“The biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations,” said Sean O’Brien on Monday night. “And this is real corruption.”
You’d expect the president of the Teamsters, one of America’s most powerful labor unions, to hold such a view. But that he delivered that comment as a fiery prime-time speaker on the opening night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was remarkable, to say the least. Especially since he was there at the invitation of the Republican nominee for president of the United States and this marked the first time in history that a Teamsters leader spoke at the GOP convention.
And that hardly was the only moment when it seemed like O’Brien’s head-turning lines on Monday night in Milwaukee would have been a much better fit for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
To wit:
“Americans vote for a union but can’t get a union contract.”
“Companies fire workers who try to join unions and hide behind toothless laws that are meant to protect working people but are manipulated to benefit corporations. This is economic terrorism at its best; an individual cannot withstand such an assault.”
There was a whole lot more, but you get the idea. For a party so long allied with business interests and the free market, this was far from the usual rhetoric. Nor was the line: “Today, the Teamsters are here to say we are not beholden to anyone or any party.”
Granted, O’Brien is arguably an outlier among labor leaders, most of whom are supporting Joe Biden for president and continuing the traditional labor union alliance with the Democrats. O’Brien’s appearance could be seen as a simple gambit to erode a key Democratic constituency and steal voters, just as the opening-night program in Milwaukee featured several Black speakers talking about immigration and even suggesting that recent migrants have received more government help than has been afforded to African Americans over hundreds of years. But the Teamsters have about 1.4 million members across 21 industrial divisions and enjoy a formidable reputation for strength. So there was more to it than that.
O’Brien’s appearance was an indicator of how much the traditional constituencies of the two major parties have flipped, with the Democrats becoming more a party of the highly educated and the economically elite and the Republicans under the aegis of Donald Trump a home for disillusioned blue-collar workers, buffeted by high inflation and convinced that the broader economic boom and rise in the stock market have left them behind.
This is especially true of blue-collar men; earlier this year a Pew Research study found men now are 6% more likely than women to identify with Republicans while women are 7% more likely to lean Democratic.
This disparity is only growing under the leadership of Donald Trump, whose aggressive, fist-raising defiance in the face of Saturday night’s assassination attempt was widely described in a wide variety of slang terminology Monday night as a show of macho toughness.
Take also the comments made to enthusiastic applause Monday night by Tim Scott, the Black Republican senator from South Carolina: “I know this is going to offend the liberal elites: America is not a racist country.”
What Scott said before the colon was just as important as what came after.
Here was a reactive salvo against the pervasive progressive notion that racism might be unconscious in America but is still structurally pervasive. Whites who have resisted that characterization and found it insulting had the chance in Milwaukee to hear a Black leader say otherwise, and the reaction in the hall suggested it was cathartic.
All of these changes, of course, help explain Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Vance has made millions from exploiting the mythology of his blue-collar, “hillbilly” origins and has supported myriad policies that are far from traditional Republican positions of the kind Ronald Reagan would have recognized. If Monday night proves indicative of the whole week, the party has come to Vance far more than Vance has had to move toward the party. And in all probability, that urge to merge still is in its early stages.
Warning signs were, of course, everywhere for Democrats Monday night, as Republicans played by the not-so-subliminal themes of strength versus weakness, unity versus division, authenticity versus dishonesty. Even elites don’t typically like to think of themselves as elite, as anyone who has seen virtual signaling on social media well knows, so the problem here for Democrats is that there are far more people who identify as victims of the elite than who claim membership; the Republicans have purloined Democratic terminology of yesteryear.
The Democratic problem is made yet worse by how deftly Republicans have included the media in their denouncement of the “liberal elite.” By characterizing the media as part of that group, the Republicans have blunted the impact of actual, factual news, such as Trump’s felony convictions. Look at the raised fist and the “fight, fight, fight,” they say, not at the jury returning its verdict. So far it appears to be working.
As some wise Democratic heads know, all of this bolsters the case for Democrats to remove Joe Biden as its presumptive nominee and find an energizing counternarrative, if that even is still possible in the months left before voting begins.
Even as that indecision and internal division plays out, the Republicans are going hard after union members: CNN reported Monday that even the leadership of the United Auto Workers, on whose physical picket line Joe Biden personally stood, are expecting at least 40% of the rank-and-file membership to ignore which party has fought for years for their rights and vote Republican instead.
Thus O’Brien felt empowered to go to Milwaukee and stick out his neck: He knows Republicans now have plenty of rank-and-file Teamsters support. His appearance also likely reflects his views about who he thinks will win this race; there’s no harm in cozying up to Trump before his return to office.
And while it’s surely unlikely that the Teamsters will endorse Trump, it’s very possible they will make no endorsement this fall and thus speak volumes in seemingly unhearing Democratic ears.
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