DSA Electeds Must Lead The Resistance To Trump

Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris in the November election has many questioning the ability of the Democratic party to resist Trump. Among liberals, fear and hopelessness abound, with many giving into doomerism, bitterly repeating regressive narratives placing blame on one demographic or the other. DSA electeds must take the lead in reorienting this anger and hopelessness in more constructive directions. The political void left by the Democratic party offers an opportunity for DSA electeds to seize the initiative and offer a vision of resistance that can pull people back from the brink of despair. They must lead by example and make the case that resisting Trump and creating a better world is possible.

The Democrats will not save us

The Democrats have shown time and again that they are neither willing nor capable of resisting Trump. Their insistence that Trump would be the end of democracy is now undercut by their newfound willingness to work with him. Not only have they worked with him before, but during Biden’s time in office they have also adopted many of the same regressive policies that they have derided Trump for. Biden is on track to deport more people this year than in any of the Trump years. Under his administration, the US is producing more oil than ever, more than any other country ever, exacerbating the climate emergency and careening us over the 1.5 degrees of warming target set by the Paris Agreement. With “friends” like these, who needs enemies? 

DSA and DSA-adjacent electeds such as Bernie Sanders or AOC who, prior to the election, heavily tied themselves to the Biden/Harris administration, have lost trust among workers and especially the left, with AOC having her DSA endorsement revoked. Bernie and AOC started as political outsiders, which was a part of their appeal. By trying to incorporate themselves into the Democratic party, a brand which is rapidly becoming toxic among working people, their main source of trust with their base (their outsider status) was compromised. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, these two important figures seem to be moving in opposite directions. On the one hand, Bernie has distanced himself from the Democrats, making several scathing statements about the failure of Democrats. On the other hand, despite the democrat’s devastating loss, AOC has continued in her attempts at party entryism, vying for (and losing) a bid to chair the House Ways & Means committee, and reportedly signalling to Democrats that she would cease her support for primary challenges to establishment Democrats. In either case, they must remember now that their appeal comes from being different from the Democrats, not from being a part of the Democratic Party.

We have seen that, absent sustained pressure from DSA members, DSA electeds are susceptible to being assimilated with a system that supports capitalism and empire. This has been marked most clearly by several DSA electeds’ disappointing support for pro-Israel policies such as supporting Iron Dome funding. Jamaal Bowman, who had initially supported the Iron Dome, has since reversed his position due to pressure from DSA. While his most recent primary bid was defeated amid massive spending on his opponents from AIPAC, by taking a principled state in line with DSA, he rejoins the larger left movement that will fight to see him re-elected in the future.

Progressive outsiders like AOC have chosen to fall in line with the Democrats hoping they will score political points that can be used to influence minor reforms later. But this strategy is a dead end. The capitalist system is exceedingly efficient at absorbing popular will when it is expressed through acceptable channels. Some reforms are occasionally won after years of sustained struggle from workers, but economic power is still kept in the hands of capital, and therefore any wins can still be clawed back over time by the ruling class.

Only through a rupture with the existing social and economic order can we win a better life for working people, through socialism. As Marxists we understand that we cannot reform capitalism from within, but only through confrontation and class struggle. This helps us to understand why the Democratic party will never be able to truly resist Trump or our nation’s trend towards fascism because, while they differ on secondary questions, the more general material interests of Democratic Party donors actually align very much with those of the Republican party; the two parties represent different wings of the US capitalist class, but ultimately they both remain loyal to the class as a whole. 

The material interests of Democratic politicians and the capitalist donors they represent means that they have no incentive to go outside the norms and institutions of the US’s capitalist-democratic legal system  in order to resist Trump, even when the Democratic Party’s base wants desperately to resist. This remains true even when Trump seeks to erode that same legal system from the inside out. Democrats will always be institutionalists because our institutions were created by and for them and their donors. 

The question, then, is how should DSA and DSA electeds orient themselves to the Democrats and to Trump in the next four years? 

Socialists must lead the charge

We believe DSA electeds must take the lead in confronting the ruling class represented by Trump, the Democrats, and the Republicans. Trump’s administration is bound to create and accelerate crises in the coming years, and socialists must be prepared to organize within and against these crises. We must be ready before crises boil over so that the working class is already organized to take advantage of them.  We will likely see large protest movements spring up to resist Trump’s policies and DSA electeds should help ensure that we learn the lessons of past uprisings to create a more lasting resistance this time around. 

In order for anti-Trump protests to develop into genuine mass movements which are a threat to the capitalist system, they must balance the twin goals of maintaining mass appeal while also retaining a revolutionary direction and militant orientation. But one lesson we’ve learned from recent protest movements such as the George Floyd uprising, is that movements without clear decision making and demands are vulnerable to cooptation from both liberals and ultra-leftists. In 2020, many marches and demonstrations were commandeered by anyone with confidence and a bullhorn. Additionally, without clear decision making structures, demands could be made by any group claiming ownership over the movement, demands that were often watered down by more liberal elements or narrowed to include only ultra-left demands divorced from a wider program to win them, and which isolated them from wider layers of society. Militant or confrontational protests were turned into tame sit-down meetings with police on the one hand, while on the other militant marches divorced from a broader strategy moved in circles back to the same places to stand off against cops, taking the pressure off of the police and elected officials by dissipating the growing energy in the movement.

DSA electeds already have a certain democratic mandate to help lead protests, and they can use this mandate to help facilitate greater protest democracy. DSA electeds must resist attempts by liberals to demobilize the movement or by ultra-leftists to hijack it, and should push for protest democracy as a way to prevent protests from being either defanged or derailed. By transforming protesters from consumers of protest to active participants, we can ensure that protesters are more informed and bought into the demands of the movement. And protest democracy can unleash the creative energy of thousands of protesters, empowering new ideas and self-organization far more powerful than what can be planned by a small group of coordinators. To help protests develop in this way, DSA’s national leadership should create a guide to establishing protest democracy that electeds and members can learn and proliferate to argue for its necessity, and organize training sessions for members and electeds on protest democracy and why it is important. That way when shit hits the fan, we’re ready.

Moreover, DSA electeds need not wait for popular energy to bubble up – they should use their office to plan and lead protests, focusing on linking together causes, making comprehensive socialist demands and reinforcing the notion that protest movements must be disruptive to the status quo. DSA electeds should find ways to escalate confrontations with the ruling class over Trump’s policies, even going so far as tactically violating unjust laws. In 2017, in response to Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban, airport shutdown protests spread rapidly across the country. DSA electeds could organize actions like that, especially ones that disrupt vital transportation, shipping, and manufacturing infrastructure. 

Electeds should also use their offices to provide cover for organizers and protesters on the ground. For example, many fear new abortion restrictions during Trump’s tenure; DSA electeds could resist this effort by setting up campaigns to mail abortion medication from their offices to those in states that ban abortions, daring the administration to stop them. They could also stage occupations of government buildings, as we saw in 2020 in Seattle or during the Palestine student movement last summer.  

With repressive state violence a distinct possibility — such as trumped up charges against protesters, RICO cases, or getting disappeared — electeds should also use their offices to keep track of protestors who have been unjustly imprisoned, organizing for bail funds, and using any means at their disposal to keep Trump’s overreaches in the news. Moreover, it is much harder to ignore protestors getting arrested when one of them is an elected representative.

Strikes are one of the most potent tools that the working class has at its disposal, so DSA electeds should support labor actions and push for more radical interventions by trade unions. Electeds should build connections with the labor movement to organize protests and strikes in response to Trump’s policies. Elon Musk and DOGE are threatening to heavily cut the federal workforce, much of which is unionized, so there is likely to be a confrontation over this policy. DSA electeds should support public sector unions in fighting cuts. In 2019, when Trump was threatening a government shutdown, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, called for a general strike in response, and began mobilizing for a flight attendant’s strike, within hours Trump had agreed to provisionally reopen the government for three weeks. In 2017 the LA ILWU dockworkers struck in protest of Trump’s support of “Right to Work” and other anti-worker stances. The ILWU has in the past refused to load goods bound for Apartheid South Africa or for Chile’s Pinochet regime and shut down the ports in protest of the Iraq war in 2004. 

DSA electeds can help foster these movements, by campaigning with unions and speaking with members to raise class consciousness of the political power that unions have. DSA electeds should support pro-union legislation and oppose efforts to weaken unions during Trump’s term, aid unions in making ambitious demands, and help them fight for them.

Overall, DSA members have a tremendous responsibility to provide political, strategic, and organizational leadership to anti-Trump protests, and DSA electeds have the most potential to fulfill this responsibility and therefore have a key role to play.

We need an alternative to what Trump’s offering

DSA electeds cannot focus solely on resisting Trump, they must also articulate a clear and hopeful alternative. 

As with Trump’s first presidency, there is sure to be a steady stream of outrages created by his administration. The relentlessness of attacks is the point. We cannot merely resist this onslaught – fighting merely to prevent things from getting worse can only lead to burn out and demoralization of the movement. 

Instead, we must offer a better path. Many feel instinctively that the system is not working for them and are looking for any alternative to it. Part of the allure of Trump is that he promises to blow up the system that many have become disillusioned by. Even false promises of change such as the initial “joy” campaign of Harris or the “hope and change” promised by Barack Obama have shown that when a campaign even offers untrue promises of change, they will resonate with a population desperate for something different. Bernie’s broad and enduring popularity can be explained by the fact that he offered a sincere vision of a world better than what we have today, and a plan to achieve it. By pushing for a transformative alternative, DSA electeds can capture disaffected workers into our movement. 

Socialist policies are popular – Medicare for All has majority approval, with 8 in 10 democrats supporting it. Abortion rights amendments passed in 7 states, 4 of which went for Trump (and Florida had a majority with 57% but not enough for a supermajority required for amendments). In Missouri, a state that also went for Trump, passed a referendum increasing minimum wage and granting sick leave to workers. DSA electeds should fight for these policies and more. 

Given that no DSA elected official enjoys a legislative majority, we face an uphill battle in convincing the general public that passing a socialist program is possible. This is especially true for national electeds, a small and shrinking minority in Congress. And truly, it is highly unlikely that the number of socialist legislators grows in a steady, linear manner until we have the numbers needed to pass sweeping reforms. But history does not unfold linearly. Rather, history is full of sudden ruptures and explosive revolutions, when periods of stasis are broken suddenly as millions take action, entering the field of history which is usually reserved for a small group of elites.

The priority of DSA electeds should not be to focus only on the next achievable legislation, but to expand the imaginations of the masses to understand politics as something more than what happens every four years. DSA electeds must champion a mass movement based approach, calling back to past revolutionary periods such as the Civil Rights movement or the mass sit-down strikes of the Great Depression, where mass action opened up political opportunities which seemed impossible just a few years earlier. In the absence of a legislative majority, national electeds’ role, therefore, is primarily propaganda and raising class consciousness, but not only through messaging, but by helping to lead the masses in struggle, showing them the truth of revolutionary potential in fact.

While the role of electeds on the national level is primarily propagandistic, there are options at the local level for passing meaningful reforms. Local DSA electeds may have more ability to enact specific reforms, as resistance to socialist-leaning policies locally is often lesser than on the national stage, and progressive majorities are often more concentrated in a handful of key left-leaning urban neighborhoods. DSA members doing good things in the community are also often able to go less noticed by reactionary national media that would demonize them. DSA has had many local successes: passing historic minimum wage reform in Renton, WA, passing a Green New Deal, rent control, raising minimum wage, and tenant protections in Portland, ME, and winning a historic tenant bill of rights in Tacoma. These reforms are not enough, but they are helpful as evidence for working people of how socialist electeds can deliver positive change.

As we have laid out in our article DSA Must Move Decisively To Launch A New Party, one of the top priorities of DSA going into 2025 should be to break from the Democratic Party and begin forming a new party. DSA electeds should take an active part in this process. 

In local elections this has already started, with some DSA electeds relying on DSA organizing for the majority of their campaign efforts. These campaigns are testing grounds for DSA organizing tactics, mobilizing members, canvassing, signature gathering, etc. But if creating organizing infrastructure were the only step in making a party, we might already have one. A new party must be a political extension of the working class, as a worker-driven organization fighting for workers. To get there we must connect together the smaller successful local movements into a wider party movement making use of strikes, sit-ins, occupations, protests, votes, and initiatives, and any other means at our disposal. 

People are eager for change, eager to fight back against Trump, but that won’t come from the Democrats. We need our own party, with workers selected from our own ranks that we put forward to fight for us and we need to become comfortable with holding those electeds accountable. DSA electeds have a responsibility to use their mandate to lead in building the mass movement that we will need if we are going to beat Trump, and we must hold them to that responsibility!