The US labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States descends into an era of ​“electoral autocracy.” We believe this period will also set the parameters of the union movement’s power and influence for years to come, for the state of democracy and worker organization have long been deeply intertwined.

For decades, the forces that have steadily eroded effective democracy and increasingly marginalized organized labor have exacerbated each other, making us vulnerable to the authoritarian danger we now face. Yet that very danger also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping them devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.

President Donald Trump’s second term in office has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this county has seen since the nineteenth century.