If I may, I'll add a correction to your quoted statement to give my intended meaning: “we don’t need a political party that relies only on support from workers.”

The subdivision and segregation of American political movements has been an incredibly useful tool in defusing them. The labor, civil rights, suffrage, identity movements, were powerful, but the lack of intersectionality made it so that once policy victories were achieved the tenor died down. My comment was focused on how this was a fundamental weakness.

For example, is voting by mail a "labor" issue? I would say no, and even if this opinion is generally wrong it shows the subdivision that occurs. There is no modern suffrage movement in the same way as existed in the early part of the 1900s. The idea of a "people's movement" is to say we need a political party that relies on the people, not kleptocrats, not lawyers, not donors, and fights for issues that are relevant to those people.

I didn't march in the recent protests because I am black, because I've felt fear from the police, because I've been systemically oppressed. Most of my peers didn't either, and the ones who were subject to those oppressions, among many others, are far braver than me, and for that I feel empathy. And for that we should march. These are issues of "people" because that's the most common denominator, not because we're excluding the factors.

The underlying thread of what I said is that we need a movement that relies on the common empathy we have for each other. I want community. I want justice. I want to love my neighbor, as myself. I want you to pray to your god while I mine, even if mine is just a nice bike ride on a Sunday morning.

And I know cynics, rightfully jaded by their lives, will probably say I'm being hopeful, youthful, naive. And I accept all of these, but I'd rather be those than have what we have today, what a simple cross to carry.

I guess I just want to listen to John Lenin's Imagine and feel like he's talking about my world. And I'm not the only one.

I won’t say that you’re naive, but only that that is kind of diffuse liberalism has no history of effecting real political change while the labor movement has a long, international history of doing so.

While it’s good to acknowledge the failings of prior forms of the labor movement in addressing issues of race and gender, this doesn’t reflect their current state or reality. Unions for groups like the teachers, nurses, or service workers across the country are already wildly diverse across every axis.

The primary failing of solidarity in the US is among white collar professionals, who see the struggle of these workers as separate from their own concerns, even though these unions been fighting for the racial and economic justice for many years prior to the current unrest. To my mind, this is the result of an ingrained classism, where said white collar workers see themselves above unionization (and thus the working class union members), preferring acts of temporary, performative symbolism over durable structures that would unite them with others across class lines. The first step in fighting this would of course be to form their own unions in explicit solidarity with those of the working class.

No. The Democrats need to be a political party that relies on support from regular people. Whether they are workers is beside the point.

Now, the unions were a good way of funneling support to the Democrats. (Which, by the way, was a bit unfair if you were a Republican and a union member, but that's not the point.) What's missing now for the Democrats isn't the workers, it's the mechanism for mobilizing bulk support.