As part of a series of essays assessing the roots of Trumpism, Robert Reich discusses “The Old Left, the New Left, and the Left Behind.” Reich’s goal is to explain how the economy has left behind non-college educated working class people, leaving an opening for the demagogic Donald Trump to come forth as their champion.
I usually find myself in agreement with Reich, Labor secretary under Bill Clinton, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of many books. To be fair, Reich’s essay is less a comprehensive recent history of the left, old and new, and more a foray into his personal history. Nevertheless, while ruminating on his story, the generalizations he makes about the left and the labor movement, and about how Trump became a force in U.S. politics are flawed.
What Reich Gets Right about Recent U.S. History
Born in 1946, Reich captures the sense of new possibilities for activism and change when he read the Port Huron Statement in 1962. The call for participatory democracy, the critique of U.S. foreign policy and the nuclear arms race, and the emphasis on “finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic” appealed to the young Reich. He was part of the New Left.
Discussing the Old Left and the labor movement, Reich makes some relevant observations: “The Old Left had faded as a result of Joe McCarthy’s red scare, labor leaders’ concerns about being seen as communist or socialist, and the effects of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.” He’s right also about the decline in the percentage of unionized workers and the Democratic party’s shift in focus to suburban swing voters. When he considers the failure of Democratic presidents to push through labor law reform, he overstates only a little when he says “Democratic presidents took organized labor for granted, if they thought about unions at all.”
The Story that Reich Misses
What Reich misses is that a left persisted even after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, the blacklisting of many activists, and the destruction of many left-wing organizations by government repression. Two left-wing unions, the United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union survived; despite the loss of leadership positions, left-wingers remained active in many other unions including the new Farm Workers Union and Hospital Workers Local 1199.
Although Reich mentions the civil rights movement, he seems unaware of the important role of the left within the movement and within the allied movement against political repression. Coretta Scott King worked on the 1948 Progressive Party campaign and was influenced by Paul Robeson. Left-wingers were active in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther King, Jr. opposed the Vietnam War, organized the Poor People’s Campaign, and criticized “irrational obsessive anticommunism.” The emergence of the Black Panther Party was just one indication of the increasing radicalism of the African American community in the late 1960s. Left-wing groups like Freedomways magazine, the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, the Southern Conference Education Fund, and the Committee to Free Angela Davis all played important roles .
New left-wing groups developed in the union, peace, women’s, gay liberation, and environmental movements and left-wingers played important roles in the rise of public employee unionism. Despite Reich’s idea that the Old Left was dead, and that the New Left moved to a different drummer, in fact youth of the New Left saw anti-communism as a threat to their own freedom and to world peace. Among groups rejecting anti-communism in the early 1960s were Students for a Democratic Society and Women Strike for Peace. Equally important, many of the pioneers of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s had left-wing backgrounds.
The decline of unions in the private sector stems largely from corporation and Republican attacks on labor and the failure of the unions and their progressive and Democratic allies to enact labor law reform. Although there was a large march organized by the AFL-CIO in September 1981 protesting Ronald Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers, Reagan succeeded in making the firings stick and destroying their union. The employers’ threat to replace striking workers led to a plummeting in the number of strikes. Bill Clinton’s embrace of many of Reagan’s ideas about so-called “big government” helped accelerate workers’ downward spiral and the growth of inequality.
To resist employer-Republican attacks, new left-influenced initiatives arose in the labor movement. In 1995 John Sweeney and the New Directions slate won the leadership of the AFL-CIO. To fight inequality, the labor movement has fought both for full employment and to increase the minimum wage. Supported by the AFL-CIO and a grass roots movement, Reich as labor secretary was instrumental in securing an increase in the minimum wage in 1995 despite Republican control of both houses of Congress. Since 2012, a new movement to increase the minimum wage to $15 has led to substantial increases in the minimum wage in 22 states and many cities. Also impressive is the election in 2023 of Shawn Fain as President of the United Auto Workers and the successful strike of the leading auto makers. New centers of activism within the labor movement include the magazine Labor Notes based in Chicago and many worker centers throughout the country.
Perhaps the most important arena of left influence in recent decades has been in the field of culture. Left-wing influence is strong in academia, music, literature, theater, film, dance, and the visual arts. Can one listen to Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ about a Revolution or Janelle Monáe’s Turntables or Iris DeMent’s Going Down to Sing in Texas and say there is no left in the U.S.? The recognition of Chapman and Joni Mitchell at this year’s Grammy awards makes clear that left-wing figures are not on the margins of our culture.
Reich has been among those highlighting the growth of inequality in the U.S. over the past four decades. That there has been a growing fight-back by low-income workers, particularly people of color, women, and young people is undeniable. That our electoral environment gives us too few opportunities to change the framework within which we struggle is evident, but we will continue to try.
Trump as Spokesperson for White Workers?
Reich asserts that Trump, despite giving big tax cuts to the rich, “somehow” made himself the spokesperson for white working-class people. He “made the working class — especially the white working class — feel he was speaking to and for them.” Thus he “channeled their cumulative anxieties and frustrations into bigotry, nativism, and hate toward Muslims, Mexicans, Democrats, bureaucrats, and ‘coastal elites.’” Although Reich’s statements are part of the conventional wisdom one reads in the mainstream media, these are all assertions rather than evidence-based arguments.
Reich is using a definition of working class that is common in the mass media – non-college educated low-income folk. A crucial problem with this conventional view is the idea that you can separate whites into a separate white working class. To Marx, the working class was composed of those individuals who lacked ownership of the means of production and were forced to sell their labor power (their ability to work) for wages so they could survive. We could use Census data to estimate the number of workers using Marx’s definition. However, let’s set that aside when we analyze Trump’s relation to workers because polling data doesn’t include the needed occupational information.
Using the conventional definition, scholars Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes using National Election Studies (NES) data show that 31 percent of Trump voters were white workers in both 2016 and 2020 and that the percentage of Republican voters from the white working class was about the same each election cycle between 1980 and 2020. Left-wing opponents of the Republicans cannot take too much joy in that statistic because the NES data show that most white workers voted for Republican presidential candidates in every year except 1992, 1996, and 2008.
In the two elections in which Clinton prevailed, the Republican vote among white workers fell to 32 percent and then 38 percent. This is partly explained by the vote for Ross Perot (19 percent and then 8 percent overall). In 2008, the white working-class vote for John McCain was 45 percent while the vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 was 57 percent. One might argue that the Obama campaign in 2008 raised hopes but delivered too little for him to keep white workers away from the Republican candidate in 2012. Trump won 62 percent of white workers’ votes in 2016 and then 59 percent in 2020. The larger point that Lupu and Carnes make is that “Contrary to the idea that Trump rearranged the political landscape, white working-class support for Republican presidential candidates has been slowly increasing since 1992.” They note, however, that the tendency for the white working class vote for Republican candidates to increase fell during the Trump presidency.
The Needs of the Moment
Progressives and the left oppose Trump’s campaign of demagogy against immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, the media, and Democrats. The greatest need is for a left-led campaign for peace, justice, and ending poverty. Forgetting the shibboleths of their ideology, Republicans joined Democrats in passing pandemic relief measures that led to a dramatic reduction in poverty. The biggest one-year reduction of child poverty (to 5.2 percent) took place in 2021 because of the Democrats’ expansion of the child tax credit under the American Rescue Plan. With Biden in the White House, Republicans voted against further pandemic help to ordinary Americans. A campaign to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and to elect a big Democratic majority in Congress could help to restore federal support for the right to organize into unions, protection of fundamental democratic rights, and ending poverty once and for all.
A most important statistic that helps explain the problem Reich only touches on (racism) is that the last time a Democrat running for President won the white vote (all whites, men/women/workers/capitalists/etc.) was 1964 --- after that enough of the "old" racism was there to be forever resentful of what Johnson did with the "Second Reconstruction" -- the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 68, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the reform of immigration law in 1965 (perhaps as significant as the other three for the political future of the US).
The resistance to progress for Black Americans =-- going back to the resistance to Reconstruction after the Civil War to the resistance to the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s to the late 1`960s -- and the REVIVAL of out front racism under Trump is a THRU-LINIE or American politics.
For periods of time (briefly in the Southern populist movement before 1896 --- more long lasting in the CIO and later the AFL-CIO up through the 1960s) there was more black-white unity around common purposes.
I am hopeful that the explosion of white support for black lives after the murder of George Floyd signals a new generation immune to the old racist tropes ---
but our side has to FIGHT to counter the racism that unfortunately seems to be in the DNA of too many white Americans