Bernie would have won. Serious.

Every democratic loss is now sparking a new round of debate about one of the most persistent questions in contemporary electoral politics: Would Bernie have won? The original debate was, of course, literal: Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s shocking 2016 loss to Donald Trump, the insurgent left insisted that their favored Democratic primary candidate would have achieved a general election victory where the nominee himself could not have done so.

The argument went something like this: Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-neoliberalism and anti-status quo orientation easily propelled him to the top of the Republican Party and popular appeal in the swing states that define the American presidency. However questionable his credibility as a working-class hero (and you may recall that he is a real estate billionaire whose penthouse has a gold elevator), Clinton was a walking avatar for the very elite political class that Trump so effectively demonized.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, had spent his career making anti-ruling arguments that mirrored Trump’s: where Donald blamed immigrants and demanded mass deportations for America’s misery, Sanders rightly castigated the rich and powerful for causing working-class discontent and demanded social security in response.

Sanders’s story – “yes, the system IS shit, you’re getting screwed, now let’s tackle the fat cats who do it and give everyone what they deserve” – offers an answer, and a positive alternative, to Trump’s tone. Clinton’s story was closer to: “No, the system DOES NOT suck, you are NOT screwed, please vote for the fat cats’ favorite politician now.”

There is no way to defeat Trumpism without class struggle and a promise of change for working people.

Eight years later, Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump has reignited a back-and-forth between camps, with the Democratic Party’s decline defined by class versus cultural issues: racism and bigotry a landslide victory for Trump, or was there ‘economic fear’? Aside from the obvious problems with the assumption that there can only be one at play or that they are completely different, these discussions miss everything that “Bernie would have won” really means: there is no way to defeat Trumpism without class struggle and a promise of change. for working people, and to achieve this requires multiracial working-class solidarity and a party that represents the interests of that coalition. Until these things happen, both inside and outside of electoral politics, prepare for Trump after Trump after Trump.

Let’s start with what skeptics of class-based politics are right: Trump and his allies on the broader right often have racism, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia as a political strategy, resonating with voters in a way that can be downright awful to watch. The right-wing digital media ecosystem has rapidly grown uglier in its rhetoric since 2016, and broad swathes of Trumpland will proudly boast that “triggering the libs” is their political guiding principle. The resistance to movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo or the fight for reproductive justice or trans rights has coalesced around a politics of nostalgia for ultra-traditional patriarchs. And although Biden’s presidency did yield something working class gainsDemocrats were still unable to credibly acknowledge or respond to voters’ pain as inflation offset these incremental improvements.

Considering all these staggering forces, it is asinine to suggest that Harris could have avoided swings of more than 10 points in crucial counties toward Trump among working-class voters by simply dropping a few more white papers on tax credits. Like Julia Claire from Crooked Media put it about We must address the national-cultural reactionary moment we find ourselves in, starting with men.” Commentator Jill Filipovic made a similar point: “(T)his election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.”

Even if you accept this premise—which comes very close to the argument that Trump voters have exceptionally bad souls—what theory of change could this inspire? Calling Trump voters a “basket of deplorables” certainly didn’t work in 2016, and hasn’t worked since. And if the plan is to redeem bad souls one by one, you’ll soon run into Republican and Democratic voters becoming more socially stratified than ever. Our social universes drive our beliefs and behaviors, and we increasingly spend our lives in different universes. To put it bluntly, what on earth could I possibly have to berate, lecture, or convince people living in deindustrialized cities in the Rust Belt about anything?

Infamously, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DY, had an answer to the dilemma of the working class exodus from the Democratic Party: “For every working-class Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs. of Philadelphia, and we can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.” This calculus largely also guided Harris, who campaigned hard for the upscale anti-Trump moderates with Liz Cheney by her side. But this approach has obvious flaws, both mathematical and political: There are many, many more working-class voters than white-collar Cheney fans. And the more a party’s base depends on the latter, the less it can deliver for the former, and the more its survival depends on maintaining a status quo that so many people are angry about in the first place. The important thing is that it doesn’t work; Trump returns to the White House.

The solution hereSo it lies in building a coalition around a narrative that competes with Trump’s – a narrative that forges new social bonds and builds on shared material interests. That story needs to come from someone who can shape and deliver it in a way that resonates, something a Sanders-like figure could do that most Democrats, given their donor base and political trajectories, cannot.

For all his monstrosity, Trump tapped into a justified sense of disillusionment with the system and managed to convince some of its biggest victims – almost half of the poorest voters chose him – that he was on their side. Of course he isn’t! But only Sanders has built the credibility to claim the same from the broader left, consistently fighting doggedly for the working class for decades. I hope others can get through his playbook a little quicker.

As impossible and abstract as it may seem to reorient the Democratic base based on shared class interests, it is still a much more concrete plan than “reducing bigotry among strangers” – the labor movement offers a clear blueprint for how to put it into practice .

Throughout U.S. history and around the world, class-based organizing that unites people across racial, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries has been one of the most powerful mechanisms for building more equal and just societies. But they have to compete against the rich and powerful to get there. The idea that the Republican Party can ever be the vehicle for this is a farce. We deserve an opposition party that can step up and side with its own base.