What should we promise? Like an FDR promise, it should be big, simple, universal, easy to put in place. Personal to everyone. Something that every man, woman, and child can grasp, without any explanation. That leaves out national health insurance—way, way too complicated, and like shooting Niagara.

I can think of two such things, though: First, promise not to “save” Social Security but to raise it to 50 percent of average lifetime hourly wage income. That’s a nice round number—50.

Second, promise at last—finally—to prohibit the firing of hourly working and salaried people except for cause.

The promises have three characteristics: The first is that it is FDR-like: big, universal, easy to understand. It cannot be complicated, or for others, like Obamacare. In this case, it builds on literal FDR promises, Social Security, the Wagner Act, Fair Labor Standards, what made the Democrats a working-class party.

The second is that it’s immediate gratification. It’s now. Unlike labor law reform, which is complex and hard to understand, and depends on a whole series of contingencies, the payoff in this case is immediate.

The third characteristic—it is all about security, not opportunity, and intended not to tell people to take chances, e.g., take out student loans, but to calm everybody down. Democrats should stop talking about increasing “opportunity,” which in our time sounds like raising money for a new tech start-up. “Opportunity” is fine, but people are rattled by capitalism enough. It is not “opportunity” but security that working people want from a party of the left. What about other great initiatives, like a $20 minimum wage or national health insurance? While simple, they are not universal or for all (the minimum wage), or if they are universal, they are not simple (national health insurance).  Defend Democracy

But a different kind.

Didn’t we fight the past election on this issue? No. We need a broader definition. You can’t have it in just one place. You can’t protect it in the electoral sphere, unless there is democracy in the workplace and the schools, where we all live out our lives. As John Dewey argues, if we have more of it in the workplace and the schools, then working-class people have a bigger stake in having democracy in the political sphere. But it has to be a way of life—and people have to see it as in their interest, far more than they do now.

And if we don’t have democracy in the workplace and the schools, all the fixes to the Constitution will not do us any good. As the ancient Athenians once did people may just vote it out.  Be the Labor Movement, Temporarily, Until There Is One

Despite unrest at Amazon or Starbucks, a serious American labor movement has yet to be. It is nowhere near being a countervailing force. The state is too weak to guarantee one, and society is too weak to sustain one. That comes from being so long without an effective right to organize. It comes also from a workplace culture where people have learned not to trust each other. Yes, the PRO Act can change that, but for the time being, the Democratic Party itself, temporarily, not just organized labor, needs to take up part of the role of mobilizing the country to demand a real labor movement. FDR once said: Make me do it. We Democrats need to get the society to push the party, because it can’t come from the party, or from party activists. It has to come from out there.

What does that mean? If the party were really serious about reaching the working class, it might consider flipping Citizens United. Instead of labor giving money to us Democrats, Democrats could give their PAC money to labor unions. If the Democrats shaved off just a tenth of the billion or so now spent without much effect on the presidential election, they could give it in the form of grants to unions to use for organizing, and it would help finance a ruckus in the land. While the risk-averse unions sit on their cash, the militant ones right now spend as much as they can to organize.

The party could pick the unions it wishes to help—gratis, no strings—except to organize. The billionaires who pony up for our PACs would gasp—but it is only, say, 10 percent of what the party is spending at the presidential level now. It is a way for the Democratic Party to organize on the ground now, which is just as important as building up the party in races at the local level. Organizing drives are like political races, only more intense. The more the party spends, the more people who are now apathetic are going to become activists, outside of the Democratic Party, but changing the culture, and likely to put more pressure on Democrats to be a party of the working class. To be sure, that is less likely in the building trades, but with some exception, the dead wood is not where the party should spend the money. This is quasi-state support, and some would say, dangerous for an independent labor movement. Perhaps so—if such a thing really existed. But if it seems to give the party influence over labor, we give labor influence over the party by building it up. A big part of organized labor is dead wood. Maybe even the dead wood will spring green shoots if somebody shows them the money.

Or we could try something even bolder still.

We could invite the working class expressly into the structure of the party, to give it some limited specific control over the selecting the leadership. One way is to have a nationwide mail ballot election open only to union members to elect the super delegates that the party leadership now appoints. Yes, we could limit it to union members who are registered Democrats. Let the delegates that they elect be the delegates vote in the second round. The effect here is literally to replace the “establishment” as the “decider.” And let those super delegates draft a platform for the party convention itself to adopt, modify, reject or consider

To be sure, this might just be symbolic—but it is an open displacement, symbolically, of the highly educated elite that is supposed to be in control of the party.

Maybe this will work. But what will not work is just to go on telling people we are the party in favor of labor law reform. Biden did his best to be a pro-union president and it had little effect.

Even Harris tried a bit—she refused to intervene in the dockworkers strike, which might have upended her election.

There are two problems here: First, it is very hard to explain to working-class people what the Democrats, if really in control—in full control of the Senate—could do for them. How it would pay off for them. When it would pay off for them. Nor is it the fault of poor Biden or Harris or Obama or Hillary Clinton that the PRO Act especially is so hard to explain. After all, the party outsourced to the AFL-CIO and other unions the task of coming up with it. For 50 years, for my entire adult life as a union-side lawyer, organized labor has been bungling the cause of labor law reform. The early bill under Clinton was a stupid, defend-what’s-left attempt to guarantee jobs to strikers in declining industries and not to organize or expand labor’s base, and would have had little effect even if it had passed. It had little support in the country. The PRO Act that came later is far better, but may sink under its own complexity, and some key provisions will never survive the Supreme Court.

What could survive, and be easy to explain, if we had a bolder organized labor, is something simpler, a civil rights act, with the same individual legal remedies, like juries, punitive damages, legal fees, that exist under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. But it’s riskier too, opening control of the labor movement to the rank and file who might go out and get their own lawyers, and could bring their own suits, with no control of an ossified union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO, if it had more nerve, could have just presented a clean version of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act but put in all those remedies for anyone who tried to organize and got fired. That, at least, is simple—at least we could explain it. We might even mobilize the country behind it. But just as the country does not understand the mind-numbing PRO Act, or care about it, the Democratic Party does not either. Even if they could, any immediate benefit to an individual worker seems uncertain and far off.

The Civil Rights Act for labor? That would be easy to explain.

There is a second problem, though. We will never be able to give the right to organize as a gift. This is a big deal, after all. To give it, we need to figure out how to stoke up the country to demand it—and to see that only Democrats can provide it. The working class is not demanding the right to organize, or at least the PRO Act, which the average voter, even the sophisticated voter, does not understand. It is not enough for some wonderful people in the Biden administration to work on it—until working people themselves demand it on their own.

In The Narrow Corridor (2019), Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who to much surprise just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, make a similar point about women’s right to vote. Women had to take it, they argue, and by that logic, the working class has to take it, and not receive it as a gift from policy wonks in the Democratic Party.

But we can show them the money—give people a sense of what might be on the table. That’s the important thing about the big promises

Let’s start with raising Social Security instead of, God forbid, “protecting” it as we do by making it just a little bit worse.

The key word in Social Security—security. And it goes to people directly. There is no labor movement that first needs to arise from the ashes to provide it. The Democratic Party, for this purpose, is the labor movement.

It’s hard to think of a better way to steal Trump’s base. Right now, Social Security pays just 36 percent of people’s income for a medium earner who retires at age 65, the former “normal” retirement age. Let the Democrats bring it to 50 percent. That’s a nice round number: 50 percent, so it’s easy for people to keep tabs, to know if it really is being protected. And make it a statutory right.

It would force the party to decide in front of the whole country: “Who are we for?” The only serious way to get to 50 percent is to lift the cap on the payroll tax as the major means for doing so, and that exposes the structural obstacle to being a working-class party. The cap is $168,000 and we have been defunding Social Security as more and more people earn over that amount, including those in the constituency from which the party draws its leadership, not the super wealthy, but those doing very well, thank you. It would be a shock to the constituency from which we draw many of our best activists and, while not super wealthy, do contribute significant money and time. Other than the ineptitude of organized labor, that’s the internal contraction that keeps the Democrats from being a working-class party.

Still, consider how the working class is rattled. Every month 5.5 million Americans lose their jobs. To be sure, many are voluntary quits, but they often quit involuntarily because pay is too low, hours are awful, and it’s intolerable to say. If that’s not bad enough, there is technological change, endless, frightening outmoding of jobs, in AI, already here, but not just in AI, and more ahead, with no stopping point. Even if jobs continue as they almost certainly will, they will be even less secure. And of course, working-class people have no savings, no wealth, and the stock market does not go up 23 percent a year for them as it does for much of the liberal elite they despise. The least the elite of the party can do is to chip in out of their own pockets for more security.

But here is the message to our own postgrad liberal elite: “Democracy isn’t free. Be prepared to write a check.”

No, not to a PAC—but the IRS. Weren’t the unions supposed to take care of this?

“Why is it up to us to pay?” Yes, it’s understandable that those in the top 20 percent of the income structure, rapidly becoming the party’s base, may think, “Hey, the unions were supposed to take care of this.” And in a sense, they’re right. It’s hard to take the lead in redistributing income—it’s just against nature. They may well think: Weren’t the unions supposed to handle this? Yes, the stock market just went up by 23 percent last year, and balanced growth IRAs went up a lot too. Yet it takes that much to feel safe. Let’s put aside retirement. With good reason, they fear that the wealth they have from their own privileged education is necessary to get the same education for their children. “Wait—I have to protect my child!” There is no democracy in education. That’s why it’s hard to have democracy in the workplace.

The point of raising the cap is to show that, yes, for the benefit of the working class, we can tax that ever larger part of our base, the educated part, which does all the talking. Nor need it be so great as to jeopardize too much the ability to pay what it now takes for the privileged education of our young.

Then consider the second big promise—a law that directly protects your right to a job, a right not to be fired except for just cause. This has long been a favorite cause of plaintiff employment lawyers like me. There is no greater divide between the working class in this country and that of Europe than the right of an employee not to be fired except for just cause. In Berlin, on a short-term fellowship, to students at Humboldt law school, I once tried to teach a class on American labor law. No one could get over the shock of the American rule of “employment at will,” the principle that an employer can fire even a long-term employee at any time for any reason, without even having to explain. At the beginning of every class, students would want to go back to our first class and ask, “Wait, are you serious? Is this possible?” It was beyond their comprehension, not just for the German students, but the Belgian students, the Cambodians, and everyone else in the class.

This too is a promise that would come directly from the Democratic Party and not depend upon the revival of the unions.

I sometimes hear from friends that our courts would be overwhelmed. But there are alternatives to state and federal courts. There could be a single agency, or state agencies, to hear the claims, as with the so-called “labor courts” in countries like Germany.

There is one big reason for this change—it might embolden the working class. It is to change the culture in the workplace, the servility, the learned helplessness, that leads people to bow and scrape before their bosses and reserve their anger for liberals far away whom they never see, and kick the poor migrants on the border. Until the Democrats change that culture, to name the fear people have and exorcise it, we will never win over the large majority of the working class. Remember, It’s a Culture War

So far as I can tell, as a union side lawyer, authoritarianism has been on the rise for years, chiefly in the workplace. Since 1973 or so, along with CEO pay, there has been an increase in royalism, in top-down management. Though hard to see year by year, this is just as big a cultural change in the United States in my lifetime as sexual choice, and even comparable to the rise of social media as an influence on our character.

The big change is the increasing fear of association, I mean nonpolitical association, of the kind that enraptured Tocqueville in Democracy in America. He made clear that these were not political but usually work-related associations, or at least outside the sphere of government.

But we now keep people from associating outside of that sphere, especially if they are hourly workers. One sign of it is the rise of distrust—of everything. People distrust the president, Congress, and just about every other institution, because in the workplace, where Tocqueville-type association should occur, they have learned to distrust each other.

Let me give an example. I represent fired workers as well as unions. When they are not in unions, workers who are fired lose not only their jobs but their friendships. Friends there—or former friends, now—will often no longer talk to them, or talk to me trying to figure out the case. When I bring these suits for non-union fired employees, I am sure of one thing, that there will be one and only one witness on our side, and that is the person who is the plaintiff.

Everyone in that workplace knows that he or she dies alone. Ending employment at will would be the first shot in a culture war. It is hard to pick up the habit of resisting tyranny in the political sphere if people spend most of their waking lives on their knees at work.

It might even bring some free speech at work. Right now, many a workplace, for white males, is a safe space only to speak up for Trump, or Musk, or just the far right. That’s true even in union workplaces. That’s one reason the Trump right is so fearful of diversity—the absence of Blacks in the workplace makes it that much easier to intimidate the whites. In some cases, racial diversity in a workplace protects the whites there as well. It is astonishing to me that, despite what they encounter day to day, one-third of the white working class has enough nerve to vote for the Democrats. It is just a guess that one-third tend to be in workplaces where they feel safe, less intimidated by Trump bros who can support Trump without fear of offending the boss. There is a far-right political correctness, with a hint of violence behind it, at the shop-floor level. And it thrives in a culture based on the fear of being fired at any time.

The New Dealers understood that they were fighting a culture war. Or just as Stalin was trying to create a new “Soviet man,” and Hitler was trying to create a new type of German, the Roosevelt left was, less ham-handedly, trying to create a new type of American, or change the American character. That is the purpose of the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, to embolden the working class that had had no self-confidence before. Like the USSR and Nazi Germany at least in one respect, the New Deal was an example of what the historian Charles Maier calls the “project state.”

But in constructing this new type of American, New Dealers had it relatively easy—it will be much harder to bring democracy to the workplace, in a service economy, not amenable to mass organizing. It is even harder now to couple this with democracy in education. Oh yes, we ended the digital divide, and now with everyone online, we have only diminished the education that people used to have. Right now, by many accounts, reading comprehension in the US is dropping. A third of adult Americans read at the level of 10-year-olds and are more or less illiterate. Though we worry about disinformation, and rightly so, fewer people follow the news in any way at all. They are not even getting disinformation. And when working-class people get the chance, they often try to vote down tax increases intended to educate their own children. Meanwhile, thanks to education, the rich get richer—and the Democratic Party does not even go near this issue. Public education is so decentralized and locally based, it seems impossible to change. There is nothing simple to propose. It is even more treacherous an issue, and more complex, with more tradeoffs than even national health insurance. In Europe, there are no institutions like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, or elite state universities and research—really, the crown jewels of our economy. Such institutions do not exist on the same scale in social democracies, where it matters far less which college one chooses. There is no equivalent in, say, Finland, whose education system is the envy of the rest of the world, or should be.

It is the lack of democracy in education that may explain our inability to be a working-class party, and it may be the existence of a liberal humanist culture that has put democracy at risk. The tragedy of the Democratic Party is that so many of its best people have a material interest in maintaining a system that has created this terrible divide, which ending the digital one has only exacerbated.

One possible solution may be to put in place an estate tax on wealth—of a kind that stops the real wealth transfer between generations. As some economists point out, the highly educated are passing on their wealth—not when they die but when their children go to school.

Liberalism, progressive liberalism, just like neoliberalism, can be an ideology that hides even from us our own material interests. The only counter here is to change the structure of the party, and invite in the working class, not our ideal of it, but the working class as it really is.

After all, even in the case of the white working class, one third in the last election decided they could not stomach Trump. I have learned sometimes that a client should tell the lawyer what the law should be. Maybe they would be better at telling us, if we listened, how we can go big and keep it simple too.