The truth is that the working class has no money or power and is easily
manipulated. It may be the backbone of the nation, but it's controlled by the
power elites. And those folks in power are, to say the least, short sighted.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2019 3:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will the GOP Become the Party of Blue-Collar
Conservatism?
While the Democrats talked the talk for years, the top leadership of the Party
had turned its back on the working class long before FDR provided some relief.
Maybe at the local, county and state level the Democratic Party still backed
the issues affecting the working class, but name one president prior to FDR who
supported Labor over Wall Street. Wilson? Cleveland? And following FDR the
Democrats had the likes of Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and Obama. Only
LBJ took on the establishment in his fight to bring about social reform.
The truth is that none of the nation's political parties favor the working
class.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Will the GOP Become the Party of Blue-Collar Conservatism?
Will the GOP Become the Party of Blue-Collar Conservatism?
Washington State Dept of Transportation / Flickr
From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt onward through to the
1990s, the Democrats had long been considered the party of the working
class. That perception lingered long after the fact that by the 1990s,
they had more accurately become the party of Wall Street and Silicon
Valley, often embracing policies at variance with their traditional
blue-collar supporters. As Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie
Chen outline in a paper sponsored by the Institute for New Economic
Thinking: "Within the Democratic Party, the desires of party leaders
who continue to depend on big money from Wall Street, Silicon Valley,
health insurers, and other power centers collides [sic] head on with
the needs of average Americans these leaders claim to defend." So the
Democratic Party, a historically center-left political grouping, has
increasingly embraced a neoliberal market fundamentalist framework
over the past 40 years, and thereby facilitated the growth of
financialization (whereby the influence and power of a country's
financial sector become vast relative to the overall economy).
Donald Trump exploited that shift during his 2016 campaign: Not only
did he proclaim his love for "the poorly educated," but he also
campaigned as an old Rust Belt Democrat-not only by attacking illegal
immigration and offshoring, but also coming out against globalization,
free trade, Wall Street, and especially Goldman Sachs.
As president, of course, Trump has proven incapable of "walking the walk,"
even as he continued to speak about "draining the swamp" and
eliminating business as usual in Washington. But there is increasing
evidence suggesting that some of the more ambitious and opportunistic
politicians in the GOP are seeking to exploit the material abandonment
of working-class voters by the Democrats. Both Senators Josh Hawley
and Marco Rubio are trying to move the party in a more pro-worker
direction, championing a new kind of blue-collar conservatism that is
supportive of unions and policies that emphasizes the "dignity of
work." Likewise, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has recently
introduced a tax rebate for lower-income Americans to offset the
tariffs President Trump has proposed on Chinese goods-essentially an
annual payment from the federal government to citizens to offset any
increased cost in consumer goods that might arise from Trump's
proposed tariffs, thus neutralizing the economic impact, and
countering the political argument that the president's trade war on
Chinese goods ultimately represents a tax on American consumers. As
Henry Olsen notes in the Washington Post:
"Cotton's approach addresses both the economic and political
challenges arising from Trump's tariffs. Economically, giving the
revenue back to average Americans offsets the expected rise in prices
they will face as a result of the tariffs. Consumer spending, which
was feared would decline in response to the price hikes, would now
likely stay high: Why cut back in spending when you're not losing any
money? That would keep the economy strong."
In other words, it's a tax-time Universal Basic Income.
Cotton's proposals would augment a little-discussed feature emerging
now in the U.S. labor market, as CNBC's Jeff Cox writes: for the first
time in this cycle (which started in 2009), "the bottom half of
earners are benefiting more than the top half-in fact, about twice as
much, according to calculations by Goldman Sachs," using data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. More recently, Derek Thompson of the
Atlantic cites additional work by labor economist Nick Bunker, who
makes the case that "wage growth is currently strongest for workers in
low-wage industries, such as clothing stores, supermarkets, amusement
parks, and casinos. And earnings are growing most slowly in
higher-wage industries, such as medical labs, law firms, and
broadcasting and telecom companies." Absent a significant growth
slowdown, these workers might increasingly identify their economic
self-interest with Republicans, not Democrats, particularly given the
increasingly restrictionist stance the GOP is adopting on immigration,
which will further tighten the labor market structurally and enhance
the relative bargaining position of American blue-collar workers.
The one lingering question is whether or not this trend will yet
supersede the power and influence of the GOP's historic corporate
constituencies, notably oil, mining and chemical companies, Big
Pharma, tobacco, the arms industry, and civil aviation. On the face of
it, this could well prove to be a tall order. But it is conceivable if
trade policy is ultimately rendered subordinate to national security
concerns, as increasingly appears to be the case today. In the words
of Michael Lind, all it would take is a national developmental
industrial strategy predicated on sustaining U.S. military
supremacy: "to identify and promote not specific companies but key
'dual-use' industries important in both defense and civilian commerce."
That
would seem to be a more likely scenario for the GOP, one that would
build on Trump's steady inroads into the Democratic Party's
traditional blue-collar constituencies, while simultaneously catering
to the party's strong links to national defense interests.
Although a military-industrial strategy might run counter to some of
the interests of the party's traditional corporate backers (such as
Charles Koch), it would likely prove hugely beneficial to America's
manufacturing heartland, particularly the country's disaffected blue-collar
workers.
Historically, these workers have been Democrats, but their livelihoods
have been decimated by decades of trade liberalization and other
neoliberal policies. As Lind points out, a national industrial policy
based on the model of Alexander Hamilton but married to "Cold War 2.0"
could, therefore, consolidate the GOP's efforts to become more of a
party of the working class. And such a policy is not historically
anomalous: during the original Cold War, free trade and globalization
were always subject to the constraints of containing the expansion of
Soviet-led communism. A large chunk of the world under the enemy
sphere of influence was off-limits to American trade and capital.
Today, even with the overriding influence of the Koch brothers, and
the Mercer family, a number of Republicans are geopolitical hawks
first, and economic libertarians second. They increasingly see that it
makes no sense to go to war against wage earners while claiming to
protect the same wage earners from Chinese competition, especially if
Beijing becomes the new locus of an emerging Cold War 2.0.
Furthermore, if they are in safe, rock-solid GOP districts, they are
less vulnerable to a primary attack from corporate interests
antithetical to those positions. As geo-economics is increasingly
remarried to geopolitics (as it was during the original Cold War),
"blue-collar conservativism" will likely gain increasing policy
traction in certain conservative circles, even though Republicans
still have a ways to go before they can fully shift their party's
agenda toward a modern-day equivalent of "Bull Moose" progressivism.
Donald Trump is, first and foremost, a wrecker, as opposed to a builder.
Arguably, that is one of the things that got him elected in the first
place.
But he has set the stage for a further political realignment,
especially as more educated whites and elites migrate to the
Democratic Party, and traditional Southern populists reside in the
GOP. There are very few Fritz Hollings types left in the party, whose
views on trade, immigration and manufacturing are closer to the
Democrats' historic New Deal constituencies.
This theory, though, is not watertight, and new coalitions are still
very much in flux. But as things stand today, ironically, the
Democrats now have trade and open borders policies that are closer to
those of the old Reagan/Bush Republicans and libertarians such as the
Koch brothers, while the GOP policy under Trump is gravitating toward
the old positions of the AFL/CIO on both trade and immigration, a
policy combination that makes the embrace of a kind of blue-collar
conservatism even more credible for the GOP. Furthermore, as trade
issues (especially in regard to China) are increasingly conflated with
national security concerns, the GOP may ultimately decide to build on
Trump's attempts to re-domicile key supply chains back to the U.S.
From the national security hawk perspective, this will ensure that
strategic industries necessary to sustain American military power
remain on home shores, even if this conflicts with the principles of
free trade, limited non-interventionist government. Sustaining
permanent production on U.S. soil, not just innovation in America and
production elsewhere, would be profoundly favorable to blue-collar
workers (hitherto among the biggest casualties of globalization) and
likely consolidate the GOP's efforts to become the future party of the
American working class, unless of course the Democrats suddenly and
unexpectedly reclaim their New Deal legacy.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.
Marshall Auerback /
