For several decades, the state of working-class power in the United States has been bleak. Unions are weak, and millions of workers, including nearly half of union household voters, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Seeing the weakened state of labor, many liberals and leftists have turned to other social forces — nonprofits, left politicians, or even climate-friendly billionaires — to win health care, environmental, and other progressive legislation.

In recent years, inspired by the experience of Bernie Sanders’s and others’ campaigns, the US left has recognized the strategic importance of political action: elections, legislation, and political parties. The need for political action has become common sense for today’s left: Neither mass protests nor workplace organizing alone are sufficient to build the power needed to defend workers’ interests and ultimately transform society.

Some leftists take this argument even further. Pointing to the role of politicians and legislation in the New Deal labor upsurge and workers’ decreasing structural power under “post-industrial” capitalism, Chris Maisano argues that elections may now be more important for “working-class reorganization” than workplace organizing. “The potential for making new advances today,” he writes, might be “relatively more dependent on political action than on leveraging workers’ location in the production process.”