Walter Benn Michaels Talks Politics with Class Unity

Class Unity recently spoke with literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels about the continuing role of race and antiracism in American politics and whether the decline of “peak woke” rhetoric changes the underlying class dynamics. The discussion ranges from Palestine and competing forms of antiracism to Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, labor unions, lesser-evil voting, and the limits of symbolic politics. It also considers working-class political realignment, right-wing populism, immigration, European political formations, national sovereignty, and the prospects for rebuilding a left with actual institutional power. Michaels is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and coauthor of No Politics but Class Politicswith Adolph Reed Jr. Readers can watch the original Class Unity conversation and find more of Michaels’s writing at nonsite.org.

Class Unity: Welcome to another Class Unity event. We are excited to be joined by Walter Benn Michaels to talk about how to make sense of the current political and historical moment. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author of many books, including The Trouble with Diversity, The Beauty of a Social Problem, and, most recently, No Politics but Class Politics with Adolph Reed Jr. Walter, thank you for joining us. Why don’t we begin by letting you speak for a few minutes, and then we will open the discussion?

Walter Benn Michaels: Thank you for having me. I agreed to do this because I support Class Unity. I have known people who have been involved with the organization for years, and I think it is a good thing. My one reservation is that I have not been writing much about politics recently. For the last year and a half, I have mostly been writing about art and literature. I can plug the new issue of nonsite, which concerns the New Deal and includes an essay of mine on Henry Roth’s great novel Call It Sleep. I argue that it is a communist novel—not a novel about communism, although Roth did join the Communist Party, which was a much bigger deal at the time than joining Class Unity.

I was a little uneasy about presenting myself as a commentator on the current political scene because I do not really think of myself that way. But I received some questions in advance, and two themes emerged that seemed useful to address. One was the widespread sense that “peak woke” is over. I should say that “woke” is a term I do not believe I have ever written on paper, and I am using it now only because it is probably true that peak woke is over. But I do not think the category is ultimately very helpful. People on both sides who treat it as the central political issue are missing the point.

It would be a mistake to think that because people are not behaving with the same kind of hysteria that we saw in 2020, or because conservative filmmakers can now make fun of the same people I make fun of, the political meaning of antiracism has fundamentally changed. Consider the issue that has dominated the campus left and much of the American left over the past year: Palestine. You cannot understand the American response to Palestine without recognizing that Israeli settlement and occupation are commonly analyzed as settler colonialism and as a campaign of white supremacy. To put it schematically, what George Floyd represented in the summer of 2020, Israel’s assault on Gaza has represented more recently. From that standpoint, race and antiracism have not receded at all.

This is not the identity-training version of antiracism associated with Robin DiAngelo, which was always easy to mock despite being highly visible. But the response to Palestine is equally grounded in a racial account of the conflict: it is understood as an expression of white supremacy. I do not think the movement would have taken the form it has in the United States, and especially on campuses, if the wrong being protested were not understood in fundamentally racial terms.

At the same time, the response to the pro-Palestinian campus movement has also been framed in antiracist terms, namely as opposition to antisemitism. The response to Black Lives Matter was “Blue Lives Matter,” a disguised racial counterclaim. But the institutional response to pro-Palestinian activity has been an explicit campaign against antisemitism. If you described the conflict from outside, you might say that one side sees itself as fighting white supremacy while the other sees itself as fighting antisemitism. The major question on American campuses then appears to be which form of racism, or which form of antiracism, people oppose or embrace. Race remains completely dominant in liberal and left politics, every bit as much as it was in 2020 and in some respects even more.

That should not be surprising. Adolph Reed Jr., Kenneth Warren, Cedric Johnson, and many others have been arguing for years that race and racism have long played this role in American life. The title of my essay “The Political Economy of Anti-Racism” was a tribute to Judith Stein’s essay “The Political Economy of Jim Crow,” which examined North Carolina in the 1890s. The circumstances were different, but the function of race in relation to class was comparable. Race has repeatedly served to obscure class relations by translating them into relations between racial groups. The end of peak woke therefore means very little if race remains at the center of political explanation and the same class fractions continue to support that explanation.

Imagine a student who entered college in 2020 passionate about Black Lives Matter and graduated in 2024 passionate about Palestine. There has been no fundamental pivot in that student’s politics. The continuity is opposition to white supremacy, and most people involved would describe their politics in exactly those terms because that is how they have been trained to understand the world. The difference is that the opposition now has its own race card to play through accusations of antisemitism. What we are seeing is largely a struggle between two forms of antiracism.

Woke was a particular form of antiracism. It may no longer be the same cultural obsession, but part of the problem is that some people who identify with the left have come to regard woke bureaucracy as the left’s principal enemy. At a conference in Germany, I heard paper after paper expressing horror at woke students, trans issues, and university bureaucracy. I thought: this has nothing to do with the left. Just as a commitment to woke politics had no necessary relation to class, obsessive anti-woke politics has no necessary relation to class either.

If the political claims associated with woke are that there should be no discrimination against Black people, gay people, or transgender people, socialists agree with those claims. We think they are often fetishized and made to serve bad political purposes, but we do not want discrimination. From the standpoint of the left, simply collecting examples of foolish or offensive woke behavior is a waste of time. I used to receive endless emails documenting the latest absurdity. Attacking those cases may have had a purpose when the phenomenon was deeply institutionalized and rarely challenged, but anger at them cannot substitute for politics.

What the left must keep central is that anything which mystifies class relations obstructs the organization of a political movement. Woke politics did that, but anti-woke politics can do it too. We should defend the right to teach critical race theory against censorship and then criticize critical race theory on intellectual and political grounds. The purpose of the criticism is to show why class relations are the proper subject of political action, not to join a coalition held together only by contempt for college students.

Magazines such as Compact illustrate the problem. People who have always been on the right can appear beside people who once identified with the left as long as everyone opposes woke politics. Within that framework you can be for unions or against unions, for abortion or against it; the decisive qualification is that you dislike woke culture. That is far too low a bar for a left politics. The fact that a conservative agrees with us about the absurdity of a diversity seminar does not make that person our political ally.

Opposing antiracism in its most virulent 2020 form does not place anyone on the left. Race has not receded from American politics, and I do not think class relations in contemporary capitalism can be discussed without encountering race in one form or another. Nor is the debate simply racism versus antiracism. It is increasingly two antiracist accounts quarreling with each other, each keeping racism rather than class on the table as the decisive question.

I looked again today at polling on who Americans believe to be the victims of racism. When I first began writing about this in 2016, polls showed that Trump supporters often thought white people were the main victims of racism. Now a majority of white Americans appear to believe that. It is false, but it is politically important. These people do not understand themselves as racists; they understand themselves as fighting racism. Working-class Black people are told that racism is what keeps them down, while working-class white people increasingly imagine themselves as the victims of a reverse version of the same process. At least the Black account contains a limited truth: in a racially neutral but still unequal society, more Black people would occupy affluent positions. That is not a desirable endpoint from a socialist perspective because the class structure would remain intact, but the claim is not wholly imaginary. The white-victim account is.

Yet both accounts prevent people from recognizing that capitalism is what keeps them down. Working-class white people see themselves in a reversed mirror of what Black people have been told about racial disadvantage. Even the presidential election is therefore largely about race, although Kamala Harris has presented her appeal in more universalist language, which is a step in the right direction. The important point is that race remains central even when the argument takes the form of two competing antiracisms.

Class Unity: I agree that Harris’s reduced emphasis on race may be a step in the right direction, just as it differs from Hillary Clinton’s emphasis on gender. But the campaign still feels deeply idealist: everything is about ideas, “turning the page,” and claiming that we are better than the recent past. It is not yet a material politics.

Walter Benn Michaels: I am not saying that people should vote for Harris because she represents a meaningful move to the left. Her brother-in-law Tony West was a senior Justice Department official in the Obama administration and later went to work for Uber. He helped develop the strategy, eventually validated in California law, by which people who work for Uber are classified as independent contractors rather than employees and are consequently deprived of ordinary labor protections. Historians of neoliberalism may or may not remember Harris, but they will remember that project.

The reason to vote for Harris is much more negative. Under a Democratic administration there remains some room to organize a left and build a working-class movement. Under a second Trump administration—especially one determined to avoid the restraints of the first term—there may be far less room. I was relieved when Harris replaced Biden simply because she can function. Watching Biden move had become a nightmare. But beyond being physically capable and not being Trump, there is little positive to say. Perhaps her decision to use universalist rhetoric reflects some submerged influence from her Marxist father, but it is more likely a campaign tactic. We do not need to know what she believes in her heart. The question is what her administration would do.

I agree that a Harris presidency would probably mean neoliberalism as usual. But neoliberalism as usual would still be much better than a Trump presidency. In my lifetime I have never cast a presidential vote that was not a vote for the lesser evil. Bernie Sanders was an exception as a candidate, but he never reached the general election. Even in 1934, the Communist Party’s assessment of Franklin Roosevelt was not that he represented the left; it was that his nationalism was an American alternative to fascism and ultimately destructive in its own way. That judgment missed how much worse the alternative would have been. Harris is not on the left, but it would still be very bad if she lost.

Class Unity: Let us turn to Palestine. In 2020, one of us took a DSA class on Israel and Palestine that included an article titled something like “The Israeli Working Class Is Not an Ally.” At the same time, conversations with Israeli relatives suggested that Israeli workers were being squeezed as intensely as, or more intensely than, workers in the United States; Tel Aviv had become one of the world’s most expensive cities. There seems to be a serious disconnect between parts of the American pro-Palestine movement and material reality. Yet the stakes in Gaza and here are obviously high. Is there an opening for an argument more firmly attached to social and economic reality within the American movement?

Walter Benn Michaels: This is an area in which one must know a great deal to say a great deal, and I do not know enough. I thought an essay Alex Gourevitch published in Damage several months ago was very good. Its basic point was that no existing political force has the power, or even an imaginable path to the power, required to produce a durable solution beyond a ceasefire.

We should support a ceasefire for straightforward humanitarian reasons. But a ceasefire would still leave Palestinians in a catastrophic position. Gaza was already an open-air prison; now it is a devastated open-air prison. Israel would remain in the same increasingly precarious political situation it has occupied for years. I do not see a political force in the region offering a left solution. If you subtracted the Palestinian question and looked only at Israel, you would find an increasingly stratified society and an exploited working class. Those conditions ought to create an opening for the left, but comparable conditions in Western Europe and the United States have strengthened the right instead. Hamas does not offer a socialist political-economic alternative.

The connection I can analyze with confidence is the one within American politics. For many activists, pro-Palestinian politics provides a new arena in which to enact opposition to white supremacy and to protest their university, just as antiracist politics around admissions or policing did before. The continuity within the American left is visible. But the idea that this campus politics connects to a plausible political-economic future for Palestine is delusional.

The mirror image is also delusional: the claim that American Jews are profoundly endangered by students at Columbia chanting “from the river to the sea,” even when some students behave aggressively or express antisemitic ideas. Many of those students were committed antiracists until this moment and are on paths into law school, consulting firms, nonprofits, and the American upper class. Being pro-Palestinian has become one way of performing that politics. That does not make them wrong about the horror in Gaza, just as demonstrators were not wrong that George Floyd was murdered and that race played a role. The point is that correcting racial disparity in police violence does not by itself transform class relations or even stop poor people from being killed by police. Poor white people have long been killed by police without attracting comparable attention, not because society is prejudiced against whites, but because the victims are poor and their deaths are treated as part of ordinary policing.

The movement’s American political meaning and the future of Palestine are different questions. I have not encountered an account that explains how the current movement leads to a viable left settlement. The immediate goal is a ceasefire, which is an objective everyone can understand: stop the killing. But after a ceasefire, what political arrangement follows? Israel and Hamas appear committed to defeating or destroying one another rather than negotiating a shared political solution. That is not a program the left can endorse.

Class Unity: Even if there is no perfect solution, we still have to pressure the United States to end its support for the destruction in Gaza. The depressing reality is that we do not seem to possess even the power to do that, much less to create something better.

Walter Benn Michaels: We have not had the power to transform conditions for the working class for a long time either. Many younger people have repeatedly heard the sentence “there is no left in American politics” without absorbing its meaning. It means that the beliefs we hold are not connected to an organized source of power. The Sanders campaigns were intoxicating because, briefly, they made it appear that some version of the American left might gain power. That appearance proved false, or at least the Sanders movement did not provide a route to it.

Perhaps Harris would be somewhat harder on Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden has been, but that is an extremely low bar. Biden repeatedly announced red lines, watched them be crossed, and then invented new red lines. Harris might act differently, but Trump would not be better on Gaza. His concern seems to be that killing too many Palestinians creates bad publicity, not that the policy itself is wrong.

Class Unity: When you spoke about wokeness, you said it has nothing to do with the left; now you have said there is no real left in the United States. There is no class left or social democracy in the old sense, and the established social-democratic parties became neoliberal. Yet there is still a “left” analog: people who call themselves the left and are thoroughly immersed in identitarian politics. What right-wingers call wokeness often resembles what you call left neoliberalism. We may not have the left we want, but we have a left we do not want. How should we understand that?

Walter Benn Michaels: I do not completely disagree. Unlike many colleagues, I did not come up through left political organizations. I am a literary critic. During the Vietnam War I attended demonstrations reliably, but I was not an organizer. When I became serious about intellectual work, the professor with whom I studied was extremely right-wing and, as I eventually realized, to some degree antisemitic. What struck me as unattractive among friends more involved in left politics was the famous sectarianism—the amount of time people on the left spent attacking other people on the left. As I became more involved, I discovered why: many positions circulating on the left really did need to be attacked. But the conflict can also become a kind of shadow play.

The reality of being on the left is not exhausted by identifying the people who misuse the label. At the University of Illinois Chicago, we organized one of the first faculty unions established at a major American university since the unionization drives of the 1970s. The Trouble with Diversity had just appeared, and I was controversial on campus. Some people stopped attending the organizing committee because they thought the union would be a project for white men, partly because I was visibly involved. But that anxiety receded once we organized around labor. People whose classroom teaching was saturated with the language of white supremacy put that framework in the background when they confronted their employer. In the union, the immediate problem was the boss.

Identity politics could return dramatically around a campus controversy, but many of the same people who spent hours discussing white supremacy would still attend the union meeting the next day. That suggests where hope for a left lies. The task is to organize people around labor and their relation to work. In that setting, everyone who works for an employer encounters a class relation that cannot be reduced to the categories organizing their intellectual lives.

Graduate student unions are useful for the same reason. I was initially skeptical because people do not remain graduate students forever, but participation in a union gives them an experience of collective political life that is not merely an allegory of what they study in class. If there is a way forward, it begins there. Harris is not good on these questions; Tony West’s work for Uber represents the core neoliberal fantasy that there is no relation between capital and labor, only individuals possessing different forms of human capital and contracting with one another. Yet the left still has to begin from the actual labor relation.

There are moments when this becomes visible. The United Auto Workers carried out a strategically skilled and successful strike and also took a position calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The union could not determine what happens after a ceasefire, but it brought an international question together with organized labor. My view is that there is no left because there is no agency of power through which the left can impose its position. Universities are potential venues only insofar as the politics occurs through the organization of university labor, not merely inside the classroom.

This is why even something as apparently narrow as graduate student unionism matters to the presidential question. Under repeated Trump administrations—or under a successor committed to the same project—the National Labor Relations Board could reverse the legal basis for graduate employee unions. Right-to-work rules and other restrictions could further curtail labor rights. Democrats have left unions terribly precarious, but a Republican administration could destroy many of the remaining institutional openings.

It is not enough to march around campus saying what we believe to be true. We need a venue in which people can exercise enough power to accomplish something. Labor remains the primary venue available in a capitalist society. Trump would be far worse for labor than Harris, which is not the same as saying that Harris would be good. Even the neoliberal administration is better for labor than a Republican administration committed to weakening or eliminating unions.

If Harris were running against a conventional Republican such as Mitt Romney, I would still say that voting for her mattered, although the stakes would not seem as immediately catastrophic. Trump is erratic and capable of doing things other Republican politicians might hesitate to do. But even if you think the difference has been exaggerated, the left gains nothing by weakening the institutions within which it might organize.

A Democratic victory does not give anyone permission to relax. If your employer still disciplines you, your human-resources department still imposes its politics, or you are losing your job, those are the material relations that can mobilize you regardless of who is president. We must therefore do two things at once: vote against the greater danger and understand that presidential voting is secondary to organizing at work. It becomes primary only if a candidate threatens to eliminate meaningful future elections or destroy the organizations through which opposition can act.

There is an accelerationist fantasy that worsening the crisis will “heighten the contradictions” and force people into revolutionary action. I know of no historical case in which deliberately empowering a movement that wants to suppress working-class organization has produced a stronger left. When people are pushed against the wall, they are more likely to be crushed than radicalized. I do not care whether Trump meets an academic definition of fascism. Endless arguments over the label are as unhelpful as old arguments among literary critics about whether naturalism is really distinct from realism. Whatever the exact classification, he is bad. Creating a national disaster will not help the left. Preserving the institutions within which organizing remains possible might.

Graduate unionism at UIC taught participants what a labor relation is more powerfully than classroom instruction could. Adolph Reed once told me that it was the only university where students immediately grasped his insistence that slavery must first be understood as a labor relation. At elite institutions, students often wanted to treat it exclusively as an expression of racism. At UIC, graduate workers understood the labor relation because they were living and organizing within one. The faculty learned through strikes as well.

If the left is ever to possess power, labor must be at its center. You are in a better position trying to hold a Democratic politician to principles that politician at least claims to share than trying to hold a Republican government accountable to principles it openly rejects. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s conduct during the railroad dispute, for example, deserved contempt and criticism. But hypocrisy is, as the saying goes, the tribute vice pays to virtue. A politician who must pretend to honor labor can potentially be pressured in a way that a politician who celebrates breaking labor cannot.

Lesser-evil choices are more or less inevitable in actual politics. Palestine itself presents desperate choices among bad actors and bad outcomes. The left’s deeper problem is that it lacks the power to hold even nominal allies responsible. Many people in and around Class Unity come from universities, but what matters is what they do when they leave. Academic jobs are disappearing. Working for a nonprofit often leads directly into left neoliberalism. Whatever work people enter, their political activity should begin from their relation to that work.

I do not care about my colleagues’ declared politics if they show up on the picket line. Their presence there tells me something material. We can disagree about what follows from the picket line, but we have no basis for effective political disagreement until we can exercise the power represented by the picket line. A union is one of the few available ways to become a left that has power. The most important political resource in a job is the collective capacity not to do the job—to withhold labor until the boss concedes something. If I were looking for work now, one criterion would be whether that power could be built there.

Class Unity: What do you make of the so-called realignment: working-class voters leaving the Democratic Party and increasingly voting for Republican candidates? Right-wing populists such as Trump and JD Vance claim rhetorically to champion working people against elites, even if their sincerity is doubtful. The president of the Teamsters spoke at the Republican convention, which seemed like a significant development.

Walter Benn Michaels: The Teamsters president explained that internal polling showed a large share of his members supported Trump. To understand that phenomenon, it helps to examine the history of race in the United States. Two novels by Thomas Dixon—The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman—provide brutally clear examples. In The Leopard’s Spots, after a Black man is accused of raping and murdering a white girl, the town assembles to lynch him. Dixon emphasizes that every class is present: the banker, the blacksmith, farmers, farmhands, and store clerks. They look at one another and discover what they supposedly share: whiteness.

What is the political function of that whiteness? It redescribes a class-divided world as a racial community. The banker tells the farmhand, in effect: I am not your class enemy; I am your racial brother. The racial unity requires someone outside it, and Black people are made to perform that function. This is an early, explicit form of white populism.

Antiracist politics can perform an analogous mystification. Affluent Black professors at Harvard are presented as evidence of progress to Black workers who will never attend an elite university and may struggle at an underfunded public institution. The assumption is that those workers should identify with affluent members of their racial group. We would not ordinarily tell a white working-class student at Chicago State that the success of white professors at the University of Chicago compensates for the student’s declining prospects. Yet increasingly, white populism does ask white workers to identify with affluent whites as racial brothers rather than recognize them as class opponents.

Right-wing populism is therefore not a left movement. In this form, it has always been a politics of the right. Working-class voters correctly recognize that Democrats have done little for them, but many falsely conclude that Democrats have done a great deal for Black people or immigrants. They see upper-middle-class Black commentators on television whose careers involve representing Black identity while denouncing racism, and they mistake those careers for benefits delivered to Black workers. Their own insecurity is then attributed to favoritism toward another group rather than to capitalism.

Trump has praised the idea of firing striking workers. The Teamsters leadership knows this, yet many members still support him because they do not believe that capitalist power created their situation. They believe preferences for Black people or immigrants did. The same pattern is visible outside the United States. In Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, a working-class father crushed by capitalism becomes convinced that immigrants receive everything while people like him receive nothing.

Race and antiracism are both useful to the upper-middle class because both can direct working-class anger away from class relations. The manipulation of antiracism into a language of white victimhood serves the same function. The pure political expression of that mistake is voting for Trump. But a worker who says that Democrats have failed for fifty years is also stating something true. If you answer only that Harris will not fire people for striking, the worker may reply that Democrats have presided over decades of decline while allegedly giving benefits to people at the border.

That is especially ironic because business Republicans historically favored abundant immigration. For many years, the Wall Street Journal consistently supported open immigration because employers wanted labor. During strikes in Pennsylvania steel mills in the 1890s, employers met Italian immigrants at the docks, put them on trains, and delivered them to the mills as strikebreakers. The immigrants thought they had miraculously found work the moment they arrived in America. The striking workers, who may scarcely have known what an Italian was, responded with violence and developed a racialized hostility toward Italians. The bosses had used a straightforward divide-and-conquer strategy. Everyone involved belonged to the working class, but racial division allowed employers to manage that class.

The rise of contemporary right-wing populism is another phase of that familiar politics. The left should oppose workers when they adopt it, but it should not respond by treating them as morally contaminated and permanently outside working-class politics. They remain victims of capitalism, and any viable movement must organize them on that basis.

Class Unity: Since we are discussing populism and border policy, what do you think about developments in Europe? Both right- and left-populist formations have grown. Some people in Class Unity are interested in George Galloway’s party in Britain and Sahra Wagenknecht’s movement in Germany. They support labor and workers’ issues but also adopt positions often described as right-wing, including border control and support for families.

Walter Benn Michaels: I do not know enough about Galloway’s current party. I have tended to regard him as an opportunist, though I cannot confidently say that assessment is correct. I know the German case somewhat better through friends who were involved with Die Linke. Die Linke resembled a more successful DSA but foundered on the same contradiction: it claimed commitment to working-class politics while embracing identitarian politics with equal intensity. Those commitments do not remain stable together, and the party became increasingly marginalized. Wagenknecht recognized the problem early and broke away.

The complication is immigration. Wagenknecht takes a restrictive position that is not identical to, but can resemble, the position of the German far right. The fact that neo-Nazis support a policy does not automatically make the policy wrong, but any alliance with them is obviously dangerous. My understanding is that Wagenknecht has said she will not join a government that includes the far right, while figures on that right invite her to lead people who share some of its concerns but do not want to think of themselves as Nazis. Immigration is powerful terrain for the right, and it is extraordinarily difficult for a left politician to address it while remaining electorally viable.

I am skeptical that either Wagenknecht or Galloway has solved the problem. Conservative parties long combined restrictive rhetoric with permissive practice: they talked like border guards and acted like Walmart greeters because employers wanted workers. That arrangement kept immigration from becoming the singular political issue it is today. The growth of white-victim politics—a mirror image of Black-victim politics—has made the old maneuver much harder to sustain.

National sovereignty presents a related temptation. Some writers associated with Brexit correctly criticized the left-neoliberal defense of the European Union. But leaving the EU and reasserting national sovereignty did not by itself create a left alternative. When attacks on cultural liberalism and academic virtue-signaling substitute for rebuilding organized labor, the result drifts toward the right. The alternative to left neoliberalism is not nationalism; it is a labor movement with power. Anti-Corbyn currents in the British post-left and the American politics gathered around Compact illustrate how quickly opposition to wokeness can become the organizing principle of a non-left politics.

When younger class-oriented socialists are attracted to that politics, I worry about where they will end up. Identitarians are not leftists, but anti-identitarians are not necessarily leftists either.

Class Unity: We agree that some post-left writers have moved to the right, but we are less persuaded that criticism of Wagenknecht fits the same pattern. One important test is Gaza. Wagenknecht has taken one of the strongest positions in German politics, whereas some of the British post-left has become openly Zionist. Those may be distinct political tendencies, which might leave more cause for optimism.

Walter Benn Michaels: That is a good point. Germany is different because its relation to antisemitism is historically understandable but also politically extreme. At the conference I mentioned, I said that treating antisemitism as the central form of racism in contemporary America missed the structure of racial politics here. Even people sympathetic to my work were appalled because German history makes the subject unavoidable. For Wagenknecht to take a better position on Gaza under those conditions is meaningful and genuinely hopeful.

My reservations about the British post-left are firmer because I have followed it somewhat more closely, although I could be wrong there too. The larger difficulty remains: how can a coherent left politics acquire a working-class base without sliding from border control into nationalism? Zeev Sternhell’s work on the origins of Israeli nationalism is relevant. Many founders of the Zionist movement regarded themselves as national socialists—not Nazis, but socialists committed to building socialism in one country. Sternhell showed that whenever their nationalism and socialism came into tension after they arrived in Palestine, nationalism won.

That is the danger. A simple demand for open borders can guarantee political marginality, but making national sovereignty the answer can allow nationalism to defeat socialism. I hope Wagenknecht avoids that outcome, but it is a genuinely hard problem.

Class Unity: We want to return to the presidential election and the skepticism about “vote blue no matter who.” Trump may be more hostile to labor than Harris, and choosing a lesser evil can sometimes be practical. But the organized left is now tiny and concentrated largely in nonswing states. The most important question may not be which candidate individual socialists vote for, but whom they are seen to support. Working people often regard socialist organizations as auxiliaries of the Democratic Party. Even if Democrats are marginally better on labor, repeatedly voting for them can produce an institutional drift toward the Democratic political machine. Would abstention make more sense, at least in this election, as a way to establish political independence?

Walter Benn Michaels: What do you recommend instead of voting for Harris?

Class Unity: Abstaining. Given the small number of socialists and their concentration in safe states, the only thing the left may be able to win in this election is a clearer public identity.

Walter Benn Michaels: Then the act has to be ostentatious. Its purpose is to ensure that people see socialists refusing to cozy up to Democrats. You are not arguing that socialists should support Trump, only that a visible refusal to support Harris would show working-class voters that the left is independent.

My objection is that the working class does not care whether a small socialist organization ceremonially refuses to vote for Harris. The imagined chain of consequences is magical: Teamsters notice that DSA withheld an endorsement, conclude that a genuinely independent left now exists, and become open to socialism. If the action is not strategic, it becomes a moral gesture; but voting is not a test of personal morality. It is a practical decision, as it was when children first voted for a class president.

If you are not in a swing state, I do not care whether you vote for Harris. Nobody does, because the presidential vote will not affect the outcome. You might feel morally cleaner, but that feeling has no political force. So I will qualify “vote blue no matter who”: vote blue in a presidential election when your vote has some imaginable chance of mattering. If it cannot matter, abstain or vote for someone else if you wish, but do not mistake the act for an effective political statement.

I live in New York but remain registered in Chicago. If the presidential contest were the only item on the ballot, I might not bother changing my registration because neither vote could influence the result. Switching my baseball allegiance from the White Sox to the Mets has about as much effect on either team as my presidential vote has in those states. In the absence of any causal link between the act and the outcome, the act is politically empty.

Class Unity: The argument is not moral; it is symbolic. Does it not damage the image of socialist organizations when they are seen as part of the Democratic Party?

Walter Benn Michaels: Symbolic action can matter if a plausible causal chain exists. I do not see how the abstention of a small group becomes visible to union members in a way that changes their view of socialism. DSA is itself marginal except in a few places where it elects people to offices that matter. In New York, local candidates can make a real difference. Some belong to DSA and some do not. The fact that a DSA officeholder votes with other Democrats most of the time is not in itself discrediting; the question is what the vote accomplishes.

We are a very small class fraction looking at one another on a screen. If we want to do things with workers, we should do things with workers. Whether we privately vote for Harris is not the central issue. The relevant question is whether an action helps build a working-class labor movement.

Imagine eight years of JD Vance after Trump. What would remain of unions? You could easily end up with little more than company unions: organizations permitted to speak on behalf of workers but denied an effective right to strike. That was a standard position of the German right in the 1930s, and it requires no imagination to see an American right-wing administration adopting it. The possibility that organized labor could be deprived of its power is more consequential than the image created by socialist abstention.

Everything we do should be judged by whether it helps build a working-class movement. “Vote blue no matter who” applies here only to the presidential election, not to every office on the ballot. In local and down-ballot races, vote for the person closest to your actual commitments because those elections can present different choices. But if your presidential vote can affect whether a government hostile to labor takes power, allowing that government to win is a serious mistake.

Class Unity: What about voting Green or otherwise withholding support in states that Democrats will win regardless? One argument is that Democrats exploit fear of Trump to do whatever they want while assuming that people on the left will vote for them anyway. A visible willingness to withhold votes might put pressure on the party: if Democrats lose support, it is their responsibility to offer something materially worthwhile.

Walter Benn Michaels: I think the casualness with which some people discuss the consequences of another Trump administration is delusional. Intense hatred of woke politics can distort the analysis. I wrote The Trouble with Diversity before “woke” became the usual term and have spent years criticizing the politics it describes. But when resentment of woke culture combines with vaccine politics and a generalized hostility to the state, it can pull people toward the post-left world represented by Compact. That is one reason former comrades sometimes cease to be comrades.

The weakest part of the “teach the Democrats a lesson” argument is the claim that if Trump wins, the fault lies solely with Democratic politicians who refused to satisfy the left. That answer means little to people harmed by the administration that follows. Of course we should be angry with the Democratic Party. But a vow to punish it by enabling something worse often expresses anger more than strategy.

If the tactical idea is that bringing the far right into power will show centrists how bad conditions can become and push them toward revolutionary socialism, I know of no historical evidence for it. The far right’s victory does not educate the center; it weakens or destroys the institutions through which the left might act.

Class Unity: We are not arguing that electing Trump will turn centrists into socialists. In a state such as Illinois, where Harris is almost certain to win, would a campaign for alternative candidates still be pointless? Could pledges to withhold votes create leverage without changing the outcome? Your own qualification suggests that “vote blue no matter who” applies only where the contest is close.

Walter Benn Michaels: In down-ballot races, everyone should vote for the person closest to their beliefs, and the closer the office is to the community, the more directly that principle applies. The argument we are having concerns the presidency.

Suppose Democrats are so certain to win a state that you can safely vote against them. To the extent your confidence is correct, Democratic strategists share it. Your withheld vote therefore exerts no pressure. Imagine voting for Jill Stein in Illinois because she cannot win and Harris cannot lose. Democrats see that some voters defected and that they still won comfortably. The very reason they did not spend resources preventing the defection is that they knew the result was secure. What leverage has been created? The entire political drama has occurred inside the voter’s head.

In a state where the vote matters, withholding it risks producing a much worse government. In a state where it does not matter, withholding it cannot pressure anyone. People may describe the gesture as a strategic lesson rather than a moral statement, but in the first case it is reckless and in the second it is private theater. That is why I do not find the pressure campaign convincing.

Class Unity: That is probably a good place to leave it, even though we have not reached complete agreement. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

Walter Benn Michaels: I thought I had persuaded everyone to go out and vote after a couple of hours. Am I mistaken? In any case, thank you. It was fun talking with you.

Class Unity: Thank you very much.