Pat Buchanan and the “White Working Class”

Mr. Buchanan giving his favorite salute

Pat Buchanan, frothing about one decision made by Sonia Sotomayor entirely on the basis of existing civil rights law, wants conservatives to “stand up for the white working class.” Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Just in case you were in suspended animation for the last few decades, or are very young (or watch Fox News), here are a few ways conservatives in power have “stood up” for the working class, white and otherwise, since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980:

– They have gutted legal protections for union organizing and appointed anti-union administrators to the National Labor Relations Board to the point at which fewer than 10% of private-sector workers are unionized.

– They have seriously weakened workplace health and safety protection by adding all sorts of exceptions to existing legislation and by drastically underfunding OSHA inspection and enforcement.

- They have fought to resist any increase in the minimum wage at both Federal and state levels.

- They have vehemently resisted the Family Leave Act and any mandate for increased sick leave or longer paid vacation.

– They have helped to defund public transportation.

– They have done everything possible, including tax breaks, to encourage corporations to export what were decently paid and often union jobs to low-wage zones abroad.

– They have made it more difficult for workers to sue employers for age and gender discrimination (half of all workers are women, and white workers get old too).

The working class, nonwhite and white together, standing up for itself

In other words, if they’re standing up for me (speaking as a “white” and currently unemployed worker), I wish they’d sit the fuck down. Pat Buchanan’s supposed concern for the “white working class” is disingenuous, racist, hypocritical hot air. “Conservatives” in America today are about one thing: conserving the wealth and privilege of the (almost all white) wealthy and privileged class. If we didn’t know that in 1980, we sure as hell do now.

I laugh, bitterly to be sure. But really it’s no laughing matter. Simultaneous appeals to class and “race” or nationality from members of the dominant ethnic group are invariably protofascist, because fascism is the vertical alliance of the ruling (capitalist) class with the working class of the same ethnicity or nationality against a manufactured Other: the Jews, the niggers, the immigrants, whoever. Racism is to fascism as beer is to vodka: the fermented but undistilled compound.

The responses to the Sotomayor nomination and to the assassination of Dr. George Tiller by people like Buchanan, Bill O’Reilly, and Randall Terry, together with the resurgence of “freemen” and militia-type organizations, are reinforcing my suspicion that the Republican Right may well collapse into a kind of white “Christian” nationalist party with an increasingly violent semi-underground terrorist wing–attacking immigrant rallies, picket lines of mainly black or brown workers, abortion clinics and pro-choice demonstrations, and of course queers and queer public presence. (See also the xenophobic responses of Sarah Palin’s base during the last weeks of the McCain campaign, or the sheer lunacy displayed at the “teabag” rallies in April.)

When you hear the likes of Pat Buchanan start spouting about the oppression of the “white working class” in our current political and economic crisis, expect more extreme views and more intimidation and thuggery to follow close behind those words, while the “mainstream” instigators ostentatiously wash their filthy hands on TV and piously declaim against violence. We need to be ready.

And here they come, spouting the words of Thomas Jefferson, who would not have crossed the street to spit on them if they were on fire…