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working class
Progressive Group Launches House Recruitment Drive to Defeat Corporate Dems
"Our mission is clear: We must usher in a new generation in the Democratic Party, led for and by the working class, to take on billionaires and corporate power," said the head of Justice Democrats.
Jan 14, 2025
The progressive political action committee Justice Democrats on Tuesday launched a 50-state recruitment effort "seeking nominations of everyday, working-class people to run for Congress after a cycle of unprecedented spending from the billionaire class and right-wing super PACs in Democratic primaries."
Justice Democrats, which "helped recruit and elect members of the Squad to Congress, will recruit the next generation of primary challengers in Democratic primaries in open seats and blue districts against Democratic incumbents who are out of touch with their constituents," the group said in a statement.
As Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi put it in a
Politico interview published Tuesday, "There is something wrong with this party as a whole right now, and it's time to clean up shop in this Democratic Party."
Democrats are still reeling from their loss of the White House and Senate and failure to reclaim the House of Representatives in November's elections, in which numerous critics attributed Vice President Kamala Harris' defeat by Republican President-elect Donald Trump to a failure to connect with working-class voters.
"To be the party of the working class, we need more working-class leaders in power," Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas asserted Tuesday. "Leaders like the elected Justice Democrats in Congress have shown us another way of doing politics is possible and represent the promise of uniting our fractured nation into a multiracial democracy where everyone thrives and no one is left behind."
The 119th Congress is one of the richest & oldest ever. Today, we officially launch our 2026 candidate recruitment–working class communities deserve working class leaders in Congress. Nominate someone you know to take our power back from billionaires: jdems.us/nominate
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— Justice Democrats (@justicedemocrats.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 6:14 AM
"It's time to end the era of career politicians and the corrupt campaign finance laws that keep them in power," Rojas added. "Our mission is clear: We must usher in a new generation in the Democratic Party, led for and by the working class, to take on billionaires and corporate power. The Democratic Party can only win back working-class voters with real, working-class leaders."
Justice Democrats currently serving in the House of Representatives are: Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (Texas) and Reps. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).
Other groups including Sunrise Movement have also launched efforts to push the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction, including by reviving a ban on corporate lobbyist donations to the Democratic National Committee and banning super PAC spending in Democratic primaries.
This, after special interests led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Wall Street-backed cryptocurrency lobbyists poured $30 million into just two Democratic House primaries to oust working-class incumbents Cori Bush (Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.).
Some congressional Democrats have taken these defeats as a sign that "we might have swung the pendulum too far to the left," as Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) toldNOTUS Tuesday.
However, Justice Democrats is urging Democratic lawmakers and candidates to eschew pressure to move rightward out of fear of further losses and instead pursue policies that will win back working-class voters.
"Until party leadership leads the way to take big money out of politics, ends the billionaire influence over our elections and policies, and puts the needs of working-class people back at the center of its agenda, voters will see its populist platitudes as lip service," said the group, which vowed to "continue to lead the charge to show that with working-class voices in Congress, we can fight for universal healthcare, create millions of union jobs, end taxpayer funding for endless wars and genocide abroad, and lower costs for everyday people nationwide."
As Andrabi and Rojas wrote for Zeteo Tuesday: "A debate is taking place on how the party should move forward: Will we finally begin to be the party of the multiracial working class and embrace a new generation of leaders like the Justice Democrats in Congress? Or will we double down on becoming Republican-lite by cozying up with the wealthy elite and fall into the GOP's divide-and-conquer strategy, targeting our most vulnerable communities?"
"The choice is up to us—the everyday people our politicians are elected to serve," they added. "We can let the billionaire class and Democratic leadership handpick corporate Democrats who will do their bidding or we can recruit and empower the working class instead."
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Now Is the Time for Progressives to Take Over the Democratic Party
This moment of crisis is an opportunity to get the party on track. We should not squander it.
Jan 13, 2025
Once again, the Democratic Party is in crisis.
Activists both inside and outside the party have a big question to answer: Do insiders pivot to the center or the left? Do outsiders join the party or abandon it?
In both cases, the choice should be obvious: embrace the progressive economic agenda (move left) and enter the party en masse.
This moment of crisis is an opportunity to get the party on track, to turn it into what people want and need. Indeed, the table is set for us to transform American politics and save our democracy.
Beginning with the 2016 election, the American political system became defined by three competing blocks squeezed into a two-party system:
1. On the right, the Trumpian reactionaries,
2. In the middle, the neoliberal status quo, running from the Clinton-wing of the Democratic Party through the Romney-wing of the GOP
3. On the left, the progressives, defined by Sen. Bernie Sanders' insurgent presidential campaigns.
This new tripartite competition represented a sharp break from the neoliberal consensus that had defined both parties from 1992 through 2015. The abrupt shift in 2016 was the result of widespread dissatisfaction with a contemporary economic order defined by massive wealth inequality and, for the vast majority of the population, increasingly limited horizons, a life of overwork combined with non-stop precarity.
Trump will fail to provide the epoch-defining, shared economic prosperity he has promised the public. Rather, economic outcomes will be familiar, only more so: the few winners will win bigger, while the masses will continue to struggle just to tread water.
Now, for the second time in eight years, Trump and his minions will have power in Washington. And for the second time, in all likelihood, they will fail to alter how the economy performs for the average household.
The reasons for this are simple. To date, in a modern industrialized/technological society like ours, there is only one set of economic strategies that has been proven to constrain wealth disparity and distribute greater benefits to the majority of the population. This successful model was pioneered by FDR during the New Deal era. Then, after World War II, it was pursued in all the other prosperous democracies around the world. Broadly speaking, this is the program re-introduced to the American public by Bernie Sanders and the progressives, albeit updated for the 21st century.
The economic crises of the 1970s, created an opportunity for President Ronald Reagan to take American economic policy in a new direction in the 1980s, with less direct government intervention and more reliance on markets to determine how society made and spent its wealth. With President Clinton in the 1990s, the Democratic Party effectively dropped its opposition to the core tenets of Reaganomics, embracing what came to be known as neoliberalism. Then, in 2008, the entire global neoliberal financial system essentially imploded—and, while political leaders and economic elites tried to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, the public has remained recalcitrant, viewing the whole system as rigged for the already wealthy and their sycophants—which sounds a lot like something Donald Trump might say. But do his policies really break with a system that benefits rich people like him?
Trump's program, while moving away from neoliberal orthodoxy in a few ways (trade policy, immigration), keeps the basic architecture intact, and doubles down on some core neoliberal policies: tax cuts for the wealthy, accelerated deregulation, and the defunding of state programs. This is why Trump will fail to provide the epoch-defining, shared economic prosperity he has promised the public. Rather, economic outcomes will be familiar, only more so: the few winners will win bigger, while the masses will continue to struggle just to tread water.
However, Trump is intent on fulfilling other campaign promises that will transform American society. His cabinet nominees show that he is serious about establishing an authoritarian state apparatus intolerant of dissent.
This is why the current fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is so essential.
If the Moderates triumph and Democrats remain the party of the status quo, clinging to a zombie ideology that cannot deliver what Americans want and expect from life—it will not be able to vanquish reactionary populism. The constitutional republic will, at best, remain in peril.
The only choice for the Democratic Party if it hopes to succeed is to reject the political establishment, and embrace progressive economic principles, such as those listed in PDA’s 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights. Registered Democrats overwhelmingly support each item of this ambitious progressive agenda. Indeed, the most coveted of all demographics, Young Americans enthusiastically embrace this program by similar margins.
So, this should be straightforward. Rank-and-file Democrats want a progressive party. Unfortunately, the defining feature of American politics in the neoliberal era is that money matters more than people. The heretofore dominant wing of the Democratic Party, aka the Party ''establishment,'' is first-and foremost a money-raising behemoth.
This is why progressives must bring their A game. Many party loyalists embrace centrist policies out of a misguided notion of pragmatism. Our goal is not to chase these Democrats away, but to persuade them to support something more ambitious and inspiring. We have a very compelling case to make on all fronts. We can win them over.
We must reject the influence of big money, demand its removal from political campaigns, and limit its role in lobbying to a level commensurate with what an average household, or small business, can afford annually.
Similarly, we have to welcome outsiders into the party, assuring them that a progressive Democratic Party will be all-inclusive and will listen to its members.
At the same time, we must be unwavering in our commitments. Perhaps most significantly, we must reject the influence of big money, demand its removal from political campaigns, and limit its role in lobbying to a level commensurate with what an average household, or small business, can afford annually.
Yet, we have to be humble about the task ahead. The capitalism of the 2020s is very different from that of the 1930's—and transforming the economy on the order of FDR or Reagan requires extended political success, as well as buy-in from people and sectors across the society.
But we also shouldn’t sell ourselves short. We are promising an unrivaled reward for everyone who joins with us. The opportunity to make history, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves; to establish the world’s first multi-racial democracy in the most diverse country in human history, a society that will stand apart in a globalized world, as the rejoinder to ethno-nationalism and fascism, informed by the collective wisdom of all the world’s cultures; a land of unprecedented wealth, well-distributed among its citizens, and of limitless opportunity; home to the world’s leading universities, with unparalleled research capacity; a strong country at peace with the world, in harmony with the planet; a society of equals; a democracy; an America as good as its promise.
The first step to getting there is for one of the two dominant political parties to embrace the progressive economic policy program, which has a proven track-record and can deliver the prosperous middle-class society that Americans crave.
In a forthcoming article, I will explain why mass participation and direct engagement with the Democratic Party is essential to the success of this program and the maintenance of American democracy.
Join PDA’s efforts to create a truly progressive Democratic Party, which we desperately need at this crucial hour of our history.
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Beware the Faux Populism of Corporate Democrats
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won't just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Jan 08, 2025
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all...
It's not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
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