The Democratic Party will NOT save us: Organized resistance and social movements are what we need to build if we are serious about change

Last week, in the Email that Rep. Scholten sends out, she spent a great deal of time talking about how the “Big Beautiful Bill” would be bad for people, especially around the issues of health care cuts, food assistance cuts, attacks on public education and several  other important matters.

Rep. Scholten is correct in pointing out what kind of damage the “Big Beautiful Bill” will do. Unfortunately, all she did was vote against it, since the Democrats do not control Congress. Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin did the same thing in her July 19th Email, critiquing all the things wrong with the “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

However, what Slotkin and Scholten did not do was to talk about where much of this money will be going, money that has been cut from food assistance and medicaid. The Big Beautiful Bill allocates $170 billion to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, and for a border wall and militarization in the next few years. Specifically, the bill includes funding for some of the following:

• $45 billion: for expanding detention capacity, including building new facilities and expanding existing ones. 
• $29.9 billion: for enforcement and removal operations, such as hiring more ICE personnel and providing transportation costs. 
• $10 billion: for a DHS cost-reimbursement fund related to border enforcement. 
• $12 billion: for state reimbursement related to border enforcement. 

So, why did Slotkin and Scholten say nothing about the increased funding that will further the Trump Administration’s desire to arrest, detain and deport as many immigrants as possible? For one, Slotkin, Scholten and the Democratic Party as a whole have voted for ICE funding, the expansion of private detention facilities and related Department of Homeland Security efforts directed at the immigrant community since ICE was created in 2003. 

A second major reason that Democrats have not talked about expanded funding for ICE and other immigration related repression is because the Democratic Party leadership did not want to talk about it. This matter is explored in an excellent article from the Intercepted, entitled, “TRUMP’S BUDGET BILL WOULD EXPLODE FUNDING FOR ICE. TOP DEMOCRATS AREN’T TALKING ABOUT IT.” The reason why the Democratic Party leadership did not want to talk about ICE and the the further criminalization of immigrants, along with the further militarization of the border, is because they fundamentally agree with those policies, just as they did under Clinton, Obama and Biden. (See Daniel Denvir’s book, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It.) 

Some people might point out that Senator Slotkin recently co-sponsored theVISIBLE Act, which requires ICE agents to not cover their faces and have some form of identification on their person when arresting and detaining immigrants. Of course it is problematic that ICE agents are covering their faces, but Slotkin’s legislation says nothing about how ICE has arrested, detained and deported millions of immigrants since ICE was created. As I wrote in a piece last week, Senator Slotkin doesn’t have a problem with ICE arresting in detaining millions of immigrants. In fact, she is pushing the VISIBLE Act legislation because it will, “strengthens officer credibility, and improves public cooperation.” This clearly means she doesn’t oppose what ICE does, only that she doesn’t want them to cover their faces.

For her part, Rep. Scholten has voted with the Trump Administration on several bills to further criminalize undocumented immigrants, as I have documented, Scholten and Slotkin refused to condemn the US bombing of Iran last month, and Rep. Scholten recently voted for the pro-Trump Genius Act, as did the majority of Congress, which would further Trump’s corruption, but also “expose our financial stability, national security, and consumer protections to greater risk.”

For those who continue to put their faith in electoral politics, I would argue, as does historian Howard Zinn, that the most effective means to address systemic oppression is by building radical social movements that are too powerful for politicians to ignore. From an Interview, Zinn said:

Significant changes occur when social movements reach a critical point of power capable of moving cautious politicians beyond their tendency to keep things as they are — or when these movements, by direct action, bypass the political system and bring about change by acting directly on the obstacles to change. When the anti-slavery movement reached its height in the late 1850s and early 1860s, it pushed President Abraham Lincoln toward the Emancipation Proclamation and pushed Congress toward the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. When the labor movement became militant and called strikes all over the country in the 1880s, it won the eight-hour day directly from employers without the actions of government. In the 1930s, the strike and the growing labor movement pushed President Franklin D. Roosevelt into the New Deal reforms — minimum wage, Social Security, subsidized housing, etc. When black people protested and demonstrated all over the South, bringing about scenes that shocked the nation, then we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But before that legislation, militant black protesters desegregated lunch counters and began to change the South by direct action. The movement against the war in Vietnam reached the point where it could not be ignored, where the direct action of deserting GIs, angry veterans and draft resisters created an atmosphere in which the government could no longer count on the support of the American people — and then the government began to move gradually toward ending the war.

It is true that things are worse under Trump than it was under the Biden Administration, but that is due primarily to the fact that the Democratic Party rarely keeps there promises on social and economic policies and actually embraces Imperialism, State violence and Capitalism as necessary. 

The Democratic Party would love for all those involved in resisting current policies in the US to focus on getting Dems elected in 2026, rather than building powerful social movements. Indeed, this is the strategy of the Democratic Party, which is to be slightly less oppressive than the Republicans, but when they control Congress they only modify GOP policies instead of listening to the existing social movements or population most impacted by white supremacy, policing, the climate crisis, a market-driven housing system, militarism, patriarchy and other systems of power and oppression. 

I would highly recommend that people read Lance Selfa’s book, The Democrats: A Critical History, which chronicles how the Democratic Party has undermined social movements throughout US history, by prioritizing voting over direct action, by convincing people that voting for the lesser of evil is good, and by not enacting robust social and economic policies when they have political power…….what we call betrayal. Lastly, why would we continue to defend and participate in a system of representative democracy, when we can have direct democracy or collective liberation through powerful social movements.