If you read a lot of anti-Trump commentators, you’ve probably seen a lot of justifiable alarm about Trump’s attacks on civil society—the free press, academia, the legal profession, and so on. But ask yourself: How often does that list include unions? And what does it say about the current state of “The Resistance” that the answer is “almost never”—even as Trump just committed the largest act of union-busting in American history, and even as a lawsuit from Elon Musk’s SpaceX threatens to knock collective bargaining rights back to the 1920s?
On this week’s WER Live, Anat and I tackled this question and more, including:
Why we should be skeptical of anyone who clutches their pearls over “the working class” but never talks about unions, or how to build real power for working people outside of winning elections.
Why it’s wrong to suggest that we can, or should want to, “return to normal” after Trump.
No, Trump won’t cancel the midterms—but that doesn’t mean they will be free and fair, either. We currently live under “competitive authoritarianism”—a hybrid state that retains many of the formal trappings of democracy, but where the ruling party routinely and strategically breaks and reshapes the rules to entrench their power.
The right has “electoralized” abortion, guns, and the Supreme Court; we must learn to “electoralize the election” itself—make voting an inspiring act of defiance of this unjust regime.
I explain why I haven’t yet published much on the hot Democratic data/messaging debates of the last several months, and what’s ahead for Weekend Reading.
Thanks for watching!
