The “parliamentary cretinism” of the Democrats’ opposition to Trump

Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy.

On August 1, the 9^th circuit court of appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the U.S.) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used a pretext of “national security” to void union contracts in multiple agencies across the federal government.

Within days, agencies across the federal government—most significantly, the Veterans Administration—ripped up their union contracts.

The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic congressmembers from the current 13 to eight. That would leave the Texas congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024.

Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court sanctioned union-busting with a yawn if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to the battle stations.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged to ask California voters to vote in a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander that state to net at least five, and as many as nine, new Democrat-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who saw him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever-cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan.

Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime?

Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about their jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump.

The liberal opposition to Trump can only conceive of defeating him and Trumpism at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede that is an existential question for them.

To bring it back to the labor example, it’s clear that aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labor movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labor leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionize the federal workforce.

In a labor movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organizing the unorganized, days of action and the like to galvanize a real opposition to Trump. But for most labor leaders, this is not even part of their thought process.

As long-time labor activist and socialist Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview: “We have slid into a period in our labor movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on-track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.”

The atrophy of social movement organization and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-governmental organization leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn legalized abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. This mobilization stayed the Supreme Court’s—then, as now, under a Republican-appointed majority—hand.

But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith into the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law, especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster.

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism:

“For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the 9th Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked,” Kelley told The Hill. “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.”

Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Shumer (D-NY) who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honor the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House.

In an essay on “The Dead End of Checks and Balances,” political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the U.S. Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the needs of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people.

Periods of popular reform have only come when mass movements have forced the political system to break out of the straitjacket of “checks and balances.”

Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. The article co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions makes the case for reviving the general strike as part of labor’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that they see labor activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 election. As the article notes, “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other.”

This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labor leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside – outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organize “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside.”

The long history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo than it has shifted the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’s corporate friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labor studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.)

It’s clear that the left and the labor and social movements are in a very precarious state today, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out:

The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.