The most horrifying thing about Trump’s State of the Union? The 2 words he never said | Will Bunch

February 9, 2020

By Will Bunch 

 

Imagine that it’s January 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt is delivering his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. The planet is literally on fire from the Big One, World War II. Nazi Germany has overrun France, and Adolf Hitler’s regime has been raining bombs on London for months. Japan has overrun much of Asia.

But FDR begins his speech with a long riff on how great the American economy has done under his presidency— including some gratuitous swipes at his predecessor Herbert Hoover, even though it’s been eight years since Hoover left the Oval Office. There’s a brief, bloodless mention that “our relationship with our European allies has never been stronger," and then he moves on — urging a standing ovation for the oldest living veteran of the Civil War. And when the speech is done, the radio pundits gloss over Roosevelt’s snub of the global conflagration.

 

That’s too crazy to contemplate, so then how insane was it that President Trump rambled on for one hour and 18 minutes (and four seconds) last Tuesday in his reality-show-influenced 2020 State of the Union address and ignored the cataclysmic fires that have engulfed Australia and echoed the flames that are ravaging California year after year, let alone the increasing scientific evidence that we’ve entered a time of rapid sea rise, drought and killer storms?

 

How could the leader of a global superpower give a serious talk on the current state of his nation in 2020 and never once utter the words “climate change”?

And how did so few people even notice? Delivered just hours before his impeachment trial ended in acquittal, Trump’s third State of the Union summoned up a whirlwind of distracting pop-culture headlines — awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to cancer-stricken hatemonger Rush Limbaugh to own the libs! — and a now-predictable blizzard of lies, including a false narrative about a black Philadelphia schoolgirl that was exposed by my Inquirer colleagues.

Amid that 130-decibel assault of political noise, the planet’s actual crisis of climate change became the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous clue, the dog that didn’t bark. Centuries from now, when Rush Limbaugh’s hate words have drifted off to space and his name is long forgotten, scholars -- if there still are scholars -- will find that Trump’s stunning denial of science and a raging crisis was this speech’s only historical significance.

The president occasionally tries to deny being a “climate denier,” but Tuesday’s silence was deafening. Especially when Trump did take time to brag that America under his so-called leadership is pouring fossil fuels on the world’s fires. “Thanks to our bold regulatory reduction campaign, the United States has become the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world, by far,” he declared to thunderous applause.

That truth — hardly comforting in a time when oil and natural gas are the major sources of greenhouse-gas pollution — was typically followed by Trumpian distortions. If the U.S. is “energy independent,” then why do we continue to import about 10 million barrels of oil every day, much of it from murderous dictatorships? If our interest in fuel production is job creation, why does Team Trump ignore the employment power of clean energy?

But those deceptions pale in comparison to the biggest problem — that the American president is bragging about its oil-and-gas growth when scientists are predicting planetary catastrophe without major cutbacks by 2030 in fossil fuels, and near elimination in the generation after that.

Trump’s ode to climate denial came just before the news that Antarctica — with its massive glaciers that could swamp the low-lying areas where 40 percent of Americans (and billions elsewhere) live — posted its warmest day in history, 65 degrees. This followed a report that one of Antarctica’s largest glaciers, the size of the state of Florida, is melting much faster than earlier predicted, with a potential to sharply increase projections of sea level rise.

But you don’t have to travel to the South Pole to see climate change. I can just look in my back yard here in suburban Philadelphia, where snowdrops and other spring plants are blooming after January was nearly six degrees warmer than normal. Ditto for Europe, which just experienced its hottest January on record.

And yet, of course, President Trump dared not mention any of this, because viewers might question why his administration keeps making it easier to burn coal or drill for oil — both as a sop to his full embrace of oil-and-gas lobbyists and their money, and because undoing all things Obama is catnip to his base. (Although worth noting is that Obama also hailed rising oil-and-gas production, and history will also not remember that kindly, either.)

Team Trump is betting that 2020 voters will only care about low gas prices at the pump. But that’s only true if you talk only to the typical Fox News viewer, a white person over 50. Ask most Americans currently under 35 — a voting bloc that gets bigger by the day — and they’ll say climate change is their No. 1 issue. (And among all Democrats, it ranks No. 2 behind only health care.) Trust me, these voters heard the dog that didn’t bark on Tuesday.

This weekend, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, reporting from the final frantic days of the New Hampshire primary, found a thirsting among voters — especially, but not exclusively, younger ones — to hear even more from the Democrats about what they will do to roll back four years of devastating climate denial from Trump.

 

Marcotte noted that at an Elizabeth Warren event, her biggest applause moment came from a seemingly arcane question about the Granite State’s endangered moose population, because it teed up a stirring defense of the Green New Deal. She also hung out with a group of mostly under-25 protesters outside Friday’s ABC News debate who are mad there’s been such little discussion of climate. Said 19-year-old Kyle Burzycki: “It’s embarrassing how little they’re talking about it, seeing as it’s the most important issue facing our country.”

 The so-called grown-ups don’t seem to be receiving the message. The one ABC debate question on climate came late, and it came with the how-are-you-going-to-pay-for-it baby boomer skepticism that continues to alienate under-35 voters. The Democratic National Committee — which nixed a plan for a climate-only debate and reversed itself on taking fossil-fuel donations — hasn’t helped, either. The party seems to have learned little from 2016, when young-voter defections to the Green Party’s Jill Stein helped elect Trump.

Many Democratic voters are demoralized right now by Trump’s acquittal, the triumphalism of his base, and the inept chaos of their own party’s Iowa caucus. And while there are significant differences between the Democrats — only Warren and Sanders have fully embraced the urgency of the scientific warnings — everyone still in the race would represent an 180-degree reversal from the cynical denialism of Trump. If the party wants to win in November, it’s time to wave that banner higher, shout a little louder, and make sure that Tuesday night was America’s last State of the Union address to pretend that climate change is not real.

Posted: February 9, 2020 - 1:37 PM

Will Bunch | @will_bunch | wbunch@inquirer.com

Trump, Pelosi, and the Decline of Institutional Roles / Mischiefs of Faction

Trump, Pelosi, and the Decline of Institutional Roles

February 5, 2020

By Matthew Green

Original post on Mischiefs of Faction here.

President Trump’s State of the Union address yesterday was highly partisan and triumphant, filled with more than the usual amount of stagecraft and “reality show” moments. But it was bookmarked by two unprecedented events that overshadowed the speech itself: Trump refusing to shake Speaker Pelosi’s hand, and Pelosi ripping the president's speech in half.

Perhaps both events were calculated, as some have speculated; perhaps they reflected the emotions of the moment. But I would argue that they also signified a recent and distressing trend in American politics: the erosion of respect our political leaders have for each other and for the constitutional roles they play.

Many people have spoken out about the numerous ways that Trump has broken norms of presidential behavior and acts “unpresidential.” Trump has particular contempt for other officers of American government, including the speakership. His failure to return Pelosi’s handshake follows months of insults against the Speaker on Twitter and a remarkably personal and bitter December letter to Pelosi accusing her of “violating your oaths [sic] of office.” Lest one is tempted to chalk this up to mere partisanship, or Trump’s lingering bitterness about impeachment, recall that Trump was willing to attack Speaker Paul Ryan when he perceived him as disloyal, such as on the issue of birthright citizenship.

These actions violate two norms that, according to Julia Azari, help constrain presidential overreach: respect for the independence of other political institutions, and recognition that partisan opposition is valid. It means nothing to Trump that the Speaker, regardless of her party, is a fellow constitutional officer, second in line to the presidency, and duly elected by the House of Representatives. (Not to mention, the Speaker invites the president to give the State of the Union speech in the first place. Talk about treating your host rudely.)

In the past, Pelosi has, at least rhetorically, voiced respect for the Trump’s constitutional office. She has repeatedly touted her reverence for the presidency, if not the president -- a subtle but important distinction. Nonetheless, her dramatic physical rejection of the president’s speech calls that reverence into question. (She also opted to introduce him without expressing her “high privilege and distinct honor,” as is customary.)

I also think that Pelosi’s move underscores a slow but steady change in how modern Speakers have viewed the Chief Executive. Since at least the mid-20th century, Speakers recognized that one of their central roles was to defend the institutional presidency regardless of party, especially in defense and foreign policy matters. In my 2010 book on the House speakership, I documented how Speakers of the House, starting with Sam Rayburn, sometimes exercised legislative leadership on behalf of the president, even if they were of the opposite party and their own partisans disapproved.

That institutional role of the speakership began declining after the Vietnam War, which sharply divided the country. In the 1980s, Speaker Tip O’Neill battled relentlessly against President Reagan’s effort to support the Nicaraguan Contras in their fight against the Sandinista government. The subsequent end of the Cold War removed an existential enemy that gave both parties reason to support the White House on issues of national security and foreign affairs.

Pelosi’s gesture went well beyond a foreign policy disagreement with the White House, of course. Even if it was in retaliation for Trump’s rudeness, or as a response to how he tried turning the State of the Union address into a campaign rally, it marked a sharp break from the norm of institutional deference that even highly partisan Speakers showed opposite-party presidents in public settings.

These developments (while hardly as bad as, say, the violence seen in the antebellum Congress) are nonetheless troubling. Simply put, our political system cannot function if its leaders do not appreciate the constitutional authority of their rivals. As Yuval Levin notes in his most recent book, the roles and duties of institutional actors – not just in political institutions, but other institutions too -- are vital to maintain a democratic civic society.

I don’t expect Trump and Pelosi to change, nor their sharp partisan differences to vanish overnight. But perhaps, after last night’s spectacle, we should consider cancelling the televised State of the Union address and go back to a written one. If bad behavior becomes the new norm, it is unlikely to give people much faith in their national government or those elected to lead it.

For Americans, flu remains a bigger threat than coronavirus

For Americans, flu remains a bigger threat than coronavirus

By Soumya Karlamangla

latimes.com

3 min

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By Staff Writer

12:05 PM

While a new virus that originated in China has prompted Americans to wear masks on the subway and cancel international trips for fear of falling ill, a much deadlier killer already stalking the United States has been largely overshadowed: the flu.
Like the new coronavirus, influenza can spread from person to person through the air and cause a fever and cough. But unlike the coronavirus, which so far hasn’t led to any deaths in the U.S., influenza has killed approximately 10,000 Americans since October, according to federal data released Friday.
“Here in the U.S., this is what is killing us,” said UC Riverside epidemiologist Brandon Brown. “Why should we be afraid of something that has not killed people here in this country?”
To be sure, the coronavirus, known as 2019-nCoV, has alarmed public health officials as they try to avert a worldwide health crisis.

China has quarantined more than 50 million people to contain the outbreak. This week, the World Health Organization deemed the coronavirus a “global health emergency,” and U.S. officials advised Americans not to travel to China, prompting airlines to cancel flights.
And on Friday, health officials ordered a two-week quarantine for 195 Americans who were flown from Wuhan, China, to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside.
But so far, just six people in the United States have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, all cases that were associated with travel to China.
By contrast, in California alone, 211 people have died of influenza, including seven children, since the season began in October, according to state data released Friday. That figure, gathered from death certificates, is widely considered to underestimate since the flu can prompt fatal conditions like heart failure or pneumonia, which are then instead listed as the final cause of death.

But the flu doesn’t captivate the public’s attention in the way a new, emerging virus does. Unknowns generate news, anxiety and sometimes panic.
Waiting in a downtown Los Angeles subway station Thursday, Josh Aguilera wore a white mask strapped over his nose and mouth. He had begun using the mask a few days earlier during his subway journeys between work and home to protect himself from the coronavirus, he said.
“I ride the subway every day so I feel like I’m at risk,” said Aguilera, 31.
But a bigger worry for people taking public transportation or in other crowded spaces is the flu, experts say. Nationwide, 19 million people in the United States have had the flu this season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is something I guess we’re used to so we don’t really pay attention to it much,” Brown said. “I think we need to shift our attention back to the flu.”
The CDC is not recommending that people wear face masks to protect against the coronavirus, or any other respiratory illness.
Federal officials continue to recommend, however, that people get immunized against the flu. The flu shot can make people half as likely to get sick as someone who didn’t get the vaccine and the flu season runs through May, according to the CDC.
“Get your flu shot — take measures to prevent getting sick with the many things in this country we have to get sick from,” said Tufts Medical Center infectious disease specialist Dr. Shira Doron. “The likelihood of an American being killed by the flu compared to being killed by the coronavirus is probably approaching infinity.”

So far, 213 people have died worldwide from the coronavirus. Public health officials are still learning who is most likely to die from the coronavirus.
Experts know that the flu tends to be most dangerous for the elderly. However, the strains of flu circulating this year have been hitting young people especially hard. In California, 37 people under the age of 50 have died from influenza this season, according to state data.
“We have to get people vaccinated,” said New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan.
One upside of the anxiety over coronavirus, experts say, is that it may inadvertently prevent flu cases, since the diseases are transmitted in similar ways.
To protect against the flu — or coronavirus, if that’s your concern — people should wash their hands frequently, sneeze or cough into the crook of their elbow and avoid contact with ill people, said Dartmouth College professor Dr. Elizabeth Talbot.
“There are a lot of things we can do in a very routine way to stay healthier,” Talbot said.

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Bernie Sanders is the logical successor to the Trump presidency

By Julia Azari

January 30, 2020

5 minute read

As the Iowa caucuses approach, there’s been lots of talk on the internet about whether Bernie Sanders can win. He’s gained support in the polls, has a lot of campaign money, and earlier in the season earned some coveted endorsements on the left. He’s also decidedly still a candidate who makes the political and media establishment uncomfortable. But if we learned anything from 2016, it’s that the possibilities for who can win a nomination contest and a general election are many. So it’s worth thinking about what kind of president Sanders would be.

This requires us to confront the presidency as it is, in the wake of Trump and all of the developments leading up to that. This isn’t some bipartisan whiskey fantasy bullshit, or an Aaron Sorkin vision of patriotic speechifying. The question of what kind of president Sanders would be goes beyond his temperament and ideology, two topics that I conservatively estimate account for about half the internet at this point. I would also urge readers not to interpret this as a polemic against or in favor of Sanders (Mischiefs of Faction will not be endorsing any number of candidates.) Rather, I want to offer some ideas about how the practice of government in an expansive and ambiguous office is influenced by a fluid and uncertain selection process and a bitterly partisan political landscape.

Let’s start by thinking about Trump’s nomination and presidency. In 2015, Brendan Nyhan observed that Trump’s success in early primary polls could be partly attributed to his ability to draw on appealing, but inaccurate, public visions of the power of the presidency. Nyhan wrote, “Mr. Trump is the purest Green Lantern candidate we’ve seen in recent years. He cleverly exploits the appeal of presidential omnipotence by contrasting his supposedly decisive style of business leadership as a real estate magnate with the compromises, inertia and policy failures that are inevitable in politics.”

While this was certainly an accurate diagnosis of the broader contrast between politics and the private sector, Trump’s presidency has exposed both the potential and the limits of such a presidency. The presidency does, in fact, have a great deal of unilateral policy-making power. Presidential communication also turns out to be important, albeit not necessarily for persuading Congress to pass bills. In their new book, Unmaking the Presidency, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes describe Trump’s approach as the “expressive presidency.” They define this primarily as personal self-expression at the expense of civil virtue, but if we combine the idea of an expressive presidency with the existing concepts of a permanent campaign and a partisan presidency, we come up with a powerful description of the office that is not entirely limited to Trump. It’s not impossible to imagine a variety of situations in which a president – one who has been especially successful at building a devoted following based on rhetoric and ideas – could continue these kinds of communications in office. Such a president could establish, over and over again, a specific vision of the country and who should lead it, and the ability of a new president to serve as the voice for the underrepresented. This type of communication is better suited to some appeals than others, but it is remarkably adaptable to different ideologies.

It would be a mistake to see this turn in the presidency as merely rhetorical, however. Unilateral action has accompanied some of the top rhetorical priorities. For Trump, these priorities include both conventional Republican items like rolling back regulations, and those specific to Trumpism like immigration restrictions. Legislative accomplishments, even with Republican majorities in Congress, have been more elusive.

It’s not that difficult to envision a Sanders presidency unfolding in a similar fashion. Obviously, the priorities and the messages would be very different. And this isn’t necessarily to criticize Sanders’ weaknesses but rather to assess the way his strengths fit into the office as it exists now. Sanders clearly gives a hell of a rally speech, inspires his followers, and offers a way of thinking and talking about politics that’s clear and consistent. Those things just don’t seem likely, based on the available evidence, to fully unite party factions or build up a durable national policy majority. To be clear, I think the evidence suggests that if nominated, Sanders could pull together the necessary coalition to win; the strength of partisanship means that nearly any competent politician could. But the tactics at which he most excels - and the ones encouraged by our nomination system - are not conducive to the style of legislative governing that dominated the twentieth century. Instead, the presidency offers some tools to make policy change, without needing to cobble together enough support to get Congress to pass a bill.

One major question is whether elite Democrats would warm to Sanders as a candidate and a president the way that Republicans have embraced Trump. If you buy the asymmetry thesis and think the Democrats are a party of groups, it might be a tougher sell, with distinct factions remaining unconvinced that Sanders represents their interests. If the argument that the Democratic Party organizes itself around egalitarian ideology is correct, or if negative partisanship inspired by Trump overrides everything else, then it’s possible that a factional candidate Sanders could create the shallow party unity that Trump has enjoyed. And such unity has been able to do a lot – as we are seeing now with impeachment – but it’s important to keep in mind that what it couldn’t do was produce Congressional majorities to pass sweeping legislative change. It’s an expressively united party under an expressive presidency.

It’s almost certain that the current nomination system allows factional candidates to succeed. What's more, current party conditions also have the potential to turn any and all of the candidates into factional candidates. A long season with lots of debates has exposed the weaknesses and flaws of the candidates. Biden has the most endorsements, but still claims a shaky front-runner status and has failed, in the words of FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon, to really inspire political elites in Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden’s detractors worry about his age, his record on many issues, and his representation of a return to “normal” that wasn’t that great for everyone. Elizabeth Warren might be able to bridge the gap between the establishment and the emerging left, but, like Pete Buttigieg, she struggles to win support among voters of color and voters without a college degree. Any of the remaining contenders could fit into this model of the presidency, offering appealing messages to their core supporters and conducting most policy out of the executive branch. Most of the discussion of what’s wrong with the nomination system has focused on producing electable candidates or qualified presidents. But it’s possible to have a president who is perfectly qualified and yet unequipped, politically speaking, to build coalitions and govern across branches. The result could be a presidency that is primarily rhetorical and unilateral, alternating with each election between distinct governing visions, producing the exact kind of instability in government that the presidency was designed to avoid.

Outrage over offending red America highlights a major double standard in media

Outrage over offending red America highlights a major double standard in media

Right-wing media clutch pearls after a Republican strategist mocked Trump supporters on TV. But when Trump attacks millions of Americans, they and mainstream journalists simply accept it as normal.

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY

PUBLISHED 01/30/20 12:47 PM EST

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Republican strategist Rick Wilson has been mocking President Donald Trump and his supporters on TV for years. In January 2016, he described “most” of Trump’s supporters as “childless single men who masturbate to anime.” In July 2018, he said Trump supporters want to deport anyone “darker than a latte.” And appearing on CNN this past Saturday night, he called Trump’s base the “credulous boomer rube demo” while putting on a southern accent.

It’s that last insult that sent pro-Trump, right-wing media raging. Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel tweeted, “These liberal hacks paint conservative voters as illiterate hillbillies on national TV because they despise @realDonaldTrump and they despise you.” The Trump campaign sent out fundraising emails centered on the segment. The clip provided team Trump’s media operation with some much-needed content to divert viewers’ attention away from impeachment. The idea that Democrats represent the “out of touch liberal elite” is an evergreen criticism from conservatives, and right-wing media embraced the opportunity to use Wilson’s CNN appearance and host Don Lemon’s reaction to push that messaging once again.

One slight problem in all of this: Wilson is not a Democrat, nor is he someone any reasonable person would describe as “liberal.” Wilson is a conservative (and not exactly a fan of us here at Media Matters) perhaps best known for creating the infamous Reverend Jeremiah Wright ad used to attack then-candidate Barack Obama as “too radical, too risky” ahead of the 2008 presidential election. But on Wednesday, Fox News’ Dagen McDowell tried to argue that the “Never Trumper” Republican is not an actual Republican. He is.

Beyond this controversy, it’s worth exploring the double standards of divisive rhetoric. 

Ivanka Trump quote tweeted a video of the CNN segment, writing, “You consistently make fun of half the country and then complain that it is divided.”

Setting aside this conservative-on-conservative quarrel (meant to frame Wilson and CNN as liberal), let’s take a deeper look at who, exactly, is “mak[ing] fun of half the country.”

President Donald Trump is not normally one to mince words. Whether he’s throwing around schoolyard insults at his opponents or making other offensive comments, he “tells it like it is,” his supporters argue, viewing his behavior as a positive trait. Some media figures have gone so far as to laud his strategy of crafting personalized insults for his political enemies. But in accepting Trump’s actions as normal, the press is giving him tacit permission to act in ways that would have landed past presidents in news cycles of condemnation and scandal.

In December, Trump tweeted something that seemed too mean-spirited even for him: “So sad to see that New York City and State are falling apart. All they want to do is investigate to make me hate them even more than I should.”

There aren’t any readily available examples of other modern presidents ever saying they “hate” entire cities or states. Even in the most generous interpretation possible, if one is to believe that he’s only saying that he hates politicians living there, it’s still a disturbing sentiment to have a president saying anything so negative about citizens of his own country. 

The following day, Trump lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and called San Francisco a “decaying city.”

These comments popped up in a handful of blog posts at places like Mediaite and Talking Points Memo, but they were only mentioned in passing on some cable news networks and in major newspapers. Deadline simply rolled those tweets and others into a post titled “President Donald Trump Tweetstorm -- The Saturday Edition.” 

When Trump came to Chicago in October to attend the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention, he devoted a good portion of his speech to attacks on Chicago and its then-Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.

“It’s embarrassing to us as a nation. All over the world, they’re talking about Chicago. Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison,” he said at one point after rattling off homicide statistics.

In 2018, Chicago had just the 16th highest murder rate among U.S. cities, behind places like Memphis, Tennessee; North Charleston, South Carolina; West Palm Beach, Florida; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. One difference between Chicago and those cities is that they happen to be in states that Trump won in 2016. 

In August, Trump smeared Jewish people who vote for Democrats as either ignorant or disloyal.

At a recent rally, Trump called Democrats “stone-cold crazy,” said “they want crime, they want chaos,” and claimed, “They’re vicious, horrible people.”

His comments were mentioned in passing in a recent Connie Schultz article in The Nation and during a handful of cable news segments. This is a president who shows contempt for people who didn’t vote for him and who views those who criticize or oppose his policies as enemies. But as CNN’s John Avlon -- who was critical of Trump’s language -- said, it “wasn’t normal” and shows that “we are becoming accustomed to this kind of vicious, horrible rhetoric from an American president.” It speaks to the kind of generous curve Trump is regularly graded on compared to other politicians.

For all the outrage emanating from the right-wing circles aimed at the left for its supposed disdain of red America, why don’t they -- or at the very least, mainstream media organizations -- hold Republicans to account for promoting a disdain for Americans who live in big cities or vote for Democrats?

Media aren’t holding Trump to the same standards as past presidents, and it’s not entirely clear why.

Following the news in the Trump era is a lot like trying to drink from a firehose. It’s a near-impossible task that can leave those who try to do it worse off than when they began. As Trump has inserted himself into the news more than any other president -- whether by tweeting his way into a new controversy, setting a new record for spreading false information, or whisking the country into dubiously justified conflicts -- it leaves journalists in a position where they simply cannot cover every single thing he says or does with the same attention they’d have done with past presidents. This means that some stories don’t get the focus they probably deserve. One thing is for certain though: A Democratic president would have been excoriated for weeks on end for some of the things Trump has said without much fanfare. And that’s a problem. 

Perhaps Trump’s words were brushed off at the start of his first presidential campaign because most people saw him as a sideshow candidate without a real chance of winning the Republican nomination. Perhaps he was then given a pass because many believed that even after the nomination, he’d lose. Perhaps criticism was held off in hopes that he’d pivot and find a more traditionally presidential tone once in office. But journalists are out of excuses now. They must either start holding Trump to the same exact standards to which they’ve held past presidents and presidential candidates, or they need to admit that those past standards were arbitrary.

During an April 6, 2008, fundraiser, then-candidate Barack Obama addressed one of the most common questions he faced during his run for president: How could he, a first-term senator and a Black man, connect with white, working-class voters? How could a campaign centered on optimism reach people who’d been failed by their government time and again? In explaining why simply ticking off a list of bullet points about policy wouldn’t be enough, he said something that nearly 12 years later is still pointed to as evidence that he was an out-of-touch elitist, even though that’s precisely the opposite of what it shows (emphasis added):

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.

Conservative pundits haven’t stopped citing these comments ever since as evidence of Obama’s supposed disdain for rural Americans. At the time, there was a massive outcry over the remarks, often complete with misquoting like when MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough alleged that Obama had actually said, “Your faith, the faith of your fathers, the faith of your grandfathers, the faith of your grandmothers -- it's just a crutch. It's just a crutch. You only believe that because you're bitter, because you're poor, because you didn't go to college, because you're working class.” Obviously, that was not what Obama said. Yet the speech continues to be used to paint him -- and Democrats as a whole -- as elitist. A Lexis search for news articles or transcripts containing the words “they get bitter” and “guns” pulls up more than 1,800 results, the most recent being an op-ed published just this month.

When the press reward bad behavior with friendlier coverage, it’s abdicating the crucial role it plays in democracy.

It isn’t just Trump who gets a pass for this rhetoric, either. For years, Republican politicians and conservative pundits have made attacks on cities and those living along the coasts part of their campaign strategy. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) mocked the people of California, saying, “We are seeing tens of millions of dollars flooding into the state of Texas from liberals all over the country who desperately want to turn the state of Texas blue. They want us to be just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair." Last year, Fox Business published an op-ed by Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) about what “real Americans in the heartland” think about Trump’s economic policies. During House impeachment hearings, Republicans brought signs calling Democratic leadership the “coastal impeachment squad,” suggesting that their districts were less important and less worthy of representation than GOP members from Ohio or Nebraska.

These attacks on millions of fellow Americans -- when they come from Republicans -- are generally just shrugged off by mainstream news outlets. Just this month, Sean Hannity praised Trump for raising taxes on people living in blue states by eliminating the state income tax deduction. Sure, these attacks might get written about here and there, but rarely in a way that actually denounces that type of exclusionary rhetoric. Imagine what would have happened had a House Democrat brought a sign into a congressional hearing calling Republican voters a bunch of rural hayseeds or something similarly derogatory. There would be endless handwringing, pearl-clutching, and allegations of snobbery and disrespect -- and all those responses would be correct. But for whatever reason, media rarely hold Republicans to the same standards they hold Democrats.

In 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made headlines with her now-infamous “basket of deplorables” line. She said that there were Trump supporters that you could put in “what I call the basket of deplorables,” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- you name it” and that they had been embraced by Trump’s campaign. What she said next almost always gets left out in media coverage:

But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Both she and Obama, with his “they get bitter” comment, were trying to discuss the importance of outreach, to not see the “other side” as enemies, and to understand that not everyone can be easily grouped or written off. The comments were about having empathy for people who might not agree with you politically. But both candidates were excoriated in the media. 

What does it say about the priorities of mainstream political media that those perhaps inartfully worded comments were attacked while another party’s open disdain for tens of millions of Americans with zero outreach or attempts to connect is just something we all have to accept without criticism?

If providing equal coverage of these comments from the right is too much to ask, the least the media can do is not play along the next time conservatives pretend to be outraged about liberals supposedly attacking Americans.

Here We Have It. The Trump Impeachment Smoking Gun.

Here We Have It. The Trump Impeachment Smoking Gun.

A report about a book by John Bolton makes the president’s Republican defenders look like liars and fools. Maybe they’ll be fine with that.

By Jonathan Bernstein

,

January 27

1/27/2020, 9:40:57 PM

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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President Donald Trump’s team opened its impeachment-trial defense in the Senate on Saturday morning. I was wrong about how the president’s lawyers would go about the job. I had suspected that they would use a tantrum to rally Republicans to their side, but it turned out that Republican Senators had their tantrum late Friday night when they chose to be outraged that the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff of California, referred to a (somewhat thinly sourced) news report that someone at the White House had threatened that Trump would have the “head on a pike” of any Republican who opposed him.

Trump’s lawyers began with a misstep, rehashing their flimsy claim that there’s some kind of significance to the fact that Schiff paraphrased, instead of directly quoting, the words Trump used in the July 25 phone call in which he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to participate in a smear of a leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

But they didn’t rely on emotion in their presentation. Instead, they did what defense attorneys do. They floated alternative interpretations of the evidence the House managers, serving as prosecutors in the Senate trial, had presented in support of the articles of impeachment accusing Trump of abusing his power by trying to coerce that country’s interference on his behalf in his 2020 re-election effort. They pointed out that some of the witnesses who testified on the House side were not entirely reliable on some questions. And they added a bunch of mostly irrelevant points, such as the administration’s overall support for Ukraine (which in fact only makes Trump’s decisions to pause congressionally approved military aid and refuse to schedule an Oval Office meeting with Zelenskiy harder to understand as anything but elements of a pressure campaign) and the fact that previous presidents had also put foreign aid on hold (which no one denies, but the question is why it happened this time).

I’m not sure I’d call the first few hours of their presentation strong, but then again if they are constrained by their client to pretend that the Zelenskiy call was “perfect,” they have a difficult hand to play. It could have been worse.

And then, Sunday night, it fell apart. The New York Times reported that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has written in his upcoming book that Trump made explicit the quid pro quo that his lawyers are denying: that Trump told him directly that he wanted to keep the military aid frozen until the Ukrainian government agreed to help with investigations of Democrats. Not only that, but apparently the White House has had Bolton’s manuscript all month. Trump’s team knew this was coming.

While I certainly don’t expect the president’s support in Congress to collapse, it’s impossible not to see close parallels to the “smoking gun” tape that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. That tape, proving that Nixon ordered his staff to have the Central Intelligence Agency block the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the Watergate scandal and released to Congress and the public after the House Judiciary Committee had passed articles of impeachment, was so devastating for Nixon not so much because it was proof of his crimes; plenty of proof of plenty of crimes had long since been placed in the record. Instead, it became the moment when conservative Republicans realized that Nixon had deliberately set them up with false arguments even though Nixon knew that the evidence, if released, would undermine those arguments and make them look like liars and fools. 

That is exactly what appears to have happened with the Bolton book. Trump knew that Bolton’s testimony and supporting notes, if they ever surfaced, would undermine the claims of his supporters. In some ways, it’s not quite as strong as Nixon’s smoking gun, since there’s no tape (as far as we know!) furnishing absolute proof of what Trump said to Bolton. But in some ways, it’s worse. Nixon knew what was on the tapes, but until the Supreme Court ruled against him he might at least have hoped that he could keep them secret. Apparently in the Trump case, at least some people in the White House have known for weeks that Bolton was going to release this book, and yet they still encouraged their allies to say things that were about to be shown to be false.

So far, it appears that Republican politicians would rather look like liars and fools — following ever-less-plausible White House lines, perhaps hoping that no one notices — than dare to oppose Trump and his still-loyal allies in the Republican-aligned media. Maybe they’ll all stay on message, even after this episode. Some of them, I’m sure, are either such blind partisans or so far inside the conservative information feedback loop that they may not even notice. But I have to believe that, whatever they do about it, a lot of Republican politicians are feeling more uncomfortable than ever. 

1. Mara Pillinger at the Monkey Cage on the World Health Organization and the coronavirus.

2. Rick Hasen on the dangers coming in election 2020.

3. Dan Drezner on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

4. Geoffrey Skelley on the possible effects of the Des Moines Register’s endorsement of Senator Elizabeth Warren.

5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on the possibility that Senator Bernie Sanders could become president and what it would mean.

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White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor / Erik Loomis

journals.sagepub.com

White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor:

Erik Loomis

25-31 minutes

 

First Published December 31, 2019, in New Labor Forum.

 

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Supporters of President Donald Trump attend Trump Day 100 Rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Saturday, April 29, 2017.
Michael Candelori/Rex/Shutterstock.

The uptick of open white nationalism since 2016 has rightfully alarmed the many millions of Americans who find racial violence repellent. The murder of Heather Heyer by white supremacists in Charlottesville, the rapid expansion of hate groups, the murder of two people defending an immigrant from an attack on the Portland light rail, the concentration camps on the border, and the gunning down of twenty-two people by an El Paso shooter emboldened by Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric are just a few examples of the return of naked racial violence. This white nationalism, or the belief that the United States should be a white-dominated state that keeps minorities in a distinctly subordinate position, has become part and parcel of the American right over the past several years, personified in Donald Trump, his advisor Stephen Miller, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the nation’s immigration enforcement agency. Racial revanchism has been a major, though not the exclusive, driver of the conservative movement as the twenty-first century has advanced.
The media has framed the white working class as central to this resurgence, often without much evidence. The connection between Trump’s election, the rise of white nationalism, and the disaffection of the white working class has become a near truism in major media publications. Yet the media has failed to question the truth of this. Many “authentic white working-class voters” in stories about Trump voters have later proven to be Republican operatives or part of organized right-wing groups. These same media organizations never seem to interview white working-class voters who did not vote for Trump. They are simply erased from the conversation.
There is no question that Trump had strong connections with at least some white working-class voters, with more union households voting Republican than in any presidential election since 1984.¹ Most important, these votes came in the most deindustrialized parts of the country. But there is not much evidence at the present that the rise in white nationalism is an especially white working-class phenomenon. In terms of active participation, going to right-wing rallies, intimidating immigrants on the border, and joining fascist organizations, it is at least as much angry white middle-class and wealthy people as working-class whites. Working-class whites have moved increasingly away from the Democratic Party in recent decades, to great political consequence in 2016, while highly educated whites are slowly moving toward Democrats. But the fundamental category shift seems to be education, not income, as non-college educated but financially successful whites have also dramatically moved toward the Republicans. Moreover, data suggest that working-class whites believed Trump was significantly more economically liberal than the Republican Party as a whole.² Yet, white nationalism definitely has some appeal in working-class communities and that its appeal is probably growing. Recent books, such as Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, demonstrate how racial resentment combined with economic instability and a sense of loss has led large swaths of the Midwest’s white workers toward an embrace of racial revanchism and an affirmation of gun culture. It has also led them to elect politicians who cut their own social services.³
Racial revanchism has been a major . . . driver of the conservative movement as the twenty-first century has advanced.
However, the debate, so often reduced to “why don’t these workers vote their own interests,” is itself skewed. Thomas Frank, most famously among the many others who have explored this question, fails to understand that in fact we all have multiple and sometimes competing interests that motivate our choices and our actions. For many people, perceived racial self-interest is and has long been a powerful force.⁴ American workers often display some sense of class solidarity. But the question becomes to what extent those workers will prioritize that class consciousness over ideas of racial solidarity, religious concerns, homophobia, or beliefs in misogyny. At the polling booth, for example, a white worker may reject her union’s political endorsement because of her belief that abortion is a sin or because she hates immigrants. Or a Latina worker may be influenced by her union’s endorsement because the candidate supports immigrant rights.

Economic Decline Rekindles White Nationalism

The economic desperation in many working-class communities contributes to the appeal of white nationalism. Having spent a great deal of time in the last decade in the small economically depressed town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, I have witnessed the level of hopelessness brought on by the closing of factories and the shift to low-wage jobs of the sort provided by Walmart. In Clarion, Confederate flags abound. Hopelessness and its consequences include the use of opioids, an embrace of gun culture, growing racial resentment, and blaming others for a wide range of problems. The Republican Party has capitalized on this desire to scapegoat others, adopting it as an electoral strategy in an impoverished county that went for Trump with over 70 percent of the vote.
The story of a town like Clarion is one that can help us connect deindustrialization with white nationalism. But it is only a piece of the story. What connects it—and what is especially dangerous given the economic position of the working class—is nostalgia, the most politically reactionary of all human emotions. What helps Trump make emotional connections to large swaths of the white working class is an imagined vision of the 1950s—one with a robust industrial economy in which whites ruled the racial roost, women knew their place in the home, and men could tell a racist joke without having their children or strangers admonish them. While this nostalgic narrative is mostly mythology, it contains enough economic truth to provide cover for the racism and misogyny that make up the rest of Trump’s appeal. For many white workers, nostalgic visions of the white dominance of American society very much include economic domination. This helps to explain the misplaced anger among whites over affirmative action programs that seem to give people of color a leg up, while in fact these programs just level the playing field a bit.
. . . [T]he rise in white nationalism is . . . at least as much angry white middle-class and wealthy people as working-class whites.
But other than the channeling of racism into the more organized networks of white nationalism—a notable development for sure—what is really new here? A brief review of the relationship between race and work in America helps elucidate the present and suggests the current phenomenon is not an aberration. The fundamental labor system of European colonialization of the Americas, from New York southward to Argentina, bound Native Americans and Africans into forced labor for European profits. New England’s unique history barring slavery after the American Revolution has obscured for generations of Americans the centrality of slavery to the nation’s founding. Moreover, many New England fortunes came out of the slave trade—from those made in textile production to those garnered by financing and marketing of the products of slavery and those who owned the ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade. While the nation’s foundational labor system was split between a slave South and a free-labor North after American independence from Britain, even among many anti-slavery northerners, the real problem with slavery was not what it did to black people, but how it affected their fellow whites. In short, they worried that slavery created a stratified society that led to an indolent wealthy class living off the work of African Americans, leaving no room for the middling white farmer and worker who made up the core of northern society. They looked at the poverty and political powerlessness of the poor southern white and saw a frightening world they believed the slaveholding class wanted to expand across the nation.

White Supremacy and the History of Organized Labor

After the Civil War, the organized labor movement began developing, with white supremacy at its core. As David Roediger and many historians following him have explored in depth, connections between work, citizenship, and whiteness have long been at the core of American working-class ideology.⁵ The first major national law spawned by the American labor movement was the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, which originated in the Workingmen’s Party of California and spread nationally. Western workers used violence to expunge from their workplaces the Chinese, culminating in the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, when Wyoming miners slaughtered at least twenty-eight Chinese miners.
While the Knights of Labor made tentative alliances with black workers, the Knights barred Chinese and “Hungarians”—a catchall term for eastern Europeans—workers from the union. The American Federation of Labor took a vociferous anti-immigrant stance for decades. A 1902 pamphlet titled “Meat versus Rice,” a racist rant against allowing Asian workers to compete with white Americans, was coauthored by AFL leader Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from England. Employers routinely used black workers as strikebreakers, knowing that racial animosity would undermine class solidarity. The antipathy of unions toward black workers and the exclusion of blacks from their ranks made African Americans skeptical of unions for many years.
The rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s did finally bring black workers into unions in large numbers, but they were often stuck in lower paid, danger-prone positions in factories. And they were largely excluded from leadership roles within their unions. The CIO’s attempt to organize the South in Operation Dixie after World War II washed up on the rocky shoals of white supremacy, with southern employers and politicians using race-baiting and anti-Semitism to taint the industrial federation as a bastion of Jewish organizers in support of civil rights. The indifference of most AFL-CIO leaders to civil rights after the merger of the two federations in 1955 did not suggest a change was to come.

Labor and Economic Restructuring

The relationship between race and the labor movement has changed over the past half-century. But that has often happened more at the leadership level than among the grassroots and it has coincided with large-scale economic restructuring that severely undermined the industrial working class, especially in those critical electoral states that went for Trump in 2016. There are three main reasons for this shift. First is the growth of public-sector unionism. With government employment long one of the few places African Americans could get relatively steady work, the rise of public-sector unionism by the late 1960s brought a lot of black workers into unions.
Second is the impact of immigration. Shifts in U.S. immigration policy and immigration law have had profound effects on the labor movement. In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie argues that, in part, the labor movement was successful in the 1930s because the working class was not fighting over immigration, which had been severely curtailed by the Immigration Act of 1924. A quota system, the National Origins Formula established in that law, placed the sharpest restrictions on non-Western Europeans.⁶ The Immigration Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished the National Origins Formula, allowing greater numbers of non-Europeans to enter the United States. As a result, the American working class became incredibly ethnically diverse in the next half century.
There is no question that the rush of immigrants from Latin America and Asia after 1965 profoundly changed both the nation and the labor movement. Between 1970 and 2000, mass migration catapulted the Mexican-born population in the United States from 760,000 to 9,177,000. Many unions began to view this huge influx of immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, as a new constituency ripe for organizing to resuscitate a declining labor movement. Major campaigns, such as Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Justice for Janitors, announced a new era of immigrant organizing in America.
Third, deindustrialization followed by corporate wars against organized labor decimated the heart of the existing labor movement, turning unions such as the United Mine Workers (UMW) of America, the United Steelworkers (USW), and the United Auto Workers (UAW) into shells of their once powerful selves. Automation began replacing sizable numbers of union workers by the 1960s. The Border Industrialization Program, a 1965 Mexican program to create an industrial zone on the U.S. border to attract American companies with low wages, began the process of American companies outsourcing union jobs to lower wage countries. By the 1970s, a trickle became a flood. The so-called “Black Monday,” when the largest steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio closed in 1977, served as a national symbol of disappearing jobs. Deindustrialization received a new level of legal protection with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, notably signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton. All of this decimated union membership and union power, with enormous political implications. Unions have been the only organizations in American history to channel the voices of working people into politics in a way to improve everyone’s economic situation. With so many unions eviscerated and with Democrats, the theoretical party of the workers that in the 1940s had brought unions to the center of government power, indifferent to the fate of workers, a vacuum was created. For some workers, that vacuum has been filled by white nationalism, anti-immigrant fervor, and racism.
Unions have been the only organizations in American history to channel the voices of working people into politics in a way to improve everyone’s economic situation.
Deindustrialization changed what the union movement looked like, with government and service workers now making up a much larger percentage of the movement. The unions that have grown in recent decades are those that continue to invest in large-scale organizing and whose growth has been among workers of color, most notably the SEIU, today the nation’s second largest union.
The era of deindustrialization also came with wide-scale outsourcing and capital mobility, with corporations closing factories in the United States, only to reopen them in the Global South. Neither Democrats nor Republicans had any answers for unemployed industrial workers in the Midwest and Northeast except for cheap bromides about reeducation and suggesting that workers move to where the jobs are. What this did was open up the space for disaffected white workers to place blame for the problems in their lives elsewhere.
What white nationalists do is to interpret these economic, racial, and social changes in the United States as an apocalypse for whites. They focus on what once seemed like outdated forms of racial panic, such as “race suicide” or the idea that whites are being outbred by immigrants, an idea that had its day in the time (and the words) of Theodore Roosevelt. These notions allow working-class people to channel the very real anger they feel about their equally real economic dislocation, growing poverty, and hopelessness for the future. These resentments existed long before Trump came around to channel them. Long before Trump, there was plenty of evidence of anger and racism within white working-class communities that could twist into white nationalist sentiment. Thomas Sugrue’s discussion of how the Detroit white working class reacted to integrated public housing projects in Detroit at the height of the New Deal by voting out liberal New Dealers is just one of many examples of an underlying white nationalism that has long existed in the working class.⁷ Sociologists and anthropologists continue to depict this. For instance, Maria Kefalas’ 2003 study of white ethnic enclaves in southwest Chicago, Working-Class Heroes, provides a window into the bitterness and resentment of white ethnic workers waiting for someone to conduct their anger.⁸ Moreover, as Monica McDermott, among others, has shown, working-class whites have long maintained racist animus toward minority populations.⁹ Short of joining a specific group, embracing white nationalism or white supremacy is not an either/or phenomenon. It is a sliding scale of disaffection, anger, and hatred, all of which Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party have unquestionably tapped into. But these elements have existed in the white working class since its formation.
Even in these times of more racially progressive unions, the connection between organized labor and a nationalism that is not-so-subtlety coded white has long been obvious. Buy American campaigns are one example of this. Workers have routinely responded to globalization through demonizing overseas workers. UAW workers smashed Toyotas as a response to Japanese imports in the 1970s, but that did nothing to save their jobs. A few years ago—when the Bakery, Confectionary, and Tobacco Workers Union was in a fight with Mondelez (which now owns Nabisco)—the union created a racially tinged cartoon about capital mobility moving their jobs to Mexico. The cartoon made a brief mention of bad working conditions there, but otherwise resorted to portraying Mexicans as people in sombreros, effectively dismissing their needs as workers in favor of a Buy American campaign. This may be a minor example, but it demonstrates the continued power of nationalism over international solidarity at a time when the rapid growth of the Latino population is one of the powerful triggers of white nationalism.
Another example of the connection between a white-coded nationalism and the working class is union-branded clothing. While some unions have clothing that represents union colors, for many other unions, the clothing is as much an exercise in patriotism as it is in solidarity or union pride. Clothing for many unions is drenched in the American flag, bald eagles, and expressions of an aggressive Americanism that reinforces white-coded values in American society. This overly masculinized patriotism may be part of working-class culture, but it also speaks much more to white workers than to others. It is difficult to see the new unionists in home health care work or the middle-class members of teachers’ unions in this clothing. Again, this issue may seem minor but actually forces us to ask questions about the relationship between different sectors of the working class and ideas of American values. Are union shirts emblazoned with assertive expressions of a chauvinism that has so often excluded workers of color a tacit engagement with white nationalism? Or is sensitivity to these symbols part of a broader left that has turned away from overt signs of patriotism and embraced an internationalism and criticism of America’s behavior abroad that both divides it from the left of the New Deal era and from much of the contemporary white working class, a divide that the historian Michael Kazin has bemoaned?¹⁰ It at least suggests a part of the disconnect between white working-class culture and elite liberal culture that provides white nationalists another potential avenue into working-class support.
Clothing for many unions is drenched in the American flag, bald eagles, and expressions of an aggressive Americanism that reinforces white-coded values in American society.
What we ultimately face is a resurgent white nationalism that has at least the potential to draw in large numbers of angry white working-class people who voted for an openly white supremacist presidential candidate in 2016 in critical industrialized counties in purple states. Regardless of just how central white nationalism is to the state of the working class today, how do we as labor activists respond to the very real threat posed by white nationalism? What policies can we promote in the attempt to alleviate this problem?
First, we have to advocate for economic policies that raise the boats for all workers, regardless of race, and that also provide dignity for working-class people without a college education. Both political parties have completely failed to articulate anything useful for people in Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; Clarion, Pennsylvania; and so many other places. As the Democratic Party seems to be slowly evolving out of its centrist neoliberal phase, new left-leaning ideas about employment and industrial policy are once again on the agenda. These new ideas include a government job guarantee, a universal basic income, a new generation of labor law, and other programs designed to lift workers out of poverty. These ideas provide a context in which to debate and articulate the future of the economy instead of looking nostalgically to a past we cannot recreate. The challenge now is creating a working-class economy for 2050, not 1950.
. . . [N]ew left-leaning ideas about employment and industrial policy . . . provide a context in which to debate . . . the future of the economy . . . The challenge now is creating a working-class economy for 2050, not 1950.
An economy that provides opportunity to the working class hardly guarantees white nationalism would not appeal to blue-collar whites. For many, it still will, as it has throughout the history of the American labor movement. But for many white working-class people, the perception of decline is not just outright, it is relative to people of color and to perceived erosions of white privilege. These imagined assaults on white privilege range from desegregated schools and jobs to affirmative action programs and the prevalence of Spanish as a language in the workplace and the community. Real hourly wages for workers without a college education have declined significantly since the 1970s and black workers have not made up wage gaps with white men, but the perception among large numbers of white workers is that they suffer because workers of color have taken their jobs.¹¹ Given this dynamic, the best vaccination we have against white supremacy among workers is to give them the power to demand a better life for themselves and their families.
Second, we have to be forthright about both the historic and contemporary racism of white people, and not just white workers. We have to acknowledge that the future of the American labor movement is one of diversity and that there can be no compromise with white supremacy, nor can we countenance naked and cynical appeals to one section of the working class at the expense of others. Despite media portrayals of the working class as exclusively white, the real working class is by far the most diverse sector of the nation. In fact, at this point, the working class is close to majority nonwhite and is already a majority in many cities and some states.
Despite media portrayal of the working class as exclusively white, the real working class is by far the most diverse sector of the nation.
Moreover, the face of the working class will continue to change, even if all immigration ended today. Rolling back the nation to its 1950 demographics is no more productive or possible than a return to its 1950 economy. Organizing again for worker power has to reject any semblance of white nationalism and fight for justice among the actual working class. All attempts to appeal explicitly to the white working class will not only reinforce their perceived special status as workers but also fail to organize the working class as it exists. If this means that some white workers will turn to racist organizations and violence, there is probably not much the labor movement can do to stop it. But we can fight for an economy and society that represents all workers. Any other option is both morally and politically bankrupt.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.ORCID iD
Erik Loomis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8572-8273

Notes

1.
Philip Bump, “Donald Trump Got Reagan-Like Support from Union Households,” The Washington Post, November 10, 2016, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/10/donald-trump-got-reagan-like-support-from-union-households/.
2.
Herbert P. Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, “Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era,” Politics & Society 47, no. 3 (September 2019): 425-79. See also, Thomas B. Edsall, “We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is,” The New York Times, August 28, 2019, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/trump-white-voters.html.3.
Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019).4.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).5.
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the White Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).6.
Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal & The Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).7.
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 58-88 especially.8.
Maria Kefalas, Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).9.
Monica McDermott, Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 4th ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).10.
Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011), especially 252-77.11.
Elise Gould, Janelle Jones, and Zeke Mokhiber, “Black Workers Have Made No Progress in Closing Earning Gaps With White Men Since 2000,” Economic Policy Institute, September 12, 2018, available at https://www.epi.org/blog/black-workers-have-made-no-progress-in-closing-earnings-gaps-with-white-men-since-2000/.

Erik Loomis is an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island.