By late summer 2025, approval ratings for Trump and the Democrats were both underwater, with Democrats polling at their lowest point in three decades. A September 2025 Gallup poll also found that sixty-six percent of Democrats now prefer socialism to capitalism.
As the US public gets more and more savvy to the unmitigated corruption of both major political parties, the Democratic Party has developed more and more covert tactics to build its donor base. At a national level, the Democrats have clearly figured out that presidential candidates don’t actually need to be well-liked. In fact, they successfully thwarted the most popular presidential primary campaigns in modern history in 2016 and 2020, when Bernie Sanders ran for president, and the Democratic Party made sure he was not the candidate both times. The DNC successfully argued in federal court that they did not need to respect the actual vote count during the primaries because it is a private corporation that can change its own rules as it pleases.
Since then, the DNC seems to have figured out that it actually fundraises better when it’s losing, and when it has a monstrous foil like Trump to campaign against. Since at least 2016, the Democrats have abandoned trying to mount politically progressive candidates and have instead focused on moving to the imaginary center – becoming experts at mounting weak, corporate-friendly, status-quo-loving candidates for president–- who likely won’t win, but will surely keep the fundraising machine churning.
In 2020, the Democratic Party anointed Joe Biden after he was polling at 4th and 5th place for months among all presidential primary candidates. A majority of voters were so disgusted with Trump at that point, any Democratic candidate would have won by a landslide. And in 2024, after Biden’s deteriorating mental condition became impossible to deny any longer, the Democratic Party anointed Kamala Harris to replace Biden as the presidential candidate, without even holding a primary election.
The voter turnout for Harris was lower than usual in the 2024 general election. A whole 29 percent of Biden’s 2020 voters didn’t vote for Harris over her unwillingness to commit to ending the genocide in Palestine. And I’m sure it didn’t help that millions of Americans watched Team Blue send loads of militarized cops to college campuses to crack the skulls of students and faculty, protesting against genocide.
Meanwhile, early voting polls revealed that voters lacked faith in Harris’ ability to manage the economy, which makes sense given her lack of any kind of real economic platform. Harris also brazenly ran her presidential campaign with Liz Cheney, the daughter of one of the most prominent US war criminals from the Bush era. And then she released multiple campaign ads, promising to be tougher on the US/Mexico border than Trump. (That didn’t age well!)
And toward the end of her campaign, she promised that the only thing she would do differently from Biden would be to put a Republican in her cabinet. It’s really no surprise that amid these kinds of right-wing, tone-deaf, capitalist-friendly campaigns, masses of people are turning away from the Democratic Party. In other words, the Democratic fundraising machine needs a boost!
Enter the “50501 Movement”…a self-described “Movement’ beholden only to the everyday Americans who create, fund, and organize its actions and events.” The website proclaims: “We, the American people, have banded together in the interest of a common goal; to end executive overreach and reject the authoritarian actions of the Trump Administration. 50501 is not run by politicians or any political party. We are not paid or coerced into action. We are driven to act out of our own sense of what is right: decency, democracy, and civil liberty for all people.”
Under “What is 50501?” on their Reddit page, they say, “50501 is a completely decentralized, grassroots coalition of individuals that aims to end executive overreach by the Trump administration and protect our Constitutional rights.” On their Partners page, they double-down with the democracy rhetoric: “50501 is first and foremost a movement of, by, and for the people. We are not nationally incorporated and have no plans to change that.”
50501 traces its “humble beginnings” to a Reddit user, “Evolved Fungi.” Their reddit FAQ page emphatically states that “Nobody” funds them, and that it’s entirely volunteer-run. And then they say, “Our partners/associates (listed on fiftyfifty.one) assist with resources, such as hosting our websites and event platform, creating media, gathering safety information, etc., but they do not provide funding for protests on the national or state level.”
But looking a little more closely at the hundreds of email lists, websites, social media sites, resource pages, toolkits, handbooks and merch sites that 50501 operates, it’s quite clear that whatever kind of organization this is, it is anything but an organic, grassroots social movement. A little bit more digging reveals three of 50501’s consistent organizing partners across many states- Indivisible, MoveOn and Political Revolution. These three main partners work very closely with the Democratic Party.
Indivisible and MoveOn operate 501(c)4 projects for political lobbying that are not required to disclose their funding. Indivisible was founded by former Democratic Party staffers. Both Indivisible and MoveOn operate PAC’s for directly funding Democratic campaigns and lobbying on campaign issues. Based on its 2023 Annual Report, Indivisible received almost $6 million from private foundations (~41% of its annual budget), $4.5 million from major gifts, and $3.2 million from small-dollar donations. MoveOn is a major funding source for Democratic Party campaigns. In 2024, MoveOn pledged $32 million to support President Biden and other Democratic candidates for Congress. Some state and local 50501 websites actually acknowledge these partnerships directly, in spite of the national website’s insistence that 50501 is completely decentralized, independent and grassroots-led.
Does 50501 have any demands?
Besides the patently-partisan funding/organizing arm of these protests, it’s interesting to study 50501’s political messaging. 50501 has held at least 10 national protests to date, between February and October of 2025. The political demands of this coalition are incredibly broad and ambiguous. There is no single, comprehensive list of demands, and any actionable items vary by state and chapter.
For example, in California, No Kings is pushing Gavin Newsome’s Prop. 50, a partisan redistricting plan designed to counter Republican gerry-mandering and deliver more seats to the Democrats. This is a controversial proposition, according to critics of both major parties, because they say it violates California’s constitutionally-enforced independent redistricting process. Other state-level initiatives include training for future protests, using the 50501 toolkit, some voter education efforts, and story-telling efforts, but no pursuit of actual concrete demands/reforms at the national level. This is a little surprising given how many millions of people they’ve brought out into the streets.
Mostly, 50501’s messaging focuses on what they oppose: executive overreach, undemocratic actions, and plutocracy. For example, on April 5, 2025, the name of their national protest was “Hands Off.” And on their social media messaging, “Hands Off” was followed by a list that read: “Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Our Jobs, Our Wallets, Our Bodies, Veteran’s Services, Cancer Research, NATO, Consumer Protections, Clean Air, Clean Energy, Schools, Libraries, Free Speech, LGBTQ Rights, Immigrants, Courts and More.” Conspicuously absent from “Hands-off” protest demands is any mention of Palestine and the genocide, which is easily the biggest and most serious political issue of our time.
In fact, on-the-ground reports from various Palestine organizers in Chicago, Wisconsin and Washington D.C. reflect often hostile responses to pro-Palestine/anti-genocide messaging at 50501 events. Anti-genocide activists have been mocked, silenced and verbally attacked. Code Pink published this video from the October 18th rally in D.C., showing an older white woman harassing an anti-genocide activist, telling him, “You’re at the wrong event, dude. This is No Kings. This is about our democracy.”
There’s also been a clear visual clash at these events between pro-Ukraine-war activists and anti-US-imperialism activists in general. The frequent flying of Ukraine and US flags at 50501 rallies has been prominent and clearly approved by the organizers with their “Hands-off NATO” messaging.
What are the demographics of 50501 protestors?
While 50501 has drawn millions of people from various backgrounds, a survey conducted at the No Kings protest on October 18th in Washington D.C. (one of the nation’s most diverse cities) concluded that “The typical attendee at the D.C. protest was an educated, white woman in her 40’s who heard about the event either through friends or via Instagram.” Eighty-six percent of surveyed protesters in D.C. were white, and 57 percent were women. And when asked what issues motivated participants to come out, “Trump” was, by far, the #1 issue.
The bourgeois, liberal nature of these events is perhaps best epitomized by the many signs saying, “If Kamala were president, we would be at brunch.”
In response to the October 18th ‘No Kings’ rally in Denver, Lisa Calderón, an African-American former Denver mayoral candidate and prominent progressive voice in Denver, wrote on social media: “White liberals are rightfully eager to denounce Trump, but not to face the truth: the same institutions now collapsing under his fascist regime have NEVER fully worked for Indigenous people, Black & Brown folks, and immigrants… When I spoke at one of these rallies months ago, I was met with hostility — not from conservatives, but from white liberals who only wanted anti-Trump rhetoric — not the uncomfortable truth that Democrats also sold out workers to corporations, billionaire tech bros, and war profiteers — funding genocide abroad while ignoring dissent at home.”
Indigenous activist Raven Payment also spoke at the October 18th, ‘No Kings’ rally in Denver. Here is part of what she said:
I was asked to give a land acknowledgment for today’s No Kings demonstration. I don’t do that shit… This infers that I use polite words about the theft and loss of life of my ancestors. To name the tribes. To give a moment of silence before the show goes on. But I’m tired of these hollow gestures. Land acknowledgments have become a ritual of comfort, a way for you all to feel righteous without surrendering power, without giving land back, without changing a damn thing. Words without action are not respect. They are permission for the injustice to continue.
The land doesn’t need acknowledgment. It needs restoration. It needs protection. It needs the people who belong to it to be visible again.
Because here’s the truth, Native people are invisible to you.
You come out to protests wearing your Handmaid’s Tale costumes, shouting about dystopia, about the fear of what could happen to you, about losing control of your body, your freedom, your voice.
But the terrible things you’re afraid might happen to you?
They already happened to us.
The dystopia you imagine: we lived it.
The genocide you fear: we are surviving it.
The apocalypse you dread: it already happened to my ancestors.
You want to fight tyranny? Learn from the people who have endured it for centuries.
While there is clearly a dominant white, liberal demographic at these events, it’s important to note that the scope of these protests has been broadened by anti-imperialist, indigenous, anarchist, socialist and communist voices that have shown up, even if these platforms are not officially recognized or approved.
One prominent voice from the No Kings protest of October 18th was that of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who actually called for a general strike to protest goers. This was a surprisingly radical moment for the 50501 protests. And his call was met with many cheers by the 100,000-plus crowd in Chicago.
Can we really call 50501 a “movement?”
In all of its press materials, 50501 regularly refers to itself as a “movement.” And many mainstream publications have followed suit. While 50501 might look like a social movement from the outside, with around seven million estimated participants coming out to the streets on a single day, its big partisan donors and top-down organizing structure signal something much more akin to an astroturf campaign.
50501 protests did not erupt organically, as they would like to imply. These protests are organized and structured by a Democratic-Party donors. And the parameters of dissent are clearly delineated. “We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events,” the 50501 main website states. In other words, there will be no direct action and no confrontation of any actual power structures.
However, there have been break-off groups that have confronted power in some direct way separately and apart from the main 50501 protests. Paul Messersmith-Glavin, a prominent Portland-based anarchist activist, had this to say about 50501’s engagement with anti-ICE activists in Portland:
It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that this Saturday’s “No Kings” march in Portland is explicitly avoiding going to a primary source of the problem: the ICE facility on South Macadam Ave. Not only is it disappointing, but it is also infuriating that the organizers–Indivisible Oregon and 50501 Portland Oregon–have gone out of their way to throw the brave comrades who have been holding down daily protests at the ICE facility under the bus while perpetuating the state serving and divisive “good protestor/bad protestor” narrative; ironic coming from an organization calling itself Indivisible. Thousands of naked bike riders–and countless frogs, inflatable chickens, unicorns, & marching bands–demonstrate better political analysis, strategy, and courage acting in solidarity with those protesting at the ICE building than the organizers of this Saturday’s parade. Abolish ICE!
50501 organizers have also been walking the fine line of calling themselves “anti-fascist” while encouraging participants not to identify as “antifa,” due to the Trump administration’s recent designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. This has created confusion for some protestors, who don’t know whether they’re supposed to be anti-fascist or not.
Astroturf vs. actual social movement:
Let’s compare, for a moment, 50501 to Black Lives Matter, which is considered the largest mass protest movement in US history. Black Lives Matter erupted organically after the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. It was an authentic grassroots movement in all 50 states plus Washington DC, with approximately 7,750 demonstrations documented in the United States between May and August of 2020, with protests in at least 60 countries around the world- making it one of the largest international protest movements in history. Unlike 50501, BLM articulated a very clear set of demands.
In 2016, in the post-Ferguson Black liberation movement, The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) launched the Vision for Black Lives, “a comprehensive and visionary policy agenda,” endorsed by over 50 Black-led organizations. In July 2020, the BREATHE Act was created, focusing specifically on criminal justice reforms. M4BL demands can be divided into six categories: End the War on Black People; Reparations; Divest/Invest; Economic Justice; Community Control; and Political Power. Within these broad categories, there were many other demands: a universal basic income (UBI), a wealth tax, an end to the privatization of education and healthcare, abolishing the “1994 Crime Bill,” the demilitarization of law enforcement, defunding police and reinvesting in local community safety, an end to the death penalty, an end to all jails, prisons and immigration detention, just to name a few of them.
Unlike 50501, Black Lives Matter arose from the working-class and had no big partisan donors or organizers. BLM messaging appeared almost overnight all over the country. Street signs were changed. Statues came down, and big capitalists opportunistically took advantage of the historic moment to sell more merchandise. Netflix launched its BLM movie collection. Amazon began selling BLM products. Brand recognition and virtue-signaling went viral in corporate spheres of influence. And within a few short months, the movement lost its steam inside this capitalist system that commodified its message, sold its brand, and politically stripped the movement of any revolutionary potential.
The Democratic Party- the Graveyard of all Social Movements
The struggle with any political movement in the most capitalist nation on Earth is the risk of it being commodified, co-opted, subverted and destroyed by the ruling class. This is one of the main ways that capitalism neuters and neutralizes any potential threat to existing power structures. Note, for example, how the anti-ICE “resist frog” costume is now being sold with a conspicuous US flag on its chest, all across social media platforms. Will the imperialist frog be the lasting legacy of these anti-ICE protests?
For BLM, as with many social movements, we can also see a very heavy-handed attempt to re-route this potentially revolutionary movement back into the Democratic Party. In December of 2020, before he took office, President-elect Joe Biden met with Civil Rights leaders in a private zoom meeting that was leaked to The Intercept. Following months of mass protests and mass social unrest, Biden promised this group of leaders that, as President, he would pass extensive and desperately-needed police reforms, with the important caveat that “anything we put forward to change the organizational structure of policing” cannot include the notion of “defund the police.”
At this moment, Biden had just campaigned for president that same fall, with the support of many BLM leaders and supporters, heavily relying on black and brown faces in his campaign ads, but when it came to delivering real structural change to this crucial constituency, alas, his hands were tied.
Two months into Biden’s presidency, in March of 2021, almost all of M4BL’s demands had been ignored, co-opted or sidelined, stripping the BLM movement of its revolutionary vision, and barely offering up meager reforms in its place. The final legislation that came from this movement, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, never made it through the Senate. It didn’t even become law. And as lawyer and BLM activist Derecka Purnell explained at the time, even if it had passed, it would not have even saved George Floyd’s life.
To add insult to injury, in the last five years, many police departments across the country have actually seen substantial growth in their budgets, in a complete upending of BLM’s demands. “Cop cities” proliferated under Biden across the United States. And in cities like Springfield (MO), Oakland, Minneapolis, Houston, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Oakland, Memphis, and Chicago, police funding now accounts for more than one-third of total municipal budgets.
In addition, police killed more people under Biden than under Trump’s first term. After Biden made all kinds of promises to BLM and Civil Rights leaders, this is how he repaid them. He even had the nerve to go on “The Breakfast Show” during his campaign in May of 2020 and say, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
And this is the story of what happened to the largest social movement in US history. If we choose to learn from this history, we can begin to analyze the extent to which capitalism, along with capitalist political parties, destroy all real social movements through political co-optation and commodification. Dylan Rodriguez, professor of Black Study at UC Riverside calls the Democratic Party, “the most effective counterinsurgency organization to emerge in modern history.”
The Desperate Need for a Revolutionary Political Party:
There is no doubt whatsoever that Trump and Trumpism is a giant menace on the Earth. This administration’s ruthless, reckless imperialism abroad, along with his attempted implementation of a racist, terrorist police state at home, his DOGE agenda to loot the US treasury while cutting thousands of jobs, federal regulations, basic public benefits, and the gutting of environmental protections are just a few of Trump’s early achievements and outrageous abuses of power. Trump and Trumpism absolutely need to be stopped. But how did we get Trump?
For those who forget, leading Democrat Hillary Clinton, in her self-described “pied piper” strategy, elevated Trump as the Republican candidate in 2016, in hopes of increasing her chance of winning. And from that moment on, Trumpism has opportunistically filled the vacuum in the United States where the actual Left should be. Trump seized on the anger of many in the working-class, who have been angry for decades, as we’ve watched capitalism (in the form of neoliberalism and austerity) destroy the last remnants of the social welfare state from the New Deal era. This decades-long austerity project, along with the consistent upward transfer of wealth, really gained momentum under Reagan in the early 1980s. But it’s been continued ever since under every president, Republican or Democrat.
Since 1980, the overall cost-of-living has increased by about 290 percent. Home prices have outpaced inflation with a 560 percent nominal increase, and rent has increased at a similar rate. College tuition has increased by a nominal increase of 800 percent. Gasoline and food have increased by around 250 and 300 percent, respectively. And healthcare costs… they have increased by more than 1,000 percent!
In terms of real wages, since 1980, the median household income has increased by just 25 percent. And minimum-wage workers have actually seen a 30 percent decline in real wages since 1980. No wonder the working-class is angry!
We live in an age of extreme wealth inequality where the richest one percent of Americans now own nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Assuming the median U.S. household income is around $70,000/year, it would take the average worker in the United States close to three million years to amass Elon Musk’s net worth… three million years.
Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, has ravaged the earth, causing endless and more frequent wars, genocide and mass environmental destruction, all in the name future capitalist development projects to enrich a handful of billionaires, while the rest of the world starves. The last 45 years of downward mobility for the working-class is not a pattern we can only blame on Trump. People across the country and around the world are angry at capitalism, even if they think they’re just angry at Trump.
There really should be a Left in the United States to tackle these issues. But instead there are two capitalist parties full of empty promises. Trump was elected on a mandate to end foreign wars and return the US economy to the Golden Age, bringing back the economic prosperity of decades past. And predictably, he has done exactly the opposite- looting the treasury, while lining the pockets of the ruling class with the spoils. And simultaneously, he blames the declining economy on immigrants, refugees, and any other oppressed group– diverting class anger into racism and right-wing extremism.
And why did voters choose Trump again in 2024? Because when Biden was in office, the Democratic Party did basically nothing for the poor and working-class. Biden ran on a $15 minimum wage. He never passed that. He ran on a public option for healthcare. That never happened. His signature economic plan, Build Back Better, never really materialized. And he rewarded the BLM movement by selling their black and brown faces in his campaign ads, while he turned around and increased police funding. He started a war in Ukraine and began funding and facilitating a genocide in Palestine. The Biden administration cut off Covid relief funds and then kicked 25 million people off Medicaid, launching the Medicaid purge that Trump is continuing. These are the bankrupt betrayals of the working-class that led many, many people to buy into Trump’s fake populism in the first place!
Here’s the naked truth: The Democratic and Republican parties are not political parties with a corruption problem. They are private corporations with a democracy problem– they have the annoying burden of trying to appear to operate under some semblance of democracy, when their real goal is to enrich their donors and maintain the oligarchy. This has to be understood. We don’t need to just push the capitalist parties to represent us better. We need to understand them as our true class enemy.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen mass protests against capitalism (austerity, corruption, and imperialism) in Italy, Spain, Indonesia, Nepal, East Timor, Philippines, Madagascar, Morocco, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru, just to name a few countries. And just in the last couple of years, we’ve seen millions of people protest around the world against the genocide in Palestine.
Just in the United States this year, we’ve seen mass protests for Palestine, protests in support of immigrant rights, and big protests against ICE raids and deportations. And besides the very large 50501 protests, we saw more than 250,000 people come out nationwide for the “Fight the Oligarchy” tour earlier in 2025.
But like 50501, “Fight the Oligarchy” had all the markings of a giant Democratic fundraising rally, with AOC’s presidential or Senate run predicted for 2028- while offering up zero material demands. It is peak irony that Bernie Sanders has worked so hard to give people class consciousness. He’s brought up so many issues of wealth inequality, big money in politics, and corporate corruption. And for several months in 2025, Bernie and AOC flew all around the country in private jets, going from city to city– to tell us that Trump’s oligarchy is bad. Sadly, this message completely ignores the Democratic Party’s own oligarchy problem. In fact, it was the Democratic oligarchy that derailed Bernie’s presidential campaign in 2016 and 2020, and in doing so, paved the way to Trumpism. In the end, the “Fight the Oligarchy” narrative delivers the same lie as the ‘No Kings’ protests– that if we can just get rid of Trump, all of our problems will be solved.
Karl Marx once said, “The oligarchy does not perpetuate itself ‘by retaining power permanently in the same hand, but by dropping it with one hand in order to catch it again with the other, and so on.” For decades now, we have watched this mass working-class anger rise up again and again in the United States and around the world. We’ve seen mass protests against capitalism and oligarchy take the form of major protest movements– Occupy, BLM, and Palestine— and then this anger always gets diverted right back into capitalist political parties, away from its true class enemy.
In this era of Trumpism, the Democratic Party is working hard to convince us all that if we can elect another Democrat, we can go back to brunch, back to bourgeois democracy, in spite of all the betrayals and failures of the Democrats that put us here in the first place. It is time to lift the veil on the astroturf campaigns. It is time to remember that the two major political parties are private corporations, working on behalf of their donors. It’s time to understand that oligarchy is the nature of our government under late-stage capitalism. And it is time to begin to build revolutionary politics, as if our lives depend on it.
