Republican Working Class Pretense - a Sick Joke
Some Workers’ Party
Three cheers for Terri Gerstein, a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She has made it onto The New York Times editorial page with the discovery that the Republicans aren’t really the party of the proletariat they pretend to be. Here is an excellent paragraph from Gerstein’s commentary, which deserves consideration for a NSSA (“No Shit Sherlock Award”) this year:
“As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, blue jeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story…This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The ‘issues’ section on the campaign websites of [Republican US Senate candidates JD] Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy… Republican candidates …these candidates don’t care about the real needs of working people.”
You don’t say!
Okay, I should probably step back from the sarcasm.
The Republicans really have been getting away for with preposterously pretending to be some kind of “populist” working people’s party. It’s been pathetic to see a plethora of pundits and reporters facilitate this outrageous posing. And Gerstein makes an interesting and perceptive point about the telling selectivity of the issues the party of Trump and Taylor-Greene claims to embrace from a “worker” perspective. Far from embracing real working-class causes like enhanced union organizing and collective bargaining rights, increased minimum wages, and enhanced occupational safety, the Republicans bring their supposed proletarian street cred with matters that reflect the vicious right-wing culture war. As Gerstein notes:
“Legislators or policymakers in at least six conservative states last year swiftly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to workers who quit or were fired for refusing to comply with employer Covid-19 vaccination mandates. The sudden largess was at odds with these states’ generally miserly approach to such benefits: They’d previously done most everything possible to limit the lifeline of unemployment insurance, including prematurely cutting off federally funded benefits in the summer of 2021…What superficially seem… to be examples of Republican support for worker rights are really Trojan horse incursions to advance their culture war.”
This is all no small part of why my fellow Routledge author the political scientist Anthony DiMaggio and I have been able to dedicate richly annotated book chapters to shredding the ridiculous, faux-populist Republican myth of Trump and Trumpism’s supposed “working class base.” The Trump cohort base has been considerably less proletarian, less economically anxious, and more affluent as well as more white, Christian-fundamentalist, male, and authoritarian (indeed fascist and fascistic) than the Democratic base in the last two election cycles. It is no more proletarian than the groups of US voters who backed Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. The “Trumpenproletariat” is a fairytale that has helped give the Republican party a “populist” veneer it does not deserve. Sadly, many liberal and progressive thinkers have bought into it over the years,
Gerstein is quite right to hold the Republicans’ proletarian pretense up against the plutocratic reality of the Republican’s policy record and platform.
Still, there’s four key things missing from Gerstein’s Op-Ed.
Radical, not “Conservative”
First, the Republicans have for some time been much worse and more lethally reactionary than just the same old rightmost major party making faux-populist claims while waging right-wing cultural combat. “Conservative” does not adequately capture their politics anymore. They are white-supremacist arch-authoritarian radicals now. The GOP has become an essentially neofascist party exhibiting numerous core characteristics of fascism, including the embrace of political violence, militant and vengeful “palingenetic nationalism,” savage white supremacism and nationalism, political eliminationism, paramilitarism, conspiratorialism, hyper-patriarchy, cultism, anti-intellectualism, paranoid anti-socialism, and a readiness to trash previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law.
The Democrats are Also Fake Populists
Second, Gerstein shows no understanding of the very basic fact that the Democrats are also a capitalist party that only pretends to “care about the real needs of working people.” The Democrats have consistently aligned with their big corporate and financial backers to prevent the passage of comprehensive labor law reform and the introduction of universal free public health insurance for all. They have not advanced the genuinely progressive taxation required to seriously challenge the massive over-concentration of wealth in the United States (so extreme that the top tenth of the upper 1% has more wealth than the bottom 90% here). They have not made serious efforts to re-legalize union organizing and restore the labor movement to its once central place in American workplaces, communities, and politics. They do not move to carve into the nation’s massive military-industrial and imperial budget – the Pentagon system that eats up more than half of US federal discretionary spending while transferring wealth to high-tech “defense” (empire) corporations. They do not undertake the giant social investment required to meet the needs of the nation’s mostly working-class residents. They are currently helping lead the world to precipices of thermonuclear and environmental collapses that will solve the working class’s problems by ending life on Earth.
All of this and more that could be said about the Neoliberal Democrats’ captivity to capital is no small part of why so much of the nation’s working-class majority refuses to come out and vote for them even as the other major party has crossed over into a rabid, arch-plutocratic neo fascism. It's not that Trumpism went and got the Dems’ onetime New Deal era working class base. It’s that the dismal, dollar-drenched and demobilizing Dems and the bipartisan capitalist near-destruction of US labor movement have depressed that old base and thereby helped open the door to Republican victory. It’s not a new story. It goes back at least to the second half of Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency.
This is What Capitalism Does
Third, as I explained in my last Substack, fascism is the product and perhaps even destination of capitalism. Marked by a constant tendency towards the upwards concentration of wealth and hence power, capitalism creates the context for fascism by rendering politicians’ democratic promises and bourgeois democracy laughable while at the same creating an endless series of crises that call for big government intervention. With democratic institutions, values, and promises recurrently and systemically trumped (no pun intended) and made to look inauthentic and ridiculous by corporate and financial power – this on a re-escalated scale in the now half-century old Neoliberal era – the state interventions are certain to be “authoritarian” and “illiberal.” Absent an organized Left that can change the balance of forces, the authoritarian government intervention will come from the right, not the left.
“There’s a Way Out of This Mess, It’s Called Voting” - NO!
Fourth, voting is NOT enough to counter this. Gerstein makes a fine case for not buying the Republicans’ working-class pretense and presumably therefore for voting for Democrats in the upcoming mid-term election elections. Okay, but beyond the fact the lesser evil Democrats are also an elitist and capitalist-imperialist party, there’s a giant problem: the US political order grossly violates the basic democratic principle of one person, one vote and tilts far to the right of majority public opinion. My last Substack broke down the different Minority Rule mechanisms (gerrymandering, plutocratic campaign finance rules, the absurd power and malapportionment of the US Senate, the ridiculous Electoral College, the “Simon Says” power of the lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, and states’ rights) that turn the Democrats’ constant call for people to into something like a great march into quicksand. The US representational and policy regime is wired to turn elections into depressing, fake-democratic spectacles of popular defeat and demoralization.
“There is a way out of this mess,” the defeated former Democratic US Senator Claire McCaskill told MSNBC viewers a few nights ago, “it’s called voting.”
Nope, not under bourgeois democracy, American Style, wherein unlimited campaign funding by dark money billionaires is viewed as “free speech,” where presidents aren’t elected by a popular vote, where presidential elections are reduced to a handful of contested states, where the God-like Supreme Court is absurdly far to the right of the populace, and where California and Wyoming both have two representatives in the powerful upper chamber of Congress despite the fact the former state is home to nearly forty million people and the latter one is home to less than six hundred thousand folks.
From Moore to Zinn to Marx
I have a good guess on what the great liberal filmmaker and my fellow Substacker Michael Moore is likely to say after the Republifascists sickeningly trounce the Democrats in next week’s mid-terms. He’ll argue that he sent Substack subscribers a month’s worth of daily pieces on how a mid-term “Blue Tsunami” was coming in order to help bring it about by fueling optimism. “I tried and I failed. It was worth the effort.” My guess is that he’ll say something along those lines.
(By the way, I’d be happy to be wrong about how the mid-terms are going to turn out. I may be wrong, of course.)
I have a different take. I vote to block awful Republi-fascists like Chuck Grassley and Kim Reynolds with lesser evil dirtbag Dems (and to expel anti-abortion state supreme court justices) in a red state (Iowa). I’m not an election boycotter. Good for me. Big deal! It takes ten minutes to vote at the Iowa City Public Library. As Howard Zinn wrote in March of 2008, “Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.” Friends don’t let friends vote drunk with the illusion that the nation’s big quadrennial major party big money narrow spectrum candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas qualify as the real politics that matters. Nobody has said it better than Zinn who wrote against “The Election Madness…that seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls…” As Zinn elaborated:
“I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death…. I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.”
I endorse that statement 80 percent. The difference is that I am a very ecologically-oriented revolutionary Marxist, not an anarchist-leaning progressive seeking to make our masters behave more decently through citizen action. At the current stage of capitalism-imperialism’s lethality – responsible for each of Noam Chomsky’s recently stated “four horseman of the apocalypse” (climate-led ecocide, nuclear war/WWIII, pandemicide, and “proto-fascism”) – what’s required is not shaking our rulers into changing policy but rather overthrowing our rulers and radically replacing their capitalist-imperialist social order with eco-socialism. Like it or not, we are at the inflection point that Marx and Engels wrote about in 1848: “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Postscript: “Burn Pit” Joe Needs to Take a Long Look in the Mirror
Some quick related words on Joe Biden’s big democracy-in-peril speech last night.
Yes, “democracy,” or more properly what’s left of electoral democracy, is “on the ballot” in next week’s mid-terms. That’s not hyperbole. The Republi-fascists are running a giant swath of Big Lie proponents who are perfectly ready, willing, and quite possibly able to knock the last nails in the coffin of previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law over the next few years. Yes, “we’re facing a defining moment, an inflection point.” You betchya.
Yes, the attack on Paul Pelosi by a Trumplef*#k home invader echoing the January 6th fascist mob by yelling “Where’s Nancy” is just another terrible sign of the horrific political violence hanging over the nation and that currently threatens election workers and other public officials and employees. And yes, the Republi-fascists (an accurate term Biden would never even semi use) represent grave threats “to our personal freedoms, to the future of health care and Social Security, Medicare.”
But no, the president is wrong to refer to the United States as a longtime shining beacon of democracy and indeed as a democracy at all. It is no such thing, and it was never in fact designed to be a democracy – the last thing the nation’s wealthy and militantly propertarian Founders wanted to see in their republic. It is an unabashed de facto bourgeois class dictatorship, a corporate and financial plutocracy wherein concentrated wealth and power trump majority progressive public opinion on one key issue after another. This is richly documented in the best political science literature and journalism. And its why Joe Biden went as a 2019 presidential candidate hat in hand to elite Wall Street donors to proclaim that “nothing would fundamentally change, no one’s standard of living would change” when he became president – a remarkable statement in a nation where the top tenth of the upper One Percent had as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent and where mass poverty and homelessness were widely evident.
“Democracy,” Biden said, “means the rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed, but the rule of the people.” Well, my fellow Americans, it’s great that we don’t have a monarchy – though our corporate media masters seem to think we should want one with the way it goes on about the British crown – but a vast social science literature and simple observation and reporting show conclusively that we have “the rule of the moneyed.” At the same time, as I have been showing for years on CounterPunch and elsewhere, the United States’ governing political and electoral institutions – the Electoral College, the gerrymandered House of Representatives, the absurdly powerful and malapportioned US Senate, the God-like and reactionary Supreme Court, the over-empowered and gerrymandered states – combine with the nation’s underlying unelected dictatorships of money and empire to savagely trump the core democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”
Yes, democracy, or what’s left of it (how much?) and rule of law are under attack from --- though Biden could only imply this, for fear of sounding partisan – the (unmentionably fascist) Republicans. But why does the attack have such a strong chance of widely expected success? Why have the nine US House January 6th committee hearings had essentially no impact on public opinion even as they have expertly detailed and movingly exposed Trump and his team’s many-sided authoritarian assault on the 2020 presidential election – an assault so extreme that it culminated in a literal mass physical attack on the US Capitol in an effort to prevent the constitutional certification of Biden’s clear victory?
No small part of the answer is that democracy and rule of law’s currency has already been very badly degraded by soulless and anarchic capitalism; by the savage concentration of wealth (a defining tendency of capitalism) and hence power; by rich folks’ purchase of politicians, policy, justice; by the longtime and living Minority Rule distortions of the US Constitution. Millions upon millions of US Americans know in their bones the truth of the old working slogans:
“Money talks, bullshit walks.”
“The Golden Rule: those who have the gold rule.”
“Lunch bucket” Joe has always known the “golden rule” very well. That’s why he kissed up to the parasitic political bankrollers from Wall Street in 2019. For all his working-class campaign imagery, with expertly crafted Bruce Springsteen-narrated commercials about his blue collar origins in Scranton, PA, Biden has been a totally capitalist animal The longtime “Senator from MBNA” and the leading incorporation state of Delaware is one of the ultimate Washington swamp creatures, an eager doer of capital’s bidding from the not-so left side of the party system. (I’ve documented this at length – see this for just one example).
And where has Biden been in defense of half of humanity – girls and women – on the abortion issue this year? Why didn’t he respond to the vicious Christian fascist Dobbs v. Jackson decision by declaring the war on abortion rights a national public health emergency and then pass an executive order providing safe and legal abortion services on federal lands, military bases, and veterans’ hospitals across the county, including in neofascist “Red State America”?
I could say a lot more, but time and space are limited. If Biden wants to know why even bourgeois democracy, American-Style is on its last legs today, he should take a long look in the mirror.
Oh, I call him “Burn Pit” Joe because he was the leading Democratic US Senate cheerleader for George W. Bush’s imperialist invasion of Iraq, which led to his beloved son Beau’s death from exposure to the US military’s insane and eco-cidal “burn pits” in Iraq.
Biden is currently joining Vladimir Putin in threatening to turn the entire planet into a thermonuclear burn pit over Ukraine. That’s one way to solve the working class’s problems: end life on Earth.
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