Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?

 

 

 

"Newman, who grew up in Pittsburgh and conducted dozens of interviews with current and retired union members in western Pennsylvania, including Herman Sauritch, told me that she had noticed a pronounced change in whom workers saw as their enemies. For older union members, “ ‘us’ was the workers and ‘them’ was business, which Republicans were lumped into,” she said. For their younger counterparts, “ ‘them’ was largely based on perceptions of a cultural élite.”

This new conception has taken hold, in no small part, because conservative media outlets, from Fox News to talk radio, have relentlessly propagated it. But Democrats also bear some responsibility for the shift. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., noted that, in the nineteen-seventies, Democrats began telling a story about economic progress that made almost no mention of the conflict between workers and capitalists. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and on through to Barack Obama, the new narrative was “a variation of the Republican story that prosperity comes from unencumbered businesses,” Podhorzer said. This faith in markets would have startled pioneering labor leaders like Walter Reuther. The Democrats’ business-friendly turn occurred, ironically enough, just as inequality was widening to levels not seen since the Gilded Age—a problem that deepened as Democrats embraced free-trade agreements. They also supported the deregulation of Wall Street, which helped cause the 2008 financial crash. After the meltdown, the Obama Administration bailed out banks that had engaged in fraud but did little for the homeowners they had victimized, who could hardly have been faulted for wondering whose side the government was on." 

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