The Reactionary Value of “Pro-Labor” Vibes

I’m still traveling—around California now—and have shared some photos and musings at the bottom of this post.

But I just wanted to quickly insist on two things that I think even very smart folks are misunderstanding:

1. Almost nobody in Washington, left or right, cares about building working-class power.

2. You must situate your analysis of the economy in a global context or else your political commitments, no matter how “progressive,” will end up serving reactionary ends.

I need to explain what’s going on here.

Rana Foroohar is a well known journalist at FT with some left-aligned political sensibilities. As she admits in this tweet, she has been courted by Oren Cass and American Compass. Matt Stoller was an Elizabeth Warren adviser who milled around the “technocratic left” before finding that he had a rapt audience on some of the harder edged parts of the American right. He too has linked up with Cass and American Compass.

For those who don’t know, Oren Cass is a one-time domestic policy adviser to corporations-are-people-too Mitt Romney. In recent years, Cass started touting the American working class…making him something of an intellectual architect for Hillbilly Elegy types. His magazine, American Compass, has a “post-liberal” brand that claims to be pro-worker, but has been critiqued repeatedly for its policies being functionally anti-worker. Senator Tom Cotton, to give you an indicator of how this lines up with MAGA politics, spoke at the magazine last June and lavished praise on its project.

The reason there’s an apparent convergence between Cass’s reactionary-aligned project and people like Foroohar and Stoller is that they all share in nominally “pro-labor” vibes. They claim to promote working-class politics (as do I!). So why am I so critical of them?

Because theirs is a pseudo working-class politics in the absolute worst, elite-capture sort of way.

We exist in a global economy, correct? America’s wealth owes to its privileged position in processes of neoliberal globalization, correct? Funny, then, that these folks think about promoting the American working class only in the domestic political context.

To the extent that this emergent milieu thinks about American labor in its global economic context, it’s only via overwrought claims about the so-called China shock (“China stole our jobs, argh!”). That portrays America as a victim of Chinese predation…which is, at best, politically opportunistic and demagogic.

What the “pro-labor” vibes here mask is economic nationalism and great-power war preparation, which co-constitute each other. Just as their analysis lines up with the flag of a particular nation, so too does it prescribe “solutions” for the world that seek to secure and enrich the self at the expense of others. This is self-defeating precisely because it’s bad analysis. A global hegemon that turns mercantilist dooms the world, even apart from the war risks and military buildups it rationalizes. A doomed world is bad for American workers.

The world we’re currently creating is one in which countries that have the means will become “post-neoliberal” while everyone else will be forced to keep being immiserated by neoliberalism until something just breaks. That’s a clear North-South divide; it’s clearly a world-system in which the rich hoard and perpetuate unequal terms of exchange with the rest of the world.

Focusing at the national (vice global) level is a distraction if it does not focus on the balance of class forces in society. Who benefits, and who is harmed, by our economic policies? If the policies you advocate do not address the relative power of owners of capital versus the precarious majority, then it’s not “pro-labor.”

Foroohar may “find it interesting” that someone with exclusionary, oligarch-backed politics would see value in her views.

But if one rides the wave of paranoia about China, ignores the balance of class forces, and thinks about labor through a nationalist lens, then yes—reactionaries will indeed find one useful. That should hardly be a surprise.

Monterey and San Francisco Travelog

Monterey is a special place.

After I ran away from home to join the US Air Force at the age of 17, I won some kind of cosmic lottery. The military sent me to Monterey to study Korean at the Defense Language Institute. It was the first real site of my intellectual blossoming. My mind opened up. The language program I was enrolled in was rigorous; at the time it had a washout rate of 50%. But I thrived, outperforming my peers, which included people who had actually been to college; something that seemed out of reach for me at the time.

My success in Monterey gave me the confidence to enroll in the local community college, Monterey Peninsula College (MPC). My wildest fantasy was to eventually get a PhD and come back to teach at MPC; well, the PhD part happened so that’s something.

At any rate, no physical place has ever captured my mind or my heart the way Monterey has. I make it a point to stop in every time I come to California. And if I were rich enough, this is for sure where I’d settle.

When I was stationed in Monterey, I walked by the Portola Hotel (then called the Double Tree) pretty much every day because it anchors one end of Alvarado Street, which is the main artery running through downtown Old Monterey.

As a poor kid making no money at the rank of Airman First Class, it was the most luxurious place I’d ever seen. I dreamed of staying there, and could hardly imagine how glorious it must’ve been on the inside. So it’s a small triumph that I was able to stay here for what is now the fourth or fifth time. It’s very nice, and a life-satisfying thing for sure, but hardly as grand as I’d built it up in my imagination.

The Holman Building in Pacific Grove, which features briefly in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, has been remade into condos that now start at $2.4 million (!). Beautiful interiors, unbeatable location, and very far from affordable.

Monterey celebrates its historical working classes. I had never seen that in any other place I’d been. And while I love the romantic gesture, the veneration is stripped of its labor-leftist reality, which is what the working class was in this area. Unsurprising, then, that nobody can afford to live here.

I ran into some good Washington friends my first night in San Francisco!

I've visited San Francisco pretty much every year since 2007. Every time I come back, I'm struck at how the tale-of-two-cities character of it gets more extreme. It's embarrassing that the richest country in the world has within it some of the worst poverty.

Maybe it’s just me but the place feels like it’s getting more dangerous. And the temporary fix—posting security guards and cops everywhere there’s a business in need of shooing away poor people—is no fix at all. Feels like some Children of Men shit. There’s a metaphor in that, perhaps, for thinking about international security.