You Patsy
We don't have time for this bullshit.
America’s two-party electoral system has long been a trap for labor unions. The Republican Party is existentially opposed to the entire project of worker power, and would be happy to eradicate unions from the face of the earth; knowing this, the Democratic Party long took unions for granted, under the “Where else are you gonna go?” rationale. For decades, Democratic presidents have not felt compelled to use much political capital to advance the priorities of organized labor. They have taken unions’ donations and given, in return, primarily the fact that they were less bad than Republicans. It is very true that breaking out of this trap is important if unions ever want to regain the political power they once had.
People in the union world know this. Often, the knee jerk reaction from the portion of those people who are not very bright is, “We need to be more friendly to Republicans.” They see a two-party system and they see that being staunch supporters of Democrats has not stopped the erosion of union power for a half century and they therefore conclude that, hey, maybe let’s try the other side for a while and see how that goes.
This is stupid. This is how stupid people think. “Gee we’ve been sitting in this desert for a long time getting thirsty. Maybe we should drink this cup of poison?” No. This is not the correct conclusion.
I have long argued that the path out of the two-party trap for unions is: organize workers. Organize workers. Only ten percent of American workers today are union members. Organize the other 90 percent. That is the ladder necessary to climbing out of this political quicksand. “Hey I thought we were talking about elections and now you’re talking about something different.” Organizing more workers is the path to political power for unions. Labor organizing first, everything else downstream of that. The reason why Democrats have often felt free to take unions for granted is not just because Democrats are disappointing; it’s because unions are weak. When you add millions of new workers into the pool of organized labor, you make organized labor stronger, and eventually that strength forces politicians to listen, because politics is about how much power you are able to wield. The solution, in other words, is not begging politicians to be nice to us. It is getting strong enough to make demands that must be obeyed, because we have the people. I wrote a book about this.
Large scale labor organizing is a long term project. It requires massive investment and focus for many years. As a whole, organized labor in America is not good at carrying out such long term projects. Union density today is lower than it was in 2020, a year when union density was lower than it was in 2016. As long as that is the trend line, unions are not going to escape this trap.
Meanwhile there are presidential elections every four years. So what happens in practice is that even if unions theoretically agree about the organizing part, they focus on the immediate threat of the election, and continue to pour money into the Democratic Party. Though this has had paltry returns historically, I can name one Democratic president who did in fact do very important tangible things that seriously helped unions and their workers: Joe Biden. I believe Joe Biden should drop out because he is too old and is going to lose, and I believe he is guilty of a tremendous moral crime in Gaza, but his whole bit about being “the most pro-union president” is true. He ain’t perfect on labor stuff but he’s miles better than his predecessors going back decades. Which is to say that even in the standard rubric of two-party elections that unions face every four years, Biden is the one Democratic president whose record could be used to make a legitimate case that the hundreds of millions of dollars that unions funneled to him actually paid off.
Also he is running against a legitimate fascist who not only will oppose all the laws that increase labor power as Republicans always do, but also a guy who crossed a picket line when he was making a TV show and who was kicked out of his own union for being such a piece of shit. I’m not going to rehash here the tedious point by point refutations of the idiotic premise that Republicans under Trump are some sort of “working class party.” You can Google 100 pieces doing that. I will say that if you ever want to know which elected national politicians are pro-union, just look and see if they are endorsing the PRO Act, the big labor law reform bill which would drastically increase union power in this country. Let me tell you that Democrats in Congress ovewhelmingly support it, and no Republicans do. “Not even Josh Hawley and JD Vance and the other guys who wave their hands about being pro working class???” No they do not. This is the simplest way to tell that they are all talk. Any major union leader who fails to understand this has a child’s concept of politics.
Last night Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave a speech to the Republican National Convention, praising Donald Trump and JD Vance as they looked on and clapped. Let’s give O’Brien the benefit of the doubt and say that he is genuinely looking for a way out of the two-party trap I described above, and genuinely believes that building bridges with Republicans will benefit his members. If those things are true, he is dumb. Alternately he is cold-blooded and dishonest and willing to sell out the entire working class in order to try to strike a deal that benefits his own members (a calculation that, I promise, will not work out). Those who make deals with the devil shouldn’t cry when the devil turns out to be a liar.
It’s one thing to say “unions should keep open lines of communication with both parties and focus on their own priorities and accept support from politicians of any party that wants to be on the right side of the issues.” Sure. Agree. It is a completely separate thing to appear at a staged political event that exists for the purpose of getting one candidate elected. The purpose of the RNC is to help Trump win. Period. That is all. If O’Brien thinks that he can talk his way out of that with a good speech, he is wrong. The main effect of his presence there will be to lend credence to the bullshit Republican line about being the “working class party,” to help lure in voters who know the system is broken and can be tricked into voting for the people who will make it even worse. I choose to believe that O’Brien is just a patsy, which is the nicer interpretation.
In his speech last night, O’Brien said:
The American people aren’t stupid. They know the system is broken. We all know how Washington is run. Working people have no chance of winning this fight. That’s why I’m here today. Because I refuse to keep doing the same things my predecessors did. Today, the Teamster are here to say: We are not beholden to anyone, or any party. We will create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition ready to accomplish something real for the American worker.
Will you? Will you create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition ready to accomplish something real for the American worker? No you won’t. You won’t because the Republican Party is still existentially opposed to the growth of genuine union power and worker power in this country. How do I know? Because they don’t support the PRO Act. How else do I know? Because I have eyes and a brain and I have read the news for the past decade. Making the Republican Party less hostile to the interests of the working class is a nice goal but if you think that this will be the result of electing a fascist who tried the steal the last election and who famously stiffs people who work for him and who is an egomaniac and who has never supported the electoral agenda of unions and who lies constantly and who is running on a racist platform of demonizing immigrants—you are stupid. You are a patsy if you think this.
Donald Trump is a billionaire and JD Vance is a scumbag venture capitalist from Yale who is the protege of a billionaire named Peter Thiel. Which one of these guys is going to rein in big business, again? Which one is the working class champion who wants to rein in the power of billionaires, again? Please remind me.
Donald Trump and JD Vance are running on a promise to round up and deport tens of millions of “illegal immigrants.” Do you, as a union leader, think this will be good for workers? Do you, as a union leader, think that any of your members might be negatively affected by this quasi-military gestapo-like operation directed by lunatics like Stephen Miller? Do you, as a union leader, think that such an operation might result in any of your members having their family members snatched up and shipped off to some nation where there lives might be endangered? Do you, as a union member, think that the millions of people forcibly deported will be of the working class, or not of the working class? Do you, as a union leader, think that the wholesale Republican effort to blame all of America’s problems on immigrants who “rape and murder” innocent American women, and who are “poisoning the blood” of our nice white country, is a good thing, or a bad thing? Please explain to the members of your union who are immigrants, in essay form.
Joe Biden, as a factual matter, did a $36 billion bailout of the Teamsters pension fund. If you are the president of the Teamsters and you give less weight to that than you do to “nice words from Donald Trump and JD Vance,” you are a patsy. At best.
Sean O’Brien also said this:
The Teamsters are doing something correct if the extremes in both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage. President Trump had the backbone to open the doors to this Republican Convention, and that’s unprecedented. No other nominee in the race would have invited the Teamsters into this arena.
This is how shitty newspaper columnists talk. “I got letters from both left and right calling me a moron, therefore I must be correct.” This is the self-help mantra of idiots.
Oh, President Trump had the backbone to allow you to help him trick working class voters into electing a president who will usher in an administration that will decimate the political agenda of organized labor? Was he nice enough to do that? And you even got to stand on a big stage and hear yourself talk about it, too? Wow.
Did you know that you can read Project 2025, the policy document that outlines what conservatives want to accomplish under a new Trump administration, and it will tell you exactly how they want to roll back all of the gains that organized labor has achieved recently? You can actually read that, on the internet. Just click it.
The Teamsters union employs policy experts who are well equipped to tell Sean O’Brien which electoral outcome in this election will be better for Teamsters members, union members, and the working class as a whole. Maybe he should ask them.
The labor movement has enough shit to worry about without also having major union presidents do shit like this. Grow up man.
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Related: What Republicans Plan to Do to Labor If They Win; The Hammer, Not the Handshake; Trampoline Unionism; Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!
If you are interested in these issues I believe you would enjoy my book “The Hammer,” which you can order now wherever books are sold. If you’d like to buy an autographed copy for $40, or if you’re interested in inviting me to speak in your city, email me.
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I opened my email and saw “Hamilton Nolan” with a subject line of “You Patsy” and I was immediately like “Oh god, what’d I do?”
Thanks for this piece. Reminds me of Hoffa/Nixon, though there are no Kennedy's breathing down the IBT's neck. We need to go a little deeper into that social function of elections in capitalist society. There is virtually no mass discussion now of what elections actually are, how they mask the dictatorship of the capitalist class, what the workers’ direct action alternative to elections is. Yet the quick spread of anti-genocide encampments in universities, like the rise in strikes and union organizing, shows that direct action is again on the agenda. That direct action in itself tends to unmask the electoral trap, the con-game of elections: how could the young people facing cops and thugs and expulsions and jail in the anti-genocide encampments bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden, who has presided over the exterminist assault on Gaza? The 1960s civil rights and antiwar militants faced the same fraud of the electoral system: how on earth could we vote for a Democrat after what we’d seen them do in Vietnam? And since Vietnam U.S. imperialism has just gone from bad to worse. So we need to revive mass discussion, deep critique, of elections as a system of capitalist rule.