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Ventriloquizing the Working Man: Classic Right-Wing Trope of Selectively Speaking on Behalf of The Poor and Put-Upon Has a Major Moment This Week

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Ventriloquizing the Working Man: Classic Right-Wing Trope of Selectively Speaking on Behalf of The Poor and Put-Upon Has a Major Moment This Week

From Covid restrictions to immigration to loan forgiveness, right-wing think tanks and pundits who make a living harming the poor fake concern for their plight when it suits corporate interests.

Adam Johnson
and
Sarah Lazare
Aug 26, 2022
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Ventriloquizing the Working Man: Classic Right-Wing Trope of Selectively Speaking on Behalf of The Poor and Put-Upon Has a Major Moment This Week

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Wednesday, after President Biden announced that the White House would be forgiving between $10,000 and $20,000 in federal student loans for some borrowers, various politicians, think tanks, and pundits who heretofore have displayed no concern for the worker on matters of substance and policy—no support for recent unionization efforts, the PRO ACT, higher minimum wage, a better funded OSHA, more worker safety—suddenly decided The Working Man would be harmed by student loan forgiveness.

On a very superficial and passing basis, assuming one doesn’t have context or any sense about how loan forgiveness works, it can be an appealing argument: Why should a group of people who are, by definition, educated be handed FREE MONEY while struggling people who didn’t go to college are given nothing? And right-wing personalities are here to tell you it’s simply unfair. Calling out the hypocrisy that dozens of these very right-wing media and political personalities themselves collectively took out millions in forgiven PPP loans (a point that is so obvious even the White House is running with it) probably won’t amount to much. Hypocrisy is so routine and shameless in today’s GOP that it’s hardly worth pointing out. But the faux populists on the right are genuinely good at mugging and faking like they’re Very Concerned for the Working Person. More passive or low-information media consumers could be convinced by their most recent iteration of Ventriloquizing the Working Class so we, thus, think it’s a trope worth pointing out, naming, and dissecting in its own right. 

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To do so we will break down its usage in three recent contentious policy debates: Covid restrictions, immigration, and—now—loan forgiveness.

Covid

Let’s begin with the debate around Covid restrictions. As early as April 2020, right-wing think tanks and politicians knew that any lockdown, no matter how scattered and qualified, would have to require massive government spending on social welfare. To hardliners this was unacceptable, since it was believed this would give the poor and middle class a taste of what it was like to live in a welfare state, and thereby create a dangerous precedent. But simply saying “we need to workers to go off and die by the tens of thousands because we don’t want them to know what it’s like to make money without working” sounds evil (because it is), so instead, the white boarding sessions at The Heritage Foundation got underway, and the messaging plan was to make it seem like sending workers into perilous conditions was in their interest.

As co-author Sarah Lazare documented for In These Times, in April of 2020, Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James proclaimed, “Keeping the American people at work and prosperous is what will produce better health outcomes for our citizens.” She sought to frame sending workers into deadline conditions as good for poor people: “A growing economy has the money for research and development into new medical innovations and cures; has more resources to better educate and train medical personnel; and creates greater capacities of beds, equipment, medicines, and personnel to handle the sick. It’s also an economy where abundance allows us to have the resources to help poorer citizens get the medical help that they need.” This declaration was part of a political and media push—in concert with other conservative organizations and think tanks, as well as Wall Street executives and bosses—to prevent the most basic of public health protections, over concerns they would harm profits. Such advocacy from James, the head of The Heritage Foundation, is not innocuous: Trump named her as a thought leader in his “Great American Economic Revival Industry Group,” a designation that suggests she had some kind of relationship with the White House.

James’ invocation of workers’ rights is especially notable because, since its 1973 founding by conservatives and the ultra-wealthy Joseph Coors, Sr., The Heritage Foundation’s raison d'etre has been pushing for the gutting of social programs for the poor. The think tank has been influential in the Reagan administration, the Tea Party movement, and the Trump administration, priding itself on opposing unions, objecting to modest wage increases, and pushing so-called “right to work” laws. The Heritage Foundation’s big accomplishment during the Trump administration was influencing the then-president to introduce stringent work requirements as a condition of receiving food stamps, effectively cutting off hundreds of thousands of people from food assistance.

Debt Forgiveness

And now that more than 1 million Americans have died of Covid, with people in poor counties perishing at two times the rate as their counterparts in rich counties, and pandemic-era social programs have mostly dried up, The Heritage Foundation is at it again: invoking the plight of the working class to argue that Biden should not cancel any student debt. “Biden's Student Debt Cancellation Robs Hard-Working Americans, Will Make Inflation Even Worse,” reads the think tank’s headline. A statement from staffers Lindsey Burke and Adam Kissel declares, "Make no mistake, the working people who make this country great reject these bailouts and will make their voices heard in doing so.”

This messaging—in which some of the biggest purveyors of anti-worker sentiment invoke the rights of workers to argue against basic, humane policy—erupted in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s limited debt cancellation (which numerous borrowers and activists insist did not go nearly far enough). 

Twitter avatar for @bungarsargon
Batya Ungar-Sargon @bungarsargon
I just don't know how these people making $100K a year look people in the face who change seniors' bedpans for a living or drive a truck or work the railroad or stock grocery shelves or deliver their Amazon packages and say, "You, yes you, give me $10K." I just don't get it.
9:49 PM ∙ Aug 24, 2022
37,043Likes6,047Retweets
Twitter avatar for @MattRinaldiTX
Matt Rinaldi @MattRinaldiTX
Harvard has a $42 billion endowment. Yale’s is $31 billion. But Biden will tax truck drivers and plumbers to pay the student loans that built those empires.
11:27 PM ∙ Aug 23, 2022
67,236Likes19,043Retweets
Twitter avatar for @greg_price11
Greg Price @greg_price11
Here are some facts: Only 37% of Americans have a 4-yr college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees, and a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school. Biden's plan to cancel it would be like taking money from a plumber to pay the debt of a lawyer.
3:44 PM ∙ Aug 23, 2022
27,205Likes7,943Retweets
Twitter avatar for @tatereeves
Governor Tate Reeves @tatereeves
Today Biden will announce that welders, plumbers, laborers, & other Mississippians (black, white, Hispanic, etc.) will be forced to pay off the debts of Harvard doctorate degree gender studies majors living in California. Why does the Democrat Party hate working people so much?
3:38 PM ∙ Aug 24, 2022
3,144Likes648Retweets
Twitter avatar for @GovRonDeSantis
Ron DeSantis @GovRonDeSantis
It’s unfair to force a truck driver to pay a loan for someone who got a PhD in gender studies. Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for student loan relief and Biden’s order isn’t constitutional. If anything, universities handing out worthless degrees should be on the hook.
3:40 PM ∙ Aug 25, 2022
56,516Likes11,797Retweets

Never mind that blue-collar workers and members of the working class are also among those drowning in student debt, or, as numerous others have pointed out, blue-collar workers, like railroad workers and plumbers, can make a very decent living, especially those with unions. The chorus of voices raising a moral alarm about student debt relief being anti-worker have proven track records of consistently harming workers (Gov. DeSantis, for example, has made bashing teachers’ unions a cornerstone of his tenure, and has launched an all-out attack on LGBTQ teachers and students). And they only bring up workers to invoke their supposed needs, hopes, and desires to advocate policies that hurt the poor and exploited classes.

Immigration 

A popular topic where the right evokes the Plight of the Working man is that of immigration. Again, it sounds sort of bad to say what they really think, which is, “We are white nationalists who want to maintain the majority population of the white race.” So instead they shift to the “American worker” and how it important it is we protect the “American worker” form the job-taking dark immigrants coming into our country and shifting our “culture” and “demographics”. 

Twitter avatar for @JDVance1
J.D. Vance @JDVance1
Just idiotic. “Remain in Mexico” was one of the smartest immigration policies of the last 30 years. A president who cares about his own people dying of fentanyl overdoses doesn’t do this.
Twitter avatar for @thehill
The Hill @thehill
#BREAKING: Biden formally ends Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" immigration program https://t.co/wwkXdkQRZO https://t.co/cHkhoBsDIA
8:31 PM ∙ Jun 1, 2021
2,760Likes751Retweets
Twitter avatar for @ColumbiaBugle
The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 @ColumbiaBugle
Senator Josh @HawleyMO & Tucker Carlson Slamming the Washington Elites for Offshoring American Jobs & Selling America Out to China Senator Hawley: "It's time to actually put the American Worker, American Families, and American Interests First!"
3:27 PM ∙ Apr 2, 2020
403Likes168Retweets
Twitter avatar for @SenTomCotton
Tom Cotton @SenTomCotton
I joined my colleagues yesterday in introducing legislation to protect and provide certainty to DACA recipients, improve the lawful immigration system by targeting illegal immigration and criminal aliens, and protect the American worker. MORE:
ow.lyRepublican Senators Author Plan to Resolve DACA Situation, Improve Integrity & Confidence in Immigration System | U.S. Senator Cotton of Ar…Contact: Caroline Rabbitt Tabler (202) 224-2353 WASHINGTON, D.C. - Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas)...
9:45 PM ∙ Dec 6, 2017
60Likes11Retweets

Note that none of the above pundits and politicians support any pro-labor policies. They don’t support unions, recent unionization efforts, the PRO ACT, strengthening collective bargaining rules or the NLRB, or improving OSHA. In fact, Tucker Carlson has been on a multi-year crusade mocking teachers unions while having on a celebrity former Opera singer to rail against worker protections. They don’t like “workers,” they like the aesthetic of “workers” insofar as they can be used to launder their own racist, anti-immigrant attitudes. 

The Column is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Ventriloquizing the Working Man: Classic Right-Wing Trope of Selectively Speaking on Behalf of The Poor and Put-Upon Has a Major Moment This Week

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Ventriloquizing the Working Man: Classic Right-Wing Trope of Selectively Speaking on Behalf of The Poor and Put-Upon Has a Major Moment This Week

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Eric Andrade
Aug 27, 2022·edited Aug 27, 2022

Nothing like the upper class using the the middle class as a distraction and target of hatred while they continue their race to the bottom, sucking every drop of blood they can harvest, and doing so with some sick glee.

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