Rise up! Let's remember how our ancestors smashed injustice this May Day

May Day has two meanings, both of which are directly applicable to today.

It commemorates the solidarity of the labor movement (139 years ago today, workers gathered in the streets of Chicago to demand an eight-hour day).

“Mayday!” is also a distress signal used by pilots to indicate imminent danger or a life-threatening emergency (derived from the French phrase “m’aider,” meaning “help me”).

That about sums it up: Our solidarity is necessary to overcome the imminent dangers we now face — all from Donald J. Trump.

I doubt we can wait until the midterm elections to contain him. Unless we stop the damage he’s doing to both our democracy and our economy before then, much of it will be irreversible. It’s not even clear what sort of election we’ll be able to have 18 months from now.

Demonstrations are planned today in more than 900 cities against both the Trump regime and the oligarchy that supports and benefits from it. The official banner under which people will march today is, appropriately, “For the Workers, Not the Billionaires.”

Under Trump, Americans are relearning the lesson we learned about the oligarchy during the Gilded Age of the late 1890s, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit: Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good.

The Republican Party and Elon Musk’s efforts to cut veterans’ benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, food safety, food stamps, and much else that Americans depend on — all to create room in the budget for another big tax cut mostly benefiting the wealthy — is the latest and clearest example of oligarchic muscle-flexing in the Trump regime.

This is forcing the Democratic Party to move toward economic populism. Despite recent discussion in The New York Times among former leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council attributing Bill Clinton’s electoral victories to his neoliberal stances, the energy in today’s Party lies in 83-year-old Bernie Sanders and 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who are explicitly taking on the oligarchy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s polls are plummeting. Almost all now show him underwater, with approval ratings hovering around 42 percent and disapprovals at over 55 percent.

Trump’s trade war is choking off supply chains and threatening to push up prices and create shortages of critical components and products.

It’s already causing the economy to contract — by 0.3 percent in the first quarter, according to a Commerce Department report out yesterday. That’s a huge reversal from the strong 2.4 percent expansion in the final full quarter of Biden’s presidency. Wall Street has chalked up the worst performance at the start of a new presidential term in almost half a century.

At the same time, Trump is edging ever closer to defying the Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling on April 10, the court ordered Trump to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man the regime wrongly deported to El Salvador last month.

In a Tuesday interview on ABC, Trump acknowledged that he “could” secure Abrego Garcia’s release — contradicting Attorney General Bondi’s assertion that the U.S. doesn’t have the power to do so — but said he won’t. “If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that, but he is not.”

Hopefully, today’s May Day demonstrations will lead to larger ones (I’m still counting on a “national civic uprising” that even conservatives like columnist David Brooks support).

But what’s the goal of such displays of solidarity? How do they fight the imminent dangers?

Mark my words: If the economy continues to deteriorate, if the regime cuts services that the public depends on in order to give the oligarchy a huge tax cut, and if Trump ever more openly defies the Supreme Court — the solidarity will pay off in such a huge outpouring of national anger that Congress impeaches and convicts the orange menace before the midterm elections.

Mayday! And Happy May Day.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.