We Shall Overcome

December 2, 2024 – John Abrams

Students in Chicago to Protest 1968 Democratic Convention

I hope you all had a fine Thanksgiving.

I’m remembering the most oppressive era in the America of my lifetime. It was 1968-1972, when the government openly attacked a large group of its citizens. The oppression did not come only from Republicans. Even before Nixon’s 1969 presidency began, I was outraged when the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, unleashed the full force of police violence on youthful protesters at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. We were shocked and dumfounded when Nixon’s national guard opened fire on innocent students at the Kent State massacre in 1970, killing four and injuring many others.

Those were just the most visible expressions of an era of widespread domestic government overreach and surveillance. It was a time when young white privileged Americans experienced, to some degree, the mistreatment that minorities and women had experienced continuously since our nation’s founding.

While the sixties were the most oppressive years of my lifetime, they were also a time of tremendous progress for working people and minorities. The period ended with Nixon’s disgrace and resignation, a brief period of stabilization under Gerald Ford, and the election of Jimmy Carter, the most empathetic and ethical president of our times. It was unfortunate that Carter’s effectiveness blossomed largely after his term in office. By then, Reagan had swept into office, began the systematic gutting of safety nets, and initiated the lasting concentration of wealth that continues to plague us today.

Dead Wrong

My predictions for the recent election were dead wrong (hardly the first time) but I hold nothing against most Trump voters. They have been systematically lied to, misled, held down, and oppressed.

Workers have been economically marginalized by both parties for 50 years. From the 1930’s to the 1960’s, labor unions helped to create a prosperous American middle class by negotiating increasingly higher wages and a host of other benefits for workers. Wealth and income inequality declined significantly. In 1970, as the period of declining inequality began to come to an end, the average CEO’s pay was roughly 20 times the typical worker’s pay. This figure has skyrocketed. Today, the average CEO’s pay is roughly 300 times the typical worker’s pay. Put another way, if worker pay had grown as quickly as CEO pay during the past 55 years, the minimum wage today would be more than $100/hour.

Nothing like that has happened. Workers have been left behind. Is it any wonder that they would grasp at right-wing straws?

Nor do I hold Trump accountable for the election results. A weak old narcissistic man in decline, he is easily manipulated by wealth, power, and adulation. I hold accountable the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which are dominated by corporate greed and the interests of the donor class. We got the far greater of two evils this time around, but neither party delivers to working people.

So people stayed home. The voting age population increased by about 12 million since 2020, but the number of votes cast this time decreased by about 3 million. That matters.

Too many will suffer under Trump, and too much wealth will concentrate even more, but maybe under Kamala Harris too many of us would have been too satisfied with less-bad-business-as-usual. After 45 years of hoping for change in the Democratic party, I am settling back to the longtime view I have shared with Bernie Sanders—that the Democratic party is worth trying to change but it has not yet, even in the Obama and Biden years, proved worthy of full support.

What If . . .

Imagine if Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2020, as he came close to doing. After outright victories in New Hampshire and Nevada, he was the candidate to beat. But the party’s donocracy coalesced and compromised on Biden. If Sanders had prevailed, he may well have won the election and America would be dramatically different today. (If he had won in 2016, we would have been spared Trump entirely, but the Democratic elite never warmed to him, and probably never will to his potential successors, like AOC.)

Today, Sanders says, “Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media and our political life? Highly unlikely. They are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns.”

If we continue to condescend to and marginalize working people, it’s doubtful that the results will change. The Democratic Party must, as Anand Giridharadas says, “discard their priors and presuppositions and embrace a wholesale reinvention.” (Giridharadas’ newsletter The.Ink consistently provides some of the most insightful political thinking I have found.)

The Way Forward

I do think there will be intense long-term backlash to the horrors and chaos of Trump 2.0. As Giridharadas says, “It will be hard to subjugate this country.” Trump and cronies have not shown that they have the ability to destroy what they intend to destroy. But they will work hard to do so and it will be tough to endure. Hopefully, we will see early backlash results in the 2026 mid-terms, but a good showing will be dependent on the reinvention Giridharadas speaks of.

I don’t know how that reinvention proceeds when interests are so entrenched and unimaginative, but somehow it must emerge—without it, we are condemned to swinging back and forth between lesser and greater evils on the same frayed trapeze. My hope is that this will become a period of rebuilding that is not constrained by our inclination to business as usual, but filled with careful listening, renewed resolve, and fresh ideas.

My efforts will continue to focus on this idea: that widespread broad-based employee ownership is achievable without political support and could revitalize and uplift the working class. Big business has been a destructive force; small business could reverse that.

We Shall Overcome is not just three words, they are the words.

Still.