Miscellany Central: January 2020

Friday, January 31, 2020

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

COMMENT

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.

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

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.

Monday, January 20, 2020

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

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.

Thursday, January 9, 2020

White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor

Erik Loomis

First Published December 31, 2019

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

. . . [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

Labor and Economic Restructuring

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.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

What's the Matter With Tom Frank by Ellen Willis

By Ellen Willis

Does this polemic sound familiar? It should, if you follow The Nation, The American Prospect, Dissent, The Progressive, Mother Jones and other left publications, or the work of such writers as Richard Rorty, Michael Tomasky, Michael Lind, and Eric Alterman. Since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, variants of Frank’s argument and calls for the political strategy it implies have been endlessly repeated in the precincts of the liberal left. There is widespread agreement that the left must concentrate its energies on promoting a populist economic program, and that the Democrats, if they want to win elections, must stop being identified as the party of “upper middle class” feminists, gays, and secularists, preoccupied by what Lind calls “inflammatory but marginal issues like abortion.” Unlike Frank himself, many of the writers in this camp directly attack the cultural movements: they demand that feminists, gay rights activists, cultural left academics, and other inflammatory marginals cease and desist from waving red flags at the right by pressuring Democrats to stand firm on abortion and other social issues or making silly claims that popular culture has its subversive aspects or engaging in elitist debates about curriculum or defending artists who dunk Jesus in urine. Libs to cultural radicals: shut up.

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These writers also tend to share the dubious assumption that the Democrats are at heart the party of the downtrodden, and that the neoliberal economic agenda they have pursued since the Carter administration is a temporary aberration induced by bad strategic thinking (Frank attributes it to a lust for corporate money, along with the mistaken belief that workers will continue to vote Democratic because they have nowhere else to go). But let me bracket that line of thought for the moment and take up their conception of cultural politics. Cultural conflict, so the argument goes, has no real political meaning in its own right and, in itself, no real social consequences—yet for millions of people it takes precedence over real, concrete interests. Cultural concerns, however “hallucinatory,” are so potent as to override workers’ doubts about Republicans’ economic policies—but their effect would vanish in an instant if Democrats’ economic policies were better. Furthermore, cultural issues are a slamdunk for the Republicans since most Americans basically share the right’s cultural values and only an affluent minority has any actual or potential interest in supporting feminism, gay rights, the sexual revolution, artistic freedom, or the separation of church and state. (Applying this rap to race, the first “social issue” to provoke a rightwing backlash and the reason the south defected to the Republicans, gets a bit complicated, since no one on the left can deny that the condition of blacks is a “real” problem—a dilemma solved by downplaying the cultural aspects of racism and arguing that it’s basically a function of class.)
All these propositions are false. They make hash of the past 40 years of American history and, indeed, of the history of the 20th century; they are absurdly provincial, for the culture war in its various forms is a global phenomenon. If the question of why the right has come to dominate national politics, and how to reverse its ascendancy, is the first and most urgent question anyone on the contemporary left must ask, coming close behind is the puzzle of why so many liberals and “progressives” have signed on to a chimerical view of the relationship of politics, culture, and class.
The first great wave of cultural radicalism in Europe and America, beginning toward the end of the 19th century and lasting into the 1920s, built the framework of cultural modernity: feminism, sexual reform and birth control movements, youth movements, selfconscious homosexuality, psychoanalysis, avantgarde art and its associated bohemianism, the

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Russian Revolution with its shortlived burst of sexual, domestic, and educational reforms, the social and cultural ferment of the Weimar Republic. The first great rightwingpopulist backlash movement was Nazism. Hitler’s kulturkampf mobilized the population against the traitorous cultural elite: the rootless cosmopolitans both capitalist and communist, the sexual perverts, the degenerate artists, the race mixers, and above all the iconic representative of all these groups—the Jews. Unlike their contemporary American counterparts, German workers could have voted for communist and socialist parties speaking to their economic interests, yet many supported the Nazis.Then as now, the left saw rightwing populism as purely a tool of corporate interests. For their part, the corporate interests thought they could control Hitler for their own purposes. Both were wrong. In the end, the murder of six million Jews could not be explained by class analysis. If you aimed to understand it, you would have to try to understand the kulturkampf : what was the profound appeal of Hitler’s world view? Then as now, the mainstream of the left resisted this question, uncritically sharing the general tendency to attribute the Holocaust to an inexplicable outbreak of “evil.”
The renewed cultural revolt known as “the `60s” had its epicenter in the United States, but its impact was felt worldwide. Feminism is a global movement, American mass culture with its invitations to sexual and other material pleasures is everywhere, and the vast increase in all manner of transnational interchange attendant on globalization ensures that almost nowhere on earth are people insulated from the challenges of secular cosmopolitanism to traditional religious and patriarchal authority as well as to nationalism and the preservation of local culture. The reaction, in turn, has not been confined to the United States and its Christian right. Militant fundamentalism in the Islamic world and its European diaspora is the most conspicuous, violent form of global backlash, but there is also rightwing Catholicism in Eastern Europe, ultraorthodox Judaism in Israel (and its Brooklyn diaspora), evangelicalism in Latin America and South Africa, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalism in India. The role of capitalism in encouraging both cultural revolt and the reaction against it is complex—more on this later—but it should be clear that the latter is not a Republican plot. The American Christian right may be in bed with capital; the Islamists of the Middle East are not. Indeed, this has been very confusing to an American left that can’t understand religion and culture as real issues: the great majority of leftists, feminists excepted, supported the Iranian revolution and are ignoring the incipient disaster of theocracy in Iraq; as for Osama bin Laden, those who do not buy the argument that 9/11 was simply motivated by

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revenge, however misguided, for American Middle East policy have again resorted to “evil” as a convenient nonanalysis.
The cultural radical impulse is rooted in the core elements of the democratic ideal: equality and freedom. There is a clear logic in the progression from affirming that all men are created equal, with the right to choose their government, enjoy freedom of speech and religion, and pursue happiness, to demanding that these rights apply to racial minorities, women, homosexuals, young people, atheists and other groups in one way or another denied them; that the challenge to repressive authority extend beyond government to institutions like the corporation, the family, and the church; that the pursuit of happiness include freedom from sexual restrictions dictated by patriarchal religious norms; that free speech include explicitly sexual and antireligious speech. Such demands, however, challenge not only deep structures of social privilege and subordination but our very definition of morality. All of us living in JudeoChristian or Islamic cultures have imbibed from infancy a conception of sexuality—and desire more generally—as dangerous and destructive unless strictly controlled, of repression and selfsacrifice as indispensable virtues. Movements that encourage us to fulfill our desires are bound to arouse conflicting emotions, to intensify people’s yearnings for freedom and pleasure, but also their anxiety and guilt about such primal rebellion. An outpouring of social experiment and innovation liberates creative energies, but also rage—at oppression, at losses of status and privilege, at the sources of anxiety and confusion. Cultural radical demands immediately question and disrupt existing social institutions, yet building democratic alternatives is a longterm affair: this leaves painful gaps in which men and women don’t know how to behave with each other, in which marriage can no longer provide a stable environment for children but it’s not clear what to do instead. Is it really surprising that cultural revolution should cause conflict?
To argue that this conflict has no political significance is to say that democratic values have none—never mind the blood and passion expended by democrats and their enemies. To argue that one’s “material interests” have only to do with economic class is to say that sexual satisfaction or frustration, bodily integrity and autonomy or the lack of same in the sexual and reproductive realm, the happiness or misery of our lives as lovers and spouses, parents and children are ethereal matters that have no impact on our physical being. (If abortion is a marginal issue, what about contraception, which was illegal in Connecticut until the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision of 1965?) To dismiss as “hallucinatory” people’s embattlement

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about what moral and cultural norms will govern their everyday lives and intimate relationships is to say that people (at least working class people) do not, under normal circumstances, care deeply about anything beyond the size of their paychecks. Nor does this view consider that culture and economics are deeply intertwined: the family, after all, is an economic as well as a cultural institution. (Is sexist bias in divorce settlements a cultural or an economic issue? What about women’s “second shift” in the household?)
A similar disregard for history, and for the concrete realities of American life, is embedded in another of Frank et al.’s assumptions: that cultural liberalism is entirely an artifact of the upper classes, while most Americans are social conservatives, essentially uninfluenced, except in a negative direction, by the cultural upheavals of the past 40 years. In fact, though the countercultural movements of the `60s came largely from the educated middle class, their influence soon spread far beyond those origins, especially among young people. Rock and roll—invented by black people, taken up by white teenagers, combined with folk music and blues by white bohemians—became the rebellious lingua franca of a generation. Marijuana and countercultural styles in dress, hair, and speech migrated from the cities to the provinces and up and down the class ladder (certain `60s styles—like long hair for men—have remained widespread in the white working class, long after the middle class abandoned them). Young Detroit auto workers and workingclass Vietnam veterans were conspicuous participants in the dissident culture and its political disaffection. Feminism mutated, emphasizing or playing down different issues, as it arrived in black neighborhoods, union halls, Catholic and evangelical churches, Colorado and Mississippi, but no stratum of society or section of the country was untouched by it. Attitudes toward openness about sex, female sexuality, single motherhood, divorce, women’s right to equal education and jobs changed across the board. Abortion is now commonplace (ending one out of five pregnancies, according to the New York Times) among women of all classes. Homosexuality is increasingly accepted, queasiness about gay marriage notwithstanding.
A telling indication of these widespread changes is the very social permissiveness of contemporary pop culture that Frank charges with contributing to the backlash. Like many critics of capitalism, Frank makes the mistake of imagining that mass culture is a pure reflection of the corporate class that produces it and has nothing to do with the tastes or values of the mass audience that consumes it—as if it were the habit of corporations to pursue profits by offending most of their customers, rather than trying to

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appeal to their desires and fantasies. No doubt some readers are offended by the liberal “beautiful people” in People, but what about the three million or more who buy the magazine each week? Conservatives may be scandalized by Skecher’s ads, or hiphop, or pornography on the Internet, but their audience is hardly limited to the rich. In the course of purveying culture the corporations have committed many sins against art, against thought, against human decency and the public good—but blowing off Middle America is not one of them.
Of course, many people who are drawn to the hedonistic world of mass culture may at the same time feel guilty or repelled; which is to say that on such matters Americans are ambivalent. There is clearly a large gap between what people say to pollsters about cultural issues and how they actually live. Surveys in which 40% of Americans claim to attend church regularly have been contradicted by studies that measure actual attendance (the most famous such study, published in the American Sociological Review in 1993, put the figures at 20% for Protestants and 28% for Catholics). A recent New York Times article on an abortion clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas, interviewed 26 patients, some of whom had had more than one abortion: several said they believed abortion was wrong, selfish, or against their religion, but nonetheless felt they were too young or poor or alone to take care of a child. The American public has also shown on numerous occasions that it is leery of the sexual Robespierres of the theocratic right. Their antics at the 1992 Republican convention, where Pat Buchanan declared “a religious war… for the soul of America” and Marilyn Quayle disparaged working women (husband Dan had earlier made his notorious attack on the single motherhood of TV character Murphy Brown), were widely considered to have contributed to Bush pere’s defeat. Americans were not happy about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica, yet they refused to join the right’s crusade against him; they reacted to the Starr Report’s prurient details with hostility toward Starr, opposed Clinton’s impeachment, and punished the Republicans for it in the next Congressional election. (This recalcitrance was bitterly frustrating to rightwing activists, prompting William Bennett to lament “the death of outrage” and Paul Weyrich to advocate abandoning electoral politics in favor of building separatist Christian institutions.) Nor did the majority of Americans support the right’s most recent wretched excess of cultural grandstanding—its orchestrating of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. Assuming for the sake of the argument that “moral values” were a significant factor in the last two presidential elections, their closeness is yet another rebuke to the notion that the mass of the working

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population supports the cultural right’s agenda. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and won it by only 2.5% in 2004; Kerry received over 26,000,000 votes in “red” states, including 420,846 in Kansas.
The public’s continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical rightwing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition. From the time the evangelical right’s “profamily” movement arose and joined forces with Catholic righttolife organizers in the mid`70s, the broad left, including liberal feminists, adopted a strategy of appeasement rather than militant defense of feminism and abortion rights. Many men on the left had supported the women’s movement only reluctantly and in response to tremendous political pressure at the height of the feminist surge; they jettisoned this baggage with relief. But plain sexism was only part of the story. It could not explain why Betty Friedan attacked feminist radicals and proclaimed herself “profamily”; why feminist leaders insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment had nothing to do with abortion or lesbian rights or a critique of traditional sexual roles; why advocates of legal abortion began apologizing, praising the moral commitment of their opponents, and talking about “choice” in the abstract rather than the procedure that dare not speak its name. The appeasers argued that they needed to soften their stands to avoid alienating traditionalist voters from the ERA campaign, the “prochoice” movement and the Democratic Party. But in truth their lack of conviction that a majority of Americans could be won over—if not immediately, then in the long run—to a politics of equality, freedom and pleasure reflected their own deep doubts about the legitimacy of those values.They were appeasing themselves as much as anyone else.
Predictably, the strategy of pandering to the right was an abject failure: Reagan was elected; the ERA lost. If an ambivalent public hears only one side of a question, the conservative side, passionately argued—if people’s impulses to the contrary are never reinforced, and they perceive that the putative spokespeople for feminism and liberalism are actually uncomfortable

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about advancing their views—the passionate arguers will carry the day. Why would anyone support a movement that won’t stand behind its own program? But the left did not learn the obvious lesson—that to back away from fighting for your beliefs on the grounds that you have no hope of persuading people to share them is to perpetrate a selffulfilling prophecy. On the contrary, the appeasers could see in their defeats only a confirmation of their pessimism. This scenario has been repeated countless times as the country has moved steadily to the right, yet it appears to have inspired no second thoughts. The stubborn failure to rethink a losing strategy can’t help but suggest that its proponents on some level do not really care to win.
If despite this abdication the cultural right has met considerable popular resistance—if most people today, including many who profess to be conservatives, are reluctant to give up certain social freedoms or deny them to others—suppose the left had consistently stood up for the principle of a feminist, democratic culture? Can anyone doubt that the political landscape would be different? It follows, surely, that if the left were now to push back on cultural issues, it would find Americans more receptive than it imagines. But for Tom Frank, the fact that the right has not decisively won the culture war leads to a different conclusion, reminiscent of Vermont Senator George Aiken’s position on Vietnam—that we should say we won and go home. According to him, nothing has changed culturally, and nothing will change, because our corporate rulers don’t want it to.
It’s at this point that Frank crosses the line from merely being wrongheaded to committing the intellectual equivalent of criminal negligence. For a great many people, especially women, have suffered, and continue to suffer, from those practical effects of the cultural backlash that he insists do not exist, and therefore need not detain us. True, the corporate wing of the Republican Party (which is to say the dominant wing, ideologically and financially) sees the religious right mainly as a key constituency that is essential to a winning coalition and useful for such purposes as providing a moral rationale for laissezfaire policies. For much of the party leadership, including Reagan and both Bushes, cultural issues have indeed been a handy demagogic tool rather than a serious priority. But this is not to say the Republicans are averse to rewarding their evangelical allies whenever feasible. They have first of all given what used to be the lunatic fringe the prestige and legitimacy accorded to players in the nation’s ruling party, as well as an ongoing national platform for their propaganda and for psychodramas like the Schiavo affair. They have treated as patronage

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for the Christian right numerous judicial appointments that will shape the courts for years to come, along with executive appointments that affect policy in areas ranging from criminal justice to women’s health. Myriad laws and executive orders have financed religious activities and sanctioned religious discrimination in publicly funded jobs, banned all federal funding for abortion, required promotion of abstinence as a condition of supporting domestic sex education programs or international AIDS prevention organizations, restricted stemcell research, blocked overthecounter sale of the morningafter pill, denied federal grants to artists who don’t meet religious right standards of decency (a very partial list). Nor should it be forgotten that the radical right nearly brought down a president out of cultural animus (Clinton’s neoliberal economic policies could hardly have been the motive).
But the impact of the backlash transcends its role in the federal government. Christian right activists are a major force in local and state politics, from school boards to legislatures, especially but not exclusively in the south. They have also profoundly influenced the political climate—including, as I’ve noted, the behavior of their supposed opponents—and thereby the informal social norms and pressures that, far more than government action, dictate what people feel free to do, say, or even think. On all these levels they have pursued a war against secularism whose effects range from the planting of religious monuments in public buildings and efforts to teach religious pseudoscience in public schools to a new unofficial requirement for presidential candidates—that they not only believe in God but feel comfortable making public professions of faith.
Frank’s cavalier pronouncement that “Abortion is never halted” is literally correct—abortion was never halted even when it was illegal all over the country—but entirely misses the point: the goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without overturning Roe v. Wade. Current legal restrictions include bans on funding abortion for Medicaid patients, parental consent requirements, regulations that make abortion clinics prohibitively expensive to operate, waiting period and counseling requirements that force women to make more than one trip to the clinic. (Evidently, for all his class consciousness Frank is unaware of how heavily these restrictions weigh on poor and workingclass women, who can’t afford to travel or take time off from their jobs, and must often delay their abortions beyond the safest period to save enough money for the fee.) And then there are the extralegal tactics—the right’s

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relentless stigmatizing of abortion (helped along by apologetic liberals), its harassment of clinic patients and staffs, its hitlist websites posting “murderers’” names and addresses, and its terrorist assassinations of doctors.
As a result large sections of the country have few or no abortion providers. Many clinics close because they can’t afford to comply with regulations, can’t get insurance, or are kicked out by landlords. Fewer and fewer doctors are willing to perform abortions, and most medical schools do not even teach the procedure. Increasingly, women who exercise their legal right do so in an atmosphere that encourages guilt, shame and fear. At the Little Rock abortion clinic women worried about being ostracized were their secret to be known. “I’d lose my job,” one said. “My family’s reputation would be ruined. It makes me nervous even being in the waiting room.” Nor should we imagine that such sentiment is confined to the likes of conservative Arkansas (where, nevertheless, Kerry got 45% of the vote). What are we to make of the recent cases of high school girls in the northeast, bastion of the cultural elite, who could find no solution to their unwanted pregnancies but to kill their newborn infants? Tom: is this real enough for you?
The idea that cultural radicalism is antithetical to egalitarian class politics—that it is at best a divisive distraction, at worst a weapon of the bourgeoisie—is not new. It has been floating around the socialist and communist movements since the 1880s and has been predominant on the left for the past century (except, perhaps, for a brief period during the 1960s). One strand of the argument rests on a populist identity politics that associates conventional morality with “working class values.” For most of history, only aristocrats had the power to avoid work, pursue pleasure and flout with impunity the moral norms that applied to their inferiors; sexual rebellion in particular has been identified with domination (see the writings of the Marquis de Sade). In the modern era, feminist and other cultural radical movements have typically been founded by people who are economically secure enough to be free of daytoday worry about survival and so able to focus on what’s wrong with the quality of their lives. At the other end of the class hierarchy, since the emergence of the “lumpenproletariat” in the 19th century, “vice” has also been associated with social outcasts who have nothing to lose. It is therefore supposed to be a point of workingclass pride, solidarity, and saltoftheearth status to reject the “decadence” of the rich and the upper middle class as well as the fecklessness of

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the very poor. The contemporary right’s incitement of working people to direct their class anger against the “cultural elite” was in fact anticipated by the venerable and still prominent left tradition of charging cultural radicals with trespassing on the values of workers. Its exponents do not see— because they are blinded by their own guilt and fear of freedom—that subjection to sexual conformity and bromides about the “dignity of work” is if anything part of workingclass oppression; that sexual happiness and freedom from alienated labor are universal goods to which everyone is entitled.
Another left rationale for rejecting cultural politics is rooted in the historical connection of cultural movements to the marketplace. The rise of capitalism, which undermined the authority of the patriarchal family and church, put widespread cultural revolt in the realm of possibility. Wage labor allowed women and young people to find a means of support outside the home. Urbanization allowed people the freedom of social anonymity. The shift from production to consumptionoriented capitalism and the spread of mass media encouraged cultural permissiveness, since the primary technique of marketing as well as the most salient attraction of mass art is their appeal to the desire for individual autonomy and pleasure and specifically to erotic fantasy.
Accordingly, left cultural conservatives have argued that feminism and cultural radicalism, in weakening traditional institutions like the family, have merely contributed to the market’s hegemony over all spheres of life. Many leftists, including Frank, see the cultural movements through the lens of their hostility to consumerism: observing that commercial exploitation of sex is ubiquitous and that rock and roll, feminism, and other countercultural artifacts have been used to sell everything from cars and fashions to credit cards and mutual funds, they conclude that cultural liberation, like the backlash against it, is a tool of capitalist domination. That capital is promiscuous in its zeal to reduce human impulses to selling points—willing to dish up feminism or family values, sex or religion as the occasion demands—is interpreted to mean that there is no real opposition between cultural left and right.
Again, this mindset puts a progressive political gloss on what is really a form of puritanism, offended by the fleshpots of the market, not just the profits. What it ignores, or denies—as Marx never did—is the paradoxical nature of capitalism. In destroying the old patriarchal order, in making all that was solid melt into air, in fomenting constant dynamism and change, capital made space for the revolutionary ideas that would challenge its

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own authority. In letting loose the genie of desire in the service of profit, consumer culture unleashes forces that can’t reliably be controlled. Frank and his fellow anticulturewarriors sneer at the idea that there can be anything subversive about popular culture, and indeed, these days the process of channeling potentially rebellious impulses into safe activities like shopping seems to be working well. Yet in the very different political and social context of the `60s, the invitation to pleasure that pervaded mass culture, from its advertising to its music, played an important role in the cultural revolt: it peeled off the repressive, securityoriented surface of postWorld War II America and suggested to young people that another way of life was possible.
A crucial ingredient of that `60s context was unprecedented mass prosperity. In the postwar years the great majority of the white population had attained a middleclass standard of living; they produced a generation of children—a particularly large one, at that—who had never known the Depression and grew up taking economic security for granted, greatly expanding the pool of people likely to notice their cultural discontents. Though black people remained poor relative to whites, they too benefited from the general prosperity, enough so that a critical mass of students, clergy, and other middleclass activists was available to start the civil rights and black power movements (which in turn became a template for feminism and a major influence on the white left and counterculture). At the same time, the success of the postwar economy muted class conflict. Although `60s radicals did raise class issues, they did not gain much traction; most people were satisfied with their economic status, while liberals regarded the persistence of poverty and racial discrimination as occasions for a cleanup operation rather than evidence of any systemic problem. In contrast, cultural issues—feminism especially—tapped into widespread dissatisfaction and quickly became the signature of the time.
As I’ve suggested, the very nature of the cultural rebellion provoked a backlash; it was well underway by 1968—even as the radical feminist movement was getting off the ground—and four years later George McGovern sank under the weight of the slogan “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” But the reaction accelerated and intensified after 1973, when the economy contracted amid the first conspicuous domestic symptoms of what would come to be called globalization. Just as economic security had encouraged cultural experimentation and dissidence, economic anxiety had the opposite effect. In addition the renewed class warfare that marked this period was presented as a cultural offensive. Politicians and corporate spokespeople

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justified lower wages, layoffs, and assaults on public goods and social welfare programs as moral correctives to Americans’ hedonism, profligacy, and excessive expectations.
Until 1980 this offensive was bipartisan (it reached its height under Jimmy Carter) and targeted the American people in general. It was the Reagan administration that began scapegoating the cultural elite (Spiro Agnew’s “effete snobs” and “nattering nabobs”) along with the “welfare queens” of the underclass. But Reagan also did something the left, to its great misfortune, has never understood: with his paean to “morning in America” and call for an “opportunity society” he coopted the yearnings that had been aroused by the `60s movements and stifled by the nonstop pullupyoursocks lecture of the Carter years. Freedom, as recoded by the Reagan right, meant pursuing unlimited wealth, at least in one’s dreams, and so identifying with the rich, their desire for low taxes, and their aversion to “big government”; it meant embracing America’s mission to make the world safe for democracy; it meant license to express rage. Pleasure in sex might be restricted, but pleasure in aggression was encouraged, including uninhibited bashing of black people, poor people, criminals, deviants, and liberals. The cultural elite, on the other hand, was portrayed as not only immoral and unpatriotic but repressive, what with its guiltmongering attacks on greed and its allergy to guns and its lectures about bigoted language. Ever since, the right has won elections with some version of this formula. Its success has depended on convincing workingclass swing voters not only that liberals are their class enemy, but that their own aspirations for “opportunity” and “ownership” are best expressed by policies that favor the rich. It’s true that during this time American workers have not been offered a serious alternative to the right’s plutocratic program. But neither have they been offered any alternative to the right’s conception of freedom. The disastrous trajectory of American politics should long since have made clear that this second lacuna is as ruinous as the first—if not more so.
What little intraleft debate there has been on What’s the Matter with Kansas? has centered on the question of “false consciousness.” Does it exist? And do workingclass cultural conservatives really suffer from it, or have they just figured out that there’s no significant difference between the parties on economic issues so they may as well vote to defend their privileges as white people or men or Christians? I find the latter view reductive and not very interesting. On the other hand, I can’t go along with Frank’s implicit judgment that the right is more deluded than the left. I’ve already argued that leftists’ refusal to take on the culture war has more to do with

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their own conservative impulses than with any rational strategy for a progressive revival. But what of the other trait the anticulturewarriors appear to have in common—their mystifying attachment to the Democratic Party? Consider that the last Democratic administration to profess the philosophy of the New Deal—Lyndon Johnson’s—held office before Tom Frank was born. A few years later, capital pulled out of the businesslaborgovernment coalition that in response to the Depression and the Cold War had committed itself to maintaining a prosperous, stable middle class with high wages, social benefits, and government regulation. From now on, Americans were told, we would have to submit to the discipline of the free market. Carter embraced the neoliberal order with its mantra of austerity; he presided (with the help of Ted Kennedy) over decontrol of oil prices and deregulation of the airline, trucking, and banking industries. Clinton supported the procorporate program of the Democratic Leadership Council and abolished the entitlement to welfare. The Democratic establishment is firmly centerright, as its last two presidential candidates have been. The party has no economicpopulist faction with any organization or influence; in any case the party of Roosevelt was the product of a particular set of conditions that are gone and will not return. Ironically, the Democrats do exactly what Frank accuses the Republicans of doing: they use cultural issues to get the base to swallow their economic policy (“We have to keep to the center or those swing voters will elect the lunatics, and there goes the Supreme Court”). Vote to protect Roe v. Wade; receive NAFTA.
Is the fantasy of the Democrats’ renaissance just a matter of naivete, or is something deeper going on? I suspect it’s of a piece with the denial that culture is important—a defense against the terror of radicalism that must be warded off at all costs. For some, there is also nostalgia for a time when white liberal men like Tom Frank were heroes, before they were robbed of the spotlight by blacks, women and gays, forced to confront private conflicts as public issues, and ultimately pushed aside by the right. There is something poignant about this, given the political bleakness of the day, but it’s an indulgence the American left cannot afford. We need to look not to the New Deal but to a new politics, one that recognizes equality and freedom, class and culture, as ineluctably linked. That we’re so far from this recognition makes Kansas the least of our problems.

Friday, January 31, 2020

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

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Here We Have It. The Trump Impeachment Smoking Gun.

Monday, January 20, 2020

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

White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor:

Economic Decline Rekindles White Nationalism

White Supremacy and the History of Organized Labor

Labor and Economic Restructuring

Notes

Thursday, January 9, 2020

White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor

White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor

Economic Decline Rekindles White Nationalism

White Supremacy and the History of Organized Labor

Labor and Economic Restructuring

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

What's the Matter With Tom Frank by Ellen Willis