Boycott Trump

Time for liberals and principled conservatives to get creative in opposing the 45th president's bid to return to the White House.

Cesar Chavez

William Faulkner famously composed a chapter (in his great novel As I Lay Dying) that consisted entirely of the words, “My mother is a fish.” I propose that we collectively compose a chapter (in the dystopian saga that is the life of Donald Trump) that consists entirely of the words, “My 45th president is a grape.’

Allow me to explain. In 1965 the great labor organizer Cesar Chavez initiated the first of several boycotts against supermarkets that sold California grapes. He did this to get growers to recognize the union he co-founded with Dolores Huerta, the United Farm Workers. Secondary boycotts (i.e., boycotts against those who do business with the targeted company) were outlawed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). But here’s a funny thing about the NLRA: It doesn’t cover farmworkers! That’s because, to get the bill passed, President Franklin Roosevelt had to mollify Southern Democrats by exempting from its labor protections farmworkers and domestic workers. In the South, both were predominantly Black, and the Democrats’ segregationist southern bloc didn’t want Black workers to get any ideas.

The exclusion of farmworkers also disadvantaged predominantly Chicano and Filipino farmworkers. It was Chavez’s genius to turn this weakness—an absence of legal protections for worker protests—into a strength by using a tool so powerful that the federal government had denied it to workers covered under the NLRA. Chavez called a boycott against supermarkets that sold California grapes. It was easy enough to strong-arm the supermarkets into not selling grapes, because grapes represented only a tiny portion of their business. If it was more trouble to sell grapes than not to sell grapes, they wouldn’t sell grapes. That was how Chavez brought grape growers to their knees. (I related this inspirational story, as well as the lesser-known unhappy aftermath, in this 2015 essay for the New York Review of Books.)

Secondary boycotts remain illegal in the context of labor actions governed by the NLRA. (They are also now illegal under a state law, crafted in 1975 with much input from Chavez, that extended NLRA-like protections to farmworkers.) But secondary boycotts are perfectly legal in the context of political protests against unusually noxious candidates like, well, Donald Trump. In my latest New Republic piece, I propose that liberals and principled conservatives give them a try. Let’s do to Trump what Chavez did to grapes. You can read the piece here.