California: Vote No on Prop 50!

In recent weeks, liberal activists, union staffers and even some leftists have consumed themselves with getting out the vote for California’s Prop 50, portraying it as a vital measure to defend democracy against the march of Trump reaction. But Prop 50 would do nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a very transparent case of “if you can’t beat him, join him” in election rigging. The Republicans have redrawn congressional district maps to their advantage in Texas, so the Democrats propose Prop 50 to do the same in California. Some opposition!

The Democrats know that they do not have many cards to play to win back the votes of working people repulsed by years of belt-tightening and liberal shaming under their watch. They offer nothing of value to redress this loss and their past crimes, which include having long presided over worsening conditions for black and brown people at the state and local levels. But they sure move quick when they feel their own seats are threatened—and in typical liberal fashion, they want to give their naked power grab the stamp of mass approval. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Vote “no” on Prop 50!

Many of those planning to vote for Prop 50 freely acknowledge that it is undemocratic. They don’t like that it’s gerrymandering, but they dislike “fascism” (read Trump) even more. As the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. Well, times certainly are desperate: mass deportations, racist purges, tariff-induced inflation, shredded democratic rights, squeezed farmers, deepening Palestinian genocide and an escalating military campaign against Venezuela, to name just a few things. Trump is on a roll and must be stopped before we are all flattened. And Prop 50 is a desperate measure. The Democrats have no coherent plan to fight Trump because all their tools—like taking crumbs from one group to give to another in the name of progressive values—have only made Trump stronger.

For this very reason, Prop 50 is not even in the slightest a measure that the times call for. From the standpoint of stopping Trump, it will surely backfire. Prop 50’s cracking of Republican-leaning areas—such as its lumping high-poverty Modoc County into a district with elite Democratic stronghold Marin County—can only drive working people deeper into Trump’s arms. The answer to the Republican disenfranchisement of urban, especially black, voters is not Democratic disenfranchisement of white and Latino rural voters. This will succeed only in hardening partisan divisions in the working class, making it even more difficult to mobilize a strong defense of its interests. The actual answer is to fight to bridge those very divisions by laying out how white and Latino workers on farms and ranches hit hard by Trump’s trade wars would do well for themselves to stand up for black people, who Trump revels in kicking down every chance he gets—and vice versa. This will not be possible unless a sharp line is drawn against Democratic Party schemes like Prop 50.

Would-be Trump successor Gavin Newsom fancies himself the president’s chief critic, while following the lead of the right whenever it really counts, from attempting to out-gerrymander the gerrymanderers to cooperating with the anti-immigrant crackdown and throwing trans people to the wolves. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is fielding a candidate, Ramsey Robinson, in next year’s California gubernatorial election in order “to end the rule of the billionaire class that controls the vast amounts of wealth in our state.” A working-class alternative is very much needed in the elections to help the building of a collective defense against the attacks of both Trump and the Democrats. But the PSL campaign is already sabotaging itself by advocating “yes” on Prop 50 as a means of fighting the right. To put it plainly, peddling a measure designed to return one of the billionaires’ parties to power is entirely incompatible with rallying support for ending the rule of the billionaire class.

Unsurprisingly, the California DSA, which has one foot firmly planted in the Democratic Party, also supports Prop 50. But the DSA going whole-hog for this measure will only further set back the socialist cause in the eyes of many workers who quite rightly hate the Democrats. As a couple of DSA members who issued a September 23 statement “Against the CA DSA Prop 50 Endorsement” put it, this mistakes “the goals of the Democratic Party for the goals of DSA.” The authors describe, based on firsthand experience among workers in the Central Valley, where Trumpism holds sway, how endorsement will only poison efforts to win workers away from the two-party system. This recognition must be translated into a concerted fight against the California DSA leadership to drop Prop 50 and immediately cut all other ties between the organization and the Democratic Party in order to avoid greater damage to the goal of creating an independent socialist party that would be hard to undo.

Some left opponents of Newsom and the Democrats advise voters to abstain on Prop 50. They correctly observe that the existing district boundaries are rife with partisan and racial bias (something that goes back to the very beginning of the republic). But from here they make an incorrect leap to conclude that it is best to stay away from the polls so as not to be perceived as favoring one set of undemocratically determined districts versus another or to be standing on the same side as the Republicans. But opposing Prop 50 in furtherance of working-class unity is not support to the status quo, or to tinkering with district maps under capitalism or to Trumpism. Much the opposite. In the context of the November special election, mobilizing a “no” vote is the way to build the working-class opposition to Trump urgently needed to get the class out of the muck.