The
Republican Party is a "working class party" now, according
to its nationalist wing. But a deeper look at its pro-worker rhetoric
reveals a longstanding trope of the "white worker" against
invader populations.
Something
very curious unfolded in the latter days of Trump’s presidency.
No, not Trump’s “big lie” about voter fraud and his
election victory. Rather, it was a peculiar spin on the future of the
Republican Party’s relationship to the working class. Some
Republicans,
including Trump,
began to describe the Republican Party as a “working
class party”
standing in opposition to the alleged elitism of the Democratic
Party. Conservative intellectuals,
religious
institutions,
and think
tanks
also began to propose a rebranding of American conservatism and the
GOP around “pro-worker” politics.
Many
observers scratched their heads at this shift, as the platform and
practice of the Republican Party have been, historically, anything
but pro-worker.
But
Trump and his far-right allies in the GOP were not so much announcing
that the class composition or policy platform of the Republican Party
had shifted. Indeed, the balance sheet of Trump’s labor
politics was horrendous.
Rather, they were seeking to forge a particular form of racialized
unity among alleged productive
members
of US society against the alleged unproductive
members.
Among these alleged unproductive are the so-called coastal and woke
elites; sometimes referenced as the “Eastern Elites,”
who, supposedly allied with Jews (although often referenced
indirectly), racial minorities, feminists, LGBTQIA activists and
immigrants from the global South, are challenging the social texture
and political viability of the United States.
According
to this narrative, it is the custodians of “woke
capital”
who are especially to blame for the assault on productive Americans,
punishing patriotic workers with a globalist,
social justice agenda,
and crushing the “real economy.” While this rhetorical
focus on the working class has surprised many pundits, it is hardly
new. It is a species of right-wing populism, a longstanding
irrationalist political current that bases itself on racism, sexism,
xenophobia, and authoritarianism. It is the manure within which
neofascist currents sprout.
The
right-wing populist movement that has grown in the U.S. since the
late 1960s has always positioned itself as an aggrieved white
movement countering the advances of the traditionally oppressed and
marginalized sectors of the population. In some cases, right-wing
populism has been blatant in its racism and white supremacy. In other
cases, however, it has been more subtle, offering a carrot to
segments of racialized populations so long as they embrace the
critical image of the U.S. as a perpetual “white
republic.”
The
Republican Party’s flirtation with pro-worker politics is both
absurd and clever. It allows them to claim that racial and gender
diversity and inclusion (not to mention anti-racism and anti-sexism)
are somehow ploys of the woke—read ‘Jewish’—elites
to rob the ordinary (white) person of what they supposedly earned
through hard work. Further, efforts to oppose racism, even
symbolically, are portrayed as an assault on “American”
history and the white population—the victims of a woke agenda
that oppresses
“straight white men.”
A
case in point was the decision of Major League Baseball (MLB) to
relocate the 2021 All-Star game. Originally scheduled to have been
played in Atlanta, Georgia, MLB made the surprising decision to
relocate the game to Denver, Colorado after being pressured to
denounce Georgia’s voter suppression efforts. Immediately, many
Republican politicians, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio, loudly
proclaimed the need to attack
the antitrust exemption that has allowed MLB to monopolize baseball
since the early 1920s. The fact that Republicans have consistently
opposed efforts to overturn the antitrust exemption were ignored.
What mattered was that they were taking on “woke corporations.”
Senator Mitch McConnell even threatened
major corporations for taking such stands, hilariously suggesting
that corporations should stay out of politics (he quickly reversed
himself).
We
must be clear. This illusory pro-worker conservatism has nothing to
do with labor rights, income inequality, occupational health and
safety, or progressive economic development—urgent issues that
confront workers every day. Rather, it is an opportunistic attempt to
create a united front of the supposedly productive classes and
fractions of American society against the supposedly parasitic
forces—both elites and “Others” ( foreign-born and
domestic)—that are draining the country of its national
strength.
Constructing
the "White Working Class"
Right-wing
claims to speak for the working class should always be taken with a
grain of salt, but they also have to be understood historically. Jim
Crow segregation in the US was not presented to white people as a
policy of the white elite but as something beneficial to all whites
insofar as they were productive members of society. Likewise, as
fascist movements grew in both Italy and Germany, the right attempted
to present itself not as the partisan protector of the rich and
powerful but, instead, of the “worker”—though in
using that term they were certainly not relying on a Marxist
definition of class.
Right-wing
populists, including but not limited to fascists, tend to root
themselves in the middle strata of capitalist society—at least
until they capture political power, at which point an alliance with
segments of the capitalist class becomes essential. This middle
strata includes small businesses, the professional-managerial sector,
the upper crust of the working class (those who must sell their labor
power to capitalists to survive), employees in the finance sector,
and many self-employed craft workers.
This
is a very unstable sector in capitalist society and is regularly
threatened with forms of pauperization by the dominant forces;
indeed, it is routinely threatened by the manner in which capitalism
operates as a system. This middle strata often feels crushed between
the rich and the poor, but it especially resents this because it sees
itself as the productive, or at least part of the most productive
sector of the overall society.
Right-wing
populist movements attempt to bridge the gap between the aggrieved
middle strata and segments of the elite by constructing the image of
a productive segment of society and, as such, defining all productive
members of society as “workers”—or, at least,
patriotic. It is no accident, then, that the ascendent German
fascists called themselves the National Socialist
German
Workers
Party, a propaganda coup to seize the workerist imagery from the Left
and redefine the “worker” in racial, chauvinist terms.
The
banner of “worker,” as articulated by the Republican
Party, is not and never has been about working-class people. It does,
however, represent a renewed effort to reach the white middle strata
and segments of white workers with several messages, messages that
must be understood in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism.
Right-Wing
Populism to the Rescue
U.S.
capitalism sustained a series of body blows beginning in the late
1960s as a result of the demands of progressive social movements for
wealth redistribution and social justice. Along with this came
changes in global capitalism as competitor capitalist countries like
Japan, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Sweden reemerged.
Technological stagnation in the U.S. was also a contributing factor.
American capitalism found itself facing a declining profit rate. In
the minds of many of its ideological leaders—what Antonio
Gramsci would call the “organic intellectuals” of the
capitalist class—this posed a threat to capitalism itself. It
was in this milieu that the experiment that came to be known as
neoliberalism emerged.
Neoliberalism,
engineered first among Republicans and later embraced by the
leadership of the Democratic Party, brought with it staggering
economic dislocation, inaugurating an era of economics and politics
that pursued privatization, deregulation, casualization, free trade
and the destruction of worker organizations. As the theory to lead
the USA out of 1970s stagnation and inflation, it also challenged the
notions of collective action among the disenfranchised and the idea
of a social contract. One need only remember former British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher’s words to the effect that there
is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families.
With
the rise of neoliberalism there was the decline of the US worker, and
working people more generally. The living standard for the average
U.S. worker stagnated or declined beginning in the mid-1970s, and
working people became increasingly dependent on credit and multiple
jobs to survive. Slowly but surely the promise of the so-called
American Dream was vanishing for millions of white Americans—people
who had been led to believe that if they played the game, their
future would improve. The other part of playing the game, of course,
was ignoring or supporting the oppression and marginalization of
populations that were not to be considered fully “American”
and supporting U.S. foreign policy, regardless of its extensive
criminality.
Changing
demographics contributed to this growing sense of unease about what
was happening in the country. Opportunities were opening up for
populations that had been historically, and almost literally,
invisible. This represented a crisis. If white Americans, people who
saw themselves as working hard and playing by the rules (even if
those rules jumped them ahead of racialized populations) were not
becoming beneficiaries of the system, then clearly, it did not pay to
be white anymore.
In
stepped the right-wing populist movement, the articulation of the
counterattack or backlash against the progressive, democratic
victories that had been achieved by the social movements of the
mid-twentieth century. The various components of the right-wing
populist movement increasingly cohered around what has come known as
the “great replacement” conspiracy—or more crudely,
around fears of “white genocide.” In other words, good,
hard working white people were being displaced by the foreign,
unassimilable ‘Other.’ And the ‘Other’ was
populations that did not work as hard; populations that supposedly
always had their hands out; populations that were not pulling
themselves up; and populations that were worshipping the wrong God.
One need only look to the most popular right-wing populist media
personality, Tucker Carlson, to find this theory blatantly
endorsed.
In April, he railed that “The Democratic Party is trying to
replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with
new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”
The
Republican construct of “worker,” then, is not responsive
to the demands of working-class people who are being stepped on and
crushed on a daily basis by the juggernaut of capital. Rather, it is
a call to those who supposedly work hard—whether a white
construction worker, a white manufacturing magnate, or even a worker
of color who either wishes to deny their heritage or somehow thinks
that they are ‘different’ from others—to join hands
in restoring to America the pride and strength that it has allegedly
lost. These are the true “workers” who must be
represented against the Eastern elites and their supposed puppets
among the masses.
Segments
of white workers, as well as some racialized workers, are attracted
to this banner because they can distance themselves from other
segments of the oppressed and marginalized, believing that they are,
themselves, different.
This
was just as true in the lead-up to the Nazi domination of Germany. In
fact, a wing of the Nazi Party focused on trying to win the German
working class to Nazism. Known by their leaders, brothers Otto and
Gregor Strasser, they called on the Nazi Party to lead a so-called
national revolution against both Jews and monopoly capitalists.
Though they made little headway, the Nazi Party continued to lay
claim to being the party of the German worker. And, through massive
preparations for war, the Nazis were able to win considerable support
within the German working class as they provided jobs, security, and
a perverse sense of imperial national purpose.
Fighting
White Supremacist Capitalism
Therein
lies the danger. White
supremacist
oppression in the U.S., which emerged from settler colonialism,
created a sense of white purpose. The mythology connected with
whiteness included the view that North America was vacant until the
arrival of the Europeans and that hard-working Europeans—later
Euro-Americans— turned an uncultivated wasteland into paradise.
And they did this with little help, at least so goes the myth. It is
this heritage that was supposedly robbed from the average,
hardworking (white) American with the rise of “big government”
and the emergence of intruder populations who were and are
undeserving of the benefits of whiteness. It is America’s
settler colonial, slaveholding past that is the connecting thread to
today’s reinvigorated “pro-worker” conservatism.
Defeating
right-wing populism will involve far more than debunking the notion
that the Republican Party is or will ever be a workers’ party.
It necessitates the construction of an alternative left politics to
address the crises brought about by the destabilization of global
capitalism and the environmental catastrophe overtaking our planet.
Right-wing populism seeks to avoid dealing with the depths of these
crises by punching down on scapegoats and convincing whites that they
are under threat.
Nor
will our confrontation with right-wing populism succeed if it tries
to avoid the challenges of racism, sexism, and xenophobia, essential
tools of capitalist domination. Rather it is in our ability to take
on these oppressions directly, demonstrating through education and
through actual struggles that it is the capitalist elites—those
who truly dominate
the economy—who
play working people for fools.
The
capitalist class is hoping and praying that white workers, in
particular, will value their white “uniform” rather than
recognize that they are being crushed—not by the poor, not by
immigrants of color, not by people of color, not by those challenging
heterosexism, but by those who never seem to be able to squeeze
enough wealth out of the bodies of working people.
This
commentary was originally published by
The
Bias Magazine
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