Why the Red Wave Didn’t Materialize

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/opinion/republicans-midterms-workers-populists.html

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A week before the midterms, a video circulated online of a Starbucks barista crying while explaining the need for a union: “I’m a full-time student. I get scheduled for 25 hours a week, and on weekends they schedule me the entire day — open to close.” The manager is bad, the staffing is inadequate and the stress is overwhelming.

The video should have elicited sympathy from anyone familiar with the lousy wages and grinding conditions that characterize today’s service economy. That was not, though, the response of the full spectrum of conservative media and personalities, from Fox News to The Daily Wire to Sebastian Gorka.

“Boo Hoo!” replied Media Research Center TV, a conservative media site. “This ‘person’” — the barista happens to be transgender, hence, I suppose, the scare quotes around “person” — “was in tears because they had to work eight hours a day on the weekend.”

Episodes like this may be one reason the red wave didn’t materialize, why Republicans failed to usher in a new dawn of prosperity for the multiracial working class that Republican leaders from Senator Ted Cruz to the House policy honcho Jim Banks say they want to champion. When it came down to it, the Republican Party offered ordinary American workers little that might have bolstered their power or leveled the economic playing field. That failure helped dash conservative hopes for a clean Republican sweep.

Mutual recriminations will ping-pong around right-wing circles in the coming days and weeks. Most will likely center on “messaging,” candidate choices and other such tactical failures. It’s true that local circumstances shape any midterm election — we live in a vast and variegated country, and each race has its own contours. Still, in an era when national politics exerts such a strong gravitational pull on local elections, the most important question is: What sort of national vision did the Republican Party offer working Americans in 2022?

It’s hard to say, really. The best I can come up with is something like this: Hand us the keys to government, but don’t expect us to give you anything in return. And in that indifference lies the central problem bedeviling Republicans up and down the ballot.

Ever since Donald Trump’s rise, there has been much talk, and some evidence, of a realignment in American politics. Breaking with longstanding G.O.P. orthodoxies on free trade, entitlements and health care, Mr. Trump coaxed huge numbers of white voters without college degrees away from the Democrats. Once in office, he delivered on tariffs. But other pieces of his populist agenda fell away, as his aides forged ahead with the old Chamber of Commerce conservatism (tax cuts, deregulation and a profoundly anti-union labor policy).

Yes, Trumpy populism was halting and self-contradictory, but the variety that emerged in Republican circles after Mr. Trump left office was downright fake. Correctly perceiving working- and middle-class discontent with corporate power and economic insecurity, Republicans in 2022 tried to channel it into cultural grievances, ginning up outrage over “woke” sensitivity trainings in the workplace, for instance. A much more effective way to check corporate power would actually be to empower workers — which is what unions do best. Instead, the right continued to pursue its old program of undermining the New Deal.

Fake G.O.P. populism challenged “woke capital” — companies that it believed had become overly politically correct — but didn’t dare touch the power of corporate America to coerce workers and consumers, or the power of private equity and hedge funds to hollow out the real economy, which employs workers for useful products and services — or used to, anyway. The Republican Party remained as hostile as ever to collective bargaining as a new wave of labor militancy swept the private economy.

Kevin Roberts, for instance, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which to a large degree still shapes the policy thinking of conventional Republican lawmakers and candidates, started out pitching himself as a populist in Washington. But as recently as August, he was tweeting standard Reaganite fare: “Government is not the solution, but the obstacle, to our flourishing.”

Other conservative “populists” embraced similar talking points. Search the “issues” statements of any number of 2022 Republican hopefuls who struggled to win, and you will most likely find some variation on: I will “always promote capitalism” (an actual statement from one of the Republicans who lost her re-election bid Tuesday, Mayra Flores in South Texas).

In 2022, “defending capitalism” without reservation means upholding the very forces these populists claim to oppose: Big Tech and “woke” capital and deindustrialization.

Think about it: If you’re a member of the downwardly mobile middle class, someone with a college degree but without a secure job, even as student-loan payments bear down on you, all this rhetoric telegraphs: You aren’t getting any help.

That was, for example, the response of Mehmet Oz, who lost his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania, to the Biden administration’s student-debt relief plan. Mr. Oz — who describes himself as a “small-government Republican” — said he couldn’t support such a measure, which he suggested would hurt the working class. But who exactly was the celebrity physician talking about?

The right often misunderstands what the “working class” actually is — imagining, say, a burly Teamster or a roofing contractor, not the adjunct professor scraping by on $25,000 a year, or even that barista working at Starbucks to pay for college.

Republican economic policy remains overwhelmingly beholden to a donor class of plutocrats and high corporate managers. Seen from that perspective, it makes sense for the party to talk about adjuncts and baristas as though they were members of the ruling class. In doing so, these faux populists can remain indifferent to issues like wages and workplace power, health care and the depredations of speculative finance. Take the organizing efforts at Amazon over the last two years. Republican lawmakers with the honorable exception of Senator Marco Rubio largely stayed silent. Ditto for similar labor actions among dock workers, hospital workers, tractor-factory hands, retail clerks and, yes, Starbucks baristas.

On Tuesday, it seems enough members of the “the multiracial working class” may have decided to repay that hostility and help deny Republicans their red wave: either by staying home or casting their ballots for the party that, despite its other failings, keeps entitlements inviolate, supports collective bargaining and has sought to ease the student-loan burden. Boo Hoo!

Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) is one of the founders and editors of Compact: A Radical American Journal. His book on the tyranny of the private sector will be out next year.

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