Submitted by medium on Thu, 11/16/2017 - 15:41
This essay first appeared on Nov.1, 2017, in Public Books as an installment in The Big Picture, a public symposium on what’s at stake in Trump’s America, co-organized by Public Books and NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. CASBS thanks Public Books for permission to re-post this excerpt.
American workers are heterogeneous politically, as well as racially, ethnically, and educationally. Unions are equally mixed. Some unions focus primarily on the narrow economic interests of their members, and others have strong commitments to social justice. Despite their differences, virtually all unions and their confederations in the post-WWII era increasingly advocated racial inclusiveness and greater economic equality. The unions, while often protectionist on trade, used their members’ electoral clout and their organizations’ money on behalf of social safeguards and public goods. But the once strong house of labor — a significant force in American politics and economics since at least the 1930s — has been largely devastated.
Union decline has been long in coming and is now close to complete, and Trump is among the beneficiaries politically. Without empowered labor unions — or something that takes their place — it is far harder to wage an effective fight against Trump and for a more equitable distribution of power and profits. Unions lobby to protect and expand rights, incomes, pensions, education, health care. They offer civic education and mobilize voters and voices. As they shrink in scope, fewer people benefit from their negotiating strength, and more workers from once heavily unionized regions of the country veer rightward.
Let us be clear. Progressivism is not a necessary trait of workers, even among those most harmed by the excesses of capitalism, by exploitative employers, or by opportunistic politicians. Friedrich Engels was mistaken in his prediction that the working class would succeed in using “paper stones” — that is, the ballot — to vote in a socialist alternative to capitalism. He failed to comprehend either the numerical growth of the middle class, which historically has had little interest in creating a socialist system, or the disinterest in socialism exhibited over the last century-plus by so much of the working class in the advanced capitalist democracies.
This disinterest has become particularly clear in recent decades in the United States, as symbolized by the rise of so-called “Reagan Democrats,” blue-collar workers who cast their lot with Reagan’s Republicans. Union members often value, and attempt to protect, jobs in industries that harm the environment and climate, and they are also far too often opponents of liberal immigration policies. Reagan played on this, and, a generation on, Trump has done so even more.
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