How the "Working Class Republican" Scam Works

A brief description of how this is all gonna go.

The sum total of the Republican worker power agenda. (Photo: Getty)

The Republican Party under Trump would like to opportunistically cast itself as a “working class” or “pro-worker” party. As a starting point to today’s conversation: this is bullshit, and the pundits who give it credence only help the bullshit spread more widely. Many labor journalists including myself have written long pieces laying out the policy reasons why this is bullshit. (Here’s one by me on the awful labor elements of Project 2025, here’s Dave Jamieson on JD Vance’s bullshit, here’s Steve Greenhouse on the Republicans’ bullshit, and you can Google for many, many more.) I’m not going to belabor, hehehe, the reasons why it is bullshit here. What I want to do today is to briefly sketch out what actually makes up the alleged shift in the GOP, and what is going to happen, generally speaking, if we allow it to flourish.

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A classic pro-labor political agenda, by which I mean “a political agenda that will actually help the working class,” consists of things that will strengthen worker power—more and stronger unions, and a government framework to help rather than hinder those unions—and things that will rein in corporate power. This is common sense, when you remember that there is a natural and omnipresent power struggle between capital and labor under our system of capitalism. Companies and investors and managers are always trying to seize more power for themselves in order to keep wages and worker power low, and the labor movement seeks to empower workers to fight against this. So: help workers get stronger, in the form of unions, and put guardrails on the excesses of corporations, via corporate regulations and taxes. Labor policy is quite detailed and labor law is its own morass of nitpickery that even I do not fully understand but in general it is easy to comprehend who a policy agenda is trying to help and who it is not trying to help by using the above framework. Do not evaluate these things based on who has more pickup trucks at their political rallies or who uses what songs for their ads or who you would like to attend a football game with or who wears a flannel shirt. (Or even who shows up to put on a concerned face at a picket line.) Evaluate the various political agendas based on whether they legitimately make worker power greater and restrict corporate power, or not.

If “build worker power and restrict corporate power” are the two pillars of left wing labor policy, here are the two pillars of the Republican Party as a Working Class Party of today:

1. Anti-immigration. This, not union power, is the bedrock of what the Republicans are selling as their working class agenda. Instead of saying “companies are stepping on workers’ necks,” they say instead, “immigrants are taking money out of workers’ pockets.” Notice that any conversation on this topic by the right wing shifts almost immediately into a rant against immigration. It never goes from “we want to help workers” to “we want to build unions.” It always goes from “we want to help workers” to “immigrants are the problem.” This is the number one sleight of hand at work in all of this. Whenever an allegedly pro-worker Republican starts talking about the perils of immigration, stop him and ask him instead what he wants to do to build more and stronger unions so that working people will actually have the ability to take their fair share of the economy back. The answer will be bullshit, I guarantee.

No matter where you land on the immigration issue—whether you think it is mostly a humanitarian crisis in which working people of the world are artificially divided and oppressed by arbitrary borders in order to benefit capitalists (true), or whether you think immigration is a serious problem for the American working class because immigrants are stealing American workers’ jobs (not true in the sense of being a national crisis, but perhaps true in spots)—the one thing that is definitely true is that immigration is not the most important part of a pro-worker labor policy. It is at best a secondary concern. The heart of a pro-worker labor policy is union power and corporate regulation. Republicans instead want to sell the idea that the American economy is a zero-sum battle between American workers and immigrants coming in to take jobs and money and housing and resources from those American workers. As a matter of fact, the American economy is not zero-sum, and the job market is not a zero-sum contest between natives and immigrants, and the affordable housing crisis was not caused by immigration, and in the long run immigration grows rather than shrinks the economy.

So while there are legitimate questions of logistics and resources necessary to take in and assimilate large numbers of immigrants into America and its economy in the least harmful way, the fact that these questions are always swapped into the labor policy discussion is just pure scaremongering by Republicans. It is just a way to use racism to distract from the fact that Republicans hate unions. If you find that analysis too blunt, we can say that it is a way to demonize an other in order to avoid addressing the genuine questions at the heart of American capitalism that cause the working class to lack power. Going forward, just count the seconds from when someone asks these Republicans about the working class to see how long it takes them to start demonizing immigrants. And then see how long it takes them to start talking about how to build stronger unions. The answer will speak for itself.

JD Vance.

2. Culture war transposed onto companies. If you are genuinely concerned about the fact that big corporations have too much power and workers have too little, restricting corporate power is its own goal. Restoring the fair balance of power is an end in itself. In the case of the Working Class Republican Party, that is not how it works. Republicans are still the party of business. They do not want to restrict corporate power in order to empower the working class. What they do instead is to take their culture war issues—gay rights, trans rights, “DEI” aka racism, and other right wing/ religious obsessions—and apply them to corporations. So they hate “big tech” and whatnot not because those companies are too powerful and are therefore detrimental to the working class economically, but because they believe those companies are too powerful and are therefore detrimental to right wing values culturally.

This is a pretty clear distinction! Although one that routinely befuddles national pundits. “Buhhhh, Josh Hawley and JD Vance said big tech companies are bad… is this populism?” No. This is culture war, applied to corporations. Instead of saying, for example, “Anheuser-Busch needs to sign a strong contract with its union in order to help workers live better lives,” you say, “Anheuser-Busch sucks because Bud Light had a trans person in an ad!” To me, it does not seem hard to see which of these positions represents true concern about the dangerous imbalance of power between workers and corporations, and which one is just bigotry masquerading as populism. But a lot of pundits seem mystified.

Again, as in the case of anti-immigration, what we see is that in place of substantive policies that would make workers stronger, Republicans offer a lot of hand-waving about who workers should be mad at, without the substantive policies. My personal favorite example of how twisted up this genre of politicking can get is when Marco Rubio wrote an op-ed almost supporting the Amazon warehouse union drive in 2021, not because unions are good (he made sure to say they were not) but because “companies like Amazon have been allies of the left in the culture war, but when their bottom line is threatened they turn to conservatives to save them.” Unions are bad, but if a company gets too woke, we’ll give them a union as punishment! This is not a pro-worker agenda, my friends. Please do not fall for this.

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That’s it. Those two elements are the core of the Working Class Republican Party. The fact that the national political media takes this seriously as some sort of meaningful shift in policy is a testament to the fact that we really need more experienced labor reporters in this country. It is very dumb.

Now, let me make a prediction to you about how this will play out, if Trump and Vance ascend to the White House. Corporations, which employ many lobbyists who are attuned to these things, will perceive that the Republican anti-corporate push is rooted not in a genuine distaste for corporate economic power but rather in a distaste for the trappings of progressivism that major corporations don for PR purposes. So what will corporations do? They will change their outward appearances. They will retire the pride flags and they will stop putting trans people in ads and they will stop putting out Black Lives Matter statements and they will stop touting their DEI policies. And they will tell their ad agencies to put more American flags in their ads.

This will be enough to satisfy the Republican Party. They will be able to proclaim victory in their culture war against woke corporations. Said corporations will proceed to conduct business as usual. The Republican Party will enact its typical anti-union policies and cut corporate taxes and scrap corporate regulations, and carry out flamboyant and draconian anti-immigrant efforts, as they always do. This regulatory environment will be good for corporate power and correspondingly bad for worker power and union power. Then when the next election rolls around the Republicans will say “Hey we defeated the woke anti-family big corporations—you can tell by how many American flags they have in their ads now.” And dozens of political pundits on cable news networks and major newspapers will say “Wow, it really seems like the Republicans are now the working class party—listen to how they insult the big companies, whereas liberals are always talking about complicated policy stuff that those pickup driving people don’t even understand.” And union density will continue to decline and the balance of power between labor and capital will move in the wrong direction. And this will continue for as long as people are fooled about it, I guess.

This is all there is to it. I really find this whole credulous acceptance of the premise that there is some real newfound concern for the working class within the Republican Party to be extremely tedious so on a personal level I would appreciate if you explain this bullshit to your friends and also, please, if we could avoid having to indulge in this discussion for the next four years, that would be great, too. Please unionize your workplace in the meantime.

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More

• I wrote a piece for In These Times yesterday about what the left should be doing now that Biden has dropped out and it looks like Harris is sliding in. It’s a moment of opportunity. This all may result in the DNC being less apocalyptic than I had expected, which, as someone who is going there to write about it, is a little disappointing, but I will swallow that disappointment out of patriotism, etc.

• Previously, on the topic of the bullshit Republican Working Class agenda: On what Project 2025 means for labor, on why Sean O’Brien is a patsy, on how to jujitsu the culture wars. For a more complete discussion on why the labor movement is central to the task of saving America, you can read my book, “The Hammer,” which is about that very question. I am lining up a few more book tour dates for the late summer and fall—if you’re interested in bringing me to your city to speak, email me.

• Thank you to everyone who subscribes to How Things Work. As I mentioned in this piece, it would be great if there were more labor journalists in the US media. That is tough, because labor journalism tends not to be a lucrative field, and also the journalism industry as a whole is collapsing. This publication is my own attempt to build independent media in this environment. This place is 100% supported by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I have chosen not to put up a paywall here so everyone can read it. I rely on those of you who can afford to pay the (modest and affordable) subscription price to help me pay the bills. If you like How Things Work and want to help keep it alive, please take a few seconds now and become a paid subscriber. I appreciate it.