Every Democratic defeat Now a new round of debate is unleashed on one of the most trite questions in contemporary electoral politics: would Bernie have won? The original debate, of course, was literal: Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s shocking 2016 loss to Donald Trump, the insurgent left insisted that its favorite Democratic primary candidate would have achieved a victory in the general election where the candidate herself couldn’t.

The argument went something like this: Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-neoliberalism, and anti-status quo orientation easily catapulted him to the top of the Republican Party and popular appeal in the swing states that determine the American presidency. However dubious his credibility as a working-class hero may be (and you may remember that he’s a billionaire real estate titan whose penthouse has a gilded elevator), Clinton was a walking avatar of the exact elite political class that Trump so effectively demonized.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, had spent his entire career making arguments against the ruling class that precisely mirrored Trump’s: while Donald blamed immigrants and demanded mass deportations for America’s ills, Sanders rightly lashed out at the rich and powerful. for causing discontent in the working class and demanded social welfare in response.

Sanders’ narrative – “yes, the system IS screwed, you ARE screwed, now let’s take on the bigwigs who are doing it and get everyone what they deserve” – offers a response, and a positive alternative, to Trump’s speech . Clinton’s narrative was closer to “no, the system ISN’T screwed, you ARE NOT screwed, now please vote for the bigwigs’ favorite politician.”

Eight years later, Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump has resurrected another tug-of-war between camps that attribute the decline of the Democratic Party to class versus cultural issues: racism and intolerance Did it deliver a landslide victory to Trump, or “economic anxiety”? Leaving aside the obvious problems of assuming that only one can be at play or that they are completely different, these discussions miss everything that “Bernie would have won” really means: there is no way to defeat Trumpism without class warfare. and a promise of change. for workers, and achieving it requires multiracial solidarity of the working class and a party that represents the interests of that coalition. Until those things happen, both inside and outside of electoral politics, prepare for Trump after Trump after Trump.

Let’s start with What skeptics of class politics are right about: Trump and his allies across the right have often stoked racism, misogyny, homophobia and violence. xenophobia as a political strategy, resonating with voters in ways that can be downright shocking to watch. The right-wing digital media ecosystem has become increasingly uglier in its rhetoric since 2016, and broad swaths of Trumpland will proudly boast that “unchaining the liberals” is their political lodestar. Reactions against movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo or the fights for reproductive justice or trans rights have united around a policy of nostalgia for ultra-traditional patriarchs. And while the Biden presidency achieved some working class achievementsDemocrats still failed to recognize or credibly respond to voters’ pain when inflation offset those incremental improvements.

Given all of these discouraging forces, it is obtuse to suggest that Harris could have prevented more than 10-point swings in crucial counties toward Trump among working-class voters simply by throwing out a few more white papers on tax credits. As Julia Claire from Crooked Media put it on “We need to address the reactionary national cultural moment we find ourselves in, starting with men.” Commentator Jill Filipovic made a similar point: “(T)his election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. “It was an accusation against the United States.”

Even if one accepts this premise, which comes awfully close to the argument that Trump voters have exceptionally evil souls, what theory of change could it inspire? Calling Trump voters a “basket of deplorables” certainly didn’t work in 2016, and hasn’t since. And if the plan is to redeem evil souls one by one, we quickly run into the fact that Republican and Democratic voters are becoming more socially stratified than ever. Our social universes drive our beliefs and behaviors, and increasingly we spend our lives within different ones. Put bluntly, what the hell could I possibly have to scold, lecture, or persuade people living in deindustrialized Rust Belt cities of anything?

Famously, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had an answer to the dilemma of the exodus of the working class from the Democratic Party: “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs.” from Philadelphia, and we can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.” This calculation also greatly guided Harris, who campaigned hard for high-level anti-Trump moderates with Liz Cheney at his side. But this tactic has obvious shortcomings, both mathematically and politically: There are far more blue-collar voters than white-collar Cheney fans. And the more a party’s base depends on the latter, the less it can deliver on the former, and the more its survival depends on preserving a status quo that has pissed off so many people to begin with. The most important thing is that it doesn’t work; Trump returns to the White House.

The solution hereSo it lies in building a coalition around a narrative that competes with Trump’s, one that forges new social bonds and leverages shared material interests. That narrative has to come from someone who can shape it and convey it in a way that resonates, something a Sanders-style figure could do and that most Democrats, given their donor base and political trajectories, cannot.

For all his monstrosity, Trump tapped into a justified sense of disillusionment with the system and managed to convince some of its biggest victims (nearly half of the poorest voters elected him) that he was on their side. Of course not! But only Sanders has built the credibility to claim so much from the broader left, spending decades fighting consistently and doggedly for the working class. Hopefully others can go through their playbook a little faster.

As impossible and abstract as it may seem to realign the Democratic base according to shared class interests, it is still a much more concrete plan than “reducing intolerance among outsiders”: the union movement offers a clear plan for how to put it into practice.

Throughout American history and around the world, class-based organizing that unites people across racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines has been among the most powerful mechanisms for building more equal and just societies, but they must confront the rich and powerful to achieve it. there. The idea that the Republican Party could ever be the vehicle to achieve this is a farce. We deserve an opposition party that can step up and side with its own base.