A New Version of the Same Old Story
I am tired of having to argue with people about the “white working class.”
As historian David Roediger noted in his book The Sinking Middle Class, “The phrase ‘white working class’ inevitably accents its first word and undermines its last.” The working class is global, diverse, bound together—as it always has been—by the need to work in order to survive, not by cultural cues or identity markers. To single out white workers for their whiteness is to elevate race over class, to imply that white people who do wage labor have a set of common interests that other workers do not.
But it is also notable when the word “white” is absent from the discussion, having already shaped discourse in its image. “Can the GOP Really Become the Party of Workers?” asks an article in The New York Times by Noam Scheiber. Certainly, some elements of the Republican Party would like us to think so, as long as the “workers” in question are still white men. Presidential campaigns, Roediger pointed out, are often inflection points for how Americans think about class.
The term “white working class” came to us, Roediger wrote, from electoral politics, not from any kind of shop-floor organizing. Those white workers were assumed to be socially conservative, downwardly mobile, rural or suburban, straight, almost comically “unwoke,” and above all, male. Reporters visit them, as I have previously noted, once every four years in the so-called backwaters where they are supposed to be found.
J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is a millennial millionaire who got famous trashing his own “hillbilly” family in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and brings to the Trump ticket a more middle America version of the bootstrap myth. From Middletown, Ohio, and with family in Kentucky, Vance couldn’t wait to leave this world behind and scold his relatives for their lack of personal responsibility. Now he waxes poetic about his hometown and family on the campaign trail.
As Sarah Jones at New York magazine notes, Vance became a darling of the New Right—the ostensibly populist movement that has repackaged old conservative grievances against liberal intellectuals for 2024’s crises—by pretending to care about workers’ needs. He differentiates, though, between “good unions” and “bad unions,” Jones writes: “The Fraternal Order of Police is a good union. The Starbucks union is bad.”
Yet the Starbucks union—along home health care workers and dollar store, Walmart, and Amazon employees—is more representative of the working class in America than the cops are, regardless of what Vance and Trump might say. Vance, as Elizabeth Catte noted in her 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, remade his (somewhat) home region in the image he wanted to see, but the reality is very different.
Vance wasn’t always on the Trump train. When he was promoting the personal responsibility, neoliberal narrative at the heart of Hillbilly Elegy, he was an anti-Trumper, peddling a narrative that a certain kind of liberal found soothing about why working people would vote for The Apprentice huckster. Trump, he once argued, was selling “cultural heroin,” an “easy escape from the pain” of life in late capitalist America. But he found MAGA religion when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022, backed by billionaire Peter Thiel. Suddenly, it was the border that was the problem: “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” (Never mind that Vance, as Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller note in The New Republic, once “worked for a white-shoe law firm whose clients included Purdue Pharma, the disgraced manufacturer of Oxycontin.”) Trump enjoyed the conversion so much that he added Vance to his ticket.
Then there’s Josh Hawley, a likewise Yale-educated Republican Senator, who in a recent speech argued that “in the choice between labor and capital,” his party must “start prioritizing the workingman.” It’s the shipping of jobs overseas that Hawley is focused on, like Trump, and the workingman he cares about is a hard-hatted white dad. Hawley and Vance and their ilk, Scheiber writes in the Times, “have worked closely with a new generation of think tanks and intellectuals, who flesh out proposals for what a conservative economic populism might look like.” That even includes, Scheiber notes without naming them, “certain labor unions and other left-leaning groups.”
Presumably, Scheiber means the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose president, Sean O’Brien, spoke at the Republican National Convention this summer, giving the party, as Alex N. Press at Jacobin writes, “a photo op for a party desperate to use workers as props in its rebranding campaign.” Other labor leaders, and even some of his own members, openly criticized O’Brien’s move; one member told Press, “I truly do not understand how you compliment rightwing politicians on a national stage without at least getting them to agree to something we are supposedly demanding. For example, I was told we are attacking right-to-work politicians, but here we are donating to Josh Hawley and praising J.D. Vance?” But Vance and Hawley—and Trump—were thrilled. As Press notes, it doesn’t matter what O’Brien said, only that he showed up.
Unions have endorsed plenty of Republicans in the past—the Teamsters, for example, backed Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush—but these new supposedly pro-worker Republicans are only pro a very specific type of worker. While O’Brien might fit the bill, many of his members do not. During the Trump Administration, New York Teamsters Joint Council 16 leader George Miranda told me after one of his members, Eber Garcia Vasquez, was deported, “Immigrant rights and labor rights are explicitly tied together . . . . So we have decided to be a sanctuary union, meaning that we protect our members.” The union, he said, would educate all its members on what it meant to stand up for the immigrants among them.
Members also criticized O’Brien for sharing an article Hawley wrote on “pro-labor conservatism,” which apparently means blaming diversity initiatives and trans people for the decline of worker power. Never mind how many Black, migrant, queer, and trans members the union might have.
It’s not as if O’Brien doesn’t have other options. After all, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain showed up at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) wearing a T-shirt reading “Trump is a scab.” (O’Brien was not invited to the DNC and jokingly blamed yet another unionized workforce, the U.S. Postal Service, for losing his invitation.) The UAW and the American Postal Workers Union are among several progressive unions that have called for ceasefire in Gaza, a shorter workweek, and other policies that reflect the diverse nature of the actual working class. Even while Fain was speaking at the DNC, the UAW was demanding that a Palestinian speaker be allowed at the podium as well.
Internationalism matters not just because of loyalty to a centuries-old radical ideal. Trumpism-Vanceism-Hawleyism isn’t a real pro-worker platform. Instead, it’s peddling nationalism, and whether or not the word “white” is included in its outreach to the working class, the vision it has of America is of a hierarchically arranged nation that has no room for most of us.
Trump’s supposedly pro-worker policies were mostly protectionist: tariffs on imports, bluster on China, renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. Meanwhile, his Labor Department was anything but pro-worker, and his recent gleeful chat with Elon Musk about firing workers caused the UAW to file charges with the National Labor Relations Board. “When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean,” Fain said in a statement.
In shifting the blame for bad jobs (or job losses) to borders that leak jobs out and fail to block immigrants from coming in, economic nationalism apologizes for the status quo. It offers little to protect workers from the real tyrants in their lives: the bosses. Real class consciousness turns the lens back toward the employing class, the one to which Trump, Vance, and Hawley now indubitably belong, however humble their origins.
Too many liberals have bought into the myth of the white working class, and have dropped the word “white” from the phrase but catered to whiteness nonetheless. “[T]he overall message on immigration from the Democratic Party in the past week, as it has been since Ms. Harris announced her candidacy last month, has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades,” The New York Times announced after the DNC. Democrats at once bemoan the racism of the Trump voter and blame him for their pandering on border policies and economic nationalism.
Such nationalism itself is international: Around the world, the far right, with its drive toward stronger borders and ethnic purity, is on the rise. In Britain, where I spent the summer, anti-immigrant riots broke out under the new Labour government, with reactionary mobs setting fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, smashing up mosques and shops run by Muslims, and assaulting people in the streets. “In Tamworth,” Richard Seymour writes, “where the recently elected Labour [member of Parliament] had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m [$10.5 million] a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England,’ ‘Fuck Pakis,’ and ‘Get Out.’ ”
While the riots were eventually smothered by larger antifascist protests, commentators rushed to acknowledge the pogromists’ “legitimate concerns” while sighing with relief for “decency” winning the day. As Seymour notes, though, “Those who flooded the streets to stop the riots had recently been slandered as ‘hate marchers’ by politicians and pundits alike when they rallied in support of Palestine.”
As I write this, we lack good data on the class backgrounds of the rioters, but we do know that we have been stewing in a sea of racist rhetoric, invoking class as a substitute for race rather than the other way around. As Seymour writes, “Racism does not so much express misplaced class grievance as organize the toxic emotions of failure, humiliation, and decline. The terror of white extinction, to that extent, is the fear that without rigid boundaries and borders those who have hitherto been protected will plunge into the toiling mass of humanity.”
In this context, it’s important to note that the unrest is about gender as much as it is about race. It is not an accident that Hawley speaks of “workingmen,” that he and Vance evoke the days of the industrial breadwinner with a wife at home. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” have been memed by his opponents, but it’s worth noting that the obsession with (white) baby-having is embedded in Great Replacement fantasies and the infamous neo-Nazi “14 words”: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The insidious thing, of course, is that one doesn’t have to be a white supremacist or even a nationalist to find paeans to the traditional family and the industrial job seductive. The American mythos, as Greg Grandin detailed in his magisterial The End of the Myth, has such ideals built in. It is too easy, then, for even well-informed commentators to make the slip between “white men” and “workers,” to assume that what is good for the former is good for the latter or that they are one and the same.
But this new, supposedly pro-worker conservatism is anything but. It is a new version of an old divide-and-conquer strategy that is designed to leave the hierarchies of the capitalist world intact while winning the allegiance of a new generation to jobs, the family, God, and country—not even through the offer of pie in the sky when you die, as the Industrial Workers of the World would have said, but purely through the pleasure of having more than someone else, and perhaps even getting to take part in the punishment doled out by the manager, the CEO, or the President.