After the Midterms, It's Time for New Working-Class Strategies to Dethrone the Rich

The resounding Democratic Party candidates' victories over Republican opponents on November 3 begs the question of a new political moment in the US. Is it similar to Blue Waves of the recent past—meaning a change in political party but no improvement in the material conditions of the American population?

To ask the question means, in my view, to unpack the powerful actors that hold the reins of power, economically and politically. The actors are corporate America and the wealthy, the ruling class.

This class of owners was large and in charge before the November 3 midterm elections. Crucially, that anti-GOP vote failed to dislodge this class that controls the profit system.

Money shapes policies in ways that votes don't under the current imbalance of power between the rulers and the ruled.

It's a case of voting against President Donald Trump and GOP candidates. It's not the same thing, I suggest, as a vote for Democrats who allied with Republicans to coordinate and fund the daily operations of the American empire, or hegemon, arming and funding Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, before the November 3 midterm elections.

The franchise or the vote is necessary but not sufficient to alter the relationship of domination and subordination between the rulers and the ruled in America. What follows from that relationship is more of the same, war abroad, directly in Iran, and by proxy in Ukraine, to the detriment of living and working standards in the US.

The two-party monopoly, or duopoly, and its addiction to perpetual war, retains a stranglehold over American society. All is not lost.
Take heart. There are tactics and strategies that address this relationship beyond voting for Democrats.

And I am not talking about the 1960s and protests against the American War in Vietnam. As a youngster, I participated along with millions of others across the US.

Rather, I am talking about the here and now. Consider this.

People in Spain have gone on a general strike to protest the scarcity of affordable rental housing. Millions of Spanish people are participating.

Students in France and throughout Europe have taken to the streets to protest substandard education conditions and overall living situations against the backdrop of elected officials funding Ukraine's proxy war against Russia. European elites' animus toward Russia has a kind of parallel to how the ruling class of Israel and the US demonizes the nation of Iran.

In the US, there is a history of general strikes, one you don't learn about in school. There was a Seattle General Strike of 1919 and the Oakland General Strike of 1946, for instance.

It's been 80 years since a general strike in America. I recall talking to a friend passing out flyers to a No Kings rally earlier this year.

She mentioned talk of a general strike in the fall. Well, it's fall now, and a general strike seems nowhere near on the horizon.

Instead, there's euphoria about the landslide midterm vote against Republicans and for Democrats. Meanwhile, the robust voter mobilization is over, and danger looms as the population gets a green light to lapse back into observing national, state, and local politics.

This of course is in part what fuels the establishment of pay-for-play politics that sidelines the (non-)voting public. A symptom of this is that each election season is breaking fundraising records.

"In the 2026 midterms, the 40 biggest donors made more than $2.4 billion in campaign finance contributions through mid-October," according to the Brennan Center. "The top 40 have given more in every midterm since 2014, and the total from this cycle is eight times the giving of 2014’s top donors, even accounting for inflation."

The working class, to use the language of the marketplace, can't with its votes compete with that amount of money in pay-to-play politics. Money shapes policies in ways that votes don't under the current imbalance of power between the rulers and the ruled

That statement might appear strange. Americans are taught that voting defines democracy.

However, the transformational working class victories of the past—from abolishing chattel slavery to ending child labor—were not the outcomes of voting. What working people did with others outside the ballot box to improve their lives and those of their children and grandchildren is what secured such victories.

Time for new working-class tactics and strategies to forge an American movement politics that puts people first? If not now, then when?