Shawn Fain was a light in the darkness

The most shameful moment of this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) occurred Tuesday night. Political commentator and The view Co-host Ana Navarro, whose father was a member of the Contra death squads secretly funded by the Ronald Reagan administration, euphemistically described her family being forced to leave Nicaragua as “fleeing communism” and won applause for comparing Donald Trump to “communists.”

That Barack Obama’s speech was a complete coup. The other rough patches were more predictable. Delegates who were not engaged were shut out of meaningful participation. Ken Chenault, a venture capitalist and former CEO of American Express, was invited to speak about the importance of saving democratic institutions from Trump, because those institutions create a very favorable business environment. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, in an otherwise extremely forgettable speech, criticized Trump for not being a “real” billionaire like he is. Barack Obama’s speech reminded us exactly why his liberalism is so poor. And the less said about Hillary Clinton, the better.

The Democratic Party is a mix of contradictory forces that would be found in different parties in any normal parliamentary democracy. As a result, there were also good moments. Bernie Sanders was excellent as usual, showing once again that he has the strictest message discipline in contemporary American politics. Every time he opens his mouth, he talks about wages, inequality, and health care. And much of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech was good, even if it was marred by her false claim that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly” to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. On Wednesday night, the ratio of January 6th-questioning to even vaguely populist policy was dismal, though Walz’s speech at the end of the evening made up for that to some extent.

But the highlight of the list was Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers (UAW). He pulled off a masterstroke. He used the opportunity to talk about the strikes that have forced companies to abandon outsourcing. His speech even put one company in particular, Stellantis, on the spot: On the day of the speech, UAW locals filed several complaints against the automaker, laying the groundwork for a grievance strike.

Fain said workers cannot let the right use the diversions of the culture war to divide them because their “only real enemy” is the insatiable greed of corporate America. He criticized Trump not for being crass or “extremist” or threatening the norms of American politics, but for being a strikebreaker.

In what appears to be a regressive climate in terms of class politics, Fain’s DNC speech – and his outspoken presence in general over the past year – was a huge breath of fresh air.

Fain was the UAW’s first directly elected president. He was part of a reform group that opposed union corruption and harmful concessions to bosses on issues such as two-tier wage structures. “Record profits,” he kept repeating, should produce “record contracts.”

Shortly after taking office, Fain led his members in an ambitious “stand-up strike.” It was the first time in union history that the UAW had gone on strike against all three major automakers at the same time, and they won. A few months later, the UAW made history with a successful organizing drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — a region and employer that together had long been considered impervious to unionization.

Fain’s approach often unsettles the guardians of the economic status quo. In a profile for the The New York TimesHe has, for example, declared that billionaires “have no right to exist.” The idea of evolving a society that is egalitarian enough not to support such obscene concentrations of wealth has long been unthinkable in mainstream American discourse, and Fain’s rhetoric was enough to inspire CNBC’s Jim Cramer to babble hysterically about “class warfare” and even compare Fain to Communist Party USA leader Earl Browder.

In real life, class warfare is inevitable given the basic structure of a capitalist economy. Business owners and workers have opposing interests, with the former always looking for new ways to use their power to extract more profit from the latter. The only question is whether this war will be one-sided. And on that issue, Fain’s simple message Monday night at the DNC was that it doesn’t have to be.

He took time to talk about the UAW members at Cornell University — food service workers, groundskeepers, janitors and facilities workers — who, the night before, “had to strike for a better life because they’re fighting corporate greed, and our only hope is to confront corporate greed head on.”

Fain repeatedly used the phrase “working class,” in a way that no one but Bernie Sanders has ever used in a speech to the Democratic National Committee. He criticized Trump’s pseudo-populist nonsense in a way that few other speakers could do with as much credibility, recalling Trump’s mendacious 2016 promise in Lordstown, Ohio, to bring back lost auto jobs, and Trump’s conversation with Elon Musk last week on Twitter in which the two billionaires “laughed about the firing of striking workers.” (The Trump/Musk conversation is now the basis of a formal unfair labor practice complaint filed by the UAW.)

In a more subdued nod to Hulk Hogan’s speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), where Hogan ripped off his shirt to reveal a “Trump/Vance” T-shirt underneath, Fain removed his blazer to reveal a T-shirt bearing a slogan that the crowd enthusiastically chanted repeatedly: “Trump is a scab.”

This is exactly the right way to attack Trump. The contrast could not be more stark between Pritzker boasting about being a “real” billionaire and Fain dismissing Trump and J.D. Vance in his speech to the 2024 Democratic National Committee as “two lapdogs of the billionaire class.”

At the RNC, the room was packed with delegates holding mass-printed signs demanding “mass deportations now.” At the DNC, Fain identified this demagoguery for what it was:

Donald Trump, the scab, is implementing the divide and conquer tactic of the rich. It’s the oldest ploy in the world. They want to blame the frustrations of the working class on a destitute and desperate person at the border. They do it because they want the working class to be divided and to distract from the only real enemy: corporate greed. The rich think we’re stupid, but working class Americans see it for what it is.

The logic of his position is simple. Blaming low wages and job losses on competition from a more desperate section of the working class is grotesque hypocrisy when it comes from politicians like Trump and Vance who clearly don’t care about jobs and wages in any other context. And the position itself makes no sense.

If undocumented workers are given the opportunity to become American citizens, they will be able to come out of the shadows and join unions, or sue employers who violate labor laws, without fear of deportation. The most conservative estimate of the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States puts it at about eleven million. Even if Trump and Vance escalate the already brutal mechanism of deportation with creative new forms of performative cruelty, it is unlikely that they will be able to go as far as the dystopian police-state tactics that would be required to successfully arrest eleven million people who, in the overwhelming majority of cases, are simply trying to keep their heads down and live their lives. The practical effect, if anything, will be to make the majority of them even more terrified and therefore easier to exploit—which will drive down wages for everyone.

Fain’s speech hinted at a way forward based on solidarity between these workers and the indigenous section of the working class. This is not just a morally There is no better solution to the problem of this hyperexploitation than to carry out “mass deportations now”. It is the only approach that could actually work.

The speech wasn’t perfect. Fain gave Harris far more praise than she deserved, especially given her campaign’s repeated abandonment of social-democratic policies she supported as a senator, such as Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, which would overwhelmingly benefit working people and diminish the power of the billionaire class.

And most glaringly, Fain did not mention Gaza. The UAW as an organization has long called for a ceasefire, and Fain himself has spoken forcefully about the “massacre and devastation” inflicted by the Israeli military and the urgent need to end the war. Perhaps Fain simply calculated that there was no plausible way, within the confines of a ten-minute speech, to reconcile his profound disagreements with Harris on these issues with his union’s understandable support for his wife against Trump, who spent his first term packing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with diehard union haters.

What this really shows is that leaders like Fain who are trying to take meaningful action against the “one true enemy” of corporate power deserve much better political representation than they are getting from the Democratic Party. With the choices currently down to two, it makes sense that Fains everywhere would prefer Harris to “Donald Trump the scab.” But the American working class as a whole deserves better in the future. In 2028 or 2032, it would be nice to see Fain run himself.

Maybe he never will. Maybe he figures he can do more good for the UAW than he can in electoral politics. But I hope someone picks up the torch. Because the politics of broad working-class unity against billionaires and all their lapdogs is exactly what we need.