Htf have the Democrats lost so much of the unionized working class?
The party and its surrounding intellectual ecosystem have been too hesitant to adopt a clear philosophy on issues their opponents can exploit: in particular trade, industrial policy, and immigration.
Politico has a pretty good article up, by Holly Otterbein and Megan Cassella, about the struggle between the Biden and Trump campaigns over the vote of the unionized working class:
The article doesn’t frame things quite like the title of this blog post does, but that’s certainly what I was thinking throughout reading it: “Htf have the Democrats lost so much of the unionized working class?” The framing of their article is something more along the lines of: “What can Joe Biden say or do to get back more of the unionized working class which voted for Obama in 2008, but went to Trump in 2016?” Nonetheless, all the information and quotes (mostly from interviews with union leaders) in the article are presented in a certain question-begging way.
Otterbein and Cassella draw attention to three issues which seem to have cost Democrats a big chunk of this constituency: trade, industrial policy, and immigration. In one of these three issues, immigration, the Democratic leadership could make a decent (but not perfect) argument that it sacrificed electoral pragmatism for sake of a larger moral principle (but, more on this below).
On trade, the article notes that the support of establishment Democrats like Biden for policies like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership has left them vulnerable to being blamed for exporting the country’s manufacturing jobs overseas. The article doesn’t mention Trump’s trade war with China, but this is obviously a related factor in how some voters whose livelihood has been destroyed by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs would tend to perceive the two parties’ candidates. The article also probably ought to mention (it doesn’t) that the 2019-20 Democratic primary rejected candidates—in particular, Bernie Sanders—who have been consistently critical of those kinds of trade arrangements over their political careers.
On industrial policy, the article notes that among some parts of the electorate, the Biden campaign has been heavily emphasizing Trump’s failure to deliver on his 2016 promise to implement a vigorous industrial policy for the country: the re-seeding of the Great Lakes and Midwest with manufacturing and the reinvestment in decaying national infrastructure have not taken place. And yet, the establishment Democrats’ modern track record on industrial policy is itself not particularly strong. (And frankly, the whole topic of “industrial policy” seems to be somehow unfashionable among the major progressive publications and thinktanks; one has to turn to oddball publications like American Affairs for any in-depth treatment of the subject.) The Republicans’ modern track record on industrial policy is also weak, but when the GOP really wants to, they can associate themselves with nostalgic imagery drawn from the last time that the US really did have strong industrial policy, which was during the Cold War. During that time, military defense (the “military industrial complex” as Eisenhower called it) was a major, foundational component in keeping domestic manufacturing well-supplied with stable contracts. Today’s Republicans, whether of the Trumpian or Bushist flavor, are happy to vaguely associate themselves with the prestige of this legacy (i.e. with space programs, with “star wars” programs, etc.), whereas progressives, as noted above, have become for whatever reason a bit squirmy around the whole subject.
Similar to what happened with the trade issue, during the 2019-20 Democratic primary the candidate who did propose intriguing industrial policies was weeded out of the process. I am thinking in particular of Elizabeth Warren, whose labor-capital codetermination proposal, which could give employees a real voice on issues like plant location, seemed totally fascinating to me (but the hivemind dismissed it as “unsexy” for some reason). At any rate, it seems understandable that many unionized workers would fail to perceive the Democrats as an “industrial policy” party—and also understandable that some would fall for the Republicans’ clever rhetoric celebrating the legacy of the last time the country did have real industrial policy.
Now we come to the issue of immigration. The Otterbein and Cassella article implies that the disagreement between the Democratic leadership and the Trump-leaning segment of union membership on immigration is actually a moral disagreement: that what’s actually at issue here is xenophobia and racism. Otterbein and Cassella note that the more liberal-leaning unions, which are relatively enthusiastic for Biden, have large numbers of black and hispanic members. This way of putting it produces the impression that the less-liberal unions are whiter, but the authors don’t specify (they should!) what these more right-leaning unions’ demographics actually look like. At any rate, the article argues that much of the Trump-supporting unionized working class has been seduced by racial demagoguery and by the psychological appeal of scapegoating.
“[Trump] has a very, very, very solid foundation of our members,” said James Williams, a vice president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, whose surveys of members painted a similar picture. “They connect with his messaging and a lot of the fear-mongering going all the way back to when he was first elected with, ‘Be afraid of the immigrant. The immigrant’s here to take your job.’ That resonated with our membership. They feel like their way of life and their way of living is under attack and without really understanding the dynamics at play. I mean, the immigrant worker is being abused by employers.”
This characterization might or might not be accurate; I am not sure. But, unlike with the issues of trade and industrial policy, with immigration there seems to be a strong degree to which the Democrats’ priorities have been motivated by high-minded moral principle. An anti-immigration union-member who blames 2010s-era immigrants for the fact that the plant in his or her town closed down in the 2000s does deserve moral (and logical) condemnation. When either party, Democrat or Republican, engages in racial scapegoating to draw the electorate’s attention away from societally damaging underlying structural forces, this is morally contemptable. And, when a party takes a principled stand against doing so, even if that stand costs them votes (or forces the formation of a somewhat more awkward coalition), this is morally laudable.
However, Democrats, and progressives in general, do bear some of the blame in entrenching the ideological “mismatch” between themselves and much of the unionized working-class, on the issue of immigration. The constant ideological theme with immigration over the past half-decade is that progressives have refused to adopt a philosophy of immigration organized around the idea of limits, or proportion. How much immigration in a given year, or month, or week, is “enough”? Progressives (along with the neocon and economic-libertarian segments of the old Bush-era right-wing coalition) are generally unwilling to answer that question—and this in turn produces the impression of a political ideology which believes at a very core, metaphysical level, that there should be no such thing as limits at all, and indeed no such thing as borders between states. For reasons I will get more deeply into in a future post, this is a philosophically incoherent position—unless there is a single planetary government (whose capital, by the way, would be where? Washington? Davos, Switzerland? Xanadu? Persepolis?). Again, the scapegoating-impulse to blame immigrants for the fact that the local factory closed down is not an impulse that should be morally negotiated with. Kudos to the Democrats and to their surrounding liberal, progressive and social-democratic social-discursive ecosystem for refusing to do so. However, this party and ecosystem does bear some responsibility, moral or otherwise, for failing to develop and articulate a coherent position on immigration, and for always seeming to be (and perhaps actually being?) tacitly maximalist on that issue. It is morally reasonable for the unionized working class (or anyone else) to step away from what appears to be a maximalist position on immigration—especially if it’s a maximalism which seems to want to avoid clarifying itself as such.
To return to the blog post’s starting question: how did the Democrats lose a big chunk of the unionized working class to Trumpism? They mostly, but not entirely, have themselves blame. On trade and industrial policy, their choices may have been intelligent on short-term practical grounds, but not, I think, on principled moral grounds—and the long-term political cost should now be clear enough. On immigration, their refusal to scapegoat immigrants is morally laudable, and their relinquishing of the votes of people who insist upon enshrining xenophobic explanatory mechanisms for the country’s economic woes was certainly the right thing to do. However, failing to come up with a coherent philosophy of immigration—one that doesn’t just settle into rhetorically “easy”, philosophically incoherent, maximalist formulations, but which rather seeks to articulate something which makes sense in a world comprised of many different states—was not the right thing to do, and this intellectual and ideological failure, which is not really “excusable” on moral-principle grounds, has also had its costs.