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.
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.
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).
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”.
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.