The One Weird Trick Doesn’t Exist

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had a May Day talk in Barre, Vermont, which was of course last night. The people who put this on in the Socialist Labor Party hall from the turn of the 20th century (amazing building) do a great job and there were well over 100 people there, good food, even a little grappa before my talk.

Anyway, I gave the talk, which mostly focused on Gilded Age strikes and the role of state, making the argument that we need to learn when and how real strikers won back in the day, stripping away the myth, if we want our labor history to be useful to us in this new terrible era. I doubt anyone was expecting in depth discussion of Colorado gold miner strikes in the 1890s and the Philadelphia transit strike of 1910. But I think it went prety well. Sold a bunch of books at least.

The first question I get in the Q&A is this, “What is the one thing we can do tomorrow to stop Trump?”

There is no answer to that question. And that was my answer, though then I went on for 5 minutes. What I said that I understand why people are desperate here, but this is a very sick nation and you have to treat the root causes. I said that Democrats are certainly going to win the House in 2026, though the new Jim Crow Supreme Court will make that much harder, and maybe even the Senate. And then maybe Democrats will win in 2028. That solves nothing. Because the chances of fascists roaring back into power in 2030 are very high just because of the reality of the average voter (which I also discussed). We have to fight Trumpism by reshaping our entire nation on different values. We have to rebuild real community, educate, mobilize, and figure out how to reach the mean average voter (who are, again, morons). There’s no one weird trick to win this. It’s been coming for decades. Maybe it is peaking now. Maybe it is not. But we need to stop thinking that the one thing will stop Trumpism and make the nation not what it is. And if it starts anywhere, it starts in your own communities.

Maybe it’s not much of an answer. There’s surely nothing profound to it. But we have to rid ourselves of the belief that we can do one thing or win one election or get one person in office and things will be better. It won’t happen.