If “build worker power and restrict corporate power” are the two pillars of left wing labor policy, here are the two pillars of the Republican Party as a Working Class Party of today:
1. Anti-immigration. This, not union power, is the bedrock of what the Republicans are selling as their working class agenda. Instead of saying “companies are stepping on workers’ necks,” they say instead, “immigrants are taking money out of workers’ pockets.” Notice that any conversation on this topic by the right wing shifts almost immediately into a rant against immigration. It never goes from “we want to help workers” to “we want to build unions.” It always goes from “we want to help workers” to “immigrants are the problem.” This is the number one sleight of hand at work in all of this. Whenever an allegedly pro-worker Republican starts talking about the perils of immigration, stop him and ask him instead what he wants to do to build more and stronger unions so that working people will actually have the ability to take their fair share of the economy back. The answer will be bullshit, I guarantee.
No matter where you land on the immigration issue—whether you think it is mostly a humanitarian crisis in which working people of the world are artificially divided and oppressed by arbitrary borders in order to benefit capitalists (true), or whether you think immigration is a serious problem for the American working class because immigrants are stealing American workers’ jobs (not true in the sense of being a national crisis, but perhaps true in spots)—the one thing that is definitely true is that immigration is not the most important part of a pro-worker labor policy. It is at best a secondary concern. The heart of a pro-worker labor policy is union power and corporate regulation. Republicans instead want to sell the idea that the American economy is a zero-sum battle between American workers and immigrants coming in to take jobs and money and housing and resources from those American workers. As a matter of fact, the American economy is not zero-sum, and the job market is not a zero-sum contest between natives and immigrants, and the affordable housing crisis was not caused by immigration, and in the long run immigration grows rather than shrinks the economy.
So while there are legitimate questions of logistics and resources necessary to take in and assimilate large numbers of immigrants into America and its economy in the least harmful way, the fact that these questions are always swapped into the labor policy discussion is just pure scaremongering by Republicans. It is just a way to use racism to distract from the fact that Republicans hate unions. If you find that analysis too blunt, we can say that it is a way to demonize an other in order to avoid addressing the genuine questions at the heart of American capitalism that cause the working class to lack power. Going forward, just count the seconds from when someone asks these Republicans about the working class to see how long it takes them to start demonizing immigrants. And then see how long it takes them to start talking about how to build stronger unions. The answer will speak for itself.
2. Culture war transposed onto companies. If you are genuinely concerned about the fact that big corporations have too much power and workers have too little, restricting corporate power is its own goal. Restoring the fair balance of power is an end in itself. In the case of the Working Class Republican Party, that is not how it works. Republicans are still the party of business. They do not want to restrict corporate power in order to empower the working class. What they do instead is to take their culture war issues—gay rights, trans rights, “DEI” aka racism, and other right wing/ religious obsessions—and apply them to corporations. So they hate “big tech” and whatnot not because those companies are too powerful and are therefore detrimental to the working class economically, but because they believe those companies are too powerful and are therefore detrimental to right wing values culturally.
This is a pretty clear distinction! Although one that routinely befuddles national pundits. “Buhhhh, Josh Hawley and JD Vance said big tech companies are bad… is this populism?” No. This is culture war, applied to corporations. Instead of saying, for example, “Anheuser-Busch needs to sign a strong contract with its union in order to help workers live better lives,” you say, “Anheuser-Busch sucks because Bud Light had a trans person in an ad!” To me, it does not seem hard to see which of these positions represents true concern about the dangerous imbalance of power between workers and corporations, and which one is just bigotry masquerading as populism. But a lot of pundits seem mystified. (...)
That’s it. Those two elements are the core of the Working Class Republican Party. The fact that the national political media takes this seriously as some sort of meaningful shift in policy is a testament to the fact that we really need more experienced labor reporters in this country. It is very dumb.
Now, let me make a prediction to you about how this will play out, if Trump and Vance ascend to the White House. Corporations, which employ many lobbyists who are attuned to these things, will perceive that the Republican anti-corporate push is rooted not in a genuine distaste for corporate economic power but rather in a distaste for the trappings of progressivism that major corporations don for PR purposes. So what will corporations do? They will change their outward appearances. They will retire the pride flags and they will stop putting trans people in ads and they will stop putting out Black Lives Matter statements and they will stop touting their DEI policies. And they will tell their ad agencies to put more American flags in their ads.
This will be enough to satisfy the Republican Party. They will be able to proclaim victory in their culture war against woke corporations. Said corporations will proceed to conduct business as usual. The Republican Party will enact its typical anti-union policies and cut corporate taxes and scrap corporate regulations, and carry out flamboyant and draconian anti-immigrant efforts, as they always do. This regulatory environment will be good for corporate power and correspondingly bad for worker power and union power.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Exactly so. Republican administrations (and some Democratic ones, too) since Reagan have principally focused on these two issues: big tax breaks and trade protection for corporations; and vilification of immigrants. Oh, and one more too: privatization of public resources (vilification of government). See also: Public Ownership of Public Goods (HtW):]
"You don’t get a bill when a fire truck comes to your house. You do get a bill when an ambulance comes to your house. The only reason why this strikes anyone as normal is custom. Fire departments are publicly owned. They are a service that the government provides to all of us. If, a hundred years ago, fire departments had become private businesses, so that anyone whose house caught on fire also got stuck with a $5,000 bill for extinguishing services, then people living today would mostly accept that as the natural state of affairs. It is easy to see that America’s division between public and private services does not follow any rule at all, except this: Under capitalism, the private sector will try to take over all services, always, and only constant government action will keep public services public.
Do I need to say that this is stupid? This is stupid. If you were designing a common sense rule to govern what services should be publicly owned, it would be something like, “The public should own the things that all the public uses.” In fact, I think that if you asked most people, you would find that they already take this for granted, whether they have thought much about it or not. Why is the fire department public and not private? Because anyone might need it at any time. It’s a common good. It makes sense to be publicly owned. This is also why the police department is public. It is why parks are public. It is why the postal service is public. It is why schools are public. It is why most roads are public. It is the basic rationale for most of the things that the government controls and runs and provides to the public as a service. It is common sense.
"You don’t get a bill when a fire truck comes to your house. You do get a bill when an ambulance comes to your house. The only reason why this strikes anyone as normal is custom. Fire departments are publicly owned. They are a service that the government provides to all of us. If, a hundred years ago, fire departments had become private businesses, so that anyone whose house caught on fire also got stuck with a $5,000 bill for extinguishing services, then people living today would mostly accept that as the natural state of affairs. It is easy to see that America’s division between public and private services does not follow any rule at all, except this: Under capitalism, the private sector will try to take over all services, always, and only constant government action will keep public services public.
Do I need to say that this is stupid? This is stupid. If you were designing a common sense rule to govern what services should be publicly owned, it would be something like, “The public should own the things that all the public uses.” In fact, I think that if you asked most people, you would find that they already take this for granted, whether they have thought much about it or not. Why is the fire department public and not private? Because anyone might need it at any time. It’s a common good. It makes sense to be publicly owned. This is also why the police department is public. It is why parks are public. It is why the postal service is public. It is why schools are public. It is why most roads are public. It is the basic rationale for most of the things that the government controls and runs and provides to the public as a service. It is common sense.
A moment’s contemplation of this basic principle is enough to make you start wondering about all the things that aren’t public. Within the group of “Things that everyone needs more or less equally,” why is there such an arbitrary division between the publicly run things and the private ones? Why do we get firefighters, but not doctors? Why parks, but not stadiums? Why roads, but not banks? Why not, you know, food? When you take a vital service and privatize it, you ensure that it will run according to a private profit motive rather than running with the goal of providing the best service to the public. America’s health care system is the most glaring example of the human cost of this. The aggregate number of years of human life that we sacrifice in order to allow a relatively small number of people to get rich off of owning and selling health care is a staggering moral crime. The underlying principle, though, applies across many other less flashy goods and services."
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See also: Everyone into The Grinder: "One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. If, for example, you outlawed private schools, the public schools would get better. They would get better not because every child deserves to have a quality education, but rather because it would be the only way for rich and powerful people to ensure that their children were going to good schools. The theory of “a rising tide lifts all boats” does not work when you allow the people with the most influence to buy their way out of the water. It would be nice if we fixed broken systems simply because they are broken. In practice, governments are generally happy to ignore broken things if they do not affect people with enough power to make the government listen. So the more people that we push into public systems, the better.Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves."
