'Politics in America: the American Right' Part II: 'Why the Labor Movement is the #1 Target of the Right
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in our series of articles drawn from "Politics in America: The American Right," by Joanne Ricca. She was the legislative research and policy director for the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. The last version of the paper was published in 2012, but it is still timely given the Trump administration's hostility toward organized labor, especially public employee unions. Click here to read Part 1.
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT and KEA retiree
In "Politics in America: The American Right," Joanne Ricca, a former legislative research and policy director for the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, listed four reasons why the right wing sees organized labor as "the main enemy:"
Unions provide the working class and middle class with organized power to make sure that the wealth they help create is fairly distributed.
Union members are more informed about issues that will affect their well-being and that of their families.
Unions are a major source of funds and door-to-door campaign mobilization needed to elect candidates who will truly represent the economic interest of working families.
The members of union households vote at a significantly higher percentage than non-union households.
Old Right v New Right
The Old Right
The Old Right mostly consisted of fringe groups like the hysterically anti-communist-and anti-democracy-John Birch Society, which was founded in 1958. "Society meetings covered a wide range of topics," wrote NPR's Nellie Gillies. "They argued that fluoridation of water was ushering in socialized medicine; that the Civil Rights Movement was a plot directed by the Kremlin; and that Chief Justice Earl Warren should be impeached."
The group claimed that the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a principal leader of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, was a communist and that the goal of the civil rights movement was to create "a Negro Soviet Republic in the United States."
The Birchers even said President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, was a communist agent. They also considered unions-you guessed it--communistic.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, moderate Republicans like Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky fought to keep the Birch Society and similar far right groups out of the Republican party. Ultimately, they failed.
I'm 75. When I was a kid, local Republicans in my hometown made fun of the Birchers as a collection of cranks and kooks of the tinfoil hat variety. Today, Bircherism is mainstream MAGA. The Birch Society is the ancestor of QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories from the most fetid of rightwing fever swamps that are the stock in trade of the Trump GOP.
The New Right
Single Issue Politics
"Candidates of the Right cannot run openly and honestly on their goal of corporate domination so it is necessary to use other tactics," Ricca wrote. "One tactic is to encourage voters to make decisions based on single issues to distract from the larger picture. This is a dramatically different strategy than used by the old John Birch Society."
Single issue voting is also called social issues voting. The idea is to use divisive social issues to keep voters from focusing on the heart of the right wing agenda, which includes union-busting, big tax breaks for the already rich, shredding the federal social safety net and wiping out laws that protect workers, consumers and the environment from the greedy excesses inherent in unfettered capitalism.
Larry Sanderson of Paducah, a veteran Kentucky union activist, called it "the politics of the 'Three Gs--God, guns and gays." Of late, it is also the politics of "W" -- wokeism, "T" for trans, and "DEI" -- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion."
Conservative Republicans have been winning on the social issues scam since at least 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president. I saw the results firsthand at a Jimmy Carter campaign stop at a UMWA coal mine in southern Illinois.
On Oct. 13, 1980, Carter, the Democratic incumbent, made a campaign stop at a UMWA coal mine near West Frankfort. The UMWA endorsed Carter, who was accompanied by then UMWA President Sam Church.
When I entered the mine site, I spotted a group of young miners with Reagan signs and asked them why they were for him. One said he liked Reagan's stand on guns; another cited abortion; and another, school prayer.
I went over to a group of older miners who were waving Carter signs. When I asked them why they supported the president, they said the Democrats had been the pro-union party since FDR.
Ricca quoted the late Paul Weyrich, an archconservative activist who helped found the New Right:
In the past we conservatives paraded all those Chamber of Commerce candidates with Mobile Oil signs strapped to their backs. It doesn't work in middle-class neighborhoods. Instead, we talk about issues that people care about – like gun control, taxes, and crime. Yes, they are emotional issues, but that's better than talking about capital formation.
In truth, a lot of people who voted for the Republican candidates positively despise the party. These voters are drawn into the political process because of their beliefs in certain issues which overrode their party preference. Of these, the three most effective for us and unseating liberal incumbent senators have been the Right-to-Life, Right-to-Work and gun control groups.
Election are not won by a majority of people. As a matter of fact, our (the Right's) leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populist goes down.
Here are more quotes Ricca included in her paper:
While Reagan was president:
You can't win by defending Reaganomics. We can only win by pushing those populist / conservative anti-elitist themes which real people support. I'm not going to…try to explain trickle down to an unemployed steelworker in Birmingham. But that same steelworker if asked to choose between our desire to see hardened criminals punished and the liberals' defense of soft-headed judges, will be with us. That's where it's at.
In the 1982 midterms, the right wing targeted longtime Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
Let me tell you, frankly, there are those rural people in West Virginia who don't understand Reaganomics and who are being hurt by Reaganomics and who wouldn't like it if they did understand it. If those people aren't hearing the issue of prayer in the schools in the West Virginia Senate race, then Bobby Bird is going to be back in the US Senate. (Byrd won. But today, both Mountain State senators are Trump Republicans.)
Weyrich singled out organized labor:
The alliance on family issues is bound to begin to look at the morality of other issues such as…the unjust power that has been legislated for union bosses.
Thus, the single issue/social issues scam enabled the right to divide, distract and manipulate workers "into voting against their own economic interests," according to Ricca, who added that "the strategy around single issue politics was absolutely key to building the electoral base the Right had always lacked."
Next time: "Religious Front for the Corporate Right."