Beyond Handwringing Over Trump: Reject Neoliberalism
A Politics of Solidarity is the Antidote to what Ails Us
By Jim Miller
Since the 2024 election, we have not heard a lot from union leaders across the country about where we need to go from here. It’s clear that the years ahead represent yet more existential peril for a labor movement that has been dodging the slings and arrows of American plutocracy and even managed to grow recently in public popularity as millions of people began to see unions as a potential answer to a ridiculously uneven economic playing field that overwhelmingly favors the rich.
But now, yet again, the national landscape will be filled with landmines for workers, particularly public sector workers like those in education. Last week, I outlined some of the threats ahead but was then pleased to hear that my own national AFT president, Randi Weingarten, had given a speech where she made it plain what the problem is that we face and called for a distinct break from past practice.
In Weingarten’s address, she takes notice of the very forces I’ve written about recently that have been eroding community and hurting workers in the industrial heartland and elsewhere and makes the case that:
Unions . . . are antidotes to the anxiety and isolation that so many feel. People form and join unions to have agency—to control their own destiny. And unions, like public schools, allow people across races, backgrounds and political beliefs to connect, to see they have common interests and values, and to build solidarity.
Conversely, the downward mobility and anxiety facing working people today are the result of a trickle-down economy enabled by our political leaders. Over the last 40 years, a new set of economic rules have prioritized wealth over work, corporate profits over worker pay, shareholder returns over societal value, and the bogus claim that, in a plutocracy, economic benefits somehow will trickle down to the rest of us. This system concentrated power in the hands of billionaires and big corporations, giving them wealth and influence at levels exceeding even the 19th century’s Gilded Age. It’s no coincidence that as worker power has diminished, wealth has been consolidated at the top, inequality has grown and public confidence in democracy has weakened.
Yes, of course, we need to grow the economy, which is always the pretext for neoliberalism. The myth goes like this: Unregulated and unbridled markets, with no guardrails, will solve everything. This neoliberal trickle-down philosophy doesn’t work, hasn’t worked, and will never work for anyone but the rich. Yet it keeps getting repackaged and resold to the American people
Weingarten also ruefully acknowledges that this election represents the first time that the party of “working people” won the most affluent third of the electorate while losing the rest. Hence, a break with the neoliberal bent in the Democratic Party is essential, and, she goes on to say, “if Trump does the bidding of Big Tech, Big Oil and the billionaires who bankrolled his campaign,” we need to remind those “who voted for him seeking lower costs and a better living standard” that his policies only offer false hope, and instead of pursuing them, we need to “break up with trickle-down neoliberalism once and for all.”
To do so, she argues that labor and Democrats need to look back to and learn from FDR, lean into and lead with economic populism, and foster democracy by defending public institutions like schools and colleges while also promoting policy that leads to genuine economic security and opportunity for all.
This might, Weingarten argues, bring back some of the angry young men who turned on the Democrats by addressing their economic anxiety and empowering rather than demonizing them. She hits the mark here as the collapse of community and the epidemic of loneliness wrought by neoliberal regimes of the past several decades have left deep scars that have been successfully exploited by the right, which has given folks a target for their anger if not a solution to their problems. And if the Democrats have nothing to offer but scolding, many have chosen to double down on their wrath as a balm for despair.
Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect observed that, “Weingarten’s speech stands as the clearest description and prescription that a labor leader has offered to the broad liberal community in the wake of Trump’s victory. It is, of course, filtered through the lens of a teachers’ union leader, but her proposals also address issues that resonate well beyond the classroom.”
Elsewhere, Weingarten argues that in the face of Trump’s inevitable assaults, blue states might serve not just as buffers but as laboratories of democracy where progressive forces might provide governmental policies that can serve as alternative models to the coming degradation of the state at the Federal level. Despite divide and conquer politics, unions, schools, and progressive states can be models of solidarity and care.
I would also add that the success of this strategy depends on unions in temporarily safer situations, like those in the private sector, particularly those in the fossil fuel economy, to resist the siren call of Trump offering haven for some while he assails others in the union movement. Surely, once he is done with the public sector, those around him won’t spare half a thought at busting the remaining, deeply weakened, part of the union movement.
A solidarity-driven strategy would also require thinking more broadly about the rights of all working people, union or not, and building deeper alliances with community allies in peril. The days of overly narrow, bread and butter unionism need to become a relic of the past if a workers’ movement is to survive in the decades to come.
Finally, beyond the world of work and labor, the Democrats need to reject proposals by the neoliberal wing of the party to triangulate and continue wooing the ever-reluctant centrist Republicans who, despite the ardent wishes of the Dem establishment, never seem to come to the party despite the endless stream of invitations. Corporate donors, tech billionaires, and the fantasy majority of anti-Trump suburbanites are never going to win a national election for the Democrats if they continue to reject economic populism, alienate working class people, and hope that a dollop of shallow identity politics will make their neoliberal turn more palatable to a majority of Americans.
Originally published at
Agree. However, in blue states such as are, the Democrats in leadership are known for their corruption under their woke platitudes.