Over at Dissent, historian Gabriel Winant reviews two new books on working people. The first is David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. The other is Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality.
Winant sums up his review this way:
It is time to abandon the assumption that workers have a “natural” home on the center-left. But we should also reject the idea that social conservatism always lies latent within working-class culture, ready for right-wing politicians to activate.
Here is a taste of his review:
When a young Chuck Schumer arrived at Harvard in 1967 as a freshman, he joined the great political stirring of those years—who could resist it? But Abbie Hoffman he was not. “I was faced with what Alexander Hamilton called mobocracy,” Schumer recalled in his coauthored 2007 book Positively American. He became a College Democrat, canvassed for Eugene McCarthy, and eschewed the radicals. Campus members of the New Left’s Progressive Labor faction horrified him, and he felt “sickened” seeing protesters scream at cops. “The police weren’t pigs. They were the people I’d grown up with. They were my neighbors. My friends. They were the Baileys [imaginary Irish-American Long Islanders with whom Schumer consults on decisions].” Soon enough, Schumer’s party—the College Dems and, of course, their friends the non-college Dems—would pay the price. “By the late ’70s,” Schumer observed, “the Baileys did not trust the Democrats anymore, and the Democrats weren’t listening to the Baileys.”
Despite decades of doting on the Baileys of Massapequa, the senator never figured out how to win them back: in 2016, he tells us, Joe Bailey voted for Donald Trump. Although 1968 is now closer in time to the Russian Revolution than to our moment, the backlash still rules: the Silent Majority, the Reagan Democrats, the Kansans who have something the matter with them, Joe the Plumber, the elegized hillbilly, the Rust Belt diner patrons, Joe Bailey. At each election, these archetypes of the white working class line up for the unrepentant oligarchs of the Republican Party.
How did the Democrats lose the Baileys? Two new books are the latest to take on the question: David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution uses narrative history to make an argument that has been recited so often since the late 1960s that it has taken on a ritualistic quality: to be American is not enough, one must be positively so. Fail to perform the proper rites of patriotic adoration, and the Cossacks will come riding in on the Long Island Expressway, pillaging and burning. This is ersatz class analysis, which passes off the most privileged fraction of the working class as a stand-in for the whole. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality traverses somewhat similar territory. Taking a more serious approach, these eminent political scientists see Trump as the result of a crisis of the historic compromise between elites and democracy, and the phenomenon of rank-and-file support for oligarchy as a kind of politics of distraction. Though more clear-headed, their book, too, rests on mechanical assumptions about the relationship between class and political behavior.
Read the rest here.
