Portside

The opening day and night of this year’s Republican National Convention featured two highly provisional transformations. The first was the de-escalation of rhetoric that seemed mandatory in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. The second, vastly more important, was the party’s attempt to transform itself into a party that increases its hold on culturally conservative working-class Americans by moving, or claiming to move, a bit in workers’ direction on economic issues, too. The odds against either happening are steep, but the discussion on worker’s rights, at least, will long outlast the newfound reluctance to call Democrats child molesters and Marxists.

Convention planners placed the party’s most explosive, demagogic, and slanderous speakers at the very start of the evening session, before any network other than C-SPAN was covering the action. But even they came off as comparative lambs. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted on Sunday that “the Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars … yesterday they tried to murder President Trump,” was all sweetness and light on Monday, or as close to it as she could get. She ran through what she called the policy failures of the Biden administration (actually, the Biden-Harris administration, as all speakers were careful to include Harris in their indictment, just in case … well, you know) without once characterizing them as pederastic, Leninist, or Satanic.

She was followed by the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s governor, Mark Robinson, who has moved into the lead in the contest for the party’s most inflammatory speaker, having recently given a speech in a church in which he said of the party’s adversaries, “Some folks need killing. It’s time for someone to say it.” Last night, however, he praised Jesus and dropped the killing business altogether, merely noting that as a young man, he’d lost two factory jobs because of NAFTA—which, he added, Joe Biden had voted for.

When the Greenes and the Robinsons eschew the invective, you can be sure that everyone else will, too.

But Robinson’s jab at NAFTA was emblematic of the party’s attempt to don the raiment of working-class hero, audibly attacking Biden for his globalist past while silently repudiating the more avidly globalist economics of NAFTA’s originators, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Such issues as the Democrats’ support for transgender people were touched on only in passing; this was the night for attacking the Democrats as economic, not just cultural, elitists.

This direction, which Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and newly anointed VP nominee J.D. Vance have occasionally advocated, would make the GOP more like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or even Germany’s AfD, pledging to defend workers’ long-established benefits even while remaining fiercely anti-immigrant and hostile to the causes of gender and racial equality. Social fascists, if you will, or semi-social, since the American welfare state is pretty puny compared to Europe’s. 

Monday’s speakers homed in on the price of gas and food and rent, depicting an America that sounded as if it was 1932, with unemployment at record highs and workers locked into their jobs for fear of being out on the street if they left. Or at least 2022, when inflation was actually high, before it eased to the point that even Fed chair Jerome Powell is resigned to cutting interest rates.

This direction would make the GOP more like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or even Germany’s AfD, pledging to defend workers’ long-established benefits even while remaining fiercely anti-immigrant and hostile to the causes of gender and racial equality.

The evening came complete with one Le Pen-esque policy specifically directed at the nation’s service-sector workers: a pledge not to tax tipped incomes of waitresses and drivers and such. Many, perhaps most, tipped workers actually don’t make enough money to require them to file taxes, so the exemption wouldn’t matter to them. More to the point, this appears to be a way for Republicans to change the subject if anyone questions their opposition to raising the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 for the past two decades. (The federal minimum wage for tipped workers—whom Republicans are trying to lure with this tax cut—is $2.13.)

Not that this mattered to anyone but nitpickers like myself, but the Republicans undermined their tale of economic rack and ruin by having two of their more well-known governors also address the convention. Not surprisingly, both Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem each spent a good deal of their time at the podium (in Noem’s case, most of her time) describing the record job gains and fantastic flourishing of their states’ economies in recent years, which inconveniently coincided with Joe Biden’s presidency. No effort was made to reconcile these conflicting pictures, though it does reinforce polling data showing most Americans believe the nation’s economy is in bad shape but also that their state’s economy is chugging along quite well.

The evening’s theme was that the Republicans were now the party for “America’s forgotten men and women,” recalling a phrase that gained currency when America was in the deepest trough in its history. In a nationwide radio address delivered during his 1932 campaign to unseat Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt called for new economic approaches “that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The “forgotten man” theme became a meme, so much so that the Warner Bros. musical comedy Gold Diggers of 1933 (“gold diggers” referred to chorus girls compelled to date sugar daddies to survive) ended with a distinctly non-comedic number, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which was something of a knockoff on “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which preceded it by a year.

Of course, unemployment today is far less than the 25 percent of 1932. But the Republican resurrection of Rooseveltian terminology is clearly aimed at working-class voters who may be on the fence in this election and for whom the appeal of attacks on wokeness fall flat. Hence the continual depiction throughout the evening of Bidenomics—the most Rooseveltian economics of any president since Roosevelt—as a policy of and by the elite.

That was clearly what the convention planners wanted audiences at home to take away from the evening’s most important, and longest, address, from Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. He walked something of a tightrope in his speech, balancing some straight talk about the outrageous imbalance of power between corporations and workers with praise for the handful of Republicans, including Vance, who’ve recently shown up on picket lines. (Biden’s unprecedented walk on the UAW’s picket line during its strike against the Big Three automakers, of course, wasn’t mentioned.) He also made clear how badly workers needed legislation that would enable them to join unions and would actually penalize employers who illegally fired workers—proposals, he neglected to point out, that virtually every Democrat in Congress has supported, and every Republican opposed.

Speaking at the level of abstraction, O’Brien spoke of the huge corporate influence in blocking pro-worker laws. Below that level, he did not go. O’Brien thanked Trump for inviting him to the convention and said the Teamsters wanted the Democrats to sit down with Republicans to enact pro-worker legislation, as if the Republicans had any interest in doing that. Democrats failed to pass the very legislation he sought because overcoming the filibuster required some Republican support, and Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican also voted against Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which made whole a major pension for 350,000 union retirees, mostly Teamsters, which otherwise was headed toward insolvency. O’Brien had even flanked Biden at the announcement ceremony.

So: raising workers’ concerns to the convention? Good. And he singled out Amazon, which the Teamsters hope to organize, as a corporate miscreant, perhaps hoping that Trump, who’s no friend of the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post, will somehow manage to pressure Amazon without actually changing labor law in a pro-worker direction.

On the other hand, mislabeling the Biden Democrats as part of D.C.’s general antipathy to workers was a huge unearned gift to the Trump campaign. Small wonder that many Teamster leaders, led by the union’s group of Black members, were outraged at O’Brien’s appearance.

Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate certainly upset the Republicans’ traditional corporate supporters. Following the lead of their owner, Rupert Murdoch, who reportedly lobbied Trump to appoint anyone but Vance, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board indignantly sniffed, “Mr. Vance visited a United Auto Workers picket line last year and proposed a tax credit of up to $7,500 for gas vehicles assembled in the U.S. He might claim he’s pro-worker, but he has turned pro-union.”

But Trump’s Republicans won’t abandon our economic masters for the proletariat. Indeed, they’re coming under the sway of a new breed of economic masters who may be just as worker-phobic as the old crew. The Silicon Valley libertarian right-wingers—such dedicated enemies of the nation-state as Vance’s former boss Peter Thiel, Monday convention speaker David Sacks, or Elon Musk—were Vance’s biggest champions. Upon hearing of Vance’s anointment, Musk announced he’d be making monthly donations of $45 million to a new Trump super PAC. If Murdoch is no friend of unions, Musk has gone him one better, telling a New York Times DealBook forum that he’s opposed to the very idea of unions.

That’s the power behind J.D. Vance and the new worker-friendly Republicans. Workers of the world, throw up.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.