How Democrats Should Handle the Pro-Labor Right

President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Sean O’Brien speaks on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In a keynote address to the Republican National Convention last Monday night, Teamster president Sean O’Brien devoted most of his seventeen-minute speech to assailing corporate control of the economy and celebrating the muscle of independent, democratic trade unions. Far from conciliatory, O’Brien tested the audience’s appetite for anti-elite sentiment outside the GOP’s preferred targets on the woke left. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Republican Party that pushed the limits of its tentative—many say cynical—courtship of union households under Donald Trump.

O’Brien tried to make the most of the opportunity. While his broadsides against business and political corruption received faint applause in the convention hall—Trump offered, at most, a tight smile—he appeared to revel in the gamble he was making. This was not a breathless endorsement but a call to build a bipartisan coalition in support of pro-labor policies. With Trump seizing the momentum in the presidential race over the last few tumultuous weeks, O’Brien evidently believed he made a shrewd decision. Better to generate some good will with a Republican Party eager to persuade workers of its populist makeover than be bound to a Democratic ticket that, prior to Joe Biden ending his campaign for reelection, potentially faced an electoral wipeout.

Progressive critics of O’Brien’s strategy were quick to pounce. O’Brien may have pulled no punches regarding corporate America’s multi-decade “pillaging” of the working class, but his barroom tribute to Trump (“he has proven to be one tough S.O.B.”) and willingness to praise Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) for his purported evolution on workers’ collective bargaining rights was enough to turn stomachs. Younger Teamsters, the White House, and congressional Democrats all reportedly felt “betrayed” by O’Brien, while veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, writing for Slate, suggested O’Brien had taken a hare-brained chance. After a rogue manager of the Teamsters’ X account posted a since-deleted denunciation of O’Brien’s chumminess with Hawley, more direct criticism flooded social media and labor fora.

Even those who argue labor needs to seize high profile moments before skeptical and hostile audiences expressed misgivings. Jacobin, for its part, observed that while O’Brien harkened back to the pure-and-simple unionism of the Progressive Era AFL leader Samuel Gompers, the great hazard of “labor realpolitik” is the assumption that “the worst of [right-wing] vindictiveness can be avoided” under a Republican administration. In an era when union membership continues to fall despite heady talk of a revival, many believe that O’Brien’s presence, rather than projecting strength, betrayed desperation.

Most central to the left’s disgust is the very premise of O’Brien’s wager. To be sure, O’Brien’s provocative engagement with Trump—whose previous administration and own business dealings largely evinced contempt for unions—would have been enough to earn the epithet of “traitor.” But few in progressive circles accept it is even possible for Republicans to ever adopt labor-friendly positions. Indeed, it is unlikely O’Brien would have faced less criticism had he addressed a GOP convention with a different nominee. Democrats and leftists are nearly unanimous in the view that the GOP’s overtures to workers are hollow, and worse, a ruse to gut the administrative state, including labor protections. Whether under a second Trump term or younger leaders like Hawley, Republicans will always kowtow to plutocrats, argue O’Brien’s leftwing critics, and thus he has done nothing but discredit his leadership of the 1.3 million-strong Teamsters.

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To some extent the backlash is understandable. Joe Biden has been a remarkably pro-worker president—far more, in fact, than his long record in Washington would have indicated. Although major goals like the PRO Act (a bill that would make it easier for workers to unionize) and a $15/hr federal minimum wage were partly stymied by a handful of moderate Democrats in the Senate, Biden wove union-friendly mandates into his industrial policies and embraced an antitrust agenda linking fair competition to wages and contracts. His historic support for the United Auto Workers’ strike last fall amid lingering fears over inflation and supply chain disruptions was also notable. Even progressives who are hostile to the administration on other fronts have conceded that, on labor issues, Biden has set a benchmark for future Democratic presidential candidates. Notwithstanding the GOP’s avowed break from neoconservative globalism, as demonstrated by the rhetoric of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his convention speech last week, there is still a massive gap between what Democrats have done in the last few years and what the Trump-Vance ticket promises.

In short, progressives have plenty of evidence to argue that Democrats, though sometimes inconsistent, offer tangible benefits to labor, in contrast to the GOP’s hollow rhetoric. But here’s the rub. When the left insists there is nothing to be gained by O’Brien’s engagement with Republicans, they forget unions’ fundamental purpose and source of legitimacy among their members: to obtain and successfully wield bargaining power. Given the adverse conditions that labor has had to weather in recent decades regardless of which party has governed, a reflexive posture against one party in its entirety is a recipe for political marginalization. Indeed, to have zero pull with one half of the political spectrum is to forfeit a good deal of power—including points of leverage over one’s primary coalition partner in Congress.

This is strangely unambitious. By denying the possibility that labor could push some Republicans to adopt favorable policies, progressives disregard their own success in compelling establishment Democrats like Biden to break from neoliberalism. Those efforts were worth it and arguably contributed to bipartisan collaboration on a growing slate of issues concerning development, infrastructure, and consumer welfare. As with the New Deal order and the peak of globalization, the party system as a whole tends to adapt to major shifts in political economy. Market fundamentalism has proven beyond a doubt to be deeply unpopular across the country, so why not ramp up pressure on both parties to pursue reform?

Pretending that the GOP isn’t attempting to chart its own post-neoliberal course—that Trumpian populism didn’t, in some ways, catalyze Biden’s industrial strategy—ignores historical patterns and leaves hyper-partisan activists blind to opportunities to rebuild working-class power outside the receding geography of Democratic strongholds.

The Gompers-style approach, in fact, is not quite the relic that O’Brien’s critics claim it to be. In a two-party system whose firm ideological sorting between left and right followed the decline of traditional industries and private sector unions in the Cold War era, and which has been long dominated by upper-middle class interest groups, regional economic coalitions, and cultural-philosophical divisions among elites, labor has always had to broker deals and seek leverage with members of both parties. Unlike in the U.K. or Western Europe, where modern center-left parties evolved organically with the growth of trade unions, the Democrats’ roots were far more agrarian before the New Deal realignment; labor realism was an inevitable response to structural conditions in which it was often hard to penetrate the political machines of either major party. Moreover, reform-driven “municipal socialists” and other third-party candidates occasionally offered an alternative before labor-oriented liberals coalesced in the Democratic Party’s Northern wing. Even at the height of the New Deal coalition, when union households typically voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, there was an understanding that some influence with Republican administrations and legislators was better than outright enmity.

In this light, organized labor’s close alignment with the Democratic Party during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama was the anomaly, rather than the historical norm. And it is arguable that this strategy only demonstrated labor’s declining political influence. Once in office, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama prioritized global trade and their party’s ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, contrary to pledges to rebuild infrastructure and spread advanced manufacturing hubs. Pro-labor Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, were largely stuck playing defense against the political fallout from accelerated offshoring. O’Brien might be grateful for Biden’s efforts to reverse course, but he knows that unions allowed themselves to become irrelevant on trade and other issues by depending on Democratic leaders to hold firm when the pattern proved otherwise.

O’Brien’s strategy thus points to one of the great paradoxes of the Trump era. There is no shortage of reasons to oppose Trump, whether in terms of his actual policies and past appointees, his well-documented penchant to incite violence, or his vile personal conduct. With the exception of Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative and a possible contender for Treasury Secretary, the first Trump administration represented big business—something intellectuals on the populist right conceded before Trump’s latest resurgence. Yet Trump, in his more lucid moments, channeled American labor’s grievances and hardships, thereby forcing a much-needed debate within the Democratic Party over how to restore its credibility with union households across the rust belt. However perverse it may be, Trump’s undeniable appeal to a huge swath of workers, particularly in the so-called Blue Wall states, compelled Joe Biden and other national Democrats to do better—to advance worker interests, not just act as a buffer against the most regressive plans of anti-government conservatives and their libertarian financial backers.

O’Brien undoubtedly senses this. So why not play harder for both parties’ affection? His calculus seems clear: Push the Democrats to offer more—to set the bar higher and be far more dependable than they had been before Biden’s “paradigm shift”—while compelling more Republicans to actually be accountable to the workers whom they increasingly rely on to win office. The latter may be harder to pull off, but labor, despite its many obstacles, is enjoying a rare moment in which both parties broadly agree that the old Washington Consensus is finished. If more Republicans grant that economic policy needs to promote social cohesion, family stability, and basic confidence in America’s institutions, and their legislative records begin to back up these positions, that would seem to be a positive development for working people.

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Of course, it would be highly naïve to downplay the trade-offs, particularly as long as Trump leads the GOP. On top of the party’s draconian stance on immigrants and hostility to a woman’s right to an abortion, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies should not be minimized. And there is the crucial matter of the role conservative judges will play far into the future. A growing cohort of congressional Republicans who vote in favor of vocational training, more industrial policy, antitrust action, and collective bargaining could easily be outweighed by a judiciary ironclad in its support of large corporations.

There are also potential downsides regarding labor’s ties to the Democratic Party. The leitmotif of electoral politics since the Reagan era concerns the almost-pathological way in which Democrats court and then ignore industrial and small-town workers; though progressive media often insists the party has not abandoned these blue-collar voters—that they are, rather, hopelessly in thrall to the right’s culture war (itself a condescending way to deny the Brahmin Left’s aversion to working-class patriotism)—the dearth of political investment in states like Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana where Democrats were once competitive is a total indictment of the liberal consultant class. Finally, alert to the multigenerational backlash to globalization, the Democrats under Biden have started to funnel billions in investment to counties and states that lean Republican. Yet, whether because of inflation or other trends that have driven up total living costs—or perhaps anemic state-level parties incapable of honing a strong message—no electoral benefit had redounded to Biden in the months before the June debate sealed his fate.

Whether working-class views of Biden’s industrial strategy can change under Kamala Harris, now the party’s likely presidential nominee, remains to be seen. Democrats have a small window to distill the impact of Biden’s myriad policies, turn the page on inflation, and advance a vision of economic opportunity in the 21^st century. But an electoral blowout for the Republicans in November, underpinned by further gains among union households, could seriously fracture the relationship between Democrats and the labor movement.

One plausible scenario is that the Democratic establishment will quietly marginalize unions outside parts of the service sector and double-down on a “values”-first strategy linking suburban and urban professionals horrified by neo-Jacksonian populism. In turn, the party base would continue to evolve as an amalgam of affluent progressives steeped in “emancipatory” cultural beliefs and an urban underclass seeking relief from the churn of dead-end service jobs—a rather paternalistic arrangement unconducive to becoming big-tent social democratic party.

Needless to say, that outcome would be electoral poison. There is, evidently, no magic playbook for Democrats to reclaim the hearts and minds of workers whose parents and grandparents showed fealty to the party of the New Deal. But there are some practical things Democrats can do now and into the future, regardless of the election. Most importantly, national Democrats need to ditch orchestrated listening tours and rebuild local party branches that are responsive to workers suffering from intimidation, wage theft, or injury. From meat packers to supermarket staff to Amazon warehouse employees, workers in many locales have no real means to flag exploitation and seek help. Failing to be politically active where these workers reside simply leaves them captive to Republicans more inclined to mouth populist rhetoric than counter local magnates.

But Democrats also need to surpass the GOP on the issue of restoring national production and continue the path begun under Biden. This emphasis goes hand-in-hand with rebuilding political trust in so-called flyover regions. Former manufacturing communities deserve more than becoming Walmart and Amazon company towns. Responding to their needs thus requires a party that is less tethered to tech, finance, and upscale urban real estate. It demands one that can navigate the industrial, agricultural, housing, schooling, and civic concerns that an older generation of Democrats once intimately understood. Only then can Democrats truly expand opportunity and security for every American worker.

Justin Vassallo is a freelance writer who specializes in American political development and comparative/international political economy, with an additional focus on social democratic and progressive policymaking.