Lisa Miller’s case against the myth of American checks and balances is spot-on. In my corner of the world—organized labor—an overestimation of the power of the courts and an underestimation of mass politics have contributed to most union leaders’ exasperatingly milquetoast response to Trumpism 2.0.
While it’s good that unions have filed legal challenges to Trump and Musk’s authoritarian wrecking-ball operation, it’s remarkable that so few federal unions—to say nothing of the broader labor movement—have yet to really mobilize their ranks to fight back against this existential threat. What did labor officials do after Trump’s executive order stripped a million federal workers of their collective bargaining? Call for wide-scale protests, disruptive sit-ins, workplace actions? No. They filed lawsuits and emailed their members to call Congress.
As I write, a judge has just issued a temporary injunction. But even if this legalistic approach holds and manages to slow down parts of MAGA’s agenda, it seems far-fetched to expect a reactionary Supreme Court to ultimately safeguard our federal services or union rights. There’s an urgent need for the labor movement as a whole to take its lead from efforts like the Federal Unionists Network, which has been pushing for mass action by workers and community members to save our services.
Where I think Miller’s case could be clearer relates to the question of how we get a majority of working-class Americans to care about the constitutional reforms she justifiably champions. She is right to affirm that “the only remedy with a track record of overcoming the juggernaut of American veto points” is “mobilizing mass majorities on the basis of responsiveness to ordinary people’s needs.” Yet this assertion stands in tension with her subsequent suggestions that getting ordinary people to care about political reform is largely a question of political education—the idea that “if Americans had a better understanding of this history—how American-style checks and balances really function, and Americans’ repeated efforts to overcome them—a new vision of the constitutional system might gain traction.”
While I agree that it’s useful to try to educate people about democratic deficiencies in our regime—as well as past fights for political reform—I’m skeptical that these efforts will make much headway on their own, separate from mass movements focused on addressing working people’s immediate needs for economic security, affordable health care and housing, and a voice at work. It’s hard enough to organize ordinary people around these day-to-day concerns; we shouldn’t think that education alone will be enough to galvanize a mass movement for the seemingly more distant issue of constitutional change.
We’ve seen glimpses of what an alternative strategy can look like in the recent private sector labor uptick at Starbucks and beyond. Tens of thousands of young workers surged into action for better working conditions, fair pay, and an end to management despotism. But the experience of this fight itself—including being directly impacted by the limitations of a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deprived of strong powers to enforce union rights—quickly made labor law reform a relevant question for these young workers in motion. It was at only at that point, and as active participants in this movement, that organizers could start getting a wider hearing for the importance of reforming our legal system and fully funding the NLRB—issues that otherwise might have seemed somewhat arcane.
On a much wider scale, millions of workers supported President Roosevelt’s push in the late 1930s to curb Supreme Court authority. Why? Because they wanted to cement their recent unionization breakthroughs and wage gains. And even then, the way public pressure ultimately helped persuade the Court to unexpectedly uphold the National Labor Relations Act was through militant sit-down strikes at Flint and beyond—actions squarely focused on economic dignity and workplace democracy. Though it would have been great to have seen a mass movement of working people emerge for broader political reform, constitutional questions only really became a question of progressive mass politics insofar as they were tied to more down-to-earth battles.
Things might look different if we had a mass labor party in the United States. In other countries, the emergence of working-class political institutions significantly raised the broader salience of political reform. Yet even in these cases, it often took a central focus on socioeconomic questions to capture the imagination of working people. German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, for example, argued that the fight for universal suffrage could only root itself beyond upper- and middle-class circles if political transformation was framed primarily as a tool for social transformation. Abstract debates about principles could only go so far. As she put it, the movement would “need other grounds of action, other considerations, other ideals if the masses are ever to be reached.”
Miller may in fact agree with these considerations; other elements of her argument suggest as much. But it’s necessary to insist upon them since much of the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump opposition remains disproportionately middle class—and, not unrelatedly, excessively focused on high-level political questions. When you’re not facing consistent material insecurity—when you’re not one of the 60 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck—it’s easy to downplay the issues that are most widely and deeply felt by working people.
My hunch is that our best bet for mobilizing working people against Musk and Trump’s authoritarian power grab is through fights in defense of their Social Security and Medicaid benefits, the other essential services they depend on, their jobs, and their unions. If and when large numbers of workaday Americans eventually start demanding constitutional reform, this will likely emerge out of, and be in direct relationship to, big battles around their economic and social needs.
