The 2024 presidential election exposed to the world the deep crisis facing the Democratic Party. There may not be agreement on the causes of this crisis within the party itself (or on what course to take now), but what is clear is that the Democratic Party has lost the support of wide swaths of the multi-racial working class, breaking apart the precarious coalition of voters that in some form or another, with ebbs and flows, made up its base since the 1960s. It is clear that this is the deepest crisis the party has faced since the New Deal and there is no obvious way out. 

The theory of “class dealignment,” explored by both liberal and progressive/social democratic thinkers in recent years, presents ample evidence of this “breakup” between the Democratic Party and the working class; it also provides a compelling narrative for the depth of the problem this presents for the Democrats. The logic goes that the Democratic Party must win back the working class, but the Democrats cannot do so if they do not advance policies in its interests, even if that means confronting the short term interests of the sectors of capital that have structurally and politically supported it for the last decades.

A growing sector of the Democratic Party — and the reformist Left — is taking up these conclusions to insist that the Democratic Party has to reorient itself if it is to win back working class voters and provide a path for progressive policies in the United States. Being anti-Trump is not enough, they argue. Democrats need to present their own substantive vision that actually engages with the demands of working people who are struggling to make ends meet, concerned with climate change and war, and feel the deep injustices of American democracy.

But this isn’t the whole story. To understand the depth of the crisis facing the Democratic Party and its effects on the very fabric of the bipartisan regime means understanding the deeper crisis of the neoliberal world order. And when we understand that it’s clear that trying to reorient the Democratic Party to recapture working class votes is not a viable path to fighting back the advance of the Far Right or for fighting for a different kind of society.

The Democrats’ crisis and the threat to its ability to govern was never simply the result of a series of policy choices over the past two decades, as several accounts of class dealignment claim; it is an expression of a frayed political order that has not yet reconfigured itself. In other words, the direction the party will decide on to win back working-class voters (or not) is balanced against the historic project of resolving the problem of declining U.S. hegemony. The process of that decline has led to huge shifts in consciousness among the working class and oppressed, and even important episodes of class struggle.

As the recent protests against mass deportations in Los Angeles have shown, class struggle presents challenges for the Democratic Party — the graveyard of social movements from the Civil Rights Movement to Vietnam and Black Lives Matter. Will it continue to act to de-escalate these explosions of activity from below to protect the institutions of U.S. democracy, as Newsom has done by trying to both present a challenge to Trump and distance itself from the more radical sectors of the movement? Is it possible — in a scenario that leaves the party few options — that it will be forced to mobilize this discontent and risk more openly confronting the Bonapartist elements of Trump 2.0 and consequently a more volatile situation that opens up the possibility of class struggle that the Democrats cannot contain?

The working class and oppressed are not only left to bear the brunt of the attacks the Trump administration has unleashed against democratic rights, labor rights, and the last tendrils of the U.S. welfare state. They are the ones who have and will organize the struggle against these attacks — attacks on immigrants, on the Palestine movement, on unions and the workforce, and on social programs. And their anger is not only directed at Republicans, but at the Democrats who not only opened the door for the Far Right, but launched similar attacks while in power. The generation now facing down Trump 2.0 is the generation that protested against governors of blue states who sent the National Guard to repress an uprising against police brutality and racism; that flooded the streets for Palestine with signs reading “Genocide Joe”; that is organizing in its workplaces to stand up to the very corporations that fund the Democrats’ campaigns; and that questions a society where billionaires take joy rides up to space while we have our noses ground in the dirt of long hours for shit pay, student debt, climate catastrophe, and genocide. The Democrats defend that system and they are paying the price.

In this context, the horizon of the socialist Left cannot be fighting to pressure the Democratic Party to reverse its rightward turn and embrace progressive legislation on the Democrats’ terms. We must take seriously the task of building the independent power of the working class from below, using the weakness of the Democratic Party to break its stranglehold on our class and to build our own political organizations that can channel the shifts in consciousness of the working class — forged out of its experiences of crisis and class struggle in the last two decades — toward a new political and economic order.

The Emergence of the Party of the Neoliberal Status Quo

Broadly speaking, “class dealignment” has come to describe how the working class has drifted away from the Democratic Party, reflected primarily in national voting trends. As Jacobin’s Neal Meyer writes, it is the process by which the “historic coupling of workers and the center left, on the one hand, and the middle class and the center right, on the other, has been broken.”¹Neal Meyer, “The Democrats Embrace Dealignment” Catalyst 8, no. 4 (2025): 9-51 Dealignment has been tracked by figures on the social democratic left like Meyer and Jared Abbott²Abbott, Jared. “Class Dealignment Is the Defining Political Challenge of Our Time.”Jacobin, April 26, 2024. in Catalyst and Jacobin. It is also increasingly being analyzed by more liberal thinkers, most notably John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

For the purposes of this piece we will focus on the writings of Meyer and Abbott. They argue that this historic relationship of the working class to the Democratic Party as a base of support took shape in the consensus formed around the New Deal and lasted — with ebbs and flows — until the advent of neoliberalism. This marked a rightward shift for the party. Its embrace of neoliberal policies that were more blatantly anti-worker in favor of more openly pro-business postures changed the party and consequently its voting base. Against mainstream liberal accounts, these authors argue that the changes to the base of the Democratic party are not merely ideological, but class-based. Class dealignment is the source of the crisis in which the party is now mired as it struggles to present an alternative to the rise of right-wing populism embodied in Trump and the MAGA movement. Though they may differ on when this process started or solidified, dealignment accounts trace how the neoliberal onslaught drastically changed the balance of class forces. 

Democrats and Republicans responded to changes in the global economy and sluggish economic growth between the 1960s and 1980s. In the United States — for such accounts take a purely national framework when describing neoliberalism — the Carter administration attempted to resolve the economic crisis of the 1970s by going against the logic of the New Deal toward deregulatory measures and de-emphasizing social spending. But it was the so-called “Reagan Revolution” that opened the floodgates, going on the offensive against the old order and bringing neoliberalism to the world stage alongside other leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher. As Meyer describes, this meant “a wholesale attack on progressive income taxes, regulations, unions, and the welfare state.” 

The Democratic Party followed the initiative of the Republican Party, going full throttle under Clinton in the post-Reagan era. After Reagan did the dirty work of crushing class struggle, the so-called “New Democrats” accepted the new neoliberal world order with a rightward turn. The Democratic Party made alliances with new sectors of capital in the finance and tech sectors. It turned toward a program of deficit reduction, free trade agreements like NAFTA, cuts to social spending, and the valorization of the free market and private sector above all that changed the terrain of labor and manufacturing in the United States and undermined the union movement and the rise of a hardened business unionist bureaucracy.

In these years the Democratic Party slowly rebranded itself as “moderate” on economic issues and “liberal” on social issues from racism to LGBTQ+ rights, for example. It went on the offensive to create better conditions for globalization while at the same time attempting to win over people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ people to the party and its neoliberal agenda. These rhetorical concessions were a response to the new consciousness that arose from social struggles in the 60s and 70s. But the latter did not mean a return to the social spending, pro-union policies of the 1930s, but an attempt to construct a new base of support. As Meyer describes, “The future of the party lay in a new alliance between white middle-class voters and people of color of all social classes […] the party’s enthusiastic pivot toward the middle class was visible in the redirection of its fundraising energy and dollars. Its electoral targets moved toward much more affluent, majority-white districts in the country’s booming postindustrial metropolises.”

As dealignment theorists observe, leading the neoliberal onslaught alienated working class and poor people who were the targets and ultimately the losers of such policies both nationally and internationally. It was the Democratic Party that consciously chose time and time again to abandon the working class, not the other way around. It realigned itself first and foremost with new sectors of capital and pivoted toward more moderate middle class voters; as Meyer describes, the Democrats were “the first movers in this process” of dealignment.

But dealignment was not an uninterrupted march out of the party; as Abbott points out, both the Clinton and Obama administrations were able to pull sectors of working class voters back into the fold — if only temporarily — with rhetoric that attempted to give concessions to the working class or “new visions” of neoliberalism. Fundamentally, however, the Democratic Party’s neoliberal turn — indeed the bipartisan regime’s neoliberal turn — oriented the party toward different sectors of society. It was in this way that manual workers, for example, went from supporting FDR’s Democratic Party by 60 percent in 1944, to less than 30 percent supporting the Democrats today. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party courted billionaire donors and the finance sectors, giving them more open roles in the party apparatus and campaign finance. As Abbott explains, “middle- and upper-class identification with the Democratic Party surpassed that of the working class by the end of the Obama administra­tion.” 

The Obama years marked, as Abbott and Meyer explain, an acceleration in this process of dealignment, which reached a fever pitch in 2016 with Donald Trump’s first election and continued through the 2024 election to today. This period has called into question what was left of the working class’s identification with the so-called “Third Way” politics presented to different degrees by the Democratic Party over the last thirty years. This affected not only the so-called “white working class,” but a broad sector of workers across race and ethnicity. Abbott writes:

It is clear that the largest decline has occurred among working-class (low-income, low-education) white voters, whose support for Dem­ocrats dropped 16 percentage points between 2008 and 2022. That said, we also observe 7.7 and 6.8 percentage point declines among African American and Latino voters, respectively. In the case of working-class Latino voters, we see a precipitous decline of 20 points between 2016 and 2022.

This data shows that the so-called “Obama Coalition” was not the future of the Democratic Party, but a distorted reflection of its past. Dealignment moved ahead at a faster pace after the Democrats reaffirmed their allegiance to finance capital in the 2008 crisis and hung the working class out to dry.

Neoliberalism as a Phase of Capitalism, Not a Policy

Unlike other liberal accounts that see shifts in voter turnout and the turn toward the reactionary, xenophobic populism of the Trumpist GOP in a vacuum, dealignment accounts identify the driver of dealignment as the party itself. 

Meyer and Abbott, for example, present a convincing overview of shifts in the voting base of the Democratic Party that cohere with the party’s turn toward courting new sectors of finance and tech capital whose interests came into more direct conflict with the party’s New Deal program. But this is only one side of the crisis of the Democratic Party.

A limit of such approaches is that they do not offer a fuller picture of why these shifts occurred — the global structural features driving the party’s politics in the era of neoliberalism and its relationship to class struggle — and in doing so they leave open the possibility of a Democratic Party that with the right proposals can be far friendlier to progressive politics that favor the working class than it ever actually was. They obfuscate the role the Democratic Party has historically played to ensure stability for U.S. imperialism both internationally and nationally, including subverting class struggle and hamstringing the independent organization of the working class. Consequently, they miss the “volatility” of the political moment that has accelerated the crisis of the Democratic Party and therefore opened the possibility of more abrupt changes in the relationship between the working class and its historical representation.

Meyer and Abbott, who locate the beginning of the actual process of dealignment in the 1990s, argue (though from different angles) that it is the party’s enthusiastic embrace of a hard-line neoliberalism and its attempts to align its electoral strategy with those “policy decisions” that alienated the working class and transformed the party into the billionaire-funded machine that it is today. Lurking here is the assumption that it wasn’t the Democrats’ neoliberal turn in and of itself that drove dealignment — creating a straight line from the end of the New Deal to the advent of neoliberalism — but the fact that the Democrats embraced and reinforced its anti-worker policies so fully. As Abbott explains:

[W]orking-class dealignment does not extend as far back in time and appears much less ineluctable than in standard left-wing accounts, which assume that Democrats’ increasing capitulation to neoliberalism has been the primary driver of working-class defections.

According to these accounts there were opportunities for the Democratic Party to retake the best elements of the implementation of social programs as during the New Deal and the Great Society, but that the Democrats chose the opposite path time and time again. It squandered such opportunities by watering down even basic expansions of the welfare state to appease business interests. As Meyer explains:

Each Democratic administration has pledged obeisance to the party’s enthusiastic (and sometimes, at least temporarily, one-sided) search for a partnership with the business world. […] [N]o Democratic administration has, in recent decades, delivered on either a substantial rewriting of labor law in favor of unions or any expansion of public health insurance that directly challenges the for-profit health care model. 

It’s true that the Democrats doubled down on this classically neoliberal approach, betting that the expansion of social rights for sectors of oppressed communities would keep certain sectors of the working class voting blue, but this alone does not explain why the Democratic Party defended the neoliberal status quo or the acceleration of dealignment and the party’s crisis in the last twenty years.

The Democratic Party’s turn away from expanding the welfare state to becoming ardent champions of neoliberal austerity and a renewed imperialist posture abroad, coupled with a socially progressive facade, was never just the “result of Democrats’ policy decisions in the 1990s and their work since 2000 to actively bring their electoral strategy into line with their economic program” as Meyer describes it. 

Neoliberalism isn’t just a set of national policies — it marked the reactionary development of imperialism across the world stage, a new political,economic, and ideological order. It was an attempt to address global economic malaise — thinning profits and outright economic crisis — with new modes of accumulation, but also to check the influence of challengers on the world stage like the Soviet Union and penetrate new markets in the former workers states. Nationally, the state pursued a massive redistribution of wealth toward the rich and gutted the welfare state that got in the way of unfettered profit-making.

The imposition of this new order required a deep consensus on the part of the bourgeois class and the bipartisan regime that represents its interests. In one form this was a bloody attempt to stomp out the activity of the working class from below to defy economic crisis and imperialist aggression. But the Democratic Party played another key role in generating this consensus, using its influence over the workers and social movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to pacify class struggle, using the gains of imperialist wealth to fund limited social band-aids to stave off potential discontent.

But this power began to exhaust itself with the 2008 economic crisis. The Great Recession marked a rapid advance  in the crisis of accumulation and led to a deep questioning of the neoliberal world order, which we see reflected in the crises of traditional parties across the world and the rise of new political phenomena. As credit institutions collapsed, threatening to topple the house of cards on which the neoliberal order was built, the Democratic Party led by Barack Obama bailed out the banks and left working people to fend for themselves. And while this averted catastrophe for the capitalist system in the short term, providing the conditions for a relative recovery, the economy never truly bounced back, with anemic growth in labor productivity and a sluggish rate of profit in both the heart of imperialism and across the world.

In a sense, this exposed the Democratic Party’s role as the managing party of neoliberalism, one that was wedded to the status quo both in policy and structure, with ever more limited ways of mitigating neoliberalism’s crisis. 

The task of the Democratic Party is to defend internationally and nationally the fraying institutions of U.S. hegemony in decline — and this is proving to be a dead end, both for the Democrats and for those who see it as a vehicle for progressive politics. The neoliberal shift of the Democratic Party that aligned it with new sectors of capital has limited the range of motion for the Democratic Party and its ability to channel anger from below to the ballot box. The Democratic Party is restricted to vacillating between right and center and finds itself without a compelling vision to win back the votes and the support of the working class and even its institutions. 

This of course came to a head with Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, where anti-Trump sentiment was not compelling enough to allow the Democrats to cling to victory. The GOP has been able to break itself free from the fetters of neoliberalism ultimately by turning to the vision presented by the Far Right, and going on the offensive with an agenda suited to the end of the neoliberal world order. In contrast, the Democrats have been trying to steer a sinking ship. The Biden administration represented the last gasp of this effort, momentarily revitalizing the Obama coalition only to have it pronounced dead in 2024.

What emerges from this extended narration of the Democratic Party’s trajectory is that it acted to mediate the relationship between the ruling class and the working class, using the rhetoric of the social movements to mobilize working people out of the streets, out of their unions and organizations, and to the ballot box. This was a response to a challenging global economic scenario. Against the idea that the Democrats could have just as well defended workers’ rights against the neoliberal onslaught, the Democrats acted in favor of the class they ultimately represent.

The Biden Course [Mis]Correction

The Biden administration emerged victorious in 2020 as a result of the Democratic Party’s massive maneuver to not only shut Bernie Sanders out of the race, but to coopt and pacify the massive shifts in consciousness of a working class that had the experiences of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and the pandemic. In that sense, the 2020 election and Biden’s win tested the limits of what the staunchly center party of neoliberalism could do to appeal to the aspirations of the working class.

Biden leaned into comparisons to FDR and proclaimed himself to be the “most pro-union president” in U.S. history, attempting to garner working-class support for an agenda backed by finance and tech capital; in return for that support, his proposed social policies aimed to mitigate the worst effects of the post-2008 social/economic scenario and respond to shifts in the consciousness of the working class following the pandemic. Part of this effort involved strengthening the ties between his administration and the leaderships of the unions in order to usher union members back toward the party. A marked shift from previous administrations, Biden attempted to repair the relationship of the Democratic Party to the unions in the face of a resurgent labor movement headed by figures like Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien.

Ultimately Biden’s attempts to allocate more federal spending to enact limited social policies that could perhaps appeal to the working class were hamstrung by Republicans and, crucially, members of his own party representing blocs of capital that saw these measures as being at odds with economic growth in a crisis-prone scenario.

On one hand, following the January 6 assault on the Capitol, the GOP reaffirmed its allegiance to Trump, and newly-elected MAGA sectors united to block Biden’s agenda, even after they were repudiated in the 2022 midterms. On the other hand, elements from within Biden’s own party worked to dismantle his policies in an attempt to both assuage sectors of capital unhappy with even tepid “green” proposals, regulation of Big Tech, and increased government spending on social programs;³Indeed, these blocs of capital, who once marked a significant part of the Democratic Party coalition, would move to Trump’s camp in the 2024 election; they supported him with the mandate to gut the federal government and social spending as we saw in the first months of Trump’s second term. from another perspective they aimed to hang onto Trump-sympathetic voters in their districts. The result was the IRA of 2021, which marked the extent of what the neoliberal regime could offer in the face of discontent from the  struggling working class and middle class.

The fact that this crisis “at the top” paralysed Biden’s agenda shows that the effects of dealignment go beyond elections. Without the working class, Biden’s administration did not have the social base to fight for his agenda; having alienated sectors of capital hostile to his economic policies, he did not have the forces to impose that agenda.

New problems emerged for the imperialist party of progressive neoliberalism in the international sphere. While Biden attempted to mend the broken diplomatic fences resulting from Trump’s first term, he was forced to confront new international challenges equipped with the old tools of a unipolar world order with the United States at the top. Those tools proved to be inadequate. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine both laid the decay of U.S. hegemony bare and showed the limits of the United States’ and Europe’s abilities to impose their agenda.

This weakness in the international sphere was deepened by the administration’s full financial, political, and military support for Israel, both in its 2021 offensive and in the genocide it unleashed on October 8, 2023 and which continues today. The Democratic Party set itself staunchly to the right of its voting base, many of whom experienced massive leaps in consciousness, particularly young people, Jewish people breaking with Zionism, and a new generation of activists across the country.

This showed the challenges facing the Democratic Party’s long-standing formula of trying to seize upon demands from below to mobilize people to the polls while demobilizing their struggle in the streets. Shackled by the historic relationship with Israel as an imperialist enclave in the Middle East, the Democrats did not and could not co-opt the pro-Palestine movement. It could not relate to the anti-imperialist sentiment driving the protests and still maintain the international front of the neoliberal status quo. Instead, the Biden administration’s official policy was to denounce and encourage the criminalization of protesters while normalizing extrajudicial Zionist opposition and ceding ground to the Far Right.⁴Zionist mobs rushed the pro-Palestine encampments at UCLA on April 29, 2025, injuring people and opening the door for LAPD to come in sweep the solidarity protest away. Joe Biden remained silent about this violence as he demonized pro-Palestine protesters consistently and called the protests “antisemitic.”

The Palestine movement threw fuel on the fire of the Democrats’ crisis. It created deep rifts in the party that are not separate from tensions related to class dealignment. Establishment sectors of the party held fast to support for the genocide, and the deep economic and political ties between the United States and Israel “were pitted against progressive sectors responding to massive repudiation of the genocide and the United States’ role in it. It showed that not even a genocide could move the Democratic Party from its ardent defense of the institutions of the neoliberal regime.

A Snapshot of Disillusionment with the Democratic Party in 2025

The 2024 election was a resounding vote of dissatisfaction with the Democrats. The results show an acceleration of working-class people leaving the Democratic Party electorate, making the contours of working-class dealignment clearer than before.

We know this story by now. The Democrats, with Kamala Harris at the top of the ballot after Biden’s ouster, lost support among nearly every demographic. The most consequential, of course, was the loss of support from Black and Latino voters, many of whom opted to vote for Trump. Since November, analyses of the election results reinforce the idea that it wasn’t merely low turnout that did Harris in, though it was certainly a factor. According to Nate Silver, Democrats lost a net 6.4 million votes of people who instead voted primarily for Trump, but with nearly 1 million votes going to third parties. In the case of people who voted for Biden and the Democrats in 2020, the Democrats lost a net of 2.7 million voters. Nearly 1 million new voters cast a ballot for Trump. 

Contrary to  Trump’s claim to a mandate however — polls show historically low approval ratings just months in his second term — these results more likely point to votes against the Democrats,  expressing a deep resentment for the party of the status quo and genocide.

Since Trump took office, the Democrats have faced their abysmal approval ratings; Democrats in Congress poll even lower than Trump, in fact. Just 29 percent of people living in the United States currently view the Democrats favorably. Zooming in to the base of the party itself, just 63 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report a favorable view of their own party, down from 72 percent in January and 81 percent at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration.

As we have seen with massive anti-Trump mobilizations, the community-defense protests against ICE raids, and even the thousands of people flocking to Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” events, anger is boiling over from below. This anger also has the Democrats in its sights, after they once again pit all their electoral hopes on being the “anti-Trump” coalition while doing little to actually stop his frontal attacks on democratic rights and social programs, as well as his attempts to consolidate power in the executive branch.  The Democratic Party leaders continue to blame Republican majorities, to put the onus of fighting Trump on the courts, and to urge its base to wait for the midterms to give them a majority in Congress.

Disillusionment touches both parties, however, suggesting that dealignment does not automatically entail realignment — the latter is still in the process of unfolding in a moment when U.S. institutions are being deeply questioned across society. A recent CNN poll found that majorities of Americans have low confidence in both parties and their leaderships, with 43 percent of respondents saying neither party has strong leadership (as opposed to 40 percent who say  Republicans do and 16 percent who say Democrats do) and 44 percent of respondents replying that neither party could “get things done” (as opposed to 36 percent for Republicans and 19 for Democrats).

As Trump oversteps in his anti-immigrant offensive, the protests that have erupted in Los Angeles and that are having aftershocks in cities across the country which both reveal the tensions brewing and the need to organize the discontent with Trump’s plans. 

The next phase of the political alignment of the working class is being written and the terrain is open for what shape that may take — but what is certain is that it will be shaped by class struggle and the response from below to Trump and his agenda.

“Realignment”? Possible Paths for the Graveyard of Social Movements

As the Democrats try to regain their footing in the second Trump administration, there are open divisions among the party and its institutions for how (and whether) Democrats should remake the party in order to win back the working class, and the sectors  the disaffected with  neoliberalism who found solace in Trump or who dropped out of the electorate entirely. The extent to which this is possible, as I have outlined above, is on the one hand limited by the Democrats’ paralysis in trying to stabilize a political order shaken by Trump but also the wider tensions in the international sphere and the global economy. Added to that is the possible challenge of class struggle entering the stage.

The possibility of “realignment” has only become harder in the last four years. One expression of this is the rightward turn among sectors of the party that are once again following the initiative of the Republican Party.This was revealed at the very top, with Kamala Harris carving out a space for herself to the right of Biden on immigration, China, and the economy.

There are those at the head of the party, such as Senator Chuck Schumer from New York or Harris, who unequivocally defend the obsolescent neoliberal regime, who hope that actually the fourth time’s the charm and that anti-Trump sentiment will carry the Democrats to victory in the midterms and in the 2028 election when a Democratic candidate faces Trump’s successor in the GOP. Fundamentally the bet is that as Trump’s Bonapartist characteristics sharpen, Democrats will ride the wave of discontent into renewed faith in neoliberal democracy. Fundamentally, this leadership of the party puts itself in the position of defending the deeply frayed and deeply unpopular institutions of the U.S. regime.

This old guard of the establishment may be faced with the prospect of making way for a new section of a post-Trump configuration, the product of the party’s rightward turn that reached a pitch in the 2022 midterm elections. Its poster child is Gavin Newsom, who is positioning himself now as the face of the anti-Trump, anti-authoritarian resistance and facing off with the president over immigration raids — the exemplar of a fractured “bipartisanship” in the post-Trump era. The governor of California presents as a strongman to rival Trump’s own strongman persona. In recent years Newsom has identified a possible solution to the Democratic Party’s crisis in making more overtures to the right. He has taken a right turn on the question of immigration, crime, and trans rights; he even hosts a podcast where he regularly interviews right-wing personalities like Charlie Kirk in the name of expanding the tent of the Democratic Party. In essence, these sectors of the party hope that following the Republican Party to the right will shake things up enough to open the party up to new or returning voters.

But not all wings of the Democratic Party apparatus — including its intellectuals — think the party can just proceed with its dance between the right and the center, forfeiting stable support from sectors of the working class and middle class. There are those who believe that the Democrats can no longer afford to simply reproduce the neoliberal status quo and that the party needs to put together a “new” program oriented toward meaningfully mitigating the worst effects of neoliberalism on the working class. This involves reconstructing the Democratic Party’s New Deal identity for the twenty-first century. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis are two proponents of such a view, one that is being increasingly reflected by liberal pundits and thinkers. Teixeira and Judis argue that “America needs a Democratic Party that is liberal on economics and moderate and conciliatory on cultural issues.”⁵Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2023), 278. Abbott has termed this view as “anti-woke social democracy.” This formula has been repeated ad nauseum in the wake of the 2024 elections: Democrats need to stay quiet on systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, and immigrants rights. Instead they need to focus on developing ambitious policy proposals — leaning on a strengthened relationship with the union bureaucracy — in favor of working people, even if this means alienating sectors of the middle and upper classes. In the long term this will contribute to the important task — similar to FDR with the New Deal — of getting the working class on board to confront the challenges of a post-neoliberal era, of remaking U.S. hegemony in a new scenario.

This logic is increasingly reflected in the “progressive” wing of the party, such as Sanders and AOC, who after falling in line behind Biden and Harris are now taking a risk to appear to confront the old leadership of the Democratic Party. There are differences within this sector on the question of how much the party should take up “cultural” issues to motivate their proposals. On the one hand there are sectors, following Teixeira and Judis, that want to focus on a strict economic populism, ceding ground to the Far Right on questions of immigration, trans rights, and racism. On the other side there remains within the party a sector, represented by the emergence of figures like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, who want to revitalize the Democratic Party’s formula of mobilizing to demobilize, taking up from within the party the aspirations of the social movements to reach out to more politicized sectors of the working and middle classes. Their economic populism and rhetoric against the billionaires who more openly dictate the party’s policies both at the federal and state level, position them as a permanent opposition within the party that has the ultimate goal of renewing hopes in the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive policies in the United States.

While these sectors of the party coexisted under the Biden administration, temporarily papering over deep fractures, the second Trump administration has and will likely continue to exacerbate these tensions, leading to more open conflicts within the party as we’ve seen with the recent departure from the DNC of party figures like union leaders Randi Weingarten and Lee Saunders. Importantly, however, whatever path the Democrats take, no sector of the Democratic Party has a vision that can actually address the misery that neoliberalism created for hundreds of millions of working people.

The Working Class Takes the Stage 

Returning to the dealignment theorists mentioned above, Abbott calls dealignment “the defining political challenge of our time.” For Abbott and Meyer, the possibility of governance that will favor the working class and meaningfully address the deep inequalities and injustices of the last period must necessarily pass through the Democratic Party. As Abbott writes: 

Progressives fail to take dealignment seriously at their, and the working class’s, own peril. Without reaching more working-class voters, any hopes of a realignment, a dirty break, a clean break, or any other kind of left alternative is dead in the water.

In their analysis, the Democratic Party is the party that has historically given concessions to the working class, concessions that allow the working class to build enough power to gain an electoral upper hand and enact policies that put the interests of the working class over those of the capitalists. On the other side, they argue that if the Democratic Party hopes to remain an active political force — one that can counter Trumpism — it needs to win back its working class base. They argue that the role of working class organization in this moment is to take “a more aggressive course to challenge the party.” 

This paints the working class as a mass of maneuver, a voting bloc, a pressure group to force the hand of politicians to take up more progressive policies. Strong, militant unions; general strikes and student occupations; mass protests against war, genocide, racism, and transphobia: such initiatives of the working class ultimately serve to push the Democratic Party — or even an eventual, possible third party configuration — to take up progressive policies.

Until then, our horizon is hopelessly limited to merely fighting back the onslaught on democratic rights, workers rights, and living conditions while hacking away at local and state elections to get more progressives elected. In their estimate, reversing dealignment could take decades. For now, the working class is on the defensive, flitting between the two capitalist parties.

This strategic conclusion comes from an analysis that, as I hope to have shown above, fails to take into consideration the complex dynamics formed by the crisis of neoliberalism and its effects on the American regime and class struggle. By continuing their role as the defenders of the neoliberal status quo, de-escalating and demobilizing class struggle in response to Trump’s attacks, the Democrats do not just risk pushing voters to abstention, third parties, or the Republicans; this is the surest route to strengthening Trump’s Bonapartism and further authoritarian measures.

But in the current scenario where it is hamstrung by its own defense of the frayed institutions of neoliberalism, the Democratic Party could very well be forced to change tack in the way that thinkers like Meyer and Abbott advise, orienting more toward the working class and its institutions; they may lean more heavily on the party’s allies outside the party, such as union leaders who veer between the Democratic Party and Trump in order to mobilize its base to take advantage of anti-Trump sentiment.

But this possible path — going from the party’s historic role of demobilizing class struggle to in part ensuring its mobilization — risks fanning the flames of class struggle. And while the Democrats may very well find a way to tame that energy back into policies that offer limited relief in a troubled economic scenario, those flames could also catch and spread beyond their control.

For when the working class organizes from below, it is not a voting bloc, but a class with its own interests. In the course of its struggles it is forced to confront its leaderships that try to contain its rage and aspirations. And at a moment when the Democratic Party’s relationship to the working class is especially weak, such divisions could lead to new leaps in consciousness of our class.

There is no path toward organizing the shifts in consciousness of the working class — honed in real political experiences in the streets and at the hands of the two bourgeois parties — that does not pass through a reckoning with the Democratic Party. The question of political organization, independent political organization, cannot come to fruition without questioning the regime. It is only by uniting our struggles from below that we will be able to stop Trump’s authoritarian attacks at the same time that we fight against attacks on our living conditions in an increasingly volatile international situation

Our task as the Left is to ensure that the next political order — which will not come about without uprisings and repression — will not reorganize itself for the benefit of the capitalist class, but instead for the needs of the working class and oppressed.