Leftists say "Vote for Democrats because they're easier to protest." But is it true?

History tells a different story

Ever since the 2004 election, which pit Bush and Cheney, the butchers of Iraq, against then Sen. John John F. Kerry, who wanted to escalate the Iraq War, it’s been an article of faith on the left that you should “vote for the candidate you want to protest.”

This means voting for the Democrat. The idea is activists have an easier time pushing a Democratic president to the left than a Republican one. There is also less political repression under Democrats, and people are more open to organizing in periods of hope than in moments of when they are being attacked by right-wing forces.

I have said it plenty of times myself, but I never scrutinized the evidence. I just finished writing a history of protest movements over the last 25 years, going back to the emergence of the Global Justice Movement during the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999.

I discovered this slogan is horseshit when tested against the actual history. In reality, when there is a Democrat in the White House, liberals go to sleep. Or brunch. Plus, since 1992 Democratic administrations have battered and betrayed every movement you can name with virtually no peep of protest or dissent from Congress, the liberal media, Democratic-aligned civil society groups, or their middle-class base.

But when a Republican is in the White House, liberals will be outraged and protest against one atrocity after another that they would be silent against if a Democrat was doing it.

If one believes “vote for the candidate you want to protest,” then the last 32 years tells us, going back to Bill Clinton in 1992, we should prefer a Republican president.

I am NOT saying vote for Trump now. Nor is this an accelerationist argument, “It has to get worse before it gets better.” It’s simply a recognition that history is a lot messier and more complex than a slogan. One caveat, I am not talking about organized labor or workers movements. They have distinct bases, history, organizational and legal forms, types of cultures and communications. But in their case as well, it often makes little difference as to who is in the White House as to labor’s successes and failures.

The recent history of social movements shows there is no definitive evidence that a Democrat in the White House makes organizing easier. Mass movements that have emerged since the 1990s had little to do with the traditional left. This includes Occupy Wall Street in 2011, Black Lives Matter in 2014, Standing Rock in 2016, Occupy ICE in 2018, and the George Floyd movement in 2020.

Then there are movements in which the left did play a significant role in organizing. The action to shut down the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle in 1999 was extensively planned out for months and featured hundreds of anarchist, leftist, student, labor, rural, environmental, and indigenous organizations. The Iraq antiwar movement from 2002 to 2007 was led by Marxist groups or individuals affiliated with such parties. The Palestine solidarity movement that grew massively after Israel began its genocide of Gaza after October 7, 2023 built on years of organizing by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestinian Youth Movement, and many more.

Since 1992, there have been two consistent outcomes with protests. Liberals take to the streets only when a Republican is in the White House. And organizing is disrupted every election, for a few months before the midterm, and for more than a year before and after the general election. Many leftists get sucked into campaigning for the Democrats, but they have zero influence. The last time the left played a role in a presidential contest is Ralph Nader’s independent bid in 2000, and that was a world before 9/11, the Great Recession, and Donald Trump.

This history also shows that left promises to hold a candidate to account after they win are empty. It did not happen with Clinton or Obama or Biden. When movements did pop off, Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, Gaza, some sections of the left helped start them, and subsequently many leftists jumped on board to organize, to recruit, to co-opt, or all of the above. But otherwise the left were unable to stop the right-wing policies of these three Democratic presidents because liberals did not care.

Liberals are largely asleep when a Democrat is in the White House. Organized labor joined the Global Justice Movement that came out of Seattle in 2000-2001. And labor and many liberals flocked to Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012, but that movement was much more vague as it famously had “no demands.” So liberals and labor joined because Occupy was not directly opposing Obama or the Democrats.

Liberals did not protest Obama’s deportations of millions of long-term U.S. residents. They did not join militant climate justice protests under Obama. Liberals, apart from African-Americans, did not join the Black Lives Matter after the Ferguson uprising in 2014. Liberals did participate in the 2014 People’s Climate March, but that was after it was taken over by SEIU, MoveOn, and Avaaz, a “clicktivist” group. I exposed how the climate march was meant to be a mass-direct action to shut down the United Nations as world leaders met there, and was defanged by liberals who turned into a corporate P.R. campaign that harmed the movement by diverting the energy into a deadend.

Compare this record to Republican rule. Under Bush and Cheney there were dozens of protests of more than 100,000 people against the Iraq War. This includes more than half-a-million people in New York City on February 15, 2003, and during the 2004 RNC. Other protests in NYC, Washington, D.C., Boston, and San Francisco drew six-figure crowds. The left organized them and liberals turned out.

In 2006, during the “Day without an immigrant” protests, perhaps the only general strike in U.S. history, Democratic operatives and politicians encouraged the walkouts by millions to protest a GOP anti-immigrant bill.

But Obama co-opted organizing from the Bush years. Obama presented himself as pro-immigrant, pro-environment, and antiwar candidate. As president he illegally bombed seven countries, carried out mass surveillance, sabotaged climate change accords in Copenhagen, oversaw massive expansion of fracking, fought illegal drone wars, bailed out criminal Wall Street banks, screwed over millions of workers and homeowners, and deported 2 million immigrants. It all happened without a peep from liberals.

During Trump’s first term, protest was nonstop. Protests began election night. The women’s marches before he was inaugurated were massive. I was at the one in D.C. that was so huge we never marched. People could not move. Then came the airport protests days after Trump took office in response to his Muslim ban. Once more, Democrats, including big-city mayors encouraged people to go to airports to protest. The George Floyd movement in 2020, which has been called the biggest protests in U.S. history, drew millions of liberals. There was widespread outrage against Trump’s cruel kidnapping of thousands of immigrant children.

Interestingly, antifascism, the most important left-wing movement of the Trump years was constantly attacked by liberals. Liberals who supported Obama’s drone wars that killed hundreds were aghast that an antifascist might break a window or hit a Nazi who emerges publicly solely to threaten, attack, and even kill brown, Black, trans, and queer people — often with the police indifference or collusion. (By May 2015 nearly 60 percent of Democrats supported Obama’s drone assassinations of overseas U.S. citizens “suspected” of terrorism and only 16 percent opposed it.)

Also, Clinton was worse than Obama. He fulfilled the Reagan Revolution: NAFTA, ending welfare, mass incarceration, criminalizing undocumented immigrants and spawning the ICE gulag archipelago, letting Wall Street run wild, 100,000 cops on the street, not stopping the rise of right-wing hate media when he had the chance. It was done to complete silence by liberals.

Biden has done the same. The Economist notes many major Biden-Harris policies are indistinguishable from first-term Trump: on the border and immigration, energy policy and climate change, tariffs, and China. On top of that Harris’s foreign policy, like Biden’s is full Neocon. Dick Cheney didn’t endorse Harris because he’s a nice guy. He endorsed her because she is fulfilling the 2003 Neocon fantasy. After the Bush administration toppled Saddam Hussein, and before Iraq became a quagmire, the Neocons were saying, “The road to Tehran runs through Baghdad.” In other words, regime in Iran was the big prize. Iraq was the stepping stone.

Liberals have sat out the Gaza genocide, and instead attack people for protesting it. Plus, the Biden White House has backed a McCarthyist-style purge of pro-Palestinian voices across U.S. society with thousands losing jobs, university admissions, grants or awards because of their activism.

The Neocons were thwarted for 20 years until the Gaza genocide. The Biden-Harris enthusiasm for exterminating Palestine is not a mistake. It’s the point. The Democrats are using Israel to re-order the Middle East: Take out Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, deal with the Palestinians once and for all by murdering and ethnically cleansing all 6 million of them, and hoping Israel finishes off Iran.

That’s why Dick and Liz Cheney embraced Kamala. She is a combination of first-term Trump, Cheney, and some libertarian sprinkles of gay rights and reproductive rights.

Liberals have shown they have no lines. They will excuse one of the worst genocides in history as long as their team is doing it.

One point about unions. When it does come to organized labor, the Democrats’ record is appalling. Reagan may have fired the air-traffic controllers in 1981, but organized labor surrendered. Instead of calling for a general strike, they held a meaningless weekend protest and still haven’t recovered. But then Clinton savaged them with NAFTA. Obama attacked unionized autoworkers with his bailout that forced down their wages, while paying Wall Street 100 percent on borderline criminal credit default swaps that were worthless. Obama also attacked teachers’ union while failing to pass the Employee Free Choice Act that would have helped union organizing.

As such, Democratic presidents have been disastrous for organized labor and the working class.

Now, here is an example of how gains have been won in recent years no matter who is in the White House. Occupy Wall Street changed the political landscape. Coming out of it was Kshama Sawant, a member of the Marxist Socialist Alternative who was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2014 as a socialist. She spearheaded the first $15-an-hour bill. A lot of forces united behind it, but Sawant and SA played key roles in getting it passed.

In early 2012, SEIU saw an opportunity to organize low-wage workers as a result of Occupy. It went public with its campaign at the end of the year. Initially its goal was a union. But after the $15 bill in Seattle caught fire — Sawant ran for office on a two-word platform, “$15 Now!” — SEIU shifted to raising the minimum wage. A number of liberal states and cities passed $15 bills.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the leftist Chicago Teachers Union launched a strike in 2012 that was also boosted by the militancy of Occupy Wall Street. Cadre from two other socialist organizations, Solidarity and the International Socialist Organization, played key roles in that successful strike.

The left activity convinced Bernie Sanders to run for president in 2016 in the Democratic primary. He attributed Occupy Wall Street as the inspiration, as well as the growing labor activity and climate activism. (He had a weak position on Black Lives Matter initially.)

During Bernie’s 2016 campaign, the Democratic Socialists of America roughly doubled in size that year, but the explosive growth began after Trump was elected. It went from about 11,000 in 2016 to more than 90,000 by 2021. More important, DSA went from a paper organization to real political work, mainly in elections, labor organizing, tenant rights, and ballot initiatives.

In 2018, under Trump, there was a wave of successful teachers strikes in Red States. Increased labor militancy combined with youth turning to socialism set off a new wave of worker organizing in 2021 with Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple stores, and REI.

So this organizing grew despite the White House switching parties from 2011 to the present.

Now, Trump is in a position to do unique damage. A lot of socialist labor organizers are deeply concerned about how he might wreck labor organizing.

As I said to start, none of what I am saying is an argument Trump would be better or neutral compared to Harris. We need to ruthlessly examine every political moment as it comes to us along with its full historical context.

But I argue that the left needs to break from electoral politics. We should build movements independent of parties that corrupt our politics. Find political alliances that strengthen organizing and militancy, not weaken it.

For 20 of the last 32 years, a Democrat has been in the White House. On top of that, Democrats have controlled at least one house of Congress for six of the remaining twelve years. That means the country is now on the brink of fascism despite the fact that Democrats had power for 26 of the last 32 years.

Forget about voting for the candidate “you want to protest.” Build mass movements instead, and not electoral machines for billionaires.

One section of the ruling class is not going to save you from another section of the ruling class.