Pluralistic: The GOP is not the party of workers (13 Dec 2024)


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A pig-faced billionaire in tux and top-hat reclines on a lounger, dicing with the Angel of Death on a table made from a coffin; they float in a black, formless void. In the bottom left corner is a GOP-liveried elephant with Trump hair. In the top right corner is a Dem-liveried sickly, spavined jackass.

The GOP is not the party of workers (permalink)

The GOP says it's the "party of the working class" and indeed, they have promoted numerous policies that attack select groups within the American ruling class. But just because the party of unlimited power for billionaires is attacking a few of their own, it doesn't make them friends to the working people.

The best way to understand the GOP's relationship to worker is through "boss politics" – that's where one group of elites consolidates its power by crushing rival elites. All elites are bad for working people, so any attack on any elite is, in some narrow sense, "pro-worker." What's more, all elites cheat the system, so any attack on any elite is, again, "pro-fairness."

In other words, if you want to prosecute a company for hurting workers, customers, neighbors and the environment, you have a target-rich environment. But just because you crush a corrupt enterprise that's hurting workers, it doesn't mean you did it for the workers, and – most importantly – it doesn't mean that you will take workers' side next time.

Autocrats do this all the time. Xi Jinping engaged in a massive purge of corrupt officials, who were indeed corrupt – but he only targeted the corrupt officials that made up his rivals' power-base. His own corrupt officials were unscathed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Putin did this, too. Russia's oligarchs are, to a one, monsters. When Putin defenestrates a rival – confiscates their fortune and sends them to prison – he acts against a genuinely corrupt criminal and brings some small measure of justice to that criminal's victims. But he only does this to the criminals who don't support him:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy

The Trump camp – notably JD Vance and Josh Hawley – have vowed to keep up the work of the FTC under Lina Khan, the generationally brilliant FTC Chair who accomplished more in four years than her predecessors have in 40. Trump just announced that he would replace Khan with Andrew Ferguson, who sounds like an LLM's bad approximation of Khan, promising to deal with "woke Big Tech" but also to end the FTC's "war on mergers." Ferguson may well plow ahead with the giant, important tech antitrust cases that Khan brought, but he'll do so because this is good grievance politics for Trump's base, and not because Trump or Ferguson are committed to protecting the American people from corporate predation itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Writing in his newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan describes all the ways that the GOP plans to destroy workers' lives while claiming to be a workers' party, and also all the ways the Dems failed to protect workers and so allowed the GOP to outlandishly claim to be for workers:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/you-cant-rebrand-a-class-war

For example, if Ferguson limits his merger enforcement to "woke Big Tech" companies while ending the "war on mergers," he won't stop the next Albertson's/Kroger merger, a giant supermarket consolidation that just collapsed because Khan's FTC fought it. The Albertson's/Kroger merger had two goals: raising food prices and slashing workers' wages, primarily by eliminating union jobs. Fighting "woke Big Tech" while waving through mergers between giant companies seeking to price-gouge and screw workers does not make you the party of the little guy, even if smashing Big Tech is the right thing to do.

Trump's hatred of Big Tech is highly selective. He's not proposing to do anything about Elon Musk, of course, except to make Musk even richer. Musk's net worth has hit $447b because the market is buying stock in his companies, which stand to make billions from cozy, no-bid federal contracts. Musk is a billionaire welfare queen who hates workers and unions and has a long rap-sheet of cheating, maiming and tormenting his workforce. A pro-worker Trump administration could add labor conditions to every federal contract, disqualifying businesses that cheat workers and union-bust from getting government contracts.

Instead, Trump is getting set to blow up the NLRB, an agency that Reagan put into a coma 40 years ago, until the Sanders/Warren wing of the party forced Biden to install some genuinely excellent people, like general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who – like Khan – did more for workers in four years than her predecessors did in 40. Abruzzo and her colleagues could have remained in office for years to come, if Democratic Senators had been able to confirm board member Lauren McFerran (or if two of those "pro-labor" Republican Senators had voted for her). Instead, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Synema rushed to the Senate chamber at the last minute in order to vote McFerran down and give Trump total control over the NLRB:

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/11/schumer-nlrb-vote-manchin-sinema

This latest installment in the Manchin Synematic Universe is a reminder that the GOP's ability to rebrand as the party of workers is largely the fault of Democrats, whose corporate wing has been at war with workers since the Clinton years (NAFTA, welfare reform, etc). Today, that same corporate wing claims that the reason Dems were wiped out in the 2024 election is that they were too left, insisting that the path to victory in the midterms and 2028 is to fuck workers even worse and suck up to big business even more.

We have to take the party back from billionaires. No Dem presidential candidate should ever again have "proxies" who campaign to fire anti-corporate watchdogs like Lina Khan. The path to a successful Democratic Party runs through worker power, and the only reliable path to worker power runs through unions.

Nolan's written frequently about how bad many union leaders are today. It's not just that union leaders are sitting on historically unprecedented piles of cash while doing less organizing than ever, at a moment when unions are more popular than they've been in a century with workers clamoring to join unions, even as union membership declines. It's also that union leaders have actually endorsed Trump – even as the rank and file get ready to strike:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yz_Z08KwKgFt3QvnV8nEETSgTXM5eZw5ujT4BmQXEWk/edit?link_id=0&can_id=9481ac35a2682a1d6047230e43d76be8&source=email-invitation-to-cover-amazon-labor-union-contract-fight-rally-cookout-on-monday-october-14-2024-2&email_referrer=email_2559107&email_subject=invitation-to-cover-jfk8-workers-authorize-amazon-labor-union-ibt-local-1-to-call-ulp-strike&tab=t.0

The GOP is going to do everything it can to help a tiny number of billionaires defeat hundreds of millions of workers in the class war. A future Democratic Party victory will come from taking a side in that class war – the workers' side. As Nolan writes:

If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise.

Nolan's remedy for the Democratic Party is simple and straightforward, if not easy:

The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either—the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)

Cosigned.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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This day in history (permalink)

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#15yrsago How electricity became a right, and what it means for broadband https://web.archive.org/web/20091217080912/http://publicola.net/?p=20687

#15yrsago Haagen Dazs opens no-Indians-allowed store in Delhi https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/randomaccess/sorry-indians-not-allowed1/

#5yrsago McKinsey’s internal mythology compares management consultants to “the Marine Corps, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits” https://www.propublica.org/article/how-mckinsey-makes-its-own-rules

#5yrsago Lawmaker admits not independently researching lobbyist’s claim that ectopic fetuses could be reimplanted in the uterus, blames medical journals https://www.wosu.org/news/2019-12-12/lawmaker-says-he-didnt-research-ectopic-pregnancy-procedure-before-adding-to-bill#stream/0

#5yrsago Private equity looters startled to be called out by name in Taylor Swift award-acceptance speech https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/private-equity-stunned-to-be-dragged-into-battle-between-taylor-swift-and-scooter-braun/

#5yrsago Radicalized is one of the Wall Street Journal’s top sf books of 2019! https://memex.craphound.com/2019/12/14/radicalized-is-one-of-the-wall-street-journals-top-sf-books-of-2019/

#1yrago How the NYPD defeated bodycams https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/14/all-cams-are-private/#spoil-the-bushel

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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

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Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

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