In our new political reality, Republicans want to smash the state while Democrats defend the authority of institutions. This dynamic contributed to the results of the 2024 election.
Faced with a coordinated MAGA attack on democracy, progressives, conservatives, Democrats, and anti-MAGA Republicans set aside their policy disagreements to defend our democratic institutions. That makes sense.
But now the election is over and President-elect Donald Trump has won, and we are living in what Naomi Klein calls the “mirror world”—an alternative reality inhabited by what turns out to be an alarming number of our fellow citizens.
In this topsy-turvy universe, the Republican Party put together a winning coalition of displaced industrial workers and disgruntled farmers—who have suffered real economic harm from global trade deals—together with vaccine-skeptical “wellness” enthusiasts, conservative critics of corporate power, and opponents of U.S. military entanglements overseas. Progressives are not accustomed to being on the side of the establishment against a populist, anti-establishment movement.
It got harder toward the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, as Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, was courting anti-Trump Republicans, touting the endorsements of neocons like Dick Cheney, advertising that she owns a Glock and will shoot anyone who breaks into her home, telling Pennsylvanians she will increase fracking, praising the U.S. military as the “strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” and promising to sign a border security bill drafted by rightwing Republicans to stem the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Our Revolution, the group that grew out of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, put out a statement “sounding the alarm” that Harris needed to do more to connect with her party’s progressive base. “Young, progressive voters—not Republicans nostalgic for the Bush years—are key to defeating Donald Trump on November 5, and their support must not be taken for granted,” Joseph Geevarghese, the group’s executive director, wrote in an email.
Still, Sanders himself, along with progressive U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, showed up in Madison, Wisconsin, to tell progressive voters how important it was to vote for Harris. “We cannot let this happen to our country,” Ocasio-Cortez said, warning about Trump’s fascist tendencies. Both she and Sanders explained how much easier it would be to push progressive policies in a Harris Administration.
Israel’s war in Gaza divided progressive voters more than any other issue. In the swing states, some Muslim voters said they wouldn’t choose Harris because of the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. Others agreed with Sanders and AOC.
A few days before Election Day, a colorful flyer landed in my mailbox, with photos of Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, wearing a keffiyeh. “Jill Stein Condemns the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza,” it declared. It quoted Stein calling the war in Gaza the “greatest moral imperative of our time” and demanding an end to U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Stein invoked the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Tiny print at the bottom of the flyer noted that it was not authorized by the candidate, but rather paid for by a group called Badger Values PAC.
The Badger Values PAC has a track record of supporting rightwing Republican candidates, The Washington Post reports. Baylor Spears, of the Wisconsin Examiner, reports that in 2022 the group spent $407,483 to help Adam Jarchow, a rightwing former state representative who ran in the Republican primary for state attorney general. During that campaign, Jarchow said he would work to enforce Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban.
While it’s not at all clear from their deceptive campaign literature, it’s obvious why a Republican super PAC chose to back Stein. Stein won 1 percent of the vote in Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by a margin of less than 1 percent. In 2024, Stein won 0.4 percent of the Wisconsin vote, and Robert Kennedy Jr. won 0.5 percent; together they garnered almost exactly the number of votes that separated Trump from Harris. Peeling off a few progressive voters was a worthwhile investment to help elect Trump.
Progressive third-party efforts are easily co-opted to damage progressive goals in our winner-take-all system of U.S. general elections. But post-election, progressive organizing still matters.
Back in 2004, when Ralph Nader was running for President as the Green Party candidate against Democrat John Kerry and Republican President George W. Bush, I interviewed Howard Zinn, the great pacifist historian, whose name was frequently invoked by Nader’s young supporters. “The Democratic Party is a pitiful example of an opposition. And when you look at what Kerry stands for and what Nader stands for, I understand perfectly why people might find it repugnant to vote for Kerry and not for Nader,” he told me. But Zinn said it was still important to vote for Kerry against Bush, since one of them was bound to win. About Nader, Zinn said, “He’s been seduced by the last thing in the world he should be seduced by, which is electoral politics. He’s not about that. He’s about movement politics.”
With Trump co-opting the idea of a popular, grassroots movement that represents the majority of people, we need progressive movement leaders now more than ever.
MAGA politics took over the space left behind when Democrats abandoned their traditional working-class constituents by embracing global trade deals, as Dan Kaufman reports in an excellent New York Times story and podcast version on The Daily. In his article, “How NAFTA Broke American Politics,” Kaufman focuses on Master Lock, the iconic Milwaukee company that outsourced 1,000 jobs to Mexico shortly after then-President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In 2024, Master Lock shut down its entire Milwaukee operation. In the podcast, former Master Lock worker Chancie Adams describes the arc of his disaffection from the Democratic Party. It’s a painful journey.
Adams’s family was part of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South who moved to Milwaukee when the city was a manufacturing powerhouse. He was the first among his relatives to buy a house, thanks to his union wages. The union got him involved in politics, too, and he actually met President Barack Obama during a campaign stop at Master Lock in 2012.
“Milwaukee, we are not going back to an economy that’s weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits,” Obama told Master Lock employees, praising the company’s decision to bring back some of its previously outsourced jobs. But a few years later, the company moved all the jobs away and shuttered its Milwaukee plant anyway.
After supporting Obama, Adams said he wasn’t planning to vote in 2024. “I’m done with that,” he told Kaufman. He had no faith Harris would do anything to help people like him. In his view, all politicians are crooks. If he had voted, he probably would have voted for Trump, he said. Yes, Trump’s a crook, too, Adams conceded but laughingly added, he’s a “gangster.”
I’ve heard similar reactions from Wisconsin dairy farmers who voted for Trump. They liked it when Trump pledged to remember “the forgotten men and women of America.” They laughed off some of his outrageous statements. They saw him as a political outsider who would throw a rock at the two-party system they felt only serves the interests of big corporations.
In addition to spurring devastating job losses in manufacturing, NAFTA helped make Wisconsin the number one state in the nation for farm bankruptcies, accelerating the loss of more than half of the state’s family farms in the 2000s.
Of course, both major parties embraced “free trade.” But Kaufman does a good job documenting how NAFTA “signaled the Democratic Party’s move away from its working-class, New Deal roots.” Pushing the party to get back to those roots is essential.
It will be a long road to recover from the 2024 election. The fact that Trump won the popular vote says something deeply disturbing about racism and misogyny in our culture. But now more than ever, we need to nurture a progressive politics that focuses on a broad coalition of workers and a democratic, pluralistic vision of our democracy.
As “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the founder of this magazine, put it, we “must be aggressive for what is right if government is to be saved from those who are aggressive for what is wrong.”