Since the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, there has always been a strain of aspirational thinking within the Resistance that maybe, just maybe, his vague and mostly fictional populist sensibilities could be harnessed for good. “The man is a deranged fascist, yes,” the thinking goes, “but perhaps he will do something nice for all the laid-off manufacturing workers and such purely to spite the Republican establishment that made fun of him.” Trump offers just enough unpredictability that forces whose most fervent desire is for things to just get back to normal can imagine that his racist rightwing populism might be nudged over into progressive populism, without him noticing. Hope springs eternal, for those willing to ignore reality indefinitely.

Some would call this “maintaining a positive attitude”. Others would call it, more accurately, “maintaining a gullible attitude”. Either way, this brand of thought has preoccupied certain Democratic constituencies enough to make their opposition to this administration perfunctory, rather than passionate. It is hard to maintain an appropriately obsessive focus on throwing the bastard out if you are always harboring the dream of striking a deal with him.

Nothing embodies this better than the newly agreed-upon USMCA – the Trump administration’s updated Nafta trade deal that has already become a receptacle of both Republican and Democratic political fantasies. The actual text of the deal has not yet been released, but from what we know so far, it seems to be rather “meh” on substance. It contains provisions that are unduly favorable to big tech, but Democrats succeeded in axing a handout to big pharma; it improves on labor conditions for Mexican workers, but fails to address the fundamental cross-border inequalities that have sucked millions of manufacturing jobs out of America since the original Nafta was passed a quarter-century ago; environmentalists have branded the deal a “failure”; the highest praise that the labor-friendly Economic Policy Center could muster was to say that “the USMCA is the best of a set of bad choices”; and for all of the crowing from the White House, the real macroeconomic impact of the deal is expected to be close to nil. It is fair to say that the deal is better than the original Nafta, which was bad, and is better than having our nihilist president simply tear up our trade agreements with little alternative, which is also bad, but it is not, you know, good, if we’re being honest. That fact has not prevented Nancy Pelosi from swaggering about like a conquering hero, swaddled in the wacky fantasy that there are actual living, breathing Americans who will now decide to vote Democratic because the party has proven that it can “govern” during impeachment. (Sadly, the last American swing voter concerned with bipartisan trade deal negotiating ability died in 2001, at the age of 99.)

The most disturbing aspect of this entire saga is not even the content of the deal. It is the political capital expended on it by those who are supposed to be protecting us from the predations of the Republicans. In particular, organized labor – a group that is engaged in a bitter existential struggle for survival due to a decades-long assault by the Republican party, and that should be the spearhead of powerful resistance to Trump and his priorities – has spent a frightful amount of time and energy securing this deal. Richard Trumka, the head of the 12.5 million-member AFL-CIO, has long made the USMCA his top public priority, and his support was vital to the agreement’s success, notwithstanding the mixed feelings of several individual unions. Ask yourself: is the renegotiation of this trade deal the most important thing for the United States labor movement, at a time when union membership has declined to only one in 10 workers, and the billionaires are hoarding all of the economic gains, and the white nationalists are running the White House? The problem is not that Trumka was involved in a trade deal; nor is it that Democrats did not get every last thing they wanted in the trade deal; the problem is that we are living in a time of incipient fascism and grotesque inequality when the millions of working people who most desperately need the protection of unions are being everywhere underpaid, disempowered and deported, and the person who represents the movement that should be kicking down doors and rushing to their rescue is, instead, focused on cutting a trade deal with Donald Trump.

We don’t need clever little bureaucrats pursuing minor policy tweaks in an effort to recapture the good old days

Perspective: it is important to have it.

The Democratic establishment’s wrongest and most dearly held belief about the 2016 election is that all we need to do is to win back some of those mythical White Working Class Voters who defected to Trump, and all will be well again. It is this view – one that ignores the deep, structural inequalities that led us here and the deep shit we are now in – that drives leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Richard Trumka to prize the USMCA so much. It is a flag that they can wave to that single demographic group that they believe holds the key to regaining power. Unfortunately for them, their thesis is all wrong. We don’t need clever little bureaucrats pursuing minor policy tweaks in an effort to recapture the good old days. We need fire-breathing warriors, rallying those who have been bulldozed by the plutocracy. The future of the labor movement is not Trump-voting midwestern whites, but young people and immigrants and women and minorities, all of whom are being constantly oppressed by those in power today. And the future of the Democratic party is not going to be secured by ostentatiously finding common ground with the current president. If you think this trade deal is good, imagine what we might get if we waited a year or two, and negotiated it under President Bernie Sanders.