DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE ELECTION - LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 7

20 October 2024

WHY THE WORKING CLASS SUPPORTS TRUMP – EVEN IF HIS PARTY HATES HELPING THEM

One of the more unsettling political conversations that I’ve ever had was after the 2020 election with a near-neighbor in Maine; a working class guy, married for many years, the father of two very smart young adults, who’s made his way as a welder for decades. We met over a beer – and he began to rant about socialism and the dangers it posed to American society. I asked him:

“Are you truly against Obamacare, given that around 80% of bankruptcies are caused by private medical insurance not covering so many hospitalization and treatment costs?”

“I have no complaints about my medical insurance”.

“But that’s because you are well paid for what you do. For many members of the underclass…”

“They should get a job” he said.

“But even someone making minimum wage…”

“I got myself out of low wage hell. Why can’t they?”

“Did your two children have to take out big loans to go to university?” I asked. He answered:

“Free education is bad education”.

“Many of the top universities in Europe are free” I noted.

“But European taxes are crazy and the state intervenes in everything”.

Before I could counter this comment the guy raised his hand, like a cop stopping traffic. And he told me:

“Clearly you’ve been transformed into a Socialist”.

“I’m a Social Democrat, not a Socialist”.

“Same damn thing” he said. And when I tried to explain that there’s a big ideological gulf between socialism and social democracy, he ended the conversation by saying: "Trump will be back – just to put guys like you in their place."

This exchange sums up a great truism in modern American politics – the working class has often backed Republican candidates ever since Ronald Reagan’s election victory in 1980… even though that party doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

Consider Social Security – a retirement pension plan for all Americans who have paid taxes and are over sixty-five – that is in danger of running out of federal funds by 2041 (though rumor has it that it could be looking at depleted coffers by 2033). Medicare – which also guarantees health care for older Americans – might just go bankrupt by the end of this decade. And here’s what the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, has to say about the future of these two crucial social welfare programs under Republican rule:

"The current Republican Study Committee [RSC] budget, representing 80 percent of House Republicans , proposed cutting $1.5 trillion of Social Security Benefits over the next ten years… It would reduce the benefit formula and raise the retirement age to 69, which would especially hurt low-income retirees."

Though Trump and his party colleagues assure us that they will not cut these two vital programs, the truth is: Republicans from Reagan onwards have been  obsessed with killing off what they call ‘big government’ – replacing it with low taxes and as little state involvement in the lives of its citizens as possible. Reagan himself stated that ‘our welfare system has become a poverty trap’ and believed that individuals who lived on unemployment payments were sponging off the state. He took office in 1981 when inflation was in the double-digits and interest rates were a crazed 20% - so his low tax, low federal spending pronouncements gained traction… especially with the traditionally Democratic working class.

What is interesting about the Reagan Revolution (because it was just that: a vast sea-change in American politics which still impacts the country today) is that it was an absolute refutation of America’s one true experiment with social democracy: Franklin Roosevelt’s The New Deal. Created shortly after he became President in 1932 in the midst of a vast economic depression, Roosevelt’s Brain Trust (his socio-economic and legal advisors) helped shape a series of federally funded programs to tackle widespread poverty and create employment.

The truth is: the Second World War had a big role in ending the Great Depression… but Roosevelt’s New Deal programs became the basis of the social welfare system of the United States until 1980. It’s hard to remember that, from 1932-1968, there was only one Republican president (Eisenhower) for eight of those thirty-six years... and he kept most New Deal policies intact.  Ditto Nixon when he was elected in 1968. But the neo-conservative movement – which began to gain traction after the Watergate scandal– abhorred everything to do with big government, and became completely intoxicated by Milton Freedman, a University of Chicago economist whose believed in "supply side economics” – which (as summarized on the Reagan Library website) promotes the ideas that “tax cuts encouraged economic expansion which would result in increases in federal government revenue at a lower tax rate. Higher revenues would then be used to increase defense spending and balance the federal budget”.

Though Reaganomics did eventually bring about an economic boom, this anti-big-government president left the country with a ferocious national debt. And even though history since 1988 has shown that Democratic presidents have been better stewards of the economy, Republicans still proport themselves to be better for business and, ergo, the worker.  Why is this so? And why do the Republicans have the support of so many blue collar Americans? In his now seminal 2004 book, ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas’, the journalist Thomas Frank had this to say about why the right grabbed working class support – even though their programs are so anti-working class:

“I answered that question by doing a close study of my home state of Kansas, the most decent, average state of them all. Kansas is a place with a radical past but which has become in recent decades the greatest culture-war battlefield of them all, as its workers and farmers enlist in futile right-wing crusades over abortion and the theory of evolution . . . and as the Republican party successfully strengthens corporations in their simultaneous war against workers and farmers. How has this happened?... My answer, in short, was that the culture wars allowed the GOP to capture the populist language of social class and present themselves as the embodiment of working-class anti-elitism. At the same time, thanks to the changing nature of the Democratic Party, real populism largely disappeared from the spectrum of the acceptable”.

And to see just how this populist strategy is playing out in the Presidential election of 2024, just consider the following: the Teamsters, perhaps the most important of US labor unions, which have almost always backed Democratic candidates, declined to give its support to Harris this year. More tellingly, as reported in Newsweek earlier this month (referencing Harry Enten, a CNN election analyst): 

“Trump is on track for the best Republican performance among union voters in 40 years. According to the forecast, Harris is leading Trump among union voters by just 9 points, which Enten noted would be the "worst Democratic performance in a generation… Democrats have slowly been losing support from union voters over the years. President Joe Biden won this group by 19 points in 2020—in comparison, Bill Clinton won by 30 points in 1992… Enten said Trump is also currently polling ahead of Harris by 31 points among voters who graduated from vocational and trade schools’”.

That last statement speaks volumes about the educational gap that is also at the heart of this year’s election – and why Harris cannot gain traction with America’s working class… even though her programs will benefit them far more than Trump’s. As Steven Bannon – Trump’s alt-right Machiavelli who helped engineered his 2016 victory – noted at the end of the last decade:

“The Republican party is totally dysfunctional. It’s essentially a working-class party. The votes all come from working class or lower-middle class people, predominantly. And it doesn’t represent their interests”.

In America we thrive on political contradictions. And this might be the biggest one going – especially as working class support for the arch capitalist for Donald Trump could be a decisive factor in the election this year.