In a keynote address to the Republican National Convention last Monday night, Teamster president Sean O’Brien devoted most of his seventeen-minute speech to assailing corporate control of the economy and celebrating the muscle of independent, democratic trade unions. Far from conciliatory, O’Brien tested the audience’s appetite for anti-elite sentiment outside the GOP’s preferred targets on the woke left. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Republican Party that pushed the limits of its tentative—many say cynical—courtship of union households under Donald Trump.
O’Brien tried to make the most of the opportunity. While his broadsides against business and political corruption received faint applause in the convention hall—Trump offered, at most, a tight smile—he appeared to revel in the gamble he was making. This was not a breathless endorsement but a call to build a bipartisan coalition in support of pro-labor policies. With Trump seizing the momentum in the presidential race over the last few tumultuous weeks, O’Brien evidently believed he made a shrewd decision. Better to generate some good will with a Republican Party eager to persuade workers of its populist makeover than be bound to a Democratic ticket that, prior to Joe Biden ending his campaign for reelection, potentially faced an electoral wipeout.
Justin Vassallo, "How Democrats Should Handle the Pro-Labor Right"
Part 1: Stalemate or Dominate?
For good reason most of the attention and energy of the media has been focused on a Republican Party dominated by Trump. In what I say in this post I don’t want to diminish the threat that his psychopathy alone poses to the country should he once again occupy the White House. But there is a lot of maneuvering going on in the background that I find fascinating, and I think it warrants more attention. Someday Trump will be gone, and then who will be in place to organize the MAGA energies that Trump has released? My working hypothesis is that a MAGA/Integralist coalition has been forming in plain sight even if it is not in the limelight which remains centered on Trump.
I think that most people understand that our political crisis is deeply rooted in a conflict of cultural values. There's the Red Team with its Middle American traditional values, values that have been severely disrupted by Neoliberal and Techno-Capitalist energies since the 80s. The Red Team is angry as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. And then there's the Blue Team with the cosmopolitan values that define the ethos and thinking of the Liberal establishment which dominates in the media, universities, and art world. They’re quite content with the current arrangements and can’t understand why the Red Team is so angry. Can’t we all just get along?
But the deeper problem is a misalignment between the values of most ordinary Americans and the elites, both Republican and Democrat elites, whom they elect to govern them. The Libertarian, minimal-taxes-and-regulation policy of the Establishment Republicans does not align with the material interests of ordinary Americans. So GOP elites compensate by pretending that their cultural values align with the traditionalist values of heartland Americans. On the other hand, the woke Liberalism of the Democrat elites does not align with the cultural and spiritual values or ordinary Americans. But they try to compensate by softening the hard-edges of Neoliberal policies with safety-net entitlements. Neither strategy works very well insofar as they have led to the stalemate that keeps the country in gridlock. The better strategy for each party would be one in which the demos found both its cultural values and material interests aligned.
Although perfect alignment is not possible, I think it's a truism that during the New Deal Era from Roosevelt through Carter, most Democratic elites and most everyday Americans, what I will call from now on “the demos”, were singing from the same hymnal on both cultural and economic policy issues. The Republicans were a rump party, and when Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon took the White House, they were singing from the New Deal hymnal as well. That harmony started to break down in the late sixties through the seventies leading to its complete collapse during the Reagan 80s.
Since the 80s, the demos— known then as the Reagan Democrats—have been up for grabs. And while it appears that a huge section of it is owned now by MAGA, I believe that their loyalties are still fluid, and that whichever team of elites, either the Blue Team or the Red, captures and holds onto the populist energies in the coming decade will be in a position to establish a ruling majority for decades to come. This is key to my working hypothesis, and I believe it's shared by people like Vance and Hawley. Unlike them, of course, I want the Blue Team to capture and hold onto these populist energies.1
So within this context, one of the truly interesting questions for me in this moment is whether we are seeing the emergence of a MAGA/Integralist GOP that is serious about rejecting the hardcore Neoliberalism that has dominated the GOP since Reagan. (A softcore Neoliberalism has dominated the Democrats since Clinton.) The GOP has long been the party of the 1%. Nobody, even rank-and-file Republicans, likes the 1%, so the plutocrats who compose the 1% have had to play the culture-war game, which boils down to "We Republicans are the 'real, red-blooded Americans'; and Liberal Democrats are a broad array of weirdos and malcontents". It's been very effective. The whole purpose of the culture war has been to keep it going endlessly so that the left-leaning and right-leaning demos would fight one another rather than uniting and going after the 1%.
But a funny thing happened in the last ten years or so. The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, another reactionary Catholic, kept feeding reactionary, mostly Catholic, SCOTUS candidates to Mitch McConnell. These reactionaries are serious about winning the culture war, and they want to ram their values down everybody's throat.
"Whoah, Whoah Whoah Whoah," went the 1% when these reactionaries overturned Roe. Didn't these judges get the memo? Our side is not supposed to win the culture war; we want it to be an endless war that nobody wins. When the Liberals won on abortion in '73, that was their big mistake because it gave conservatives something to rally around. But now that the conservatives have won on abortion, that gives the Liberals something to rally around, and it takes them out of a defensive posture and into an offensive one. This is destabilizing in a way that makes the 1% very uncomfortable.
And so now the 1% are faced with a crisis of McConnell's making, which is that anti-abortion and MAGA fanaticism is now the GOP brand. Whatever the moral ambiguities of abortion might be don't matter. People don't like fanatics, and fanatics on the Right are driving this, and fanaticism is not something that the 1% believes works in its political interests. They want stalemate where nothing gets done. This party now dominated by fanatics is not a party that works for them.
But if I'm reading this right, the SCOTUS majority, the Heritage Foundation, and guys like Vance and Hawley don't care most about the interests of the 1%; they care most about winning the culture war and in establishing a stable ruling majority. And for now at least, these right-wing culture warriors think they are winning. They are feeling their oats, and I believe this has made them fatally hubristic. This largely explains why they were able to pressure Trump to pick an extremist like Vance, why they felt no need to hide Project 2025 from public view, and why Sean O'Brien was allowed to address the GOP convention. In your face 1%!
This is how the MAGA/Integralists are announcing that they have enough influence in the party to effect a coup that will convert the GOP from the party of billionaires to the party of the people, i.e., a party of red-blooded, prolifically procreating families with stay-at-home Moms all united in their repudiation of the morally corrupted Republican and Democratic establishment elites.
As I argued last week, the Integralists see a power vacuum within a party of performance artists aping Trump who have no interest in real power or in governing, and so the Integralists see themselves as the ones to fill this vacuum. I think they hope to pull off what the Democrats were able to do during the New Deal era--get a ruling majority of Americans singing more or less the same hymns--on both cultural values and pro-worker economic policy.
This is probably simplistic and preliminary and needs more nuance, but I think describes better what’s going on the the GOP than what you’ll read in The NY Times. They see fascism, I see Integralism. Are they the same? No—Integralism is not nihilistic like fascism is. It’s a form of Jacobinism, i.e, a form of fanatic idealism. But they overlap, and even if the Integralists get control of the party, they could easily lose it to the darker, move violent, truly nihilistic factions on the Right. And clearly they are delusional if they think that they can keep a nihilistic, egomaniacal crackpot like Trump in line.
I wrote the Populist Intellectuals post earlier in the week to point out that the Vance-Hawley wing of the GOP is very much on board with this populist takeover of the GOP. They don’t want a stalemate; they want to dominate. They really believe that most heartland Americans will embrace their program, and that’s where their power, they think, lies—with the heartland demos. So the question these conservative populists are posing is: "So what is it Republicans? Real, lasting power, or continued stalemate? If the former, Project 2025 is the blueprint. Be bold. Don’t back away from it. “
Do they have the discipline and organization to pull it off? Will this be a clown car episode like J6? Will the 1% stand for it? Well, Trump/Vance has to win first. Then the infighting will begin, and we’ll see who emerges.
Their strategy is at best a long shot, but again, the boldness is breathtaking once you begin to understand what they are attempting to do. They've got the courts signed up, and if they can get the White House and the Congress in a red wave they seem every cycle to fantasize is coming, they'll have everything they need, they think. But I don’t think they’re going to win.
Part 2: Oren Cass and American Compass
So, the most important think tank in promoting this coup is Heritage, but there's another that most people have not heard about--Oren Cass's 'American Compass', which has done some work in coordination with Heritage's Project 2025. If you want to hear a good discussion of this conservative populist, pro-worker thinking, listen to Ezra Klein's conversation last week with Oren Cass .2
Cass, imo, holds his own with Klein, who, good establishment Liberal that he is, really goes after Cass. Cass is smart and thoughtful, and I believe he is operating in good faith. If he’s a fanatic, there’s little evidence for it. It scares me, though, that his American Compass has been associated with the development of Project 2025--I don't remember Klein challenging him on this.
But we need to make the attempt to understand what he's up to on its own terms. American Compass rejects the Neoliberal elite consensus, and that's why people like Sean O'Brien see the GOP as possibly moving in a direction that the Dems are not. O'Brien may be right or wrong about that. It's too early to tell. But does anybody in the Democratic elite see winning the ‘demos’ as a priority? Again, see Footnote 1.
Bottom Line: I want to focus on the underlying structural issues, and Cass is addressing them in a way that I think deserves to be taken seriously. You won't see him interviewed on MSNBC, but I credit Ezra Klein in what is clearly an honest effort to engage with him and to understand him.
So what do you need to know about American Compass? Here's the crux: According to Wikipedia--American Compass is dedicated to reforming Conservatism...
American Compass is endeavoring to shift the economic consensus towards a high view "of family, community, and industry."
In this sense it rejects Neoliberalism in its espousal of an alternative common-good approach to public policy.
With the group, Cass has argued for several changes to conservative thought:
Free markets
Under Cass, the group has strongly questioned the belief that free markets should be given primacy when setting public policy. Cass has described this "free market fundamentalism" as "pathetically simplistic." Cass and the grouping hold that absolutely proper for society to intervene in the market but also necessary for it to do so.
Industry and trade
Cass has advocated for unionization that enables workers to collectively bargain for sector-wide pay standards and working conditions. He argues that local industry should be protected by a cross-the-board 10% tariff on imported goods, which would increase by 5% until trade deficits are brought to zero, while investment in local industry would be funded by a national development bank.
A lot of this is elaborated and defended in the Klein interview. It should be apparent, that this is not Mitch McConnell's or the Koch Brothers' agenda, but it is close to Sean O'Brien's, and I think it's what Vance and Hawley,3 and maybe Rubio, are pushing for. Can they prevail within the Republican Party? I don't know. Any kind of pro-labor sentiment seems to go against the GOP DNA, but I think we need to pay attention to what they're up to as things develop. If we have learned anything in the last month we should understand that we need to expect the unexpected.
Notes
1. Had by some miracle Bernie won in '16, the Dems might have grabbed a substantial tranche that went over to Trump instead. I don't know for sure. Bernie almost certainly would not have succeeded in dominating the Dems the way that Trump came to dominate the GOP. He would have been viciously resisted by the Neoliberal uniparty--both the Republicans and Democrat establishment--and the Democrats would not have caved to the populist Left the way the Republicans caved to MAGA.
Why not? Because the Republican elite 1% realizes it cannot retain power without feeding the anti-establishment resentments of heartland populists who compose at least 40% of the electorate. Trump captured that 40%, and so now the 1% and its toadies in Congress had to choose between becoming irrelevant like Cheney and Kinzinger, or to bend the knee to Trump and hope they can remain influential enough to insure that the two simple things that matter to them--to lower taxes and to minimize regulations--remain core GOP policy.
The Democrats, on the other hand, see themselves as a broad-based coalition of center-left, diverse interest groups that constitute what they believe should be the future ruling majority as the country browns and boomers die off. They see the BerniePopulist Left as one faction among many, and they see that their majority, unlike the GOP's dependence on the MAGA populist right, does not depend on the populist left. There is no Democratic base for the Dems as there is for Republicans.
But there is a power center, and that resides with Neoliberal elites, whom I call the Aspen Institute Liberals. The NY Times editorial board typifies its ethos and mentality. And that power center is what got Joe Biden ousted earlier this week. And I can assure you that the interests of these elites do not align with the interests of most everyday Americans. Most Americans understand that, and that's why so many are feeling pushed toward Trump. Despite their repugnance for Trump, the repugnance many feel for these Aspen Institute Liberal elites is even more intense.
There's a divide-and-conquer strategy within the Democrat establishment that keeps its elites in power in a way similar to the strategy employed by the 1%.The Bernie Populist Left, if it were ever to be successful as a power center, would need much of the energy that is now captured by the MAGA Right, the kind of energy that Sean O'Brien represents. Maybe someday. That kind of coalition terrifies these Liberal elites who run the Democratic Party.
But in the meanwhile the Dem establishment believes that if the Dems can just survive this MAGA threat in the short term, they'll be home free in the long term, and these Aspen Institute Libs will continue to sit pretty. Maybe in the short term, but I doubt it in the long term. Nobody likes the 1%, and nobody, except elite wannabes, likes the Aspen Institute 10%.
2.Students in my “Human/Transhuman/Posthuman” class will remember his 2018 book “The Once and Future Worker” was assigned reading.
3. Neither have proved that they have the guts to fight this out in the way they’ll have to when the Billionaires turn on them. Will they cave or be coopted in some way?