Every Democratic defeat now triggers a new cycle of debate on one of the most recurring questions in contemporary electoral politics: Would Bernie have won? The initial debate, of course, was literal: immediately after Hillary Clinton’s shocking 2016 defeat to Donald Trump, the insurgent left insisted that its preferred Democratic primary candidate would have eked out a general election victory where the candidate herself had not succeeded.

The argument went something like this: Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-neoliberalist, anti-status quo orientation easily catapulted him to the top of the Republican Party and captured popular attention in key swing states. the American presidency. Although his credibility as a working-class hero is questionable (and you may recall that he’s a billionaire real estate titan whose penthouse has a golden elevator), Clinton was a walking avatar of the exact political elite that Trump so effectively demonized.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, spent his entire career making arguments against the ruling class that exactly mirrored those of Trump: where Donald blamed immigrants and demanded mass deportations for America’s woes, Sanders rightly castigated the rich and the powerful for causing discontent among the working class and demanded welfare as a response.

Sanders’ narrative – “yes, the system IS fucked, fuck you, now let’s take on the fat cats who do it and get everyone what they deserve” – offers a response, and a positive alternative, to Trump’s speech . Clinton’s speech was more like “no, the system is NOT screwed, you are NOT being screwed, now please vote for the fat cats’ favorite politician.” »

Eight years later, Kamala Harris’s defeat by Trump resurrected another back-and-forth between the camps, attributing the decline of the Democratic Party to class rather than cultural issues: racism and bigotry a landslide victory for Trump, or “economic anxiety”? Setting aside the obvious problems with assuming that only one can be in play or that they are entirely distinct, these discussions miss the point of what “Bernie would have won” actually means: there is no no way to defeat Trumpism without class warfare and a promise of change. for working people, and achieving this requires multiracial working class solidarity and a party that represents the interests of that coalition. Until these things happen, both within and outside of electoral politics, prepare for Trump after Trump after Trump.

Let’s start with What Class Politics Skeptics Get Right: Trump and his allies on the broader right have often stoked racism, misogyny, homophobia, and homophobia. xenophobia as a political strategy, one that resonates with voters in a way that can be downright awful to watch. The right-wing digital media ecosystem has become rapidly uglier in its rhetoric since 2016, and large swathes of Trumpland will proudly boast that “triggering the Libs” is their political thread. Negative reactions against movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo or struggles for reproductive justice or trans rights have coalesced around a politics of nostalgia for ultratraditional patriarchs. And even though Biden’s presidency has brought some results working class gainsDemocrats were still unable to recognize or credibly respond to voters’ pain when inflation offset these incremental improvements.

Taking all of these dismaying forces into account, it is absurd to suggest that Harris could have prevented swings of more than 10 points in favor of Trump in crucial countries among working-class voters simply by dropping a few more white papers on the tax credits. As Julia Claire of Crooked Media put it on on We must address the national cultural reactionary moment we find ourselves in, starting with men.” Commentator Jill Filipovic do a similar point: “(H)his election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.

Even if you accept this premise – which comes awfully close to the argument that Trump voters are particularly evil at heart – what theory of change might it inspire? Calling Trump voters a “basket of deplorables” certainly didn’t work in 2016, and hasn’t since. And if the plan is to redeem wicked souls one by one, we quickly come up against the fact that Republican and Democratic voters are increasingly socially stratified. Our social worlds determine our beliefs and behaviors, and we increasingly spend our lives in different worlds. To put it bluntly, what could I possibly have to scold, lecture, or persuade people living in the deindustrialized cities of the Rust Belt of anything?

Famously, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had an answer to the dilemma of the working-class exodus from the Democratic Party: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in the West of Pennsylvania, we will get two moderate Republicans back in the suburbs.” of Philadelphia, and we can repeat this in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin. This calculation also largely guided Harris, who campaigned hard for high-end anti-Trump moderates with Liz Cheney by his side. But this approach has obvious flaws, both mathematical and political: There are far more blue-collar voters than white-collar Cheney fans. And the more a party’s base depends on the latter, the less it can deliver results for the former, and the more its survival depends on maintaining a status quo that angered so many people in the first place. More importantly, it doesn’t work; Trump returns to the White House.

The solution hereIt is therefore about building a coalition around a discourse that rivals that of Trump – a discourse that forges new social bonds and draws on shared material interests. That narrative has to come from someone who can shape it and present it in a way that resonates, which a Sanders-type figure could do, which most Democrats, given their donor base and their political trajectories, cannot do.

For all his monstrosity, Trump exploited a justified sense of disillusionment with the system and managed to convince some of his biggest victims – nearly half of the poorest voters chose him – that he was their side. Of course not! But only Sanders has earned the credibility to say as much from the broader left, spending decades fighting hard for the working class. I hope others can go through his playbook a little quicker.

As impossible and abstract as realigning the Democratic base with shared class interests seems to seem, it is nevertheless a much more concrete plan than “reducing intolerance among foreigners” – the labor movement offers a clear model for how to put it into practice.

Throughout the history of the United States and around the world, the class organization that unites people across racial, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries has been one of the most powerful mechanisms for building more powerful societies. egalitarian and fairer, but they must attack the rich and powerful to achieve this. there. The idea that the Republican Party could ever be the vehicle for this goal is a farce. We deserve an opposition party that can mobilize and side with its own base.