interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
How Things Changed
by Sanford Schram
February 14, 2021
This interview with Sanford Schram, professor of political science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Sanford | Among progressives, there is widespread concern about poverty and about other hardship in our increasingly unequal economy — an economy that proven implacably resistant to change. And, you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is just how much things have changed.
For one, the Democratic Party, as a whole, has changed. Somebody on Facebook yesterday posted this meme of all the things Eisenhower stood for when he was running for reelection, and it was to the left of the Democratic Party today. There has been an asymmetric polarization: the Republican Party has moved radically to the right, and the Democratic Party has grudgingly moved to the center in order to try to stay competitive. That has made us, as a country, far less able to address these issues of poverty, inequality, social adversity, and economic hardship.
On top of that, the left has changed — it has fractured. A real division has emerged between whether we need to prioritize identity politics over an economic kind of change, or race over class, or vice versa.
And, finally, the right has proven to be much more aggressive in using their wealth, their money, and their influence over the mass media than I ever imagined. They have this willingness to put their resources into malicious lying and create a bloodsport politics that makes it very difficult for us to address any issues.
WBAP-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [Dateline show with guest], photograph, 1969; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1335899/m1/1/?q=news%20show: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
The right rules by using plutocratic populism. The elites gaslit the public into thinking that outgroups: immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans are the cause of their problems, allowing the elites to avoid accountability and maintain power. The elites, even as a minority, have been able to hang on to power by generating support and then rigging the rules of the game through gerrymandering, undermining access to the ballot, and changing campaign finance laws.
All of these things have enabled minority rule to remain ascendant in our, supposedly majoritarian, system. The result is an undermined faith in our political system and in The Constitution itself. We are facing a crisis as a country.
frank | Historically the Democrats have been the party of the working class. Why do you see such a disagreement among the party about what sort of coalition to build?
Take the recent news about how McConnell is using every trick in the book to cling to power. Republicans have lost the presidency, lost the Senate, and still don't have the House, and he is trying to issue edicts that he's still in charge. He is trying to keep the filibuster in place. That is part and parcel of this anti-majoritarian strategy.
Meanwhile, Democrats are falling over each other as trying to figure out the best response to an extremely effective right-wing mobilization. The right has concentrated its resources in order to rewrite the rules so that they stay in power, and Democrats, Clinton and Obama, and maybe now Biden, fail to mobilize the left and liberals towards a progressive agenda.
Why? Because Democrats are worried that if they allow the left to have too much of a say that they'll get repudiated. Over time, the Democratic Party has come to be populated with a lot of people who are very cautious in that way. Rep. Spanberger, when the House lost seats, excoriated AOC and “The Squad” for bringing up all these "left-wing" proposals. They are worried that if they are too liberal, they'll lose the support of suburbanites.
Byrd Williams Family Photography Collection (AR0769), University of North Texas Special Collections.
The correlation between economic pessimism and out-group hostility and support for Trump and declining support for democracy is actually stronger in the suburbs and among middle-class people than among lower-income whites. I think that's a story that needs to be discussed more. That's why Rich Fording and I argue in our new book Hard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics that if we want to really beat back this reactionary politics, it should be more about combating white racism that is energizing the right rather than focusing on hoping to get people to come over to the Democrats based on economic issues.
[Neighborhood on a Sunny Day], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth202022/m1/1/?q=neighborhood: accessed February 14, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Museum of the Gulf Coast.
I guess the question becomes does one identify more with race than class, and then what do your “best interests” really look like? Maybe the Republicans are serving them.
We discussed this at great length in our new book. The question of what we do know that white racism has been mainstreamed by a fearmonger like Donald Trump is a complicated one. This, of course, started way before Trump. The Tea Party created an opening for a resurgence of white racial extremist views in mainstream electoral politics, in large part, as a reaction to the first non-white president of the country, Barack Obama. Trump built off of that.
The white working-class has been leaving the Democratic Party for a long time — for about 20 some odd years, depending on how you define working-class voters. But, as we argue in our book, the overwhelming majority of poor people voted against Trump, both in 2020, as far as we can tell, and definitely in 2016. The fact of the matter is, most poor people still don't vote Republican. Trump disproportionately got his support from the suburbs. That really is the key battleground. A lot of the racism that's associated with Trumpism is not poor whites, it's white people who were moderately well off and disappointed in things beyond economics, including cultural change and a loss of white privilege.
That's a good story. And though there's an element of truth to that, I think that we have mischaracterized this resurgence of racism in that way. It's more a product of suburban, white people who are resentful of cultural change and racial diversification, including attempts to build an inclusive multi-racial democracy, than they are concerned about the economics.
Bradly, Bill. [Aerial View of SeedTec], photograph, 1988; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth10868/m1/1/?q=factory: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Deaf Smith County Library.
The correlation between economic pessimism and out-group hostility and support for Trump and declining support for democracy is stronger in the suburbs and among middle-class people. I think that's a story that needs to be discussed more. That's why we argue that if we want to really beat back reactionary politics we see today, it should be more about combating white racism than hoping that by stressing economic issues Trumpists will decide to join the Democratic Party.
How do you even begin to combat white racism?
Many people, like my good friend Kathy Cramer, the author of Politics of Resentment, think that we need to converse, listen, and make compromises. We reject that.
Over the past couple of years, we have seen just how hostile people are, how resentful they are and how implacably resistant they are to compromising. You can't reason with those people. Trump became dominant by mobilizing the inactive nonvoters. He didn't win so much by getting people to switch their votes. There were very few Obama to Trump voters. He won by mobilizing those who were resentful.
We have to do the same thing. We have to mobilize racially liberal people, who support multi-racial democracy and bring them in. In the last chapter of our book, we show that that's exactly what the “blue wave” was about. We present empirical evidence that the “blue wave” was driven by racial liberalism, and it was successful because it mobilized a lot of non-voters. And I think this happened effectively in 2020, especially in Georgia.
And then once you've done that, you're forcing the Republican Party to pay a price for aligning itself with the racists, and they will have to realize the electoral penalties of that strategy. Then, we can start to go further down the road of working towards an inclusive multi-racial democracy that lifts everybody up, including the working class, which is, I think it is important to add, disproportionately nonwhite.
A concern with progressive liberals is that you can’t detangle issues from each other – to tie the working class to The Green New Deal for example may be a deterrent.
Basically what it comes down to is what I always say to people on the left, “Why can't we just be like Denmark?” And they go, “Well, Denmark's a capitalist country.” For god's sake, get a life. They are a capitalist country, yeah, but everybody gets health insurance, everybody gets paid family leave, they have extra benefits for the father to stay home to encourage gender equity, everybody gets to go to college for free until you're 26, you can get unemployment benefits for six years. I have friends on the left that say that's not good enough. If we were like Denmark, a lot of our economic concerns would start to go away.
It starts to seem like people really aren't interested in solving the problems of inequality and poverty and social and economic hardship. They're interested in improving who's more virtuous or who's smarter, and who's more critical on the left. As I get older, it has made me more inclined to be disaffiliated. Like, I don't want to be a leftist anymore. I just want to be Danish, I guess. I don't know.
I think the same is true with leftist media. It breeds this sort of resentment that could make Glenn Greenwalds of us all.
You're absolutely right. It comes to be about your relationship to the people you're talking to, rather than about improving people's lives and wellbeing.
Kiecke, Albert. [Demonstrators Outside a Republican Rally], photograph, February 28, 1992; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth279487/m1/1/?q=republican%20rally: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting League City Helen Hall Library.
There's a new encyclopedia coming out called Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science, and I've been asked to write a lead essay based on my memoir Becoming a Footnote. In this very post-modern way, I have to reflect on my reflecting. I don't know how I am going to pull this off, but I have to ask all these sorts of questions. Who am I? Am I a leftist? What are we trying to do here?
That’s heavy. Have you come to any conclusive thoughts?
I've always identified as blue-collar. My father didn't graduate from high school. He was a letter carrier and the president of our local letter carrier union. I was a letter carrier in that union. My mother was a bookkeeper. We weren't poor, you could do fine back then in those jobs. Now you couldn't.
I've always had this uneasy relationship with the left. I feel like, for a lot of them, their relationship is not to the letter carriers, it's to the people they're arguing with. And that's always been, I think, a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. Like, well, you try delivering the mail for a week, and then you wouldn't have these debates about whether or not it's good enough to be Denmark. Right? Damn right it's good enough to be Denmark. That's sort of how I come at it.
Young, Moon. TGT Workers, photograph, 1947; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117442/m1/1/?q=blue-collar: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cleveland Historic Society.
Political science nowadays is very much focused on political theory and much less focused on empirical work. That is the problem: the left has become too academic and it's become too theoretical. The left, even if it is appropriately critical of the existing structure of power, is disconnected from ordinary people’s struggles.
This becomes a problem of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by professionals and educated people who have really good policies, but they don't really understand who ordinary people are and what they need.
But things are up in the air at moment with the defeat of Trump, the persistence of Trumpism and the success of Democrats in gaining a foothold on power. While I am not yet convinced, given that Joe Biden has created an inclusive coalition, this could open the door to policymaking that actually serves the needs of ordinary people. Maybe better times are coming, especially for people on the bottom of the social order. Here’s hoping.