Prepare to Fight!

Trump and the Republicans got a richly deserved smackdown in the midterms. Nearly every sector of society joined the massive protest vote against the president. He promised to end the “forever wars,” then launched one of his own. He promised to end inflation, then drove grocery and gas prices to suffocating heights. Some Trump voters, encouraged by his far-right critics, turned out at the polls, only to vote Democrat.

The GOP’s rout reflected seething anger at the base of a grossly unequal society lorded over by billionaires scrambling to preserve their place atop the world, whatever the cost to the rest of us. Yet it is hard to imagine a less deserving group of politicians to put into positions of responsibility. The Democrats not only share Trump’s overarching goal of shoring up the U.S. oligarchy’s position, but also offer little more than a warmed-over version of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises, above all an end to “forever wars,” skyrocketing inflation and “wokeness.” Whether moderate or “progressive,” Democratic candidates followed the same basic playbook: talk up the affordability crisis and blame it entirely on the party in power. They follow Trump’s lead, even as their chief selling point is that they are not Trump.

Of course, the Democrats left unsaid that the Biden White House got the inflation ball rolling or that the new generation of Democrats is incapable of anything beyond empty gestures of relief. City and state budgets are strained, and Democratic-sponsored austerity measures are already underway in many places across the country. Price controls, let alone even more far-reaching challenges to capitalist interests, are strictly off the table.

The Democrats have no answers to the problems plaguing the country, especially none that benefit the working class. The anger on vivid display in the elections must be channeled into a movement that can strengthen our defenses and get actual results. Workers have real power, but that power is not at the ballot box; they produce everything of value in society and keep it running. All manner of divisions, not least partisan ones, run deep. Relying on the Democrats makes it impossible to set the class in motion as the very force with the power and the interest to counter Trump. The “midterm massacre” makes independent working-class mobilization all the more urgent.

Let’s be clear: Trump suffered an electoral setback, but he is far from defeated. Trump retains all the powers of an imperial presidency on steroids, and he won’t go quietly into the night. Aside from the “big beautiful bill,” Trump has rarely leaned on Congress to get things done. Whether imposing tariffs or starting wars, he has simply wielded the very big stick at his disposal. If anything, we should expect him to deploy the vast repressive machinery under his command even more aggressively. Growing fissures in the MAGA coalition may also push him in that direction, as he seeks to show that he can still punish his political opponents.

JD Vance has begun distancing himself from Trump in anticipation of 2028, while the Democrats are already fixated on recapturing the White House. Their every move in Congress over the next two years will be calibrated to that end, not to meet working people’s needs. They will almost certainly engage in political theater of their own: grand speeches, hearings, investigations and “oppositional” bills they know Trump will veto, letting them appear to act without committing to change. Chuck Schumer, who is likely to become the new Senate majority leader, is making noise about using the “power of the purse” to cut off funding for the Iran war. It’s all for show, and geared toward restoring the U.S. military machine for the next war and its accompanying chaos down the road.

Many have expressed surprise at Trump’s muted response to his party’s electoral thrashing. Nobody should take his words at face value, least of all working people. Still, his pledge to “work with the Democrats” is not simply a grudging acknowledgment of the election’s overwhelming verdict or a ploy to buy time to make his next move. It also reflects how far he has shifted the political spectrum to the right and how the tussle between Democrats and Republicans is not a matter of life-and-death for the ruling elite. Democrats, in turn, have signaled their willingness to play ball, with Texas Senator-elect James Talarico proposing a bipartisan MAGA agenda.

Democratic Party Alliance Sabotages Our Defenses

To date, the Democrats have barely registered as an opposition to Trump. They have traded verbal barbs and filed lawsuits but otherwise just stood by and watched him run amok, sacrificing the defense of black and brown people to their own political ambitions. Once they decided that “woke” politics made them unelectable, they dropped even the pretense of standing with oppressed groups. This election cycle, they focused entirely on economic populism, while several blue and swing states passed anti-trans ballot measures. The midterms did not mark a shift to the left.

In 2024, after the Biden/Harris administration had inflicted so much economic misery, Trump won significant support among black voters and especially Latinos. His subsequent racist attacks and anti-immigrant terror prompted serious buyers’ remorse. Trump had said he would target criminals, not hunt down every black and brown immigrant as if they were animals. Democrats may not ooze unvarnished white supremacy like Trump, but they are for tough immigration enforcement, have funded ICE for years and sent their police against anti-ICE protesters. All this underscores why workers cannot afford to give any ground to crackdowns on oppressed groups.

Two years on, mass deportations have proved to be the very opposite of a jobs engine for American workers. Things have only grown bleaker. The anti-immigrant crusade reinforces divisions within the working class and drives many workers into the shadows, weakening our ability to push back against the bosses.

Workers in several industries launched high-profile strikes earlier this year. In almost every case, however, union leaders isolated the struggles, keeping them from fully disrupting operations and scoring a real victory for labor. Ahead of the midterms, they clamped down on strikes altogether to avoid causing trouble for the politicians. The bosses, though, had no qualms about waging class war.

This was painfully evident when Phillips 66 locked out Teamsters Local 877 at its Bayway refinery, which supplies New York City and its major airports with fuel. Rather than harness anger at the Iran war and rally key unions and the broader labor movement to build mass picket lines against the union-busting war profiteer, the Teamsters bureaucrats simply pleaded to get back to the negotiating table. They did so to sign terms of surrender, then pressured the ranks, desperate to restore their healthcare, to accept them just before Election Day. Yet the refining giant has not set a date for union members to return to work.

The unions are workers’ most basic defense organizations. The week before the midterms, Con Ed utility workers, with the power to shut off NYC’s lights, mobilized heavily to protest against the racist cop who killed their union brother Koran Irvine, forcing the court to up the charges. The unions taking a stand on behalf of their members, and workers and the oppressed more broadly, will get us immeasurably farther than waiting for change in 2028, especially when the Democrats push Trumpism without Trump.

The U.S. Ruling Class and Israel

The Michigan Senate race drew considerable attention. In the Democratic primary, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim critic of Israel, defeated Zionist incumbent Haley Stevens, despite the tens of millions of dollars her campaign received from AIPAC. In the general election, Stevens endorsed the Republican candidate, another staunch supporter of Israel. El-Sayed is no flaming radical. He declares himself a “capitalist who understands how capitalism works” and recognizes Israel’s right to exist, even though the Zionist state is fundamentally based on the national oppression of the Palestinians. In 2024, he backed the “uncommitted” campaign, which funneled disgust with the party of genocide into a vote for Harris, who declared her ironclad support for Israel.

El-Sayed’s victory is not a step forward for the cause of Palestinian liberation. It simply reflects a new political reality. The Democrats need to distance themselves somewhat from Israel, so it can better maneuver to secure the U.S. empire’s strategic interests, which remain as closely bound to Israel as ever. Democrats are hardly alone in this. On Election Day, Trump announced that the U.S. would stop providing Israel with $4 billion in direct military aid by year’s end. Netanyahu himself had proposed the move as a win-win—Trump could be seen as cutting off a handout when Israel can pay, and Netanyahu could present it as an end to dependence on the U.S. In place of the aid package, the two countries are looking to cement a lucrative military cooperation scheme.

The Palestinian genocide and especially the Iran war have combined with widespread disgust over the Epstein files to fuel anti-Semitic sentiment among workers and the false belief that Israel and Jews call the shots in the U.S. AIPAC is a powerful lobby for Zionism in U.S. politics, but it is hardly all-powerful, as El-Sayed’s victory shows. Blaming Israel or the oligarchy’s Jewish minority for U.S. imperialism’s many crimes lets the ruling class as a whole off the hook. The U.S. empire is aligned with Israel not because of a shadowy conspiracy, but because the Zionist state is crucial to U.S. domination of the Middle East.

DSA Electeds: Would-Be Democratic Party Saviors

The Democratic sweep has masked the divisions in the party. The DSA leadership, which fancies itself a potential Democratic Party kingmaker in 2028, is elated. The group added six members of Congress and two mayors of major U.S. cities to its roster of electeds. But anybody who thinks “socialism is in the air” better think again. These campaigns, like Mamdani’s last year, did nothing to organize workers as an active factor fighting for their own interests. The reason is clear. The Democratic Party represents billionaires and Wall Street, and many workers rightly despise it. Association with the Democrats is not going to popularize socialism, but discredit it.

Tellingly, several new electeds have already distanced themselves from DSA’s national platform. Their eyes are not set on fighting for radical demands, much less ending capitalist oligarchy, but rather on demonstrating competence in office and furthering their political careers. Mamdani calls his brand of socialism “pothole politics,” to draw attention away from his support to a scab-herding governor, NYPD repression, Zionist organizations and the privatization of public housing, among a growing list of betrayals. DSA-endorsed Nithya Raman, who will become L.A. mayor, is an open Zionist and collaborator with the city’s real estate barons.

The day after the midterms, Hasan Piker declared “woke is back.” That is far from the case. Many newly minted Democratic heroes, like Gina Hinojosa, have adamantly rejected the identity politics of the past; she underscored the point by declaring: “My pronouns are mom, Texan and soon-to-be governor.” But the DSA electeds, such as AOC, provide an even starker example. They have sworn off “woke 1” not because it enflamed divisions between white workers and oppressed groups or obstructed the kind of struggle needed to advance working-class interests, but because the pretense of concern for the oppressed has become too costly and no longer serves a U.S. empire.

The DSA’s hitching itself and the socialist cause to the Democratic Party is all the more infuriating amid the deep class anger over the country’s direction. An organization the size of the DSA running candidates in its own name could have planted a real flag for socialism and helped spur a broader working-class fightback. Much of the Marxist left joined in DSA’s euphoria. Left Voice, for example, praised the DSA victories, without even noting that these Democrats would inevitably betray “a base that has expectations for real structural change for working people in urban areas.”

By contrast, several independent working-class candidates appeared on ballots across the country. The PSL’s Greg Levy won nearly 100,000 votes in the Ohio Senate race despite the red-baiting of Democrats and Republicans alike. Another PSL candidate, Andre Easton, picked up some 10,000 votes in the Bronx. These totals did not put the candidates in office, but they offer socialists something far more valuable: a hearing among workers and the oppressed who oppose capitalism and both its main parties. That is the vital starting point to begin preparing the working class to collectively defend itself and all the oppressed in these uncertain times.