WASHINGTON—Tackling the weightiest problem to face the U.S. in decades, participants at a day-long conference here wrestled with the question their keynote speaker, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., posed: “What can I do” to preserve democracy “in a time of multiple crises?”
The answers were voiced at the July 17 session, organized by the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and named in honor of Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party nominee for the U.S. presidency in 1948 and the most progressive of FDR’s three vice presidents.
The conference took place against a constant drumbeat of attacks on the very structure of both democracy and government from extreme-right President Donald Trump and his MAGA legions and allies dedicated to creating a dictatorship.
“You have an authoritarian president and a Congress hell-bent on giving up its power. The solution is left to the American people,” Jayapal said. “I call it getting strike-ready and getting street-ready.”
And in a video message, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a constitutional law professor on leave, echoed Jayapal’s diagnosis.
“This is a time of titanic fighting between the forces of freedom and democracy on one side and the forces of totalitarianism and repression on the other,” he said.
The conference also occurred against a backdrop of less than maximum resistance by Democratic Party leaders. Indeed, one Jayapal answer to her own question was “make sure the Democrats are not complicit.”
Attendees discussed various ways to create the progressive platform while still resisting Trump and his circle of followers. Many agreed each individual progressive movement—labor, environmentalists, anti-war crusaders, and others—must get out of their own individual siloes.
Fighting back is where unions are central, two speakers said.
“We have these social movements, but each must take the responsibility of building a social whole that looks like America,” said Saket Soni, of the New Orleans-based Resistance Force. “That’s the job of us as activists and advocates.”
Unions called schools of democracy
“Unions have been called schools for democracy, where to win, people have to cross racial lines and different boundaries,” said Erica Smiley, co-executive director of Jobs With Justice. Added Aru Shinjay-Ajay of the Sunrise Movement, “Unions must be at the center of what we do.”
“And we’re almost in a war for democracy and against fascism,” Smiley said.
“There are multiple crises,” said Jayapal, known in her home, Seattle, as a successful organizer and advocate for progressive causes. She’s continued in Congress, revitalizing its Progressive Caucus.
The landscape, however, is awful, Jayapal said. “Agencies are being destroyed. Masked men are sent into the streets” to arrest and deport workers on the job and people looking for work, “the military is being used against our own people” in Los Angeles, violating U.S. law and the Constitution and “there’s the concentration of power in the hands of one person,” Trump, “supported by millionaires and billionaires.
“And all of us,” Jayapal added, “myself included, were too complacent,” believing democracy would survive, depending on checks and balances of the Constitution and the two-party system, with the assumption that both parties would follow it.
But that “requires the majority party,” Trump’s Republicans, “not cede all powers to the presidency, and that the Supreme Court not be stacked” with Trump-named justices.
Since those conditions abound, everyone else must step up, Jayapal said. Millions have in protests against the Trump regime’s abuses and excesses. Many protests have been ad hoc, but now there’s a template on the web: Resistance Lab 1.0 at www.mobilize.us.
“We’re going to take back the country. But we have to fight forward,” putting together a positive alternative platform, while avoiding the trap of fighting the dictators on their own rhetorical ground, where they blame “the other”: Migrants, LGBTQ people, and trans kids.
“They’re not the enemy,” Jayapal said of those groups. “It’s the billionaires.”
Other specific actions to restore and extend democracy included, but were not limited to:
- Emulating Zohran Mamdani’s successful grass-roots and working-class-oriented campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City. Mamdani, a state senator from Queens, convincingly won a hotly contested primary just days before.
“He said, ‘The landlords have driven your rent too damn high. I’ll do something about it,’” said Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Institute, which is working on the rent issue with the “multi-racial working-class” Tenant Coalition. That was just one example.
Must focus on fossil fuel billionaires
Otherwise, Bozuwa warned, “Trump paints government as the problem” and attracts voters. “We have to paint fossil fuel billionaires as the problem.”
- Campaigning for comprehensive campaign finance reform to destroy the inordinate influence of money in politics.
- Fighting strongly for comprehensive labor law reform here and abroad. The one AFL-CIO speaker, International Affairs Director Cathy Feingold, noted the rest of the world—both workers and oppressors—watches what the U.S. does for and to its workers, and reacts accordingly.
- Build coalitions, ideas and programs from the bottom up, not the top down. Ben Beachy of the Global Fund For A New Economy, said progressives too often make that elitist mistake.
He gave a counter-example while discussing combating the climate crisis. “In Illinois, during the first Trump administration, 20 groups came together to see what they wanted in a climate bill. They hashed out priorities, then worked with state legislators to make it equitable…We need participatory policy designing” which also gains the advantage of “broad backing,” Beachy said.
“But that’s been the exception, not the rule.”
- Faiz Shakir of the More Perfect Union documentary film website warned progressives can’t just try to restore the status quo Trump is busy wrecking. They have to go beyond it, he said. He used Trump’s $715 billion-$800 billion 190-year cut to Medicaid as an example.
Instead of just restoring the Medicaid money, he declared, the center-left must push for single-payer government-run Medicare For All. It’s even more vital, Shakir warned, because the health insurance industry is on the verge of a massive consolidation with just one surviving monopoly left, Cigna.
- Reducing U.S. domination of the world by “weapons or the economy or culture,” said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. “The Global South is already saying, ‘This is not the position we’re prepared to accept.’”
Instead, Bennis said, look to the United Nations for guidance and policies, even though the UN, like other world institutions, is a product of the Western-created post-World War II imperial order. “Its structure is not failing. It was created that way” with vetoes in the Security Council.
And the International Court of Justice stands up to the U.S., as shown by its condemnation of Israel’s mass retaliatory killing of more than 50,000 Gazans and its demand for an end to the murders, the occupation, and the war. “But the court doesn’t have a police force,” Bennis noted.
However, the court has a loud voice and is using it “against the Israeli violations and the U.S. enabling of them.”
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