, in fact, why do you think there is an absence of cohesion among the working class in the U.S.?
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. No, I think — I totally agree with what Nina Turner said. This is where we are right now.
The absence of cohesion has to do with the general — two things, I think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind of neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own problems, a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests are the only ones — in other words, private interests are the ones that can solve your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets in the way. This is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for at least three, four decades.
And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement with the UAW, we see discussions and talk of solidarity — the Boeing strike, for example — but in terms of those who are either unorganized or at the sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no longer based in high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening, it’s almost impossible to organize people and to think as a class. You know, the Amazon strike in Bessemer is a really good example of what could have been, but how the combination of fear, insecurity and the failure to really think of solidarity — in other words, the care for our neighbor, the care for those who are not us but maybe we share the same class, that sense of solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks about at the beginning of my piece, that’s missing. And we haven’t done the work, the political education work, to build that sense of cohesion.
But the other thing that I think is really important is this belief that if we — that we can one day become Trump. In other words, wealth, entrepreneurship, the striving for success, the fact that a lot of these Senate campaigns where seats were overturned, they were won by billionaires and millionaires, you know? I mean, that’s significant.
And one other thing I should add is that, you know, we could look at this at the presidential level; we could also look at it at the local level. I’m here in L.A. in what’s supposed to be the Left Coast, California, where we just had propositions that failed, a proposition to end forced prison labor, a proposition to raise the minimum wage, a proposition for rent control, you know, a proposition that actually — the one proposition that did win was one that will deeply criminalize and expand sentences for petty crimes. This is in L.A., you see? This is California.
So we’re moving toward the right. And somehow the right, for many people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s attractive. And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class with power, a class in which the state could be the lever of equality rather than deep inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting Trumps for the rest — for generations.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, it’s very interesting on the issue of prison labor and a ballot initiative there. When we were out in California interviewing prisoner firefighters who got a pittance a day, they were pushing for earlier release, but they didn’t get it often because it provided a prisoner labor force for the wildfires that plague California. But I wanted to ask you about the extremism of Trump, when he was talking about — or, you know, at the Madison Square Garden rally, of course, that Puerto Rico is an “island of garbage.” He would later called that whole rally a “lovefest,” you know, referring to women as the B-word, and, of course, how he deals with immigrants. But there’s a very interesting comment of writer Meg Indurti, who tweeted, “if you are someone who was able to overlook the genocide and cast a vote for kamala harris, then you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him.” Can you comment on this? Robin Kelley, you talk a lot about the working class and the working poor. You also have written extensively about Gaza.
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, one of the questions that came up, my students were posing this question to me the other day: What would have happened had the U.S. actually stopped supporting Israel, like in November or December of last year? What would have happened? I think the Democrats could have won. You know, we overestimate the power of the Israeli lobby, because in some ways Democrats are looking for dollars, not necessarily votes. And so, imagine what would have happened had there been this refusal to send arms to Israel. There would be no — the war would have ended. There wouldn’t be an escalation of the war. And part of the attraction of Trump, ironically, is this belief, this kind of — it’s kind of a myth, but still this belief that under Trump there were no wars. And so, here we have possibly three different wars going on at once under the Democrats. And you could see how that would generate some fear.
But to go back to the question of the extremism and elites, you know, toxic masculinity is a huge factor. The buildup coming from right-wing state legislatures to attack the curriculum, to attack DEI, to attack trans people at every single level, here we are dealing with an extremism that is actually palpable and that I could see how elites, some elites on the right, those who actually have drafted Project 2025, would support these policies. So, in some ways, what we keep calling fascism, which I agree is fascism, is pretty mainstream among the Project 2025 people, pretty mainstream among the MAGA Republicans. And the Republican Party is a MAGA party. Whatever the old bourgeoisie of the kind of older neoliberal order, whatever they think, they’re either going to go with the program or they’re going to do what they did, support Harris and Walz. And that didn’t work out for them.
So, I mean, I’m actually terrified by a future in which the kind of violence of the settler-colonial mentality, which was always there, has escalated and become normalized in a way. And let’s remember that the history of fascism is filled with supporters who themselves are targets of fascism. We have examples of that, you know, historically. So, you know, it’s hard — so we can’t just assume that because there’s an uptick in, say, the Latino vote in support for Trump, that somehow that’s an example of Trumpism’s multiculturalism, because it’s still white supremacy and patriarchy.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Robin Kelley, I just want to go back for a second to the point that you made earlier about those ballot measures. Why do you think those ballot measures were rejected? How did they get on the ballot to begin with? And then, is that related at all to the fact that, you know, the Democrats have come under massive criticism for, after 2016, after the Clinton election, basically finding ways to blame everybody but themselves? Is there a risk that that’s going to happen again?
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Yes, I think there is a risk.
As far as the propositions, California is a conservative state. You know, it has been. It has produced some of the most conservative governors. It is the home of the origins of the John Birch Society. You know, this is a conservative state. So, it didn’t surprise me too much, although California is also a state that has, you know, had basically the biggest, for a long time, or at least second-largest prison population in the country. And so, some of these initiatives came from imprisoned people themselves, came from abolitionists. The struggle for a minimum wage came from an organized labor movement. But there’s still deep anti-immigrant sentiment here in California, deep anti-labor sentiment. And keep in mind that rent control has been consistently beat down since 1995. And why? Because some of the same elites who gave money to the Harris campaign are also absentee or venture capitalists who own a lot of property, and they’re trying to profit off of them.
The Democrats, I mean, you know, I don’t have an answer to that, except for the fact that we can’t keep relying on the Democratic Party. I mean, it’s been — it’s so bankrupt. I think what Ralph Nader said yesterday is absolutely true. We need something else. You know, if not a real third party, I think Reverend William Barber has an answer, and that is to build from the bottom up, to build from low-wage workers, because that’s the vast majority of the people. But we can’t do this until we actually think of ourselves as a community, a beloved community, as a class that struggles with each other against corporate interests.
AMY GOODMAN: And we will be speaking with Reverend Barber tomorrow, so people should tune in. And Ralph Nader’s comments on Democracy Now! just exploded yesterday, so people can check them out at democracynow.org. Robin D. G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with us, professor of history at UCLA who studies social movements, author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kelley has written several books focusing on African-American history and culture as well as race relations, including Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994), and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997). He is also a prolific essayist, having published dozens of articles in scholarly journals, anthologies, and in the popular press, including the Village Voice, Boston Review, and The New York Times.
Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events.