Bluesky

On February 12, Elon Musk’s Tesla opened a $200 million advanced battery manufacturing facility, creating hundreds of new jobs. In China. Simultaneously, Musk’s DOGE team was working overtime to stop payment of already federal investments to major battery manufacturers in mostly rural areas of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and many other states. This hypocrisy should have put Democrats and progressives into high gear, pointedly asking, “Make Who Great Again?” on every platform we have. Instead, the issue stayed largely out of sight.

Since the November election, most liberals and progressives have hovered between fear, cynicism, and despair. The deluge of antidemocratic, generally inhumane actions taken by the Trump/Musk presidency are fulfilling our worst fears. So what should we do in response?

For most left-leaning activists, the answer is resistance. Resistance to Trump’s cabinet nominees; resistance to his mass deportations; resistance to Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of critical federal agencies. Team Trump’s destructive plans and actions cry out for resistance—in the streets, the courts, and anywhere else we might have impact. One example of the resistance platform is Indivisible’s “Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.” The essence of their strategy is encapsulated in one short sentence: “For the next two years, ‘no’ is a complete sentence.” This is “a time for defense,” they advise, rather than “proposing our own policies.”

Resistance to Trump and Musk is critical. But the left’s almost singular focus on defense—without offering an equally compelling vision that addresses the grievances of rural communities and working-class people—is a grave mistake. If we don’t make our commitment to an economy and politics that serves everyday people loud and clear, we will undermine efforts to fight Trump and further solidify the estrangement of the working class. Our outrage and resistance must encompass the ongoing betrayal of farmers, unions, and workers and US manufacturers and small businesses.

The “resistance strategy” that emerged in 2016 may have helped forestall MAGA’s ascendency through the 2018 and ’20 elections, but it did nothing to stop the long-term, broadly based movement of people away from Democrats. Rather, it contributed to the already heightened sense of millions of voters that Democratic politicians and activists only care about vilifying Trump; that we fight for the status quo, not for making life better for people like them. As New York Times reporters summarized their conversations with Black and Latino voters who went for Trump in 2024, “Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.” Pushed by some of the most prominent consultants and pundits on the left, that was an unforced error that may have cost Kamala Harris the election. We cannot afford to make that mistake again.

We have to do more than just fight the firehose of bad stuff. Instead, we must put forward a positive vision of what we are for, especially in terms of kitchen table issues for the tens of millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet.

These folks believe that the system is rigged against them—and they’re right. But the Trump/Musk onslaught of anti-worker, anti-farmer, pro-corporate actions are an opportunity to offer a plan of our own to unrig the system most Americans hate.

How can the left push forward a progressive, worker-centered economic agenda when the right controls the House, the Senate, and the White House? We can begin by lifting up some of the Democrats who won in Trump-leaning districts, emphasizing their pro-worker or pro-farmer positions and pledges to confront corporate power. From Chris Deluzio in western Pennsylvania to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in rural Washington, to Pat Ryan in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Democratic tent includes people who know that fighting for the little guy against Wall Street’s housing grab or for farmers’ rights over John Deere’s profits is both the right policy and a winning politics.

Second, Democrats and left-leaning groups must relentlessly push for the kinds of farm, labor, small business, and antitrust policies laid out in platforms like the Rural New Deal, or in specific bills such as Senator Amy Klobuchar’s “Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act” or Representative Ro Khanna’s “Childcare for America” legislation. These laws and proposed policies must become the benchmark against which Trump’s economic, trade, labor, and industrial policies are constantly measured. We should, in other words, fight like hell to protect the pro-worker policies and investments still on the books—and shout from the rooftops about Musk’s China factory, the purge of the labor voices at the National Labor Relations Board, and the farmers on the hook for conservation investments they made with the promise of federal reimbursement.

Finally, we need to walk and chew gum, that is, to fight mass deportations, punitive anti-diversity bills, and so much more—while also working to transform the institutions and organizations we do control so that they better serve the largest and angriest part of the electorate: rural folks and people without a college degree. Fighting for federal employees unfairly dismissed and for specific federal agencies like the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which has put billions of dollars back into consumers’ pockets, or USAID, which saves lives and helps build trust in America, is the right thing to do. But if the left reflexively fights to protect every inch of the bureaucracy and continues to position itself as the defender of “the system,” our chances of mobilizing the broad base necessary to defeat Trump and Musk are negligible. As Representative Khanna put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “The alternative to Mr. Trump cannot be a defense of institutions as they are. We need to stand for national renewal driven not by nostalgia for some golden past or simplistic anti-system slogans, but by offering transformative solutions to deliver future prosperity for all Americans, rekindling our bonds as citizens and healing our divides in the process.”

Trump’s approval rating is the highest it’s been since January 2017. That’s because millions of Americans believe that Trump is tearing down a system that’s been rigged against them for decades. If Trump and Musk are to be thwarted, Democrats will have to do more than just defend the institutions and norms that make up that system. We’ll need to stand with working-class Americans across race, in cities and the countryside; to acknowledge the righteousness of their anger; and to fight for both concrete actions and transformative policies that put economic and political power back in the hands of the people.