Labor in the Time of Trump

Jasmine Kerrissey, Eve Weinbaum, Clare Hammonds, Tom Juravich, Dan Clawson, Jasmine Kerrissey, Eve Weinbaum, Clare Hammonds, Tom Juravich, Dan Clawson

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501746628
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Labor in the Time of Trump critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions and offers strategies to build a working–class movement.

While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the Left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The contributors show that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response.

Essays in the volume examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

Contributors: Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest; Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided; Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Sarah Jaffe, co-host of Dissent Magazine 's Belabored podcast; Cedric Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago; Jennifer Klein, Yale University; Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center; Jose La Luz, labor activist and public intellectual; Nancy MacLean, Duke University; MaryBe McMillan, President of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO; Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Lara Skinner, The Worker Institute at Cornell University; Kyla Walters, Sonoma State University

Part I

THREE THEORIES ABOUT THE ATTACK ON WORKERS

1

THE KOCH NETWORK’S LONG GAME AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZING

Nancy MacLean

When historians look back on this moment fifty years from now and try to make sense of it, I do not think they will be focusing on Donald Trump. I think they will be more interested in a quiet yet radical transformation now under way. In fact, Trump’s conduct has distracted attention from an ingenious slow takeover, led by brothers Charles and David Koch of the radical right, of core branches of our government, beginning at the state level, moving on to the federal courts and Congress, and then extending into federal departments and agencies. This takeover has advanced with assistance from hundreds of well-funded organizations and campus outposts funded by the Koch donor network. This infrastructure consists of national bodies such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Federalist Society; more than 150 state-level organizations, whose work is aligned through the State Policy Network; organizing enterprises, including Americans for Liberty, Concerned Veterans for America, the LIBRE Initiative, and Generation Opportunity; international affiliates of the Atlas Network, with operations in close to a hundred countries; and campus-based centers of allied faculty. Their campus presence has expanded exponentially over the last decade, with over 300 colleges and universities now receiving funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, which is “leveraging” them, to use its language, to move its radical transformation driven by dark money.

My research has found that the right wing has been winning because the Koch network has effectively weaponized the ideas of a figure who is little known to the mainstream or the Left but who supplied the crucial ideas in play today, much as Milton Friedman supplied those of an earlier era. His name is James McGill Buchanan, and he was the first US southerner to win the Nobel Prize in economics, which he was awarded for developing the fields of public choice political economy and constitutional economics. (For fuller treatment and documentation not cited here, see MacLean 2017).

The Koch Network’s Driving Ideas

I believe that knowing about these ideas—and how the Koch network’s operations have weaponized them—is important not just in its own right, to see more clearly what is happening, why, and how. It is also important because having that knowledge may equip concerned citizens to lead the way out of the current crisis of our democracy before it is too late. A public-health nurse who read my book on the subject used this analogy: you need to get the diagnosis right before you can determine the best treatment plan.

So what are these ideas? Here are six key elements of the radical right’s overarching vision:

1. Market forces alone should determine social outcomes, with no interference from government. Government has only three legitimate roles: enforce the law, ensure social order, and defend us from foreign enemies (the easily recalled summary is courts, cops, and armies). Everything else should in time be eliminated because it interferes with property rights, economic liberty, and personal responsibility. That is why the Koch network fought the Affordable Care Act and why it attacks labor union rights and worker protections, backs school voucher programs and unlimited charter school expansion, blocks action on climate change, and works to dismantle regulations of all kinds.

2. Any attempt by the people to use their numbers to modify markets, as unions and government policies such as minimum wages do, is illegitimate and akin to gangsterism. The Koch team believes that we should only have the right to act as individuals, not to muster any collective countervailing power to that of corporations, as Americans have been accustomed to doing for generations. That is the core belief behind the Janus v. AFSCME case, which abolished “fair share” or “agency” fees for public-sector unions nationally, enabling workers to get the benefits of the union without paying for them in hopes of mortally wounding them. It is also why organizations in the Koch-allied State Policy Network are now using the Freedom of Information Act to identify union members and going door to door to try to convince them to stop paying dues. Free speech is not the true ultimate goal here, despite its role in persuading the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority; the goal is to break down the collective power of the people to block implementation of the radical libertarian program, including the privatization of public education, Social Security, and Medicare, the end of Medicaid, and more.

3. Democracy does not require majority rule; in fact, democracy is not even an especially desirable form of decision making. The radically antidemocratic libertarian cause believes in a unanimity standard: only if everyone (above all, the very wealthiest among us) supports a particular policy and voluntarily agrees to pay for it can it be said to truly represent the common good. That is why the logic of the Janus anticoercion argument is likely to be applied to taxation now that there is precedent. It is also why Koch-allied organizations and elected officials are working so hard to limit voting by those most likely to oppose their agenda, including African Americans, Latinos, and young people.

4. Elected officials do not really care about the common good; they only care about getting reelected, using other people’s money to dole out favors to ensure that. That is why we have deficits even in times of prosperity. That is also why even the most conservative of Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, disappointed the radical libertarians, because they did not go nearly far enough to end what the latter routinely deride as the “dependency” of the people on government. They proved too deferential to the voters, allowing the “takers” to continue to prey on the “makers,” hence the need for this more radical gambit (MacLean 2017).

5. Because the people cannot be trusted to restrain their claims on the wealthy, and elected officials cannot be trusted with the power to tax and spend, ironclad binding restraints must be put on both. Buchanan urged changes so significant that they would amount to a “constitutional revolution” (Buchanan 1973). That revolution would put shackles on what government could do, including such measures as making balanced budgets mandatory, limiting the right to vote, placing permanent caps on tax rates, imposing congressional term limits, and requiring vast supermajorities for any change of substance after their constitutional revolution. (MacLean, 2017b).

6. The only way to achieve such radical and unpopular changes is by stealth, spreading misinformation (such as climate science denial and the myth of mass voter fraud) and relying, initially, on the branch of government that is easiest for corporations to capture and deploy. That is state government, as shown by Wisconsin under Scott Walker and my own home state of North Carolina, two prime laboratories for this approach.

How could serious intellectuals justify these six propositions? To a libertarian like Buchanan, there is no common good. Any such notion of shared purpose will lead government to coerce those who do not agree with the majority. Democracy, Buchanan and his colleagues came to argue, violates the individual liberty of the minority. The minority he was concerned with was wealthy taxpayers who do not share the majority’s view of the public interest. Buchanan and his colleagues argued that government all but steals their property if it taxes them for purposes they do not agree with.

Thus, when in 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke disdainfully to donors regarding “the 47 percent” of Americans he said would never vote for him because they were too “dependent” on government, millions of Americans were shocked. Romney was not offering a new idea, however. By then, the Heritage Foundation was maintaining an “annual index of dependency,” derived from public choice economics, to stigmatize net tax recipients and devise strategies for ending tax transfers (Whiteside 2012; MacLean, 2017).

Buchanan was the figure who gave scholarly imprimatur to such thinking, and he did not hold back, showing an animus that reflected his southern white conservative commitments. He spoke of net tax recipients as “parasites” on the “productive” and warned of “predators” and “prey” (MacLean 2017). His very vocabulary made fellow citizens appear as a menace, not even truly human. It is a vocabulary that is disinhibiting, that licenses hostility. And it, too, is rife on the Right today. Trump’s language of “us and them” gains legitimacy from Buchanan’s theories, as does his definition of the Washington, D.C., political environment as “the swamp” (BBC News, 2016).

What would a world guided by Buchanan’s ideas—as weaponized by the Koch network’s power—look like? More stark and cruel than most of us can imagine: each of us wholly on our own (actually, each family, since the libertarians depend on women’s unpaid labor for their households), with no help from government. If circumstances prevent us from providing for ourselves, then all we can hope for is private charity, should the wealthier choose to give it. Think of the world of Charles Dickens as the desideratum of this cause.

The libertarian morality thus deems it better to have people die from lack of health care than receive it from government, from taxes paid by others. Commenting on the Affordable Care Act, which brought health care to millions who lacked it, Michael S. Greve, then chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (a Koch-funded “do tank,” by its own depiction), said, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene.… I do not care how it is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, [or] whether we strangle it” (Lichtblau 2015). The Competitive Enterprise Institute had devised and funded the case against the Affordable Care Act. Greve was also the strategist behind the Janus case and its predecessor (Lichtblau 2015). He has since been rewarded with a professorship at the Koch-funded Scalia School of Law, a key base of the network’s legal operations (MacLean 2017).

What did Greve mean by political hygiene? That for citizens to receive any new reason to value government would be for the libertarian cause a hazard so perilous that only violent imagery could convey the urgency of its extinction. So this is what the radical right means, ultimately, by personal responsibility: you should be on your own for all your needs, and if you fail to anticipate and save for those future needs, you deserve your fate. Not only that, but your suffering will have instructive value for others in the new world the libertarians are ushering into being: watching what befalls you, as government no longer helps you, will teach others that they must work hard and save. What libertarians seek, in short, is a world in which ironclad new rules—constitutional rules—keep us from using government to help ourselves and one another.

So what kind of country would the libertarian dream constitution usher in? It would look a lot like America in 1900: a place where workers had no legal right to organize for a collective voice; where corporations were free of democratic accountability, whether for discrimination, pollution, or consumer protection; a place of mass voter suppression; and, needless to say, a place with no Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare.

Consider two concrete examples: education and health care. In the Buchanan-Koch long-term vision, parents will have to pay out of pocket the cost of their children’s schooling, as they pay for food and shelter. That is what the insiders mean by personal responsibility. To most of us, the idea of taking health insurance away from people who cannot afford to pay for it is cruel, but for backers of this cause, it is a necessary step toward their vision of pure liberty. As one longtime Koch grantee, Robert W. Poole of the Reason Foundation, put it, the economic liberty nirvana is a “full liability society.” That is, you make the choice to have children? Fine, but do not expect other taxpayers to help you in any way. If you make a choice, then you bear full liability for its outcome (Poole, TK).

Ideas into Policy

Of course, ideas by themselves do not change the course of history. They need sponsors, organizers, and infrastructure to take hold among significant numbers. Then, to prevail, they must be embedded in policy, ideally in policies that are not easy to change. What is needed to make this happen? Buchanan began his work in the mid-1950s, a time of pervasive belief in government and trust that it could fix market failures for the common good. Buchanan made the case that government could not do what people looked to it to do, because politicians were not really seeking to advance the public interest as they claimed. Instead, they were just trying to get elected, or reelected, by promising benefits from taxes levied on others. Buchanan theorized that the same was true of all public actors: agency officials, union leaders, activists, and advocates were all out for their own advantage, takers seeking to exploit makers....

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Three Theories about the Attack on Workers
• Part II: How the Right Wing Advances its Agenda
• Part III: Challenges and Coalition Opportunities
• Part IV: Labor Strategies and Responses
• Acknowledgments
• Biographies
• Index
• Copyright