Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien gave a speech at the Republican National Convention two days ago. In that speech, O’Brien declared, “The Teamsters are not interested if you have D, R, or an I next to your name. We want to know one thing: what are you doing to help American workers.” It was an insistence that the union is not beholden to any party or candidate.

A day after O’Brien’s speech, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, wrote of the virtues of a pro-labor conservatism. He claims that O’Brien’s speech should be a call to return to the Republican tradition of Theodore Roosevelt — a tradition that John Gerring called “National Republicanism.”

That period of the party might sound similar to the Trumpian tunes of today. Roosevelt, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft called for high tariffs, developing national manufacturing, and a rejection of the free-market ideology so closely associated with modern Republicanism. In that era, advocates of free-market theories were seen as cranks whose “knowledge of Political Economy was obtained in the closet.”

In some sense, Hawley isn’t wrong to hearken back to that era. From the 1830s to the 1930s, American politics was characterized by intense and sometimes violent cultural conflict (the fight over Prohibition makes today’s culture warriors seem like peaceniks), a sectional division in the working class (Catholic and Southern white voters supported Democrats, while Protestants and black voters supported Republicans), and a fiery populism that, for all its virtues, could slide into crankery (remember that William Jennings Bryan, laudable for his populist thunder, went on to champion biblical literalism in the famous Scopes trial). Social life at this time was tremendously unequal, violent, and volatile. The richest captains of industry lorded over a corrupt political system, their media influence so large and profound that alternative voices had almost no oxygen.

In many ways, it really does feel like we’ve returned to America’s high Gilded Age.

In this context, Samuel Gompers, then president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), famously argued that labor’s political strategy ought to consist of “rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies” in both major parties. Given that labor was too weak to form its own independent party, he hoped that playing each side off the other might get them to compete for labor’s votes, eventually unlocking a virtuous cycle of reform where labor might have its cake and eat it too.

That was the idea, anyway.

In 1908, Gompers’s AFL endorsed Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a populist who spent the entire campaign railing against the business elite and their chosen candidate, the Republican William Howard Taft. Bryan was undoubtedly a friend to labor and deserved the endorsement, but for this Gompers was punished. The Republican Party, upon winning a major victory, went about making life much harder for labor. Shortly after the election, Gompers himself was actually sentenced to prison for advocating a boycott (he won his appeal).

The parties, it seemed, did not vigorously vie for labor’s affection in the spirit of cooperation and uplift. Instead, the Republican Party adopted a cooler attitude. As if big business needed any aid in their already lopsided battle against labor, President Taft was instrumental in helping to organize the US Chamber of Commerce, an organization O’Brien rightly called “a union for big business” on Monday. Meanwhile, the Democrats, gradually and then rapidly, came to champion labor as the hero of their appeals.

As Gompers would himself witness, the national developmentalism of the Republicans was fundamentally about building up the nation’s wealth, not redistributing it. Whatever interest they may have had in using the strong arm of the state to grow profits, they had little will to use it to foster equality. In 1908, Taft was asked what was to be done about workers who, through no fault of their own, were thrown out of work for long stretches of time. He replied, “God knows. They have my deepest sympathy.”

Gompers’s realpolitik, then, was an expression not of strength but of weakness. In attempting to play both sides, Gompers hoped to avoid punishments from political adversaries and encourage a broad, bipartisan labor spirit in Congress. Instead, labor’s inability to wield electoral power was exploited, and political interests pressed further divides in the movement. As labor grew in strength, its political influence grew, and in the New Deal it consolidated its power within the Democratic Party. The gains of that generation of workers are still the high-water mark of labor’s political influence.

None of this is to criticize O’Brien for speaking at the RNC. His speech was one of the few times an audience like that would hear a voice that criticizes the corporate sponsors of the Republican Party. But it is to say that his decision to do so was not as singular as it seems — it was structural. Labor is today weaker than it has ever been since its inception. Despite much-celebrated new organizing drives, the contemporary story of the union movement is one of decline. Actual union density is at historic lows. Meanwhile, corporate interests, barely coordinated in Gompers’s day, now have such influence that they not only advocate but actually write the legislation for both parties. Labor has nothing comparable to this level of political strength. Gompersism might be appealing today not because it promises great returns but precisely because there is little room to do anything else.

As workers within the labor movement have become severely divided along cultural and political lines, as the economic situation has become more and more unequal, while politics have become more and more unstable, the temptation to play both sides of the political gamut will only increase. Yet the pitfalls are no less great. It’s unlikely that the Republicans will send O’Brien to prison if the Teamsters ultimately back Joe Biden and Trump proves victorious, but it’s more likely that a prominent Trump supporter, the billionaire Elon Musk, might get his way in the Supreme Court, where he is currently trying to dismantle the National Labor Relations Act. It’s very likely that public schools will be greatly undermined by the Republicans’ voucher proposal. And it’s virtually assured that Medicaid funding will be cut in half. Labor realpolitik is predicated on the hope that the worst of this vindictiveness can be avoided.

Yet Democrats have not made it easy to endorse them. While the party has moved in labor’s direction on important economic issues, and while Biden has undoubtedly been the most pro-union president in modern history, the party has indeed alienated workers with appeals tailored around its increasingly upscale voting base. To deny that this has anything to do with labor’s present situation is absurd. It is painfully obvious that many blue-collar workers find themselves more at home with Trumpian populism than woke liberalism.

In the end, if labor was stronger, it would put forward its own candidates and its own vision of society. That vision would go far beyond the tenuous national developmentalism of the Republican Party and the welfarism of the Democrats. Instead, it would make clear that labor’s interests are social and universal. It is the labor movement that ought to argue for a shorter workweek; higher wages; security in old age; the construction of adequate homes in desirable places; the rebuilding of bridges, roads, and tunnels that have not been upgraded since the New Deal; the improvement of public schools; the establishment of parental leave; the funding of tuition-free trade schools and colleges; and ultimately the end of the tyranny of the rich over the rest of us.

Such a program would require a full-scale confrontation with the corporate elite and a recognition that taxation is not a dirty word but a matter of our common good, and it would recognize that rebuilding social solidarity requires investments an order of magnitude greater than anything either party has offered in the past fifty years.