[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. ] [[link removed]]

THE GOP: WORKER'S PARTY OR PARTY OF THE WHITE REPUBLIC?  
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Bill Fletcher, Jr.
September 5, 2021
The Bias Magazine: The Voice of the Christian Left
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_ 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. _

, John Minchillo, AP/CP

 

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
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including Trump,
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began to describe the Republican Party as a “working class party
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standing in opposition to the alleged elitism of the Democratic Party.
Conservative intellectuals [[link removed]],
religious institutions
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and think tanks
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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
[[link removed]]. 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
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especially to blame for the assault on productive Americans, punishing
patriotic workers with a globalist, social justice agenda
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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.
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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. [[link removed]]”

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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.

_BILL FLETCHER, JR. is a longtime trade unionist, writer and a past
president of TransAfrica Forum._

Reprinted with permission of the author.

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