What The Hell America!

Last November, the Democrats suffered an embarrassing defeat to Donald Trump, giving the GOP control of the White House and both houses of Congress. The loss was in part the fruit of a decades-long process of class dealignment, in which the Democratic Party’s embrace of corporate-friendly policies has increasingly driven working-class voters away. Trump’s Republican Party, meanwhile, has won over some of those voters with populist stances on immigration and trade while attacking union rights and promising bigger handouts for the rich.

In response to Democratic failure, Bernie Sanders has called for more working-class candidates to run for office as independents. Dan Osborn, a former union strike leader who last year came within striking distance of winning a Senate seat as an independent in deep-red Nebraska, suggests the potential of the approach to win over working-class voters who have become disaffected with the Democratic Party. But what might it mean for the working class to have an organized representation of its interests on the political scene? In the 1990s, as Democrats appeared increasingly happy to join the GOP in its attacks on labor and the welfare state, a number of progressive unions attempted to launch their own independent political party.

In a roundtable discussion earlier this year, Jacobin contributor and Socialist Register editor Stephen Maher spoke with some leading organizers of the Labor Party to discuss their experience and what it might tell us about the prospects for independent working-class politics today. Participants included Carl Rosen, general president of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and a former participant in the Labor Party organizing efforts; Jenny Brown, former cochair of the Labor Party Organizing Committee in Gainesville, Florida, for ten years, and now an assistant editor at Labor Notes; Mark Dudzic, former national organizer of the Labor Party and current chair of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare, and Howard Botwinick, associate professor of economics at SUNY Cortland and former vice chair of the New York Labor Party. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.