News Brief: Trump’s Hollow Working-Class Aesthetics and How Unions Can Lead a Real Resistance
Citations Needed | March 19, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed, and today, we are thrilled to have a guest with us to talk about labor organizing and the power of unions, especially at this time in our history? Our present? Whatever we want to say, this new era, Trump redux, Musk as dictator, and what that means for our workforce, what it means for our union power.
Adam: Yeah, so we’ve talked about, I guess, the kind of rightwing populism rebrand. We did an episode in 2021 about it, specifically focusing on JD Vance and Trumpism and Josh Hawley, which is what we consider a kind of cynical, largely superficial attempt to kind of become the self-professed party of the working class. And what we argued is that it’s largely an aesthetic. It is about a kind of idealized white worker, distant and abstract from things like the NLRB or OSHA protections or other things that actually protect workers and unionization itself, rather than what we identified as this kind of Oren Cass astroturf attempts to use the aesthetics, language, and rhetoric and the occasional token policy support to pick off this kind of labor or labor-adjacent demographic, in order to shore up the so-called white working class base among Trump and Trumpism in the Republican Party more broadly.
And so this, of course, manifested in the recent election of Trump in certain ways. Trump has been good at kind of, both in 2016 and 2024, now again, he is opposed to free-trade agreements as are many progressives as well. Beyond that, it has historically been largely aesthetic. So it just so happened that our guest today had written a book about the importance of labor in a meaningful and long-term opposition to Trumpism, which, alas, even if Trump tomorrow died of a Diet Coke-induced heart attack, would still go on without him, it just wouldn’t be as funny, that there needs to be some kind of long-term, sustainable working class movement, something we’ve talked about a lot in the show. He happened to have written a book about it, so we are excited to bring him on to discuss that in the context of Trump’s most recent and JD Vance’s most recent white working class aesthetic rebrand that, again, has kind of worked, which we will talk about as well.
Nima: Yeah, so without further ado, let’s bring on our guest. We are now joined by Eric Blanc, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, and author of the books Revolutionary Social Democracy, which was published by Haymarket in 2022, and Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, which was published by Verso in 2019. His latest book, that Adam just mentioned, which was published just this past February by the University of California Press, is We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. You can also find his writing at LaborPolitics.Substack.com. Eric, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Eric Blanc: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Adam: So I want to begin by discussing what you kind of argue in your book, what your kind of main thesis is, and we’ll kind of drill down from there. You sort of argue both in The Guardian article you wrote, but as well as your book, you have many arguments, but one of them is that to get out of our kind of dire social and political situation, to put it mildly, we say clusterfuck, that where there needs to be a focus on unions and as a sort of place of resistance and working-class power building beyond the kind of, you know, just pulling the lever every two years for the Democratic Party. You know, obviously that’s easier said than done. It’s kind of the, John Podesta, how to defeat ISIS, and the first step is defeat ISIS. It’s sort of easier to abstractly talk about than it is to actually do. So I want to begin by talking about what your kind of overall argument is, and what your framework is that you think is missing in the current debate. Because right now, there’s a lot of, your book happens to time with a lot of existential soul-searching on the Left. Of course, there’s a lot of people with a huge vested interest in maintaining the status quo who just want people to believe that there’s really not much we can do. So talk about what you think, the kind of overall thesis of your book, and what you think the steps forward are with respect to building a working-class coalition on the so-called Left.
Eric Blanc: The first page of the book has this graph that some of your listeners might have seen, but it’s like the most important graph to understand everything in this country and other advanced capitalist countries, which is the relationship between inequality and union density. So basically, union density, the percentage of workers in a union, goes up, inequality goes down. Inequality goes down, that’s when union density goes up. And what we’ve had since the 1950s is a decline in union membership, and since Reaganism in particular, just a dramatic plummeting of union density, and that has laid the basis for all of the crises we’re in. So Trumpism, climate catastrophe, you name it, basically it’s rooted in the lack of power that ordinary people have vis a vis the corporate elite, and unions are the main tool historically, and still today, through which ordinary people have some leverage against extremely powerful bosses.
And so the book is an attempt to ask, what would it take to turn that graph around? What would it take to organize tens of millions of workers? Because we’re at, now, 6% union density in the private sector, 10% total, when you include the public. And so the reality is that if we are going to defeat Trumpism, if we’re going to be able to start passing transformational reforms, electoral politics isn’t sufficient. I think it is important. It’s not an argument against that, but the missing piece has been sort of this ordinary, on-the-ground power of working people. So the book is a really in-depth case for how you could organize at scale. And so we can go into more detail if you want, but the short version is really that the existing models of labor organizing have been too small-scale. They’ve been too costly, they’ve been too focused on staff, and they just haven’t been able to give the tools for organizing widely enough to enough workers. And if you look at all the polls, workers want to join unions, and they’re eager to fight back. And so the book is an attempt to talk about how you can give essentially millions of workers the tools and the confidence, inspiration to start organizing themselves and connecting with unions down the road.
Nima: Yeah, it’s a great thing that you brought up the idea that, according to some polling, nearly half of non-union workers say they want to join a union. And as of 2023, I think, something like 67% of Americans approve of unions, kind of as a concept, right? Which is, I think, the highest level that we’ve seen in the past, like, half-century. And obviously there are shifts toward positive feelings about unions in younger people, you know, so-called Gen Z has a much more positive viewpoint of unions. And so I think all this kind of builds together and kind of leads me to a question that Adam sort of nodded to at the top of this, which is this question of aesthetics. So, you know, while obviously his working-class appeal can be vastly overrated sometimes, sometimes only a little bit, it is objectively true that Donald Trump has been very good at peeling off working-class voters of all demographics, right? Not necessarily only just quote-unquote “white working class,” and especially in this past election and rightwing populism, as we’ve discussed on the show a lot, is largely rooted in aesthetics, right? So other than his opposition to free-trade agreements, as Adam said, Trump really has no honest populist policies. He simply has rhetoric and this kind of bombast, the cultural signifiers, and facile patriotic claims of prioritizing, quote-unquote, “the American worker,” right? And so liberals have also made his job very easy by effectively morphing the Democratic Party into an elite inside club with, like, lawyers and PR flaks kind of leading the way. Eric, if you could please talk to us about this superficial aesthetic appeal of Trump and Trumpism, and what were the conditions that allowed for the erosion of what was traditionally, you know, in decades past, a Democratic kind of unionized base, and Democratic, I say, large-D Democratic, like Democratic Party-aligned. Where do you think that kind of came from, and why has it been so effective?
Eric Blanc: Yeah. So to start with the conditions, the reality is, for 50 years now, the Democratic Party has taken working people for granted at best. And so you have decade after decade of policies benefiting the corporate elite and sort of leaving working people and unions behind, and the chickens came home to roost, as it were. Think about Carter’s Volcker Shock, then Bill Clinton, NAFTA, Obama, bailing out the banks. You know, after time and time and time again, if you’re a union worker, or if you’re just a working-class person who traditionally voted Democrat, your family always voted Democrat, at a certain point, you start to question whether the Democrats are on your side. And so that left essentially a vacuum, which is our current situation in which the working class is up for grabs. It’s not that all of the working class has gone one way or the other, but it’s not just white workers, as you mentioned, and it means that because the Democrats have, frankly, not delivered, and certainly not delivered on the scale necessary to sort of make a meaningful difference in people’s day-to-day lives, it means that the aesthetic appeal can matter a lot.
So you’re right. I agree 100% that there’s no sort of real substance to the populism of MAGA and Trumpism. That’s true, but it is significant that they are trying to win working-class people, and that aesthetically, they are signifying that they want working-class people to see them as their representatives, and that’s different. The Democrats, frankly, you know, Schumer has this famous quote, ‘For every blue-collar worker we lose, we’re going to pick up two suburban moms.’ But this, for a long time, really was the orientation of the Democratic Party. I don’t even know if the Democratic Party has an orientation at this point, so it’s hard to say, like, what exactly they think can be done, but the aesthetic reflects an orientation to working people that, frankly, the Democratic Party hasn’t had. So you can say it’s just superficial, sure, but it would be nice to have a little bit more of even a superficial attempt from the Democrats.
Nima: Right, because the implications are as real as can be, right? The consequences of abdicating even the aesthetic are seen in our current reality.
Eric Blanc: Yeah, it’s not insignificant. It makes a difference.
Adam: Yeah, I think to some extent, there was an attempt, really, to have their cake and eat it too. And this really emerged, it predates it, but it really emerges with the DLC and Clintonism as this kind of, We will help the working class in some vague way, but also we will help Wall Street in that we can just increase the pie, and everyone’s pie will increase. This was kind of the vision of the ’90s, the kind of post-Soviet, the Thomas Friedman vision, that there was no need for class politics anymore, that this was a kind of vestige of the Cold War and communism, and you didn’t really need the sense that there was some mutual exclusivity and interest. And that ended up, again, either not being true or not really resonating with people. This sort of idea that you can have it both ways was the sort of temptation. And again, it’s been clear, I think, since at least 2014, 2015, when you saw how Obama spent his last six months in office, blowing all the remaining capital trying to pass a deeply unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership, a kind of NAFTA on steroids for East Asia, that this was not something people actually wanted. It was, I remember there was an article in the Washington Post that said, ‘100 corporate leaders, CEOs and billionaires sign a letter to Obama asking him to pass TPP.’ And it’s like, well, who gives a shit what they think?
Nima: Yeah, that kind of gives it away, right?
Adam: Right, and so it’s like, this was the thing that pissed away their capital, and obviously that, I think, contributed to the rise of Trump. And it’s one of these things where we keep relitigating this, and to what extent has the deck been stacked where you do have this kind of corporate-captured, pseudo-oppositional party in many ways, and you have an increasingly fascistic and nihilistic right wing that doesn’t even seem to buy into the kind of normie Club for Growth conservatism in the sense that they’re willing to wreck the economy for ideological purposes it seems at this point, what does it look like to build unionization in that environment?
I mean, I think this is where people come out, you know, I know Hamilton Nolan wrote a book last year about the kind of state of unionization that was highly critical of union leadership, but I want to kind of dig down into next steps and the nitty gritty. Because, again, I do think, abstractly, everything you’re saying makes total sense, and I think most people agree with that. But what does it look like to fend off this constant stream of crises in a feckless and I think institutionally weak Democratic Party, by design, for the average person? I mean, it seems overwhelming, and it’s because that’s part of the point. It’s supposed to seem overwhelming. Is it just a simple matter of, like, organize your workplace first and foremost? Or is that maybe a little too self-help-y?
Eric Blanc: I think it is a little self-help-y, and it’s also true. It’s basically the case that workers have to take the lead, and that no one’s going to be coming from above to save us. And I think that sense of reality can be really frightening, and I think that’s part of what’s been so frightening about the last few weeks, is you have just Trump going crazy, Musk going crazy. And the official line from the Democratic Party, you know, James Carville saying, is that we have to lay over and play dead.
Nima: Hakeem Jeffries saying that there’s no leverage. They’re like, They control everything. There’s really nothing we can do.
Eric Blanc: Right. So in that context, it is the case that it’s going to be up to ordinary people to fight back. No one else is going to do it, and that there is something about the workplace that gives you an amount of power no matter who’s in office, right? Because every public institution, every private institution, depends on your labor. That’s just something that always exists as a power that can be tapped. And so to dig into the nitty gritty, sometimes it’s the case that the boss is the best organizer. I’m not like an accelerationist. I don’t think the worst things get the better. But just to give an example, there’s been a surge in unionization in the federal sector. You’ve had over 15,000 workers in the last month join the federal unions, and that’s more than joined the entire year prior. So there’s something about the depth of what Trump is doing, and also just the openly oligarchic nature of this regime. We have Jeff Bezos basically just saying that the Washington Post has to only promote free-market ideas in the Op-Ed. There’s something about this consolidation of just the top, richest people in the world in the administration, that means that fighting Trumpism can take and should take a labor form, in a way that you know maybe wouldn’t have been as resonant under another regime.
But if you’re organizing against Bezos, for instance, like if you’re an Amazon worker unionizing, that’s also organizing against the Trump regime, de facto, but then also explicitly, because the regime is trying to deny you union rights. So every single private-sector union battle this time poses the question of, Is Trump actually a populist? Is he actually on the side of working people, or is he, in fact, just sort of a billionaire who talks the good game, and for us who are on the Left, we already have our answers to this, but you need to demonstrate clearly to the American people through big struggles, which side of the class divide Trump is on, and so part of the way you do that is through unionization fights. And it’s true that it’s harder in some ways when you don’t have a good National Labor Relations Board, but frankly, the unionization upsurge that we’ve had even in the last four years, but still in the context in which labor law is extremely broken, even under Biden, there’s very few legal protections for unionization. It’s not so different now. And so there does have to be a widespread attempt to unionize, whether you’re in the private or public sector, and to see that this is these crucial mechanism for exposing Trump, but then also just building power. And I’ve been, you know, I’ve talked to so many workers over the last few weeks, whether it’s in the federal sector or in the private sector, who said, I don’t know what I can do about politics. Everything is chaotic, but I do know that I can talk to my coworkers, and if we can build some sort of community and some sort of power, that’s going to help us get through whatever is coming ahead. And so we’ve seen a real uptick, actually, despite Trump, in some ways because of Trump, in this bottom-up unionization effort, even under very hostile conditions.
Adam: I want to talk about the sort of broader propaganda and media environment, because I think that’s obviously what we do on the show. But I think it’s also very relevant to this discussion, which is to say, I want to play Democratic devil’s advocate here, okay? If I was a former Biden official or, you know, one of these kind of dead-enders on Twitter who defends whatever the Democrats do, they would say, Look, Biden did a lot for the working class. He did the IRA, you know, he did all these infrastructure jobs. He did the sort of, you know, FTC, with a fairly progressive FTC, took on Big Tech, did a lot of regulation, had a decent NLRB. And even still, the working class abandoned the Democratic Party. And they would say largely because of racism and sexism, which I think is probably a fair criticism, right? Not that you can really do much about discrete moral failings, but it’s a factor, okay, in the sense that if Democrats deliver for working people, it’ll somehow transfer into winning elections. They would say that, look, rightwing propaganda is just so sophisticated, and Fox News is just injected into people’s veins, and now you have rightwing media controlling, frankly, Facebook to some extent, and obviously X and Twitter, that there’s just so much dogshit and racism and Knockout Game and anti-immigrant fervor and all this bullshit people are fed every day. You know, Joe Rogan telling people that real working-class people vote for Trump, that in some ways, the deck is so stacked against them that this idea of deliverism, this kind of leftwing philosophy of, if we deliver for working and poor people, it’ll translate into electoral gains, is a Bernie Bro fiction. It’s not real. And what do you say to that? What do you say to this argument that liberalism is, in fact, doing its best, but has been up against these kind of insuperable forces?
Eric Blanc: Yeah, a few things. First of all, the communication matters, and so part of it is that Biden was, like, the worst possible messenger for this. And that’s not insignificant, especially when you have policies that take a while to roll out, and that, frankly, a lot of these policies were good, that you mentioned, but it didn’t immediately, in a very visceral, deep way, obviously impact people’s lives. You have to sort of explain what’s going on, and Biden was completely incapable of doing that. And so you can compare that with, for instance, what’s going on in Mexico, where Claudia Sheinbaum has an 80% approval rating right now. It’s not just because the scale of the policies that they’ve implemented were wider, so that’s part of it. For all of the good things that Biden did domestically, which I think were significant. They didn’t come anywhere near the ambitions of the New Deal in the 1930s or what you’re seeing in Mexico, where you have, poverty has fallen by 50%, something like that. So the scale matters a lot, and the communication matters a lot. And I would add too, though, that the steel man argument points out something real, which is that unless working people themselves see and feel that the Democrats have delivered on this, it’s just not the case that automatically passing these policies will change things for the Democrats.
Part of that, I do think we have to be honest, part of it is our own failing as the labor movement, as of the Left, to seize the opening of the Biden administration. So what percentage of the workforce is in unions in the US? 10%. It’s not that surprising therefore that if the Biden administration passes pro-union policies, but then the union movement doesn’t take the opening to grow, well, yeah, of course, the vast majority of workers aren’t in unions, and so they’re not necessarily going to feel that pro-union policies automatically benefits them. If there had been double or triple union density in this country, the Democrats would have won by a landslide. Because even today, even with all of this, all of the data we have shows very clearly that union members aren’t as easy to fall prey to scapegoating. They tend to vote Democrat, anti-Republican, more and more, even in the blue-collar sectors. So it’s just the case that unions themselves have to be able to rise to the occasion. It can’t just be the Democratic Party delivering from above. There has to be some sort of wide-scale organizing. And frankly, most unions didn’t even try. The union movement is sitting on over $30 billion in funds that it didn’t use. Most national unions continued with business as usual under Biden, and so this huge opening for seizing the possibilities of Bidenism was essentially squandered by the labor movement. So that is part of the reason why we’re in the impasse we’re at.
Adam: Why do you think that is? I mean, you wrote in The Guardian that you thought traditionally labor leadership was, quote, “exceedingly risk averse, narrowly focused, and deferential to establishment politicians,” unquote. I want you to elaborate on that and maybe get into some specifics. We can talk about the kind of Sean O’Brien kerfuffle, maybe separately. But why is it that they’re conservative? Because, again, this is a criticism people have been making for decades, and to some extent, they’ve maybe gotten a little less conservative. They, you know, in the ’90s, they were outright promoting, you know, anti-worker policies at the AFL-CIO. But maybe get specific. Who are you talking about, specifically, and what forces create these conditions, and how can people and workers seek to undermine that?
Eric Blanc: Yeah, so it’s conservative in two different senses. One is just in the sense of being risk averse. So even if you leave aside the politics of it, these are massive institutions in which there’s a huge amount of money, which is a very deep bureaucracy, that are very hard to move, and that when the situation changes quickly, they don’t react. And so that was part of what happened under Biden. All of a sudden, there really was a, you know, a bottom-up effervescence. Unionization rights were being promoted from above, and unions, frankly, just did not have the capacity to move quickly. Leadership just sort of kept on with business as usual, which, business as usual for them, is talking with the Democrats behind the scenes, it’s sort of just doing the routine servicing of their members. And most of them aren’t trying to unionize. They haven’t been trying to unionize, and they didn’t pivot.
As far as the politics goes, the norm has been deference to Democratic Party establishment, so that hasn’t gotten anywhere. And so now it seems novel when you have Sean O’Brien essentially trying to do the same game with the Republicans, it’s not likely to get any further. And in fact, the opposite is true. There’s even less space in the Republican coalition for this type of behind-the-scenes lobbying, making significant changes. Jeff Bezos was at the Inauguration. So think about, if you’re a Teamsters union president, you’re trying to sort of put lipstick on the pig of this administration that is literally being behind the scenes, deeply connected to the company that is destroying every sort of Teamster job, and that you’re trying, at the same time to organize. The Teamsters are trying to organize Amazon. So there’s just a deep contradiction with what Sean O’Brien is doing. And I get the impulse to not be deferential to the Democrats, but it’s crazy to think that the Republicans are somehow going to deliver.
Nima: Yeah. I mean, part of this, I think, has to do with, I mean, something you mentioned earlier, which is, you know, positive progressive change, especially when it’s changing systems and structures that have been in place for decades, if not centuries, takes time and can be complicated and it’s sometimes hard to explain, and the, you know, material benefits for everyday people maybe take a little while to roll out, and, you know, be actually felt while, you know, on the other side, there’s this tech-bro Silicon Valley idea of moving fast, right? Move fast, break things, that kind of feels quicker, feels like it’s active, feels like it’s moving. And then when you have a complacent media describing, say, DOGE, as focused on, quote-unquote, “cutting waste, fraud, and abuse,” you get the sense that one side delivers, the other side can’t explain what they’re actually doing, and therefore seems completely either inept or inactive or certainly insufficient to meet the needs of everyday people. So, you know, when it comes to the idea of like, the narratives around this, the idea of MAGAism, of, you know, like Musk and this kind of tech oligarchy, they move fast, they deliver, they do these things. And the other side, like, can’t really explain what they do. Where do you think that fight is going to go, and how can this kind of narrative battle be won by labor and hopefully, you know, the Left, by actually, maybe turning the rhetoric into action and explaining what is happening in real time, rather than the, Well, wait and see, because this stuff takes a while?
Eric Blanc: Yeah, I mean, I think that you’re right to flag that the Republicans have been so much better at showing themselves to be doing something, and that’s important because working people are angry, and frankly, the status quo isn’t working for them, and so they want to see at least something, somebody’s trying something. And I think Trump understands that and understands the need to have enemies and to point to people to blame, and frankly, the Democrats haven’t been doing that. I do think that this is a particular possibility for the labor movement to sort of fill this vacuum, because labor can deliver immediately and it can move quickly.
And so just, you know, to be really specific, if you’re organizing at a workplace, even Amazon, before you get a first contract, they unionized, right? Imagine, remember, two years ago, they won the first warehouse on JFK in Staten Island. The week after, Amazon, all of a sudden, you know, out of the goodness of their hearts, gives 10% pay raises all across the country because they’re scared. And so even before you have a first contract, unionization battles make very tangible, very immediate gains that you can point to. And Starbucks, for instance, they’ve won a huge amount of things over the last three, four years, even before they have a first contract that workers can point to directly because of their actions.
And I think that we’re going to have to have some sort of similar dynamic now, of moving quickly to show that actually we can stop Musk and MAGA and I’m optimistic that the federal union movement can push back and can move quickly and can scale up actions that can feel meaningful to people to save the services that are literally on the chopping block. Did you see the Trump administration talking about cutting 50% of the staff for Social Security? Like, how do people think that they’re going to get Social Security checks with half the staff? It’s not going to happen.
Adam: Well, no, they’re not cutting benefits, Eric, they’re just, they’re doing efficiencies. Don’t you know that?
[Laughter]
Nima: They’re streamlining for efficiency.
Eric Blanc: But this is the thing. I think just, speaking really concretely, Trump and Musk have done a huge amount of overreach. What they’re doing, contrary to what they suggest, is extremely unpopular, and there’s a possibility to have an immediate, short-term win to save these services, because people actually do want their Social Security. They do want to have Medicaid. And I think then, if the labor movement can fight back right now, even over the next couple of weeks, and force them to retreat, that’s going to feel meaningful and quick to a lot of people. And so I’ll give one plug to the Federal Unionists movement, for people who want to support to fight back on this. There’s going to be a rapid-response form, essentially a rapid-response movement. Anywhere in your town, anywhere in the country, where a worker gets fired, there’s going to be mass protests of community members to support. So you can go to the following website, which is Go.SavePublicServices.com. Go.SavePublicServices.com. And everybody should basically be ready to go out there and raise hell to defeat what Musk is doing. I do think that’s very immediate, and can see real, tangible benefits in the short term.
Adam: Yeah, and people, because people are wondering, why are they getting, why are they overreaching? Why are they so greedy? It reminds me a lot of the centrist media handwringing when Dylann Roof, like, wrote a manifesto about why he committed his hate crime, and they’re like, Well, truly, what was his motive? It’s like, he wrote a manifesto. You can go read it. I think liberals, just to a large extent, can’t recognize ideology when they see it. And they don’t, Trump and Musk don’t give a shit about Republicans’ future electoral fortunes. They are trying to carry out a far-right coup of the government. And I think they believe, probably correctly, that if they do control the mechanisms of elections, which they will, while they won’t, I don’t think they’ll cancel elections. They’ll make it very hard for Democrats to win by doing all this so-called election reform and all this stuff. So I think they’re, they’re trying to, in some ways, accomplish a coup. And I don’t use that term lightly. So this kind of, Well, we’ll just wait it out and win it in 2026 attitude does not appear to, again, I think to a lot of observers, to meet the moment. It doesn’t really seem to have the correct urgency, because unlike in 2016 and 2017 and 2018, Trump doesn’t really have any opposition in key ways, and has the Republicans totally in lockstep.
And so I think there’s, I think you’re right. Where’s that pushback going to come from? It’s sure as shit not going to come from, you know, Democratic leadership, which, to the extent to which they have acted, has been unresponsive to the upward, I mean, their approval ratings are less than 20% among Democrats. You have normie, liberal, MSNBC types just outraged at the seeming indifference of Democratic leadership. So I do think there’s a space there for a liberal-Left coalition, for want of a better term, to, I don’t know, create some mechanism of pushback. And the lawfare stuff is important. I don’t want to trivialize that, because I do think suing people is important, and it’s pretty much all you can do in certain, in key ways. And so I think, I think you’re right. To the extent to which, you know, where are the unions? Sara Nelson, during the government shutdown in 2017, fighting back, and obviously others have fought back. So I mean, specifically, do you feel like unions are doing enough in the current moment to fill that power vacuum created on the liberal Left, or do you think there’s sort of more they can do, and to the extent which they have done stuff, what would you highlight as a good example?
Eric Blanc: Yeah, the short version is no, the union leaderships have not done enough. I think that there’s a very good chance that they could be convinced and pressured to. They move slowly. The norm in these types of movements is that the rank and file has to lead, and when they lead, the leaders will follow. And we’re already seeing that now in the federal workers’ movement, where the protests and actions have been coming from below, and then I think that the national leaderships will sort of get on board. It has to be posed really sharply, which is that, what Musk is doing, what Trump is doing, is just an existential threat to the entire labor movement, to all working people, to democracy. And it is strange, frankly, that all of these words have been said for years, like if you went to a pep rally for Kamala Harris, you know, union leaders and Democrats said all of these things. And now, when it’s happening, there’s this bizarre complacency, you know, like, Well, maybe we’ll get them in 2026, or, What can you do? You know? And that that is so dangerous because it feeds the narrative that Trump is invincible and that nothing can be done.
And so to me, the most urgent thing is to sort of signal to working people and to signal to the whole labor movement the urgency of the stakes. Get some union leaders getting arrested. Go sit in in some offices. Do whatever you need to do, to raise hell, to tell people this is an emergency situation. So I do hope that the union leadership starts sort of taking its signal more from below and going all in on, you know, mass peaceful civil disobedience, mass protest, solidarity actions. Because it’s not just going to be the federal workers. If they take down the federal workers, they have full control of the entire government apparatus. They’re going to go after everybody next. So, yeah, you know, sound the alarm. You know, start raising hell. Don’t do what you’ve been doing for the last decade, which is very little, which is just hoping somehow you’re going to keep your head down and things going to work out. Like that’s what got us literally into this mess of Trump getting elected. Somehow things were going to work out. No, things aren’t working out. Now is actually the time to try something different.
Nima: Yeah, people like fighters, right? And Trump and Musk position themselves as fighters. They’re just fighting against poor people, trans people, Black people, brown people, immigrants. But their aesthetic is one of that this is a battle, and they are up to it, and they are doing something right, and the Democratic opposition has long established that they are unwilling to fight. And I think that that goes a long way. I think it’s so important that your book has just come out, Eric, of course, the book is We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, was published by University of California Press. Everyone should go out and check it out. No better time than now, but Eric, it has been great to have you on the show. We’ve been speaking with Eric Blanc, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, author of the books Revolutionary Social Democracy and Red State Revolt. And again, his new one is We Are the Union. Go check it out. Thank you, Eric, so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Eric Blanc: Thanks for having me.
Nima: And that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Stay tuned for more full-length episodes coming your way. Of course, in the meantime, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, so your support is so incredibly appreciated and keeps the show going. But thanks again for listening, everyone. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Granddaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, March 19, 2025.
