By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
Real Clear Politics has the Democrats leading in nine generic congressional polls.
They're up by a 7.3 percent average. Even so, I'm worried that the long-running Republican social issues scam is still playing from Paducah to Pikeville and elsewhere in Bible-Belt, Red State America.
I'm uneasy because of Facebook posts like this one from a woman who said she made less than $21,000 a year:
"...Maybe the tax hike in question will affect me but I am more concerned about my government’s role in abortion on demand. Where do you stand on this issue?”
The post was on the Facebook page of a state AFL-CIO endorsed Democratic candidate for the Kentucky legislature. It was in response to a letter-to-the editor the candidate sent to her local newspaper.
In the letter, she criticized her Republican opponent's vote for the GOP tax bill that lavishes most tax breaks on better-heeled Kentuckians and slaps new sales taxes on some services and memberships.
She's pro-choice. But she's mainly focusing on economic issues, notably bringing back good-paying, union factory jobs to her neck of the Bluegrass State woods that's been hit hard by plant closings.
The poster “is a dear lady,” the candidate told me. “Someone who would give you the shirt off her back. A school bus driver."
Like almost all Republicans--and some conservative Democrats--her opponent runs hard on the social issues, notably abortion. He calls himself "pro-life," a term that rankles the Democrat, who is married and has two kids.
"Republicans are pro-life up to the womb," she said. "Once the children arrive, they don't care. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. A life on the outside should be as sacred as a life in the womb.”
Even so, Republicans have been largely successful in states like Kentucky by convincing a lot of less-than-well-heeled working people to vote on abortion, guns and other social issues and ignore issues that directly affect their livelihoods. Sadly, some social issues voters pack union cards.
The GOP social issues strategy--sucker play is more like it--is cynically designed "to distract and manipulate working class voters," warned Wisconsin State AFL-CIO researcher Joanne Ricca in “Politics in America: The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement," a white paper published in 2002.
Facebook posts like the one from the school bus driver are more proof that her research is still timely.
Ricca added: "The Right's deliberate manipulation of voters through single issues--particularly abortion, gun control, school prayer, crime and taxes--has allowed candidates to conceal their real pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda."
Hence, "single issue politics was absolutely key to building the electoral base that the Right had lacked," Ricca explained. Firmly wedded to the Religious Right, conservative Republicans trotted out "scripture to mask Right Wing ideology," according to Ricca.
"Now they could convince sincere working people to vote against their own economic interests by manipulating their religious faith. Now they would be beyond criticism. They could attack anyone who tried to expose the real pro-corporate and anti-democratic agenda as being anti-Christian."
Not coincidentally, the Kentucky Democrat's opponent, a business owner, also voted for Kentucky's "right to work law," for repealing the prevailing wage, for a paycheck deception measure, for curbing public pensions and for gutting workers' compensation and unemployment insurance programs.
Anyway, two years after Ricca's study, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Stole the Heart of America hit the bookstores. (It could just as aptly be titled What's the Matter with Kentucky.)
The author, Thomas Frank, described "the Great Backlash," meaning the joint Religious Right-Republican strategy of distracting and dividing working class "voters with explosive social issues...to achieve economic ends." In other words, "cultural anger is achieved to achieve economic ends."
Frank wrote that Backlash leaders "may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may 'matter most' to voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won."
Frank cited a "superaverage midwestern town" that could be almost anywhere--my Kentucky hometown, for sure.
"Even as Republican economic policy has laid waste to the city's industries, unions, and neighborhoods, the townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right Republican congressman, a born-again Christian who campaigned largely on an anti-abortion platform."
All five of Kentucky's Republican congressmen are anti-union, anti-government and pro-business conservatives who loudly proclaim their opposition to abortion while eagerly embracing the rest of the Religious Right's agenda, a toxic mix of reactionary theology and secular social Darwinism. Almost every GOP lawmaker in Frankfort is a Religious Rightist.
Explained Frank: "Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old fashioned situation they care to revive is an economic regimen of low wages and lax regulations....Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people."
On the other hand, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Christian faith led him to champion racial, social, political and economic justice. He was inspired in part by the Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch, a leader of the late 19th and early 20th century social gospel movement.
"The Kingdom of God is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven," Rauschenbusch said.
Similarly, King said, "It’s all right to talk about long white robes over yonder, in all of its symbolism, but ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It’s all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and His children who can’t eat three square meals a day.
“It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.” (And the new Paducah and Pikeville)
King saw the civil rights and trade union movement as natural allies. He was murdered in Memphis where he went to stand in solidarity with striking sanitation workers who belonged to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
"Our needs are identical with labor's needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community," he told the 1961 AFL-CIO convention. "That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.
Also at the convention, he said he dreamed of "equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality."
In addition, he denounced RTW. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work,’" he warned57 years ago. "It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”
Fast forward to today. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote. Let that sink in and apply it to the whole Republican anti-worker agenda in Frankfort and Washington.
In a recent column, New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni urged his readers to stay "fanatically focused" on Nov. 6 "— on registering voters, turning them out, directing money to the right candidates, donating time in the right places."
We Kentuckians who are proud to call ourselves trade unionists plan to do just that. Stay tuned.