Hands Off—Yes! But What Are the Working-Class Demands?

On Saturday, April 5th, fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to challenge Trump’s attack on, well, just about everything!

I went to the rally in New Jersey, where speaker after speaker had us chanting “Hands off our Social Security!” “Hands off our Medicare!” Hands off our Medicaid!” “Hands off our Abortion Rights!” and so on. This was the national theme developed by the Democratic Party.

A few protestors in the back chanted “Hands off Gaza,” which was not on the agenda. But they soon retreated into silence. One woman carrying a large Trump 2024 banner walked near the edge of the crowd of about 2,000 and took on a few angry shouts, but there was no confrontation. Tensions rose enough, however, that the chair of the gathering did feel obliged to remind us that this was a peaceful, non-violent gathering.

As I looked around at the well-healed demonstrators from our liberal town, I couldn’t help but imagine adding a few other items to the list: “Hands off our IRA’s!” “Hands off the Stock Market!” “Hands off Free Trade!” I’m sure that would have been right on the money.

But why was I raining on this parade? After all, these were my neighbors, good caring people who turned up on this rainy Saturday because they truly want to make our society a better place.

My mind went negative because it was crystal clear that the rally was the opposite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the established order that enabled Jim Crow and persistent poverty. Dr. King asked us to envision massive changes to the status quo. Today, we were chanting to defend the status quo that Trump is surely taking a wrecking ball to.

The Democrats who put the rallies together across the country missed a moment to present an alternative vision. This was a chance to announce new proposals to tame runaway inequality, the growth of which has undermined the Democratic Party’s coalition, and to provide job insecurity, the lack of which has given MAGA a foothold in the first place.

Instead, we got pure opposition, spirited to be sure. Its only virtue was to provide collective support to those of us who have been stunned by the revanchist thrust of Trumpism. We can’t believe what is happening and we need each other to shore up our spirits. It was a chance, feeble but necessary, to show some form of communal defiance.

But a successful movement will not grow without a vision and proposals to support it. Why didn’t the Democrats do that? Because, except for a few fellow-travelers like Bernie Sanders, their vision is deeply tied the status quo BT (Before Trump).

That set of BT institutions was working well for the top 20 percent of the income distribution, especially those with college and post-graduate degrees, including just about everyone at our town’s demonstration.

It was not working for those whose jobs had been shipped abroad to China, Mexico, or elsewhere, and who watched their communities then crumble.

It also wasn’t working so well for those who lost their jobs to finance Wall Street stock buybacks and outrageous CEO salaries.

And it wasn’t working well at all for those working at poverty wages, especially immigrant workers, risking life and limb with little protection.

In short, the Democratic Party, long the party of the working class, has no compelling vision today because it has left behind a big chunk of the working-class. As analysts debate what went wrong, they should perhaps ask why the Democrats are so reluctant to support a working-class populist agenda.

The answer lies in how it became the party of the established order and therefore was unable to provide a vision that makes sense to working people who have been screwed by the established order. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

And that’s a damn shame. Because we want and need to be inspired by a positive vision. But that will only happen when the Democrats take their hands off their imaginations and ours.

We need to return to the days when the vision was FDRs for four freedoms, not four family tax credits to support the “opportunity society.”

The Democrats still have a chance, the field is open, but really? That is not likely to happen until it is challenged by a new independent party that stands for substantive change, created by and for working people.

I’ll be demonstrating for that.