Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP Images
Federal workers and protesters speak out against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, February 19, 2025, in New York City.
Come Thursday, it will be exactly 139 years since workers gathered in the streets of Chicago to demand an eight-hour day. Ever since then, May Day has been a day when workers across the planet have assembled to celebrate their victories, bemoan their defeats, and agitate for more power on the job, more equitable economies, and, consequently, generally happier times.
This Thursday will be no exception, though turnout in these United States will be exceptionally large as the crowds will swell in response to the Trumpocratic and oligarchic plague that has descended on us. There will be demonstrations in more than 900 cities, bringing together the anti-Trump legions, though this time—it being May Day—with more of a working-class perspective.
Much like the Bernie Sanders rolling circus, this May Day will have an anti-oligarchy theme as well as an anti-Trump focus, each subsuming and being subsumed by the other. The design of this year’s actions initially emerged out of discussions among some seasoned progressive organizations, including the Chicago Teachers Union, the Midwest Academy (a venerable trainer of community organizers), and the strategists at Bargaining for the Common Good, which promotes the practice of unions’ bargaining not just for their members but also for and with the communities their members live in and serve.
In short order, their May Day initiative drew the support of not only major national unions (among them the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Communications Workers of America, the Flight Attendants, the United Electrical Workers, and the American Association of University Professors) but also a broad range of diverse activist groups (Sunrise, Planned Parenthood, People’s Action), liberal rank-and-file Democratic organizations (Indivisible, MoveOn), an anti-Trump demonstration facilitator (50501), groups representing the left edge of Democratic politics (e.g., the Working Families Party), and groups representing the center of Democratic politics (e.g., the Center for American Progress and Common Cause). Local branches of every current liberal cause, from immigrant rights to reproductive rights to Palestinian rights, have clambered aboard.
The official banner under which these heterogeneous masses will march is “For the Workers, Not the Billionaires,” and Sanders, whose entire career has been devoted to making that case, will be the featured speaker at the Philadelphia rally. To the anti–economic populist and anti–social democratic wing of the Democratic Party, this message amounts to a kind of self-defeating heresy. For them, repudiation of all that’s woke is what the party should focus on. That was clear in the discussion The New York Times recently printed among former leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council, who extolled Bill Clinton’s repudiation of welfare (which the working class then generally loathed) as the key to his electoral victories, while omitting any mention of NAFTA and free trade with China (which Clinton signed into law, wreaking long-term havoc on the selfsame working class).
In fact, with Trump’s tax cuts now before Congress, the entire Democratic House and Senate delegations (at least, now that Sens. Manchin and Sinema are gone) will be baying against billionaires in the coming weeks and months. While Trump was plainly the billionaires’ pal and helpmeet during his first term in the White House, he himself has elevated the public’s awareness of government not only for but also of and by billionaires in the first hundred days of his second term.
To his own misfortune and Trump’s as well, Elon Musk has been serving as deputy president, in which capacity he not only has slashed services on which everyone depends (e.g., food safety) but endorsed neo-Nazi political parties in his spare time. Musk’s current polling shows him to be about as popular as a strain of bacteria. This fall in public esteem isn’t his alone; it’s also emblematic of the public’s growing fear and loathing of the oligarchs now more prominent in American life than at any time since the turn of the 20th century, when almost everyone knew that that generation’s robber barons routinely bought legislatures and the Congress. Today, their most prominent successors hail from Silicon Valley, and DOGE’s moves to seize Social Security and tax records only reinforce public fears about the electronic surveillance and control exercised by our digital overlords.
Like it or not, then, there’s no plausible way to separate the attacks on oligarchy from not just progressive thinking and politics, but also a good chunk of mainstream Democratic thinking and politics. How much of that will actually result not just in support for tax progressivity but also in increasing the power of American workers—who have less of it than their counterparts in virtually every other democracy—is by no means clear. Which means that Thursday’s decidedly diverse demonstrators need to stay together and keep at it for some time to come.
