@RBReich, @GuardianUS, @glennyoungkin, @TerryMcAuliffe,
Robert Reich takes aim at the recent Virginia gubernatorial race; there are some misfires.
Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in the Bill Clinton Administration, occasionally publishes a column in The Guardian newspaper, which I regularly sample. Recently, in a column titled “It’s not all about the culture war – Democrats helped shaft the working class,” Reich made a host of allegations that I wanted to investigate further. The spur for his column was Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the November 2 Virginia gubernatorial election to Republican Glenn Youngkin. Reich noted that some mainstream media analyses concluded Democrats lost because they’d become too Left-leaning, thereby alienating lots of middle-of-the-road Americans. He demurred – strenuously. You can find the complete Reich column here.
Specifically, Reich accused Youngkin of “racism” as the basis for his victory but without offering concrete evidence. The charge of racism is one of the most – if not the most – serious charge you can make against any public figure or elected official today. But Reich only wrote about “dog whistles” and he alleged that Republican candidates and conservative media exploited hysteria over Critical Race Theory to push Youngkin over the finish line, which he denied is taught in [K-12] Virginia schools anyway. ‘CRT is comin’ to get you!’ is the implied dog whistle.
It’s all a little disingenuous. Derivatives of CRT, including curricula that are inspired by CRT and other anti-racism initiatives, are real. I don’t want to get into whether CRT is a valid theory or not, but it’s not uncommon for academic theses to become simplified and modified once they enter the public domain. Critical Race Theory itself is an offshoot of Critical Theory as originally developed by the Marxist-inspired Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in the 1930s, and CRT has been expanded since the 1970s beyond a legal theory to a much broader theory seeking to explain virtually all unequal outcomes for the Black community, not just incarceration. In the public mind it’s almost synonymous with systemic racism. But my sense is that Reich, including other columnists in The Guardian and elsewhere, have read the tea leaves and they know that many, many Americans don’t like being told they’re racist just because they’re not actively anti-racist, and they don’t want their children growing up with excessive guilt. That is what CRT means to a lot of people. So, what’s Reich’s solution? To deny that CRT is being taught. No, a law school class on CRT is not being delivered to third graders anywhere, but Reich and others are quibbling about semantics at best.
Still, the history of slavery, Jim Crow, de facto discrimination and the continuing struggle for equality must be taught.
Also interesting is Reich’s effort to say that the Democratic Party has abandoned labor in general and the union movement in particular. I’m a former union president (TNG-CWA 34070, which was the newsroom union at The Indianapolis Star), so I feel qualified to address this claim head-on.
Reich wrote that “Both Clinton and Obama … ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.” This is in spite of near total support for public employee unions, which are the only unions to show growth in America.
I cannot argue the wisdom of past trade agreements here but they unquestionably led to off-shoring jobs, yet the high cost of labor in America was as much a push as cheap labor and lax safety and environmental regulations abroad were a pull. And, unionized labor typically is the most expensive blue-collar labor in America, not counting skilled and licensed trades such as electrician or plumber – both GM and Ford moved lots of production to Mexico in recent decades, yet what were they supposed to do when faced with United Auto Workers demands for high wages and super-high benefit packages? I’m co-author, with Ted Evanoff, formerly of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, of a 2009 book on the auto industry (“At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry,” from ECW Press of Toronto) that was largely set in Kokomo, Indiana, a major Chrysler transmission plant at the time, and I can tell you, anecdotally at least, that lots of working people in the town hated UAW workers because they had it so good and other working class people didn’t. Of course, one may argue that everyone should have a contract like the UAW folks have, that every worker should belong to a strong union. I’m not necessarily against such a scenario, though some would argue that it would blow a hole in any remaining American competitiveness and drive inflation much higher than it already is - that’s above my pay grade to decide, but a truly progressive tax code across the board that’s actually enforced and without all the loopholes for lots of people, not just the corporations, would do a lot to help mitigate economic inequality.
In the meantime, though, Reich thinks the government should have ‘created’ good-paying replacement jobs for blue-collar workers uprooted by free trade agreements – sounds fair enough, but is that an intellectually honest position? If every politician, Republican or Democrat, were telling the truth about their “job creation” efforts we’d have full employment two times over. Any tax revenue spent on public works projects must be measured against the opportunity cost of not letting taxpayers themselves spend the money, as well. Again, what the final calculation might be is above my pay grade, and this a separate question from whether government or private industry should take the lead in the job creation business, or perhaps public-private partnerships might be an answer.
If Reich wants to talk about job creation and the hurt blue-collar Americans are facing (so many are, of course) I would ask him to look at our immigration policy under successive administrations. So many non-union building trades such as single-family house framing, drywall, roofing and painting appear to be overwhelmingly Hispanic in many parts of the country these days. I have no idea who’s a citizen, a Permanent Legal Resident, or an otherwise undocumented worker who has registered for an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) with the Internal Revenue Service. But I do know they are consistently terrific employees, and I also know these are jobs that traditionally were held by working-class whites and Blacks. Others have documented how the opioid and Fentanyl crisis has hit hardest in these latter communities. Is there a connection? Ya think? Right now it’s the hard-core White Power and neo-Nazi groups, as well as the far-Right generally, that claim “they’re taking our jobs.” That is a very dangerous trend and it won’t do just to condemn them; we must prove they’re wrong.
Nonetheless, Reich is correct in writing that the labor union movement has been “hammered” in recent decades (not counting government jobs), and he cites data that show union membership fell from 22 percent of all workers during the Clinton Administration to less than 11 percent today. But the failures of the labor movement (in the private sector, mind you) are not solely due to free trade agreements or the fecklessness of some Democratic presidents, or the greed of Big Business. Not only will companies seek the lowest cost of doing business, there’s always consumer behavior to consider: will he or she pay more for “Made in America?” That’s hard to discern because there are so few consumer products made in America anymore, and what is made here is not necessarily better quality. I paid a premium for my Allen Edmonds dress shoes made in Wisconsin, but I know I could get comparable quality from abroad for less.
I’m not hostile to Reich, only a bit disappointed in his self-righteousness coupled with an unattractive silence on the real complexity behind some of the issues he raises.
You can also find Robert Reich at robertreich.substack.com
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Regarding Youngkin, this week's Economist had an interesting point. "Virginia’s schools don’t teach critical race theory, but Glenn Youngkin’s old school does."...."A visitor from Mars might find Mr Youngkin’s populist scare-tactics at odds with his record of elite institutions (Rice, Harvard, McKinsey, the Carlyle Group) and immense wealth. The Martian should then be challenged to find an up-and-coming Republican with a much humbler résumé. Populist leaders, from Peron to Orban, are more often elite figures than working-class heroes; and so it is in the Republican Party.
Donald Trump, a billionaire alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, won in 2016 with help from Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner (both of Harvard). His media cheerleaders included Ann Coulter (Cornell), Kayleigh McEnany (Oxford and Harvard), Tucker Carlson (Trinity College), Steve Hilton (Oxford) and Laura Ingraham (Dartmouth College). His chief imitators include Ron DeSantis (Yale and Harvard), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale) and Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo and Elise Stefanik (all Harvard). A working-class movement this is not."