The actual answer here is to exercise actual power.
Oligarchs are always greatly outnumbered.
The only thing that is genuinely effective is mass movement. A coalition of labor unions could shut down all of Elon and Trumps businesses in hours. Block the entrances to the factories. General strikes, boycotts, that kind of thing. It’s not actually that complicated.
Instead the modern Democratic Party is in love with appeals to the referees. They think that if they can just convince some court or The NY Times editorial board or a 75 year old former republican special prosecutor they’ll win.
As we have seen that approach is a total and complete failure.
If someone in opposition was able to generate mass collective action however the change would be swift. Nobody is really trying that though.
What the modern Democratic Party knows, but understandably doesn’t go around trumpeting, is that they cannot organize mass collective action because there’s not enough people on their side. You talk about “a coalition of labor unions”, but even union members barely lean Democratic these days. There’s very few groups outside of the Democratic Party infrastructure which are polarized enough to take a side.
There are absolutely enough people on "their side" in the sense that there are plenty of people on the side of working people, way more than enough.
The problem is the actual leadership of the Democratic Party isn't on the side of working people at all, and is actually actively hostile to those in favor of classic labor policies.
Don't get me wrong the other side is absolutely not on the side of working people either, that's more than apparent.
But with those caveats out of the way, a bona-fide labor movement could make short work of all this bullshit. Unfortunately the purpose of the modern Democratic Party appears to be to occupy the place in our system where a labor party is supposed to reside.
I agree with a lot of what this article has to say, and it's true that the politics of the US would be quite different if one of the major parties were a bona fide labor movement. But they're not, and I worry that the label of "elites" makes it harder to see why they're not. It's genuinely challenging - although I agree sometimes necessary! - to explain to someone who's really fired up about racial justice or climate change that they're not representative of the public and their concerns need to take a back seat to kitchen table issues.
It's also not obvious to me that a bona fide labor movement would take a particularly strong stance on an executive order curtailing independent agencies. Being invested in the details of how paper-pushing agencies are structured is a very elite concern.
> to explain to someone who's really fired up about racial justice or climate change that they're not representative of the public
To some extent yes. But also those issues have big implications for working people. It's possible to talk about them in a way that inspires and builds a movement, or in a way that makes people feel stupid and excluded from the conversation. Often they choose the latter.
> It's also not obvious to me that a bona fide labor movement would take a particularly strong stance on an executive order curtailing independent agencies
It should be absolutely obvious why the labor movement might be opposed to what is literally the largest layoff in American history.
I'm not saying that nobody supports the Democrats over the Republicans. There's two interrelated points:
* Supporting the Democratic Party against its main opponent is very different from supporting it in its own right. There's a lot of people in the US who would prefer for Chuck Schumer to be the majority leader, but very few who look to him for cues on what they ought to believe or fight for.
* There's very few spaces where the Democrats are dominant enough to form a nucleus of mass resistance. 50-43 among union members is a nonzero lead, but if you go to your union local to organize an anti-Trump protest, that 43% represents quite a lot of voices who won't agree with the premise that there's anything to protest.
Irrespective of sides, I would imagine that most Americans believe they are on the 'side' of democracy and a constitutional republic. When they become aware that this is being taken away, I might suggest that many will change their vote.
Oligarchs are always greatly outnumbered.
The only thing that is genuinely effective is mass movement. A coalition of labor unions could shut down all of Elon and Trumps businesses in hours. Block the entrances to the factories. General strikes, boycotts, that kind of thing. It’s not actually that complicated.
Instead the modern Democratic Party is in love with appeals to the referees. They think that if they can just convince some court or The NY Times editorial board or a 75 year old former republican special prosecutor they’ll win.
As we have seen that approach is a total and complete failure.
If someone in opposition was able to generate mass collective action however the change would be swift. Nobody is really trying that though.