Solidarity is Our Greatest Weapon
What the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strikers can teach us about winning when it feels hopeless.
As I sat down at my desk this morning and opened my laptop, my feed quickly filled with posts about the newest gerrymandering efforts in Alabama and Tennessee—blatant attempts to tilt the playing field and add even more burden to our fight. In that moment, I was struck by the profound, heavy weight of the responsibility we all carry. It is easy to feel small in the face of the machinery of power, especially when that machinery seems hell-bent on turning back the clock on the progress we have been fighting so hard for. It feels overwhelming that Americans are standing against a tide of disinformation, corporate media consolidation, illegal gerrymandering, and a relentless effort to make the average person feel like their voice no longer carries weight.
But for me, that weight is part of my DNA.
I grew up in Flint, Michigan, in the 1970s and 80s. In a place like Flint, solidarity isn’t a political buzzword or a slogan on a poster; it is the very air you breathe. It is a history written in the bricks of the factories and the grit of the people who man them. I spent my childhood watching my father organize through UAW Local 599 and learning how to read from Solidarity—the UAW magazine sent to union members monthly during a turbulent era for American automakers and workers—a time defined by a punishing recession, the rise of Japanese efficiency, and ‘Big Three’ restructurings that cost jobs in droves. I saw firsthand that a community’s greatest strength is its refusal to be broken. The legacy of the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike wasn’t just a story from the past; it was a living blueprint, ingrained in our schools and etched into the historical markers that dotted the city. I grew up knowing that when ordinary people decide to stand together—or in the case of 1937, sit down together—they can bring the most powerful forces on earth to a standstill.
Today, at Lincoln Square, I find myself asking: How can I translate the lessons of Flint into this moment? Can I truly do that legacy justice? Can I help Susan, Stuart, Rick and Joe push Lincoln Square beyond being “just” a pro-democracy media company and transform this platform into a vehicle to inform and mobilize Americans—just as those workers did nearly a century ago? Those strikers didn’t win because Alfred P. Sloan suddenly grew a conscience or because the board of directors felt a wave of generosity. They won because they practiced a radical, unyielding solidarity. They knew that if one of them was silenced, they all were. That victory forced GM to recognize the UAW, transforming the American labor movement and establishing the very foundation of collective bargaining. It taught me a lesson I carry with me every day: when you make a movement “too big to rig,” the machine eventually breaks.
We are seeing that machine start to rattle and smoke right now.
We are currently in a season of incredible tension, watching a desperate faction of the Republican Party try to jam through every authoritarian tactic in the book before the midterms. They are purging voter rolls in the dead of night, gerrymandering districts until they are unrecognizable, and attempting to choke off the truth by facilitating corporate buyouts of independent media. They want to create a world where you feel exhausted, where the chaos is so constant that you simply want to tune out and give up. They are betting on our fatigue.
But they are making a massive tactical error: they are forgetting who we are.
History is not a straight line of progress; it is a constant tug-of-war, and we come from a long line of people who knew exactly how to dig their heels into the dirt. I think often of what it must’ve been like in 1941, when the world felt like it was drowning in the shadow of fascism. There was a moment when it seemed the light of democracy might actually go out across the globe. But Americans didn’t just hope for a better world; they built one with their bare hands. We saw ordinary people—factory workers, teachers, students—transform into a literal arsenal of democracy.
When we talk about “wartime examples,” we aren’t just talking about the battlefield; we are talking about the waitress in Detroit who worked double shifts to build the planes that liberated Europe, and the young men who stormed beaches knowing they might never see another sunrise, all for an idea that was bigger than themselves. That courage wasn’t found in a manual; it was found in the person standing next to them.
That same spirit is waking up today. Look at what happened in Hungary last month. This is the poorest nation in the EU that has served as the “test case” for modern autocracy in America. For sixteen years, the people lived under the thumb of a strongman who controlled the airwaves, rewrote the laws to favor his friends, and tried to dismantle every independent institution in his path. Yet, Hungarians didn’t wither. They waited, they organized across party lines, and they chose a moment to overwhelm the system with the highest voter turnout in over 50 years. They showed us that the “strongman” is an illusion—a paper tiger that only works if the people believe they are weak. Last month, Hungary wasn’t weak. They were a roaring engine of democracy.
And we are seeing that engine turn over right here at home. While the MAGA media machine touts a red wave as a result of southern state gerrymandering, the actual voters are delivering a different message. Over the past year, pro-democracy candidates have flipped over 30 red seats across the United States.
Consider Wisconsin, a state that has been a laboratory for voter suppression for over a decade. In the race for the State Supreme Court, voters chose a liberal candidate, Chris Taylor, over her opponent by more than 20 points. But look closer at the data: she won in multiple counties that Donald Trump carried by nearly 30 points in 2024. That isn’t just a political shift; that is a moral awakening. In Waukesha County—a historic hotbed for Republicans—a pro-democracy candidate flipped the mayoral seat in the county’s biggest city. Even more inspiring, voters in multiple towns there ousted conservative school board members who had aligned themselves with the right-wing book-banning movement. When parents stand up and say “no” to censorship and “yes” to their children’s future, they are channeling the same courage that fueled the suffragists and the heroes of the Civil Rights movement.
Even in the deepest “red” territories, the floor is shifting beneath their feet. Just this past weekend, we saw the tremors reach Pearland, Texas—a staunchly Republican suburb of Houston in Brazoria County that has consistently backed Donald Trump since 2016. There, Quentin Wiltz, a Black Democratic-backed candidate, defied the odds to win the mayoral race. It is a striking reminder that no map is permanently fixed and no stronghold is unreachable when the right message meets a mobilized community.
In Georgia’s 14th District—the heart of the MAGA movement—Democrat Sean Harris slashed 25 points off the 2024 GOP margin in the special election to fill the seat left vacant by Marjorie Taylor Greene. This was the biggest overperformance of the entire election cycle. These aren’t anomalies; they are snapshots of a nationwide shift happening right now, just ahead of the midterms.
The opposition is turning up the heat precisely because they can feel this groundswell. This surge in disinformation, the late-night votes to gerrymander, the desperate attempts to saturate our digital lives with fear—it’s all a reaction to your power. They wouldn’t be trying this hard to suppress us if we weren’t winning. They know that a high-turnout election is their funeral. They know that if the disengaged and low-engaged Americans—the 45% of the country who are tired of the noise but love their freedom—actually show up, the authoritarian experiment is over.
That is why we must stay focused. We cannot allow the corporate buyouts of our newsrooms or the algorithmic suppression of our voices to breed cynicism. Instead, we must become our own media. We must become our own truth-tellers, fact-checkers, and organizers. At Lincoln Square, we’ve come to terms with a hard truth: we cannot depend on the Democratic Party establishment to save us. Their digital strategy is often too slow, too corporate, and too disconnected from the trenches where the battle for the American mind is actually fought. We aren’t even certain the establishment knows what the people truly want.
Lincoln Square was built to fill that void. Beyond the walls of Substack, we are deep in the digital field, listening to public sentiment and creating content that has reached over 120 million Americans since January. We are showing up on the social platforms where people actually consume news and form their opinions, and we’re doing it with a lean, hungry team that doesn’t answer to billionaires. We are watching public perception move from confusion to clarity, one post at a time. We are using that same “radical solidarity” I learned in Flint to build a digital community of resistance that simply cannot be ignored.
We have to suit up for this fight with the same resolve as those who came before us. Democracy is not a house that is built once and then lived in forever; it is a structure that requires constant, back-breaking maintenance. We are the ones on the ladder right now. We are the ones reinforcing the foundation. And while the task is daunting, there is such a profound joy in the work. There is a deep satisfaction in growing this movement, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people who refuse to be afraid.
We are not weak. We are the descendants of those who defeated fascism, who broke the back of Jim Crow, and who built the most prosperous middle class the world has ever seen through the power of the union. We are a nation of protestors, fighters, and dreamers. We are the people who sit down when we are told to move, and who stand up when we are told to be quiet.
The road to the midterms will be noisy. It will be filled with attempts to distract us, to divide us, and to make us lose heart. But I am asking you to keep your eyes on the prize. Victory in this struggle isn’t just a possibility; it is inevitable if we refuse to be exhausted. We are winning because the truth is on our side, and because there are more of us than there are of them.
Let’s deliver the humiliating defeat that autocracy deserves. Let’s make this turnout too big to rig. Stay focused. Stay in the fight. We are doing this together, and I have never been more hopeful about where we are headed.
Solidarity is our power,
Velda and Team Lincoln Square
Join us in building this radical solidarity by donating to Lincoln Square to ensure the facts reach every corner of the country. Together, we can inform and mobilize more Americans to stand with us, and make the midterm election turnout “too big to rig.”
Velda Garcia is the Chief Growth Officer for Lincoln Square.