Democrats should wield their power to return agency to ordinary people

This article Democrats should wield their power to return agency to ordinary people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Too often, we have seen a fundamental asymmetry at work: When Democrats win power, they might pass a modest minimum wage increase. When Republicans are in power, they do things like decimate public sector unions. In the long term, this is an imbalance that leads to ruin. 

Last week’s “blue tsunami” represented a resounding repudiation of the Trump agenda. While it is common that a sitting administration will lose seats in the midterm elections, swings of the magnitude that we have just witnessed are rare and important. For certain, Trump will still try to use the executive branch to wreak havoc on democracy and provide egregious giveaways for  the billionaire class. However, Democratic control of the Senate and the investigatory power of its majority in the House should provide an important check on his ability to do damage. 

Perhaps more importantly, progressive forces made critical gains at the state level. The Democrats won six new “trifectas”: in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Now, if current leads in Kansas and Alaska hold, “about 75 percent of Americans will live in states with Democratic governors,” and roughly 53 percent will reside in places where Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature as well, Newsweek reports.

Of course, we should not assume that Democrats will use their newfound power effectively if left to their own devices. There are significant blocs of the Democratic Party wherein centrist politicians have made careers of “playing to the middle” and embracing pro-corporate neoliberal politics. Should this tendency prevail, the Democrats will have squandered a historic opportunity, to the detriment of social movements and the broader American public alike.

Forging an alternative path will mean pushing newly empowered legislators to think and act differently. Passing policies that make a real difference in the lives of working people is critical; however, this is only a first step. For movements for social and economic justice to secure long-term wins, they need to be advocating for how they — and their allies in office — can pursue structural reforms. 

A few years ago, after the 2022 midterms, my brother Paul and I wrote an article looking at the trifecta power that Democrats had gained in multiple states and asking, “Will they actually use it?” More specifically, it asked whether they would use their mandate “to enact changes that increase democratic participation and build progressive power” over the long haul.

When Republicans have gained majorities at the state level “they have used their power to push through reforms that weaken left-leaning constituencies and undermine the Democratic base,” we wrote at the time. “In contrast, when Democrats have been in the majority, they often have failed to reverse these changes or enact meaningful structural reforms — the kind of changes that both improve people’s lives and build power for the grassroots groups that can help them govern on an ongoing basis.” 

Structural reforms can come in many varieties: labor rights, campaign finance issues, measures to encourage and expand voting, redistricting, preemption laws determining whether issues are handled at the state or local level, free speech protections, regulatory modifications that allow for community involvement, and changes to the tort system, to name just a few. More than the specific issue or need addressed by a policy, being attuned to structural reforms means paying attention to how a change gives grassroots forces greater room to maneuver and reach for more in the future.

For social movements, structural reforms are a key mechanism of inside-outside politics, through which grassroots organizations work to elect champions into office who then, in turn, use the power of government to strengthen democratic participation and boost outside campaigns for social justice. Unfortunately, the right often has a better understanding of this process than liberals do.

A dramatic example of how Republicans used statewide governing power to alter the balance of forces was how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, upon gaining a trifecta in 2010, sought to permanently kneecap unions. Recognizing the importance of organized labor as a foundational part of the Democratic coalition, conservatives made Wisconsin a so-called “right-to-work” state. They also passed the notorious Act 10, which severely restricted the bargaining rights of public sector unions and subjected them to an onerous series of requirements to even continue existing. As a result, these unions lost approximately 70 percent of their members by 2021.

In contrast, when it comes to fighting back, Democrats have a distressing track record of failure and self sabotage. When Iowa Gov. Chet Culver presided over a Democratic trifecta in 2008, he vetoed a bill restoring labor rights, despite having run on a promise to reverse right-to-work. In his fecklessness, he was joined by Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who similarly vetoed several pro-union measures, despite having heavily relied on the support of the labor movement to gain office. Both ended up being one-term governors.

In understanding the difference in outcomes, we need only consider what conservative anti-tax leader Grover Norquist chillingly wrote about the impact of Republican actions in Wisconsin: “Trump’s tweets attract attention,” he remarked. “Act 10 moves forward. Quietly. Inexorably. Changing the political landscape like a glacier.”

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Democrats commonly talk about reforms that might help people in their everyday lives, like improving public education or incentivizing developers to create more affordable housing, but they don’t focus on shifting power in the long term. “Even in trifecta states, Democrats’ strategy still amounts to playing defense,” Paul and I wrote. “Going on offense would entail learning from the Right’s unashamed boldness. It would mean using Democratic majorities to build social movements and redistribute power and resources in a more durable way — putting a premium on the types of changes sometimes discussed as ‘policy feedback loops’ or theorized by socialists as ‘non-reformist reforms.’”

Which brings us to today. In the last two years, we have seen a relentless program from Trump not just to advance conservative policy objectives, but to punish social movements and shift the balance of power in favor of reactionaries. Much of this has happened at the federal level, although it has often been backed up by state-level action. The administration has continued the broader Republican strategy of systematically attacking unions, ending collective bargaining rights for over one million federal employees, and advancing a broad slate of anti-worker policies. 

But while the labor movement is a critical pillar of support for the left that has been under siege, it is hardly the only one. Trump has systematically targeted social institutions perceived as refuges of progressive values, such as universities and the nonprofit sector. The administration launched an assault on large law firms that might once have filed lawsuits to help provide some accountability for administration misdeeds. He has likewise aggressively sought to restrict voting rights, encouraged Republicans to pursue new heights of gerrymandering, terrorized the immigrant community, and worked to criminalize dissent.

Each of these moves has something in common. They do not merely aim to enact conservative policies; they seek to permanently consolidate the power of right-wing groups and weaken the ability of any opposing institutions to resist.

In this election, the Republican attempts to entrench themselves failed to overcome the backlash generated by an unpopular war, high gas prices and increased cost of living, Trump’s brazen corruption, and the shocking federal occupation of major cities in the name of immigration enforcement. Movements worked hard to fuel this backlash, but we cannot count on such dramatic surges in public disgust to appear regularly. And we should not underestimate the impact of structurally minded maneuvers, which at times have protected conservatives from successful democratic challenge for decades.

The need for progressive movements and their elected allies to pursue structural reforms is not about tit-for-tat retaliation. There is a fundamental difference between enacting changes designed to reinforce privilege, profit, minority rule and the power of the wealthy, and those designed to expand voting rights, bolster democratic participation, and increase the ability for ordinary people to have a voice in their workplaces and in the public sphere alike. The goal of structural reforms by progressives is not to consolidate the power of a tyrant like Trump, but to increase power that is wielded democratically. Indeed, the danger is that centrist Democrats — themselves beholden to wealthy donors and often susceptible to threats of capital flight — prove unwilling to challenge fundamentally anti-democratic forces when given the opportunity.

There have been some reasons for hope — and some examples of what the pursuit of structural changes can look like. Responding to a concerted campaign by organized labor, Michigan Democrats did, in fact, reverse their state’s “right-to-work” law in 2023, making Michigan the first to ever do so. The victories of progressives in Minnesota, who used inside-outside strategies to pass a variety of important gains, including expanded organizing and voting rights, is also a model that has become increasingly heralded in recent years. 

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has created an Office of Mass Engagement, meant to encourage people to actively involve themselves in city politics outside of elections, and an Office of Worker Power, designed to help workers exercise their rights to organize. These are important examples of how government can seek to strengthen grassroots movements, even as it delivers on issues of affordability. 

Overall, the yardstick by which we measure Democratic progress should not just be whether the policies they pass provide immediate benefits, but how these initiatives serve to reduce corporate power and return political agency to ordinary people. 

The damage that Trump has wrought will not be easily reversed. But if progressive movements are to revitalize democracy and reverse trends toward oligarchic rule, we must think structurally and push for the kind of reforms that build power that can last for more than one wave.

This article Democrats should wield their power to return agency to ordinary people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/11/democrats-should-return-agency-ordinary-people/