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THE RESISTANCE MOVES LEFT  
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Eric Blanc, Waleed Shahid, Leah Greenberg, Daniel Denvir
December 20, 2025
Jacobin
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_ How the socialist left and the anti-Trump Resistance are slowly but
surely learning to work together. _

From the "wine moms" of the Resistance to the "bros" who supported
Zohran Mamdani's campaign, anti-Trump liberals are uniting far better
with democratic socialists than they did in 2016., Andres Kudacki /
Getty Images

 

"Welcome to the Resistance.”

During the first Trump administration, socialists loved to invoke this
as a joke. The liberal resistance, socialists charged, was interested
only in performative displays of opposition, blaming Russia for
everything, and naively hoping Democratic Party adults in the room
would take charge and turn back the clock to pre-2016 business as
usual. Everything though has changed pretty dramatically since Donald
Trump took office for a second time.

Again, much of the liberal base is in open revolt against a leadership
that has so clearly failed to stop the inexorable march of far-right
politics. But this time, liberals are voting for Zohran Mamdani,
shifting left on Palestine, and becoming increasingly favorable to
socialism as the solution to the problem of MAGA.

Daniel Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio
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podcast _The Dig_
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organizer and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA)
activist Eric Blanc, progressive political strategist Waleed Shahid,
and co–executive director of the Indivisible Project Leah Greenberg
about how and why liberals and “the Resistance” have radicalized.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Daniel Denvir

A big part of what the socialist left has been trying to do is to make
the case to the liberal Democratic base that the only way to address
the root causes of MAGA and of Trump is by confronting neoliberalism
and the forever wars, and by overthrowing the Democratic
establishment.

And what seems really significant right now is that these
left-populist, democratic socialist politics — the kind we see in
Zohran Mamdani’s coalition as well as in Bernie’s Fighting
Oligarchy Tour — are breaking through in a really powerful way. How
did the liberal base, which had placed their faith in the Democratic
establishment to protect them from Trump, become so radicalized over
the last twelve months?

Leah Greenberg

I don’t think you can separate the reaction that the liberal base
has had in this moment from the broader societal dynamics that we have
been seeing unfold. In Trump 1.0, there was at least a pretty solid
pretense by corporate actors, by a lot of different institutions
across society, that they were attempting to hold some set of things
around the norms of liberal democracy, protect some set of vulnerable
populations, and so on.

We can all be really clear that was not out of the goodness of their
hearts. But it did create a pretty significant contrast. And what
we’ve seen this time around is just a total elite institutional
collapse in the face of Trumpism starting, basically, immediately
after he was elected.

So I think for folks who believed what the Democratic leadership was
telling them — that this was an “oncoming fascism,” that it was
going to be a direct personal threat to them and their communities and
their neighbors — to watch this combination of Democratic leadership
fecklessness going quiet to the extent that they were having really
internal circular arguments about blaming the groups instead of any
kind of meaningful accounting about what had happened, and then
simultaneously watching a bunch of other institutions across society
— everybody from Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to Target and
basically every corporation you could name — immediately rush to
bend the knee, created a much more clear illustration that the project
to consolidate MAGA political power and the project to consolidate
corporate power were one and the same. That set the stage for a lot of
what has unfolded since.

Waleed Shahid

If you look at universities, law firms, the federal government, media,
and employees of organizations affected by Big Tech consolidation,
there’s a tangible difference between 2017 and 2025 in terms of the
kinds of upper-middle-class or middle-class white-collar workers that
are probably ideologically or effectively liberal — but are really
being squeezed by this administration, being attacked by this
administration. Not just in terms of rhetoric but also in terms of
policy.

J. D. Vance, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk really hate this liberal
class. They have fan fiction about replacing the liberal class with
robots and artificial intelligence. And I just think that there’s a
way in which that class is being squeezed, and the party and the
elected representatives who are supposed to represent that class not
really having the fight in them to represent that in a big way.

Eric Blanc

I agree with Leah that the main thing is that not only is Trump way
worse this time, but also institutions are fighting way less. That
contradiction is a deeply radicalizing dynamic.

It does, I think, predate the election though. For instance, the
inability of the Democratic Party establishment to push out Joe Biden
and the whole age debacle, which we’ve sort of forgotten all about,
really did expose to a lot of the liberal base that, contrary to the
rhetoric, the motivations of the people on top seem to be much more
about ego and career than about fighting fascism. That really was a
very eye-opening experience.

Then there’s just a general dynamic where, because the authoritarian
drive of this new administration is so deep, liberals for positive and
maybe limited reasons really feel the attack on democracy as core to
their politics in a way that maybe other segments of the population
don’t to the same extent.

So there’s a radicalizing in response to events, in a way that if
you don’t actually think that the system was working as well, as
many leftists or maybe like non-college-educated workers do, maybe
even attacks on democracy aren’t as at the forefront in your mind.
But if you really do believe, and I think liberals are right to
believe, in the importance of defending liberal democracy, then it
just seems like an all-hands-on-deck moment to them more than any
other part of the population.

Daniel Denvir

Joshua Cohen had an interesting post recently where he described the
liberal revolt against the Democratic Party establishment as a
relatively autonomous revolt that the organized socialist left is in a
good position to channel, organize, and help lead — but does not,
and maybe cannot, actually control. What do you make of this argument,
and what are its implications for how the socialist left should think
about building bridges with this liberal insurgency?

Waleed Shahid

Two of the main mass mobilizations that have been successful in the
past year have been the Tesla takedown protests and No Kings, which to
me are two different iterations of what maybe is called “the
autonomous liberal revolt.” I think that these efforts show that
people are looking to express their anger and frustration and want to
be able to do it in a way that feels not necessarily ideological or
even socialist, but as a part of a fight against Donald Trump and
fascism.

I think that the third most successful mobilization that had national
impact was Zohran’s election. Where the rubber meets the road is
obviously in elections because there are very few places where people
who are socialists or even social democrats can win an election with
just people who identify with those terms. You have to build a
coalition across ideology and across demographics. Often the people
— some of the younger populist socialist candidates — embody that
fight against authoritarianism much better than the Democratic
establishment.

Leah Greenberg

Pulling from that argument, around why there’s this crisis of faith
right now, the fundamental proposition of Biden 2020 was that Trumpism
was a temporary insanity that could be fixed by electing the most
run-of-the-mill, most persuasive candidate. You’d get him in, the
adults would be back in charge, things would be okay, and this fever
would break. That was the promise. And a lot of people went for it or
even grudgingly went for it. And so I think the basic issue that is
happening right now is that there is no follow-on proposition or no
follow-on promise from Democratic elected leadership that explains
this moment.

It’s clearly not a temporary fever. MAGA is a force in American
politics, and it is going to be a force for an extended period of
time. How do you actually fundamentally get out of this situation
where every four years, every election is a referendum on democracy
and is a threat of authoritarian consolidation? I don’t think
Democratic leadership has offered a meaningful theory that replaces
the “this is a temporary fever” framing. Someone being able to
successfully make a convincing proposition about this is actually how
we shift our politics in a direction that doesn’t involve constant
confrontations with the worst 30 percent of American society — I
think that’s going to be the way that you break through.

Eric Blanc

What I’d add to that is that this is in many ways a surprising
dynamic for the Left, which is to say that the liberal vote is in many
ways a surprising development for the socialist left. I don’t think
that people were exactly prepared to see not just a repeat of
Resistance 1.0, and it’s part of the reason we’re having this
conversation today. There has been a shift toward trying to make sense
of it, but I think we probably have to go further to be really
concrete. For instance, DSA only just recently joined the No Kings
coalition and I think that’s a good sign that people are trying to
figure out how we work with this sort of broader liberal resistance
movement.

But there was also a tendency sometimes to be a little bit
condescending toward the No Kings protest, for instance. So when
we’re thinking about how we relate to the liberal resistance, I
think this is a good thing to keep in mind. Our major task right now
isn’t only to differentiate ourselves from liberals — especially
liberals who are out there fighting — but to engage with them and to
be the best builders for No Kings rallies.

Waleed Shahid

One other thing I’d add to the trajectory of Democratic Party
liberalism: the Democratic Party establishment warning liberals about
the threat of fascism is where immigration becomes a huge issue in the
story, where, contrary to popular belief, white liberals tend to be a
very big demographic in favor of immigrant rights in this country.

Just this past week from the right and left wing of Democratic Party
liberalism, both David Brooks and Michelle Goldberg in the _New York
Times_ had columns about immigrant rights. Goldberg’s column was
about immigrant rights groups that you should donate to for the
holidays. David Brooks had a column about a church in Connecticut
that’s helping undocumented immigrants and people seeking asylum
from combating ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

If anything, maybe we downplayed the threat even this time around. I
would say just fess up — I didn’t think Trump this time around was
going to be as bad as he’s been.

I think that now, because the elected officials aren’t leading the
fight on immigration as much, that creates such a huge opening for
this class of people who really care about inclusion and pluralism and
protecting the vulnerable to have autonomous ways of engaging that are
filling a vacuum that isn’t being provided by the leadership class
of their party.

Leah Greenberg

If I may offer the reverse, mirror image of that, I think the two
early signs of the disjuncture between the base and elected leadership
were H. R. 9495, the nonprofit-killer bill, which they tried to move
in a bipartisan fashion immediately after the election, and then the
Laken Riley Act in January. A very firm memory I have is trying to
communicate to Democratic electeds that our base was genuinely alarmed
and upset and did not understand why we would be offering Donald Trump
more power around enforcement, on nonprofits, more power to go after
immigrants and consolidate a secret police force — and getting
somewhere between dismissal and contempt in reaction. And people
saying, you know, not only do we disagree, but we disagree and this is
why we lost the election.

Then by mid-February, when the calls and the volume and the anger was
boiling over, having a lot of those people be like, “Why is everyone
so mad?” Our reaction was, “We’ve been telling you this has been
building. There’s actually just a consistent gap between the
communications you’ve made to people about what you care about and
the things you’re doing. And that’s coming back to attack you.”

Daniel Denvir

Leah, many have remarked that for the liberal base, it’s not so much
“Left versus center” so much as “fighters versus folders.” But
are they increasingly becoming one and the same?

Leah Greenberg

I would describe it as an x-axis and a y-axis around how far to the
left your politics are and how much you think this moment is an
emergency that requires using all the tools in the toolbox. That
ultimately requires structural reforms that meaningfully address the
roots of the crisis.

What I would say with our folks is that people identify in a lot of
different places on the x-axis of left to center but are all at
really, really high levels on “this is an emergency requiring
everything that we have.” And there tends to be a lot of correlation
in people who are both on the left axis _and_ “this is an
emergency” axis. There’s a lot of overlap in what’s required.

When we talk about structural reforms at this point, it’s not just
what we were talking about in 2021. It’s not just the For the People
Act. We are talking about the Voting Rights Act, but it is voting
rights plus what are we going do about the Supreme Court? What are we
going do about the two-party system that keeps creating these
conflicts? What are we going do about the consolidation of corporate
power that has allowed Big Tech fascists to operate as a backstop to
this administration?

I think there’s a lot of overlap when you talk about what is the
ultimate set of solutions to the moment that we are in that would
allow us to meaningfully create a country where people belong and are
dignified and have a voice. So I’m not sure I would focus on the
labels per se, but I do think that when you’re actually talking
about what gets us to the other side of this and what gets us to a
genuine improvement in people’s lives, there’s a lot of potential
for overlap.

Daniel Denvir

It’s not just liberals who have changed since the first Trump
administration, as a number of people have commented already — the
socialist left is in a pretty different situation too. In the years
following the 2016 election, many on the Left rejected or were at
least skeptical and suspicious of a lot of aspects of the liberal
resistance. Many on the socialist left saw this resistance politics as
framing Trump’s election as the product of “Russian
interference” and wanting to just turn back the clock to the
pre-Trump politics — as Leah mentioned, this idea that “the fever
will break once the adults are back in the room.”

At the same time, there was this intense debate within the socialist
left as to whether Trump’s project was fascist. Everyone on the Left
opposed Trump. But there was a sometimes interesting, sometimes arcane
debate over whether “fascist” was the right concept. But now,
everyone on the online left loves Jennifer Welch and agrees that
Trump’s project is fascist. While there are some on the Left who
might have some reservations about the Resistance, I think
increasingly the majority agrees that we should definitely be linking
arms and joining in.

Eric, how would you describe that trajectory on the socialist left and
the politics internal to the socialist left on how to relate to the
liberal resistance?

Eric Blanc

The first thing I would say is that it’s a game changer, as we’ve
been already talking about, that the liberal resistance this time
around is very explicitly being pitted _against _the Democratic
establishment. If there’s one thing socialists like to do, it’s to
fight the Democratic Party establishment. So there’s an obvious
affinity there, which explains a lot of the openness to engaging.

There’s also, I think, a question of urgency. A lot of the Left last
time around, myself included, had a somewhat valid take that the Trump
administration wasn’t as much of a radical departure from
Republicanism and right-wing politics.

And as liberals suggested, if anything, maybe we downplayed the threat
even this time around. I would say, just fess up — I didn’t think
Trump this time around was going to be as bad as he’s been. I think
a lot of us underestimated that. And then there’s an immediate
thing, not just in the abstract, but like, what does it mean that,
speaking from personal experience, I’m a leftist — I really have
for the first time in my life had to consider what’s going to happen
if I lose my job for speaking out.

There’s an urgency, and I’m coming from a place of relative
privilege. I have a union job. I’m teaching at a public university.
But I think there is an extent to which just the intensity of the
authoritarian attack across the board has led to a feeling among the
Left that it is “all hands on deck” to an extent that didn’t
feel as much the case last time around. So the question I was asking
is, what do you do with that?

I actually feel like what the Left knows how to do really well is
fight the Democratic establishment. I don’t think we have as much
recent experience with what it looks like to work in coalition with
liberals against the right wing. It’s not that anyone’s opposed,
but it just requires different things that we haven’t consistently
done in a recent period. So the question of really trying to scale up
a broader fight is the task. It does require continuing to make these
cases that our main fight right now is with the right wing and not
with the liberal Resistance.

Waleed Shahid

One other thing is that there’s always — it’s very rare, almost
never happens — a candidate on the Left who wins an election by
being publicly known as a leftist or the campaign is waged on those
terms. So there’s constant rebranding of what the fight is in the
Democratic Party — a rebranding that I’ve participated in between
the old guard and the new generation. Change versus status quo
establishment. There’s a way in which sometimes the political
weather is blowing in the right direction, where liberals become the
kind of place where you have to figure out which one of those you’re
going with, and that switch becomes really effective for elections.

Another thing I think about is in 2020, the two congressional
elections that were very much buoyed by the racial justice movement
during the George Floyd protests — Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman . . .
when the _New York Times_ endorsed Jamaal Bowman, the polling that we
saw among white college-educated liberals, went from like 17 percent
to like 70 percent overnight. In retrospect, when you look at Zohran
Mamdani being rejected by the _New York Times_ several times by their
editorial board — the _New York Times_
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York voters not to vote for him, and yet he still won. This gives me a
sense that the gatekeepers of liberalism, particularly in the _Times_,
are becoming less and less salient between 2020 and 2025.

Daniel Denvir

And Zohran’s biggest neighborhoods were brownstone Brooklyn.
Actually, his highest percentages were in Park Slope, Cobble Hill, and
so on.

Waleed Shahid

One way you can think about that is that No Kings is the “over
forty-five” expression, and the anti-oligarchy tour by Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the “under forty-five”
expression. Maybe age is primarily the divider there due to different
experiences of the financial crisis and politics since Barack Obama.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that liberals become a
really important fulcrum in these kinds of forward-movement-backlash
moments of a more progressive politics. Because in 2023 to 2024, I
think we experienced a little bit of that backlash to Black Lives
Matter in particular. Now that we’re experiencing a backlash to the
backlash, there’s a real opening here to combine those two spirits
of the anti-oligarchy tour and the spirit of the No Kings marches.

Leah Greenberg

I do think there’s also an important kernel in there about the
delinking of mainstream liberals’ faith in mainstream media as well.
One of the big shifts that we’ve seen is around where people have
confidence to get their news and analysis from. The reality is that, I
mean, obviously the _Washington Post_ is not where it was, given the
Bezos takeover. But even with institutions like the _New York Times_,
there’s just a great deal more distrust in the role that the
mainstream media has played.

Waleed Shahid

Hence the rise of Jennifer Welch.

Daniel Denvir

I want to get into that generational point you just made. I’ve been
doing a lot of work in Rhode Island building coalitions with liberal
Resistance groups. I have two separate meetings this week with local
Resistance groups around the state to build for the 2026 primaries.
One of them is an Indivisible chapter.

One thing that I found surprising since starting to do this work more
intensively is that we all know that the crowd at protests like No
Kings can be on the older end. But when I started to have
conversations with a lot of these leaders, they were like, “Where
are the young people?” And I was very surprised because I think of
it the opposite way — that young people are extremely involved in
groups like DSA, doing the encampments against the Gaza genocide, and
so on.

So there was this total fun-house-mirror situation where you had the
older folks in the liberal Resistance thinking that younger people are
just totally demobilized in the face of the fascist threat. I was
like, who do you think organized the Zohran campaign in New York
initially? This discussion that we’re having about building
socialist and left-liberal coalitions seems to also be fundamentally a
conversation about building intergenerational coalitions.

Waleed Shahid

It’s really an interesting phenomenon that the No Kings protest
tends to be attended by people with multiple degrees, sixty-years-old
and up. And while my sense of the anti-oligarchy tour is that it’s
much younger, I don’t know how race and gender play into those two
different things.

But yeah, I think the marriage of those two fights and the tension
between them is the future of a kind of progressive realignment in the
Democratic Party. In 2020, it was obviously divided through an
election that was not ranked-choice voting, and in which I would
imagine many of the people who are powering the No Kings protest did
not vote for Bernie Sanders but maybe voted for Biden or Elizabeth
Warren or Pete Buttigieg.

We should just say that the experience of the last year decisively
proves that young people remain very consistently on the Left.

Obviously, it’s the opposite with the anti-oligarchy tour, where I
assume the vast majority of the people voted for Bernie Sanders. The
interesting thing is that the No Kings protests don’t have an
elected leader who’s the spokesperson. And there’s something
really inspiring about that, about a citizen-generated endeavor that
is not carried through the star power of someone like an AOC or
Bernie. And at the same time, the policy or ideological components can
be a little less clear compared to the anti-oligarchy tour, where I
think it’s clearer what the politics are.

I’m also curious about both your experience, Leah, and your
experience, Dan. There was so much discussion in the middle part of
this year about a word we haven’t used but that’s been thrown out
for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and that’s
“abundance” [based on the book _Abundance_ by Ezra Klein and Derek
Thompson]. I feel like on the rank-and-file level, driving the
political expression in the No Kings mobilization or Indivisible,
“abundance” is not the thing that’s animating them.

That’s an assumption I have. I don’t know if it’s true or not,
but I think there’s a way in which the elite discourse among
liberalism is _not _mapping onto the mass discourse of where people
are every day, where rank-and-file “wine moms” are at.

Daniel Denvir

One really remarkable thing is that for the recent No Kings protest,
there was a breakthrough agreement to have a Palestinian speaker and
have a whole Palestinian liberation contingent in the No Kings
protest. I think this was debated and decided among a group of
grassroots liberal Resistance organizers in Rhode Island, and there
was some dissension. But they ultimately came to a solid decision to
coalesce with specifically Jewish Voice for Peace. That represents not
just this breakthrough between the socialist left and left-liberal
Resistance, but it was also a fundamentally intergenerational
coalition because it was much more gray-haired people sitting on one
side and much more millennial and Zoomer on the other.

Leah Greenberg

I think that mirrors a lot of where we’ve ended up in terms of the
national framing. In the first No Kings march in June, I marched next
to Ruwa Romman of Georgia who was one of the speakers. And we have
tried to be really intentional about balancing the fact that No Kings
is not an entity that has a platform — it doesn’t have a set of
policy ideas that it’s advancing; it is a broad front against
authoritarianism — and also being really clear about inclusion of
voices that recognize the Palestine movement.

So there is a continued negotiation, and there’s a continued process
of building together at the local level that has been ongoing, and
it’s in different places, in different contexts. I do really think
that that knitting together of the intergenerational context and the
broad front is really important.

There are so many different threads that I want to respond to here.
First, in terms of the 2020 cycle, we had a really extended
conversation with our leaders in 2020 around whether we were we going
to endorse in a presidential cycle. Should we endorse? Who are we for?

We have some data out of that that suggests that the top candidate
among our folks was Warren, very strong. There was a strong but
smaller Bernie faction. There were some folks who were kind of
scattered around the different moderate candidates. Things shaped up
in the later stages pretty quickly in a way that limits our ability to
say who went where as different candidates came in and dropped out.
But the bigger dominant feeling for folks was that they didn’t
really think that a presidential endorsement was the top priority for
locally based organizing hubs that often had a very strong foot in a
local race or a congressional race or a broader suite of activism that
they couldn’t disrupt in order to have some effect on the
presidential race.

That was where people ended pretty consistently. We respected that
very much on a national level after having that conversation. And so
we have some sense of where people’s optimal politics are.

Also, people had a really different take on primaries overall during
the first Trump term than they do this time around. That’s where
people were, just practically speaking, on abundance. I think this has
been one of the places where there is just a huge gap, as you put it,
between the conversation that is preoccupying elite commentators and
the conversation that is happening among grassroots activists and
rank-and-file folks.

Because immediately after the election, I think there’s this very
confusing moment where _Abundance_, which is a book that was intended
for a Kamala Harris term or a second Biden term, gets kind of
rebranded as an answer to why we lost and gets sucked into this super
toxic discourse around the recriminations post-2024 and this extended
set of arguments and discussions around remaking the party.

I can’t stress enough how much none of that was of interest to
people who were freaking out about fascism — which is actually
unfortunate in a lot of ways. As somebody who has a lot of enthusiasm
for abundance politics myself, I think that conflation set the stage
for a number of things that were not super healthy. And while I think
you’ve done a lot of work trying to untangle those currents and
appreciate that, the functional impact was that I think a lot of
people who might well have been open to various parts of that argument
mostly perceived it as kind of irrelevant to the questions of the day,
which were, “What are we actually going to do to protect fundamental
rights, to fight back against this massive onslaught?”

Eric Blanc

The depth of youth radicalization that’s continued really puts a lie
to one of the major talking points that happened after Trump’s
reelection in 2024, which you might remember when there was this move
from the establishment to fight against the groups and to say, “We
need to pivot to the center, drop fighting for immigrants and trans
people.” Part of the argument was, young people are making this
dramatic shift to the center — if we don’t meet them —

Daniel Denvir

As part of a “vibe shift.”

Eric Blanc

I was always really skeptical of that. I didn’t think it was in the
data. There was a marginal thing with young men, and it seemed like a
lot of the youth vote was over economic anxiety. The experience of the
last year decisively proves that contrary to that claim, young people
remain very consistently on the Left.

If anything, on the radical activist young left, which I am pretty
deeply involved with, I think there is actually still or was somewhat
of a hesitancy to go all-in on the fight against authoritarianism.
Part of that has to do with Palestine. It’s worth flagging because
it’s true that we’re coming together with more liberal people. But
there was also an experience that so many young people had of going to
encampments and feeling like big liberal institutions essentially were
screwing them over. Think about university elites, but then also a lot
of the punditry, the _New York Times_. . . . There’s a real
polarization, and I think there was also maybe a skepticism of some
liberals for not foregrounding the fight against the genocide more. We
were still living a little bit in the shadow of that, and it hasn’t
been fully overcome.

The other thing I would add is that the Fighting Oligarchy tour and
the Zohran campaign — these were not exclusively or only about
fighting authoritarianism. It had this combination of [fighting
authoritarianism and] a radical economic approach.

The place above all where we can reconnect the radical young activist
left with liberals is on fighting ICE. This is one thing that really
brings everybody together; there’s a real deep revulsion among both
of these wings at what the Trump administration is doing against our
undocumented friends and family and neighbors. That is a place I would
hope that we can, in the immediate term, scale up far more.

Daniel Denvir

One big shift that I’ve noticed between the first and second Trump
administrations in terms of ordinary members of the liberal Resistance
is a stronger emphasis on fighting the Trump regime, rather than
derogatorily speaking about or demonizing ordinary Trump voters.

Notably, Zohran launched his campaign by standing on a street corner
and asking people why they’d given up on Democrats and why they
voted for Trump. And he went on about a year later to win those
neighborhoods back.

Leah, you’ve touched on this, but we’re seeing this really
powerfully right now through the anti-oligarchy framing, which was
first put forward by Bernie and then AOC and these rallies and has
become the dominant left and liberal way to interpret what’s
happening right now. What it’s doing, I think very powerfully, is
connecting the dots between economic and political authoritarianism.

But that really wasn’t part of the mainstream discussion or liberal
Resistance discourse during Trump 1.0. What is it about the conditions
of Trump’s second administration that have allowed for this
anti-oligarchy framework to become perhaps the dominant one? And what
sort of political work does that framing do?

Leah Greenberg

There are two pieces. First, the mask is fully off. You have a bunch
of corporations that had a frame around corporate social
responsibility, a frame around, for example, doing meaningful work to
protect the 2020 election from sabotage. If you go and you look at the
list of corporations that tried to donate to protect that election
compared to who has donated to the Trump ballroom, I think the degree
to which corporations have been very visibly avid and enthusiastic
collaborators with the Trump and MAGA agenda — how even the
corporations that people ostensibly think of as “good corporate
citizens” have behaved, have gotten rid of their DEI policies, have
trashed their climate policies, have donated to the Trump ballroom or
to the inauguration — there is no meaningful, credible argument that
delinks the consolidation of corporate power in this country from the
consolidation of right-wing white Christian nationalist power. I think
that is a revealing reaction.

In the first Trump term, I think a lurking assumption underlying a
bunch of the strategy was, this guy got elected by a fluke. It’s a
quirk of the political system.

The other thing is that there was no meaningful Democratic leadership
interpretation of what was happening in the first four months. There
was this powerful Fighting Oligarchy tour with Bernie and AOC making a
really clear connection between what was happening on the corporate
power side and what was happening in Washington. I think the fact that
the act of stepping into that leadership vacuum was very important for
linking those two things together.

Now, there’s sometimes a framing that suggests that there’s a lot
of daylight between a No Kings and a “No Oligarchs” frame. I think
that that’s not particularly valid on the ground. What we’ve
experienced is that there’s a lot of openness to an overarching
story about corporate power. Bernie spoke at our most recent No Kings
in Washington; he was the headliner. We do see people really making
those connections. We see a lot of enthusiasm among our own folks for
corporate campaigns, for theories of how you actually dissuade this
kind of corporate collaboration and enablement.

Daniel Denvir

I think we can’t overstate the role played by the world’s richest
man becoming a freakish fascist accelerationist, in the powerful DOGE
way that he did, in really waking people up to the connections between
economic and political structures.

Leah Greenberg

A hundred percent.

Waleed Shahid

I imagine one of the most foremost intellectual leaders of the liberal
resistance is Erica Chenoweth, who’s a scholar of
antiauthoritarianism and resistance against dictators across the
world. They are someone who is not very Pollyannaish about the kind of
economic leverage needed to get rid of authoritarians and dictators.
And a lot of their work revolves around things like boycott strikes
and noncooperation.

After Trump was elected, Erica did a whole tour among liberal media
about their research. If you’re a liberal or someone who
participates in the No Kings march, that is another place of synergy,
where the intellectual you’re reading is saying, you need to figure
out a way to generate economic leverage and create consequences on the
regime for their actions, whether it’s lowering their public opinion
or breaking apart their coalition or creating resignations. That’s a
form of politics that’s much more common in other parts of the world
and less common here.

Eric Blanc

I want to talk a little bit more about what you mentioned in passing,
Dan, which is why there’s significantly less blaming and focus on
Trump supporters than there was last time around. Part of that is
there was an open acknowledgement from all parts of the Left and the
center that the Democratic Party is losing working people.

That wasn’t exactly as prevalent last time around. There was some
talk about the white working class, but this time around, from above,
you have the Democratic establishment blaming the groups and
“woke” for why we’re losing workers. Then on the Left, there’s
a strong case that essentially it was economic anxiety, and the fact
that Trump did so much better than last time around among Latinos and,
to a certain extent, among black voters — I think that undercut an
assumption that people had under the first Trump administration that
racism was a sufficient explanation for what was going on.

From the second you have to start talking about losing the working
class of all backgrounds and economic anxieties, this has a really
different valence for how liberals and the Left look at who voted for
Trump and how we relate to the moment we’re in. It’s really
positive to a certain extent that people are talking so much more
about the working class and economic anxiety. The answers we give are
very different than the Democratic Party establishment, certainly for
MAGA. But the fact that there is this sort of talking about class is
new. I don’t think that was the case in 2016, or certainly not
before that.

Daniel Denvir

Not to be too much of a partisan socialist here, but I do recall in
the first years of the first Trump administration intense hostility
from many liberal commentators when people on the Left, myself
included, tried to contextualize Trump’s rise in economic misery,
anxiety, contradiction — not just in terms of working-class people
being disaffected with the Democratic Party, but also in terms of the
economic system that we have creating a class of McMansion-dwelling
small businessmen who are fascists.

There was an intense hostility from many liberal commentators to
discussing that at all. They were simply saying, instead, what I think
is far more comforting for some people: “This is the eternally
racist soul of working-class white America reasserting itself.”

Leah Greenberg

I wouldn’t underestimate the psychological impact, and what it sets
in motion, to win the popular vote versus _losing_ the popular vote.
In the first Trump term, I think a lurking assumption underlying a
bunch of the strategy was, this guy got elected by a fluke. It’s a
quirk of the political system that we have that he has been able to
take office. And our job is to create as much visible opposition, so
that people who might go along with his agenda understand up front
that they’re going to face electoral consequences for it on the back
end.

The second term, if you lose the popular vote, by definition, you’re
going to need more people the next time around. So the first strategic
imperative is to drive down that popularity and win more people over,
and then start to create the sense that there are going to be
consequences for enablers. That, I think, is the arc that we saw this
year.

Waleed Shahid

I want to go back to the 2020 data that Leah mentioned, where it just
shows a deep divide between the kind of liberal commentariat and the
liberal rank and file, and then a distinction between partisan
Democrats in the coalition versus partisan liberals in the coalition.
The plurality of people were with Elizabeth Warren, who I think fits
within the anti-oligarchy politics. The plurality of Indivisible’s
base was not Joe Biden voters, in the primary at least. That maps on
to the Zohran/Brad Lander/Andrew Cuomo electorate — where people who
are older tend to be much more attached to partisan Democratic
language and framing than what I imagine is true of Indivisible’s
base. That also shows the divide between the liberal intelligentsia
and commentary versus the liberal rank and file.

Daniel Denvir

Let’s tease that point out a little, because the militancy of the
proverbial “liberal wine mom” has become an iconic, ubiquitous,
celebrated point of reference for us on the Left in the last few
months, exemplified most powerfully by the wonderful Jennifer Welch.

But it points to this question of who we’re talking to and who
we’re talking about and who we’re _not_ talking about when we talk
about the liberal Resistance. So to break this out into two parts —
first, who are the “wine moms”? What do we mean when we invoke
them? Are they the latest iteration of “suburban soccer moms”? Do
we mean something else by that? Do we mean contradictory things?

Then, to get to that point you just made, where do other key segments
of the Democratic Party coalition — black people, Latinos, Muslims
— where do they fit into the emerging political conjuncture. Not to
suggest that these are neat categories either, but—

Waleed Shahid

“Bros.” You forgot “bros.”

Daniel Denvir

Yeah. What about bros? It does recall that amazing video from
Zohran’s election night when it was Mehdi Hasan, Jamaal Bowman,
Hasan Piker, and Prem Thakker, like bro-ing out on camera at the
victory party. Mike Cernovich had a meltdown about the intense virile
masculinity that the socialist left was putting forward.

Waleed Shahid

That’s what they wanted, sorry! In primary elections, people are
trying to campaign out their path to 50 percent. The way that’s
often divided out is there’s like white college-educated,
self-identifying liberals over the age of forty-five versus under the
age of forty-five. Then there’s often black voters and Latino voters
split out as separate demographics from that group of people.

What I’ve noticed is we’re kind of doing category illusion here,
where I do think there’s a difference between the voters who can be
described as Biden, Warren, or Bernie; they could also be described as
Cuomo, Brad Lander, or Zohran Mamdani. But that difference is
significant. In the Biden camp, there’s a lot of pride among that
crew of people of the _New York Times_ 2020 endorsement process where
Biden was flatly rejected by the _New York Times_ editorial board.
Then there was that viral video of Biden talking to a black worker at
the _New York Times_, I think a security guard who was in the
elevator, and she said she was voting for him. We shouldn’t delude
ourselves with the fact that that demographic is a huge part of
primary elections.

The vast majority of Democratic electeds are lawyers with degrees from
Ivy League institutions or business owners. They are not themselves in
any meaningful way credible representatives of the working class.

The Democratic Party coalition and the antiauthoritarian coalition
that is happening — its politics are happening with one foot in the
things we’re talking about and one foot out. There’s a really big
Target boycott being led right now by many black churches. And so
there is antiauthoritarian and anti-oligarchy activity happening. My
sense of that demographic is twofold, which is — one, we had the
largest civil rights protests in this country’s history since the
1960s in 2020. That didn’t result in very much legislatively.
Because when it comes to racial justice, the country is very
schizophrenic. Second, there’s a feeling where I think the idea of
competent leadership was huge in that election. Andrew Cuomo being
Mario Cuomo’s son and a governor for three terms — that was also
really significant. There’s two things happening with black voters
in the Democratic coalition that is unique and pretty distinct from
both the young socialist crowd and the older No Kings crowd.

Daniel Denvir

One quick thing that I’ll add before we hear from the rest of you is
that, on the one hand, we have clearly seen black voter consolidation
around what we might call the Democratic establishment pretty
powerfully in multiple cases over the last decade. Yet when you
introduce generational analysis to that, it gets a lot more
complicated.

Eric Blanc

I have those numbers. Eighty-six percent of young Latinos voted for
Zohran, 84 percent of young black people voted for Zohran, and then
young white people were something more like 65 percent. So it really
shows you how much of an age cleavage there is and how much potential
is mostly still untapped for reaching into much broader segments of
the working class than we currently have via the generational route.
To me, that’s the next frontier where we can build out a more left
base.

Daniel Denvir

Leah, you mentioned earlier a shift among the liberal Resistance base
in terms of interest in primarying establishment Democrats. We saw
this broad left-liberal coalition unite behind Zohran in New York, and
it seems like we’re seeing something similar in Maine. To what
extent is the liberal Resistance converging with DSA and the Justice
Democrats’ strategy in terms of prioritizing primaries against
establishment Democrats?

Leah Greenberg

We’re watching it unfold right now, and we’re trying to get more
information. What I can say is that the overall orientation that
people are starting from is categorically different than it was at
this time around the 2018 cycle.

I think people have a much clearer understanding that there is a very
direct relationship between the frustrations that they have with
overall Democratic Party leadership and the need to get involved in
the primary and the candidate cycle. There is a much stronger sense
that there are a lot of people in elected Democratic leadership or in
the Democratic establishment who are simply not up to the job —
whether it is because they are of a generation that is simply not
grappling with the challenges, or whether it is because they are
corporate Democrats who are institutionally incapable of taking on the
challenges that we have right now.

We’re seeing a ton of focus on money in politics, on crypto, on
AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] money, on corporate
money in general. We’re seeing a ton of focus on, are people
compelling fighters who are capable of making the case about what they
are doing? Not only people who are using their leverage, but who are
actually also public communicators who are able to tell the story of
what is happening.

For folks like Chris Van Hollen, who was nobody’s idea of a breakout
star last year but who has done a combination of compelling public
communications and genuinely meaningful actions that demonstrate how
you use your leverage as a senator, I think we’re gonna see how it
unfolds. But what we’re hearing from folks is just a totally
different level of interest and engagement already, with a combination
of getting involved in open seats and with taking some real direct
action in relation to folks who are simply not living up to the job.

Daniel Denvir

If you look at the [difference in] net favorability among Democratic
voters in New York between AOC and Schumer, it’s pretty wild.

Leah Greenberg

We called for Schumer to step down back in March after the first
shutdown fiasco. I have never experienced a decision that involved
such a disjuncture between the reception in Washington around the
country. We had, I think, 93 percent of New York leaders and 97
percent of leaders around the country; we convened an emergency call
of about a thousand-plus folks to talk about it the weekend after,
with near unanimity. We got basically no blowback from anyone, because
people were really clear that there’s no reason to have somebody
representing the Democratic Party who is simply not capable of doing
that on a public stage, who has a 17 percent approval rating, and also
was struggling to actually successfully build out strategies and lead
the caucus around them.

Daniel Denvir

Waleed, you recently wrote a piece intervening in a strategic debate
on the progressive left over whether to prioritize running left-wing
primaries against established Democrats in deep blue districts versus
trying to flip Republican seats in swing districts. You make a very
persuasive case that it’s the Left’s job, first and foremost, to
primary incumbents and take over the party. Of course, it’s not that
we don’t want median Democrats to beat median Republicans. But I
think it’s pretty clear — clearer than ever since Zohran’s
victory — that we can build far more power by building deep power at
the core of the Democratic base.

Lay out your argument here and what the state of play in this debate
is.

Waleed Shahid

A metaphor I use for this is thinking about the Democratic Party as a
big ship sailing and drifting, and the political currents and
swing-district Democrats are like the sails. They move with the winds.
If the wind shifts right, they shift right. If the wind shifts left,
they nudge left.

But the left flank in deep blue districts, they can be an anchoring
force. Whether it’s AOC and the Green New Deal, or Jamaal Bowman in
2020, or even Zohran with affordability. . . . The number of Google
hits after Zohran wins his primary for affordability skyrockets. It
consolidates a term for Democrats to focus on because of his election.

Centrist and moderates use this term “wins above replacement.” I
think what they mean by that is, does this Democrat — someone like
Sherrod Brown — perform better than a generic Democrat? I think
progressives [have] the idea of primarying incumbents and defeating
them and then being able to tell a story about them and the platform
you won on — that has such a big ideological value in the party for
changing what it means to be a Democrat.

So instead of trying to take on these quixotic adventures in Montana
or even Idaho, I think we should consolidate on home turf. We have
limited resources. The donor class does not love our candidates, and
we’re playing way too many away games and burning a ton of resources
and energy trying to flip red and purple seats. We don’t have a ton
of resources, and I think our real leverage for realigning the party
is in electing people where many more of our voters currently are and
aren’t fully organized into a political vehicle and political force.

I think about the Squad: on any given day, it is only six to eight
members of congress, maybe a little bit more. There are a ton of seats
in the country that are similar demographics to the Squad’s
demographics — younger, urban, diverse — that could have a
candidate that represents them.

Justice Democrats have a candidate in Memphis right now. They have a
candidate in Harlem. This is what party-building looks like in some
ways. If you’re in a Trump +3 district, you are going to be forced
to moderate on a couple of different issues because of the pressure
you’re facing from genuine Republicans and genuine conservatives. We
still live in a democratic system, more or less, in which you are
accountable to your voters. You might be a decent vote for Democrats,
but I think about someone like Chris Deluzio or Pat Ryan, who are
often held up as the populist candidates you could have in these
purple districts. I think they’re great, but they’re not like
Squad members or DSA members —

Daniel Denvir

Pat Ryan’s terrible on Gaza.

Waleed Shahid

Yeah. There are always exceptions to their populism in a way that you
can’t count on them to be a part of a coherent political force. That
said, I prefer Pat Ryan to a generic Democrat.

Daniel Denvir

One thing I’ll note to maybe complicate this — is there always a
neat trade-off between the two? After all, we’re speaking on a day
when there’s a special election in Tennessee with a very progressive
state legislator, Aftyn Behn, hoping to pull off an upset. I have no
idea what the real odds are, but it seems closer than people imagined
against a Republican incumbent.

Leah Greenberg

We’ll see how it goes. Aftyn’s actually a former Indivisible
organizer for Tennessee. What I would say is that when you’re in a
year where there’s a wave, everyone should just start swimming.

I think that when you’re making decisions about where you
concentrate resources on a set of strategic plays, you have one set of
calculations. For us, it’s about supporting thousands of different
groups that are making different decisions in their districts and then
figuring out if there are a few places where we go in collectively in
order to support decisions that are happening on the ground. Because
fundamentally, a firm position that we have for our own folks is, it
doesn’t matter if a national organization has come in with an
endorsement unless it’s backed up by a genuinely significant level
of local grassroots engagement in support of that candidate.

So it’s hard for us to have a really clear analysis. But the
connection that people are making between, “Wouldn’t it be nice if
I didn’t have to just constantly beg my Democrat to do what’s
right?” and “Maybe I should look at this challenger” is a lot
stronger than it has been in the past.

Eric Blanc

I agree with all that. What I’d add is I think there’s an
additional part of the country, which is so deeply red, in which the
Democratic brand is so toxic, that there is space [to run] more
economic populist, independent candidates, someone like Dan Osborn
generally. I think that that is something that we have to do. It’s
an open question. I don’t know how far that will go, but I think
it’s really smart and good to try to make that happen.

I don’t think it makes sense for DSA or Justice Democrats to endorse
someone like Dan Osborn, who certainly doesn’t have our position on
immigrant rights, for instance, or Palestine. But nevertheless, I
think it’s a really positive development if that type of thing could
happen more broadly.

I’d like to see more experimentation. Frankly, I think there would
be a role for unions to play in some of these red states to anchor
just straightforward economic populist — I would hope that they
wouldn’t take bad positions on things, but maybe they wouldn’t
take just any position on some of the hot-button questions we might
have disagreements with. But that does really have a possibility of
gaining traction right now. We maybe underestimate the extent to which
there are huge divisions and demoralization in the MAGA base that
could open big openings in places that we don’t currently think of
as in play.

When you’re in a year where there’s a wave, everyone should just
start swimming.

Daniel Denvir

Just look at Zohran — a huge victory — and at the way, generally
speaking, NYC-DSA has been able to effectively build out their
organization as a party-like formation with power and political
independence, which is the gold standard for what the socialist left
has been trying to do for a decade.

On the other hand, this proliferation of left insurgent campaigns is,
by necessity, larger and broader than DSA and thus beyond its full
control. Eric, how can DSA simultaneously stick to its focus and also
help lead this broader set of currents? How does DSA help guide this
broader front without liquidating its own identity and independence,
which has been really important for the revival of left politics in
this country?

Eric Blanc

It was an overall huge step forward that after Bernie 2016, DSA
started moving toward a new type of left politics electorally, which
was different than really what was the dominant trend before then,
which was just to support any progressive and sort of anything goes.

The reason that that was limited was not just about the politics,
although that’s part of it, but it also just didn’t build your
organization. It didn’t build an independent identity. It didn’t
build power from below. You couldn’t get volunteers to be excited
time and time again afterward. So New York City DSA in particular, but
also [chapters] elsewhere throughout the country, were right to build
a socialist wing and to develop a huge amount of volunteer
infrastructure out of that.

I would flag that it’s still quite uneven across the country. There
are a lot of DSA chapters that still just do progressive endorsements.

Daniel Denvir

Katie Wilson — who is a more than sufficiently left-wing challenger,
she’s a socialist as far as I can tell — did not get Seattle
DSA’s endorsement for reasons I don’t know about.

Eric Blanc

I think there’s a difficulty in DSA now in how you respond to new
terrain, where there are genuine left fighters who certainly aren’t
DSA cadre, maybe they call themselves socialists or don’t, but
they’re not necessarily sharing our politics.

There are also a lot of good and hard debates that need to be
happening right now to figure out how we relate to someone like Graham
Platner in Maine. How could you not want to go all in in Maine around
someone like Graham Platner? My response in the internal debates in
DSA on this stuff is — keep in mind, DSA arose out of, and we’re
still basically in, the Bernie moment, right? Bernie was not a DSA
cadre member. Our growth came largely out of, and in response to,
Trump’s election but then also the Bernie moment, which was much
bigger than DSA.

I think that there’s a possibility and necessity to walk and chew
gum at the same time. What I mean by that is it makes sense for an
organization like DSA to primarily focus on running socialist
candidates. But particularly when there’s high-profile, very
important battles in which you have essentially a Berniecrat running,
I do think you need to be more flexible.

Waleed Shahid

I was someone who worked hard to get DSA to endorse Cynthia Nixon and
also, on the other side, to get Cynthia Nixon to be open to the DSA
endorsement. Same with AOC; same with Jamaal Bowman. Endorsements go
both ways.

I think it’s a genuinely difficult problem in the American political
system because elected officials in this country are much bigger than
any organization or even party. We have a uniquely individually driven
political system where every elected official ultimately ends up
becoming their own small business owner and running their own brand.

Daniel Denvir

Following up on some points that Waleed made earlier, why is the
Democratic establishment the way that it is? Why do it and its
favorite media mouthpieces so stubbornly cling to convention even as
conditions become so clearly entirely unconventional? Why are they so
resolutely in denial of or hostile to their base? Why do they insist
on concepts like “popularism” when they just mean moderation and
triangulation?

Waleed Shahid

I was recently on a panel with someone from the WelcomePAC, which is
one of these PACs that are political outfits attempting to elect
“heterodox Democrats.” So what they mean by heterodox is
anti-trans, often pro-life Democrats, anti-choice Democrats,
pro-fossil-fuel Democrats, people who are a little bit more right-wing
on immigration.

The moderator asked me and this other person, “Do either of you feel
welcome in the Democratic Party?” Both of us said no. Then she
asked, who is the Democratic Party for then? It was a challenging
question where I’m like, I think that who the Democratic Party is
for is embodied in the politics of the leadership of the party, which
is, how do you create the math equations that will get you to 50
percent? How do I manage the coalition in a way and manage the groups
and manage the message in such a polished way so that adds up to 50
percent — rather than just being a person a leader in the world and
trying to mold a consensus?

It reminds me of the Whig Party in the nineteenth century where it
doesn’t really add up. . . . The politics of the leadership and the
politics of the establishment class is vote for me, because what else
are you gonna do?

Eric Blanc

I would add that I think Trump winning is not an existential threat to
them, but the left insurgents taking over the Democratic Party _is _an
existential threat to that establishment class. That explains a lot of
their behavior, because the reality is if we can both defeat Trump and
do that in a way that is closer to Bernie politics than to fifty years
of neoliberalism, all of them just lose their jobs. But it also proves
them wrong about saying that the way you win is pivoting to the
center.

Leah Greenberg

The vast majority of Democratic electeds are lawyers with degrees from
Ivy League institutions or business owners. They are not themselves in
any meaningful way credible representatives of the working class. The
fact that that was often not even part of the conversation suggests
some of the deeper problems.

_ERIC BLANC is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers
University. He blogs at the Substack __Labor Politics__ and is the
author of __We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is
Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big__._

_WALEED SHAHID is the director of the Bloc and the former spokesperson
for Justice Democrats. He has served as a senior adviser for the
uncommitted campaign, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman._

_LEAH GREENBERG is co–executive director of the Indivisible
Project._

_DANIEL DENVIR is the author of __All-American Nativism_
[[link removed]]_ and the
host of __The Dig__ on Jacobin Radio._ 

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
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