For the record, my speech that day was not well received. In fact, come to think of it, a pret­ty long peri­od of time elapsed before they ever asked me to say any­thing to a group again. But that does­n’t make it any less true, even if they did­n’t want to hear it.

Many years ago, I spoke to a group of labor lead­ers. I talked about labor his­to­ry, and how we all love and revere the move­ment of yes­ter­year. I talked about how we wor­ship and adore the era of work­ers ris­ing up against the machin­ery of the sta­tus quo and the heroes who emerged as lead­ers of those move­ments. And then I told them that if we are not cau­tious, that the next work­er upris­ing will be against us. I warned them of the dan­gers of becom­ing so inter­twined into the fab­ric of the estab­lish­ment that the work­ing class may not read­i­ly be able to dis­cern the dif­fer­ence between the two.

Tues­day night’s elec­tion win, in my mind, is a sign of such an upris­ing. There is no need to try and dis­sect the entire elec­tion. There are enough ​“experts” doing that today already. And time will tell soon enough what it means for orga­nized labor to live under the new all-Repub­li­can régime. But there has been a lot of talk about white Amer­i­ca, and that is some­thing I know a lit­tle some­thing about.

Yes, a small seg­ment of Trump’s sup­port­ers are big­ots. And some are racists. But the vast major­i­ty are nei­ther. Liv­ing here in Iowa in a rur­al white com­mu­ni­ty in a most­ly white state, I know these peo­ple. Most are nei­ther of those things. And when the pick­up truck with a Trump stick­er pulled up at my polling place, it was­n’t a gun-tot­ing angry immi­grant-hat­ing red­neck who emerged, but rather, a union man wear­ing an AFSCME PAC con­trib­u­tor jacket.

More than any­thing, this elec­tion (in my mind) was about peo­ple who are dis­gust­ed with the sta­tus quo. Peo­ple who have lit­tle or no inter­est in ever vot­ing before came out and vot­ed because their health­care pre­mi­ums have sky­rock­et­ed (they blame Oba­macare), or they remem­ber los­ing their fac­to­ry jobs when Bill Clin­ton’s NAF­TA took effect. Many of them were Democ­rats once (or still are). They vot­ed in over­whelm­ing num­bers, not for Trump, so much as against what they per­ceive to be the pre­or­dained estab­lish­ment can­di­date being crammed down their throats.

Even among union mem­bers, the dis­gust for this cycle was pal­pa­ble. And despite pop­ulist move­ments in both anti-estab­lish­ment direc­tions (Trump and Bernie), most union lead­er­ship inside the belt­way seem­ing­ly fur­ther embraced the estab­lish­ment can­di­dates, fur­ther alien­at­ing mem­ber­ship on both sides of the aisle. There is a tenet of union orga­niz­ing that says you iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als who are vehe­ment­ly opposed to you, and then you don’t ever con­tact them to avoid anger­ing them into vot­ing against you. Labor pushed for­ward and we sent the usu­al mail­ers, knocked on the usu­al doors, and made the usu­al phone calls. The result was…well…Trump.

And while those of us who have been in union lead­er­ship rec­og­nize the impor­tance of being involved in the polit­i­cal process, and the dam­age the right intends to inflict upon us at the first oppor­tu­ni­ty, our mem­ber­ship has large­ly come to view the machin­ery of orga­nized labor as lit­tle more than a fund­ing arm of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. I mean, tru­ly, where else can you find a busi­ness mod­el where you can invest ten or twen­ty mil­lion dol­lars in a cycle, get absolute­ly noth­ing out of it, and then think it wise to try and dou­ble your invest­ment the fol­low­ing cycle?

While we may agree or dis­agree on the wis­dom, the mem­ber­ship, and the peo­ple of this coun­try, have come to yearn for some­thing else…almost any­thing else. And in a world where per­cep­tion is real­i­ty, and where pop­ulism is now king, to be con­tent to allow the per­cep­tion to exist that our entire future as a move­ment is hinged upon every elec­tion cycle, and that our only hope is to elect ever more Democ­rats, is an all too appar­ent recipe for disaster.

Our future as orga­nized labor, most like­ly, will now depend upon our abil­i­ty to gen­uine­ly mobi­lize and fight like hell for our sur­vival on every front. Wis­con­sin is here and now for us all. If we can­not change, and quick­ly, from just ser­vic­ing mem­bers and putting all of our col­lec­tive polit­i­cal ener­gy into the elec­toral process, then I fear there will be pre­cious lit­tle left to fight for when the dust settles.

His­tor­i­cal­ly, this pop­ulist move­ment is not unprece­dent­ed. And his­tor­i­cal­ly, orga­nized labor has always been run­ning from behind to catch up to such move­ments when they occur. Our action, or lack there­of, in com­ing months, will deter­mine the fate of the move­ment our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren will ulti­mate­ly inher­it. I only hope that the lead­er­ship inside the belt­way rec­og­nize it before it is too late, and start con­tin­gency plan­ning today, instead of focus­ing sole­ly upon the next cycle in two years, because today, peo­ple are more valu­able to us than PAC dol­lars, and our abil­i­ty to form an actu­al move­ment to respond to attacks is more urgent than won­der­ing which Demo­c­rat we will run for office in two years.

Where will we be when Trump appoints a Scott Walk­er to head up the Depart­ment of Labor? Or when offi­cial time is tak­en away in the fed­er­al sec­tor? Or when all of us have to hold annu­al elec­tions to recer­ti­fy our con­tracts? All of these things will ulti­mate­ly move to turn the tide in some future elec­tion cycle, but in the here and now, it is far too high a price to be paid for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic vic­to­ry that will mere­ly serve to stop the hem­or­rhag­ing. It’s tru­ly orga­nize or die time, and that does­n’t mean sim­ply sign­ing up new mem­bers, it means mov­ing all of them to action around their issues, NOT OURS, because clear­ly, there must be a dif­fer­ence between the two that we have missed along the way.