RENT IS INFLATIONARY

More Democrats Should Talk About Capping Rents

The fact that Joe Biden felt the need to call for nationwide rent-increase caps this past week is a refreshing turn toward pro-tenant policy at a time when millions of renters are all but ignored by both parties.

People attend a rally to support rent-controlled tenants who have been threatened with eviction on March 13, 2019, in New York City.

 (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images)

BYCEA WEAVER

JACOBIN
07.21.2024

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden called on Congress to cap rent increases at 5 percent — the first time a sitting president has embraced rent control since Richard Nixon implemented widespread price control measures amid hyperinflation in the early 1970s. This extraordinary announcement follows the successes of a growing nationwide tenant movement that has won local and state rent control campaigns in New York, California, Minnesota, Maine, Oregon, and Maryland over the last few years.


The announcement comes at a time when the Biden administration is struggling to revive its reelection campaign and quiet calls for him to step down from running for a second term, of course. The president seems to believe that bold pro-worker policy proposals can push him through to a second term. Whether or not it works, rent caps are a refreshing step in the right direction in a country where millions of renters are suffering badly.

Biden’s proposal for rent caps would protect tenants who live in “corporate-owned buildings” from increases larger than 5 percent for two years. “Corporate” is defined as landlords who own more than fifty apartments in their portfolio. Landlords who don’t comply would risk losing generous property tax write-offs. The plan, which requires congressional approval, is unlikely to become law in the current political environment. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s call for rent caps is a major milestone for renters, largely organized at the national level through the newly formed Tenant Union Federation.

While rent control is often maligned by conservative economists, the truth is that it works. It promotes affordability, high-quality housing, and stabilizes whole neighborhoods in the face of rapidly rising cost of living. By preventing sudden price hikes, it supports households and neighborhoods facing gentrification. By giving tenants the right to renew leases (preventing landlords from choosing not to re-sign the leases of tenants who organize against them or replacing longtime residents with tenants willing to pay higher rents), it ensures families in distressed neighborhoods can organize against divestment and demand repairs without fear of retaliatory eviction. Rent control is a critical part of any comprehensive housing policy concerned with promoting stable neighborhoods and affordable communities.

But rent control has never been the preferred policy choice of either major political party in the United States. Our enduring mythology around the “American dream” is reflected in almost every major domestic policy decision related to housing. US policy is overwhelmingly geared toward subsidizing homeownership not just as a housing policy but as a stand-in for a real social safety net.


If you want to send your children to a good public school, buy a house in the right neighborhood. As property values go up, so does the funding of the local elementary school. If you want to fund health care or higher education, take out a second mortgage. If you want end-of-life care, you better hope that the equity you invested in your home will pay for that.

There is an obvious twist embedded in that great dream: in order to reap the benefits of homeownership, property values must continuously go up. This makes the whole market more expensive — and, in turn, the whole supposed opportunity is less available to others. For decades, the neoliberal response to rising costs has been subsidizing homeowners and homeownership, putting more and more state resources into a private market that more and more people are excluded from. Today homeownership is out of reach in almost every major city, homelessness is at record highs, and the population increasingly cannot afford their monthly shelter costs.Rent stabilization should become the de facto policy of the Democratic Party.

Biden’s preferred policy is far from perfect. A two-year proposal to cap rents “while we wait for supply to come online” misses the mark. In fact, as investment flows into cities and housing production increases, rent stabilization becomes more important than ever: it protects against displacement and rising housing costs and promotes economically and racially diverse neighborhoods in the face of gentrification.

And by choosing to only regulate landlords who own more than fifty apartments, Biden’s proposal still leaves millions of renters at the whims of their landlords. Just as we should not exempt local restaurant owners from health and safety regulations or minimum wage provisions, we should not leave the housing stability of millions of people to the goodwill of the person who collects their rent.

Yet a sitting president calling for rent control — however tepid — is a major turn in a new direction for domestic public policy from the most powerful Democrat in the United States. Rather than treat renters — forty-four million households — as second-class citizens, the president explicitly is acknowledging that our housing stability matters, and that the way to achieve that is to regulate how much landlords can charge in rent.

Rent control is not just good public policy — it’s good politics. According to a recent analysis of voting patterns in New York out of Cornell University, running on tenants’ rights activates a voting block that is likely to vote Democratic. In New York, where half of the city is rent stabilized, rent stabilized tenants are a major political force that would-be office holders must contend with.

And unlike rental assistance, which individualizes the problem of not being able to afford rent and strips economic power (for example, the power to rent strike) away from its recipients, rent control creates a political class of tenants who can be organized to defend and strengthen their rights. The Biden administration proposal has the potential to create a major working-class voting constituency beyond any one election cycle.

Biden’s campaign is on life support, but the Democratic nominee for president, whoever it ends up being, should take up his call and campaign vigorously for renter protections. Right now, thirty-seven states have outright bans on rent control. Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, and Pennsylvania — swing states or blue states with Democratic governors who presumably would like to support the top of the ticket — should act swiftly and lift statewide bans on rent stabilization.

Rent stabilization should become the de facto policy of the Democratic Party. While the left of the party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has long supported rent stabilization, more recently fifteen Senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined the Tenant Union Federation in calling on Biden to cap rent hikes.

While this specific proposal is unlikely to happen without a major shift in political power, the announcement last week makes clear that the shift is on the way. Building by building, block by block, tenants are getting organized — and getting results.

CONTRIBUTORS
Cea Weaver is a director of organizing/campaign manager at Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance.

Twilight of the Woke

Hegel claimed that wisdom about a historical period often comes only after it has ended. As wokeness loses sway, we can better see its effects on socialist politics.

A Pride-colored, heart-shaped sticker with a black power fist is displayed on a Chase Bank window on June 24, 2020, in New York City. (Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)

BYDUSTIN GUASTELLA

JACOBIN
07.23.2024

Review of Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman (Polity, 2023)

Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke is a wonderful little book. The kind more intellectuals need to write. Neiman’s prose is lively and refreshingly fearless. She does not rely on complicated sentences or passive voice to gloss controversy. She takes a stand and sticks to it. Nor does she suffer from the reverse-victimhood complex common to so many “anti-woke” writers. This is a book you can recommend to friends and family members, even those who disagree with her starting premise.

For Neiman, “wokeness” is not a project that can rightly trace its inspiration from the progressive political tradition. And while much has been made about the political liabilities of woke rhetoric, few critics of wokeness from the Left have offered a sustained argument for what defines the Left and why “staying woke” might be at odds with it.

Neiman’s argument, sustained over four big chapters, is that wokeness is not only alien to the principles of the Left, but antithetical to them. It’s an argument that has, expectedly, garnered her enemies — one reviewer called her book “a cringe-inducing screed.”

But far from a screed, Neiman’s writing is compelling and sensitive. Wokeness, as defined by her, is an ideology that reduces all groups down to the “prism of their marginalization.” By doing so, it makes an implicit claim about society as a set of conflicts rooted in power dynamics between rival groups (black versus white; cis versus trans; straight versus gay; and on and on). Neiman offers a provocative question at the start: “Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally, it was the right that focused on the first, the left that emphasized the second.”

Tribalism, Power, and Doom

The book is broken into chapters such as “Universalism Versus Tribalism,” “Justice Versus Power,” and “Progress Versus Doom.” In each case, she demonstrates how the logic of wokeness falls on the right side of the dyad.

For Neiman, to be woke is to hold a tribal worldview, one that says that the in-group (defined by skin color, or gender, or nationality, or indeed even those who identify as “progressive”) is “good” and the out-group is “bad.” This, she argues, is close to the worldview of German jurist Carl Schmitt, who views “the essence of politics as a permanent struggle between friend and enemy.” That kind of polarity may seem natural in all forms of democratic politics — after all, populist and socialist appeals rely on a narrative that splits the world between the people or the workers and the elite or the rich — but there is something very different about Schmittian “political theology.”

For one thing, it so happens that Schmitt’s ideas were an inspiration for Nazism, and Schmitt himself never renounced his support for the Third Reich. His “friend-enemy” worldview is built around the notion of horizontal, irresolvable, conflicts between irreconcilable groups (as opposed to a labor-capital dialectic that could be overcome through the abolition of wage labor). For him, all concepts in politics are reducible to the friend-enemy groupings. In this light, it is impossible to appeal to some higher objective or moral judgment outside of the dynamics of these groups. Schmitt “rejected universalism, any conception of justice that transcends a notion of power” and the very notion of progress. He embraced a vision of politics where the collectivization of enmity is the goal. It’s no wonder he considered democratic deliberation superfluous.Neiman offers a provocative question at the start: ‘Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold?’

To be woke is to be similarly allergic to claims of universalism and appeals to objective standards of goodness. Indeed, the falseness of universalism is revealed as the narrow perspective of “dead white guys.” Neiman shows how flimsy this logic is. She rescues Enlightenment thinkers, especially Immanuel Kant, from their would-be assailants by demonstrating that it was the pursuit of a systematic theory of justice — predicated on the belief in the universal human capacity for reason — that allowed these dead white guys to envision a society beyond the dark and archaic tribalism of Medieval Europe. It was from these very appeals that movements against slavery and for democracy sprang. The woke rejection of the Enlightenment, therefore, represents an unconscious embrace of a kind of Nietzschean power struggle. A reassertion of “my tribe versus yours.”

Relatedly, to be woke is to hold a nihilistic view of history. Perhaps Neiman’s strongest chapter, and most acerbic, is that in which she defends the very notion of human progress. “Progressive” she writes “would be the right name for those who lean left today, if they didn’t embrace philosophies that undermine hope for progress.” Instead, today’s woke crusaders present history as nothing but a parade of horrors. A nonstop slouch toward Gomorrah. Everything you think is good? The idea of human progress, reason, scientific advancement — even math — are all actually racist. It’s a paranoid worldview that makes people see even the most innocuous things as demonstrations of evil. A white male country music star covers a 1990s pop ballad written by a black lesbian? Here’s why you should feel badly about that.

Some of this nihilism, according to Neiman, was smuggled into the Left by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s theoretical works were widely embraced by those who confused his subversive style for radical substance. As Neiman notes: “Everything in his performance screamed rebel. He wrote books that glorified those on society’s margins: the outlaw, the madman.”

Still, what Foucault lacked was a clear moral foundation. He was totally opposed to normative judgements, and therefore eschewed a belief that society ought to be better. Noam Chomsky famously claimed that Foucault was the most amoral person he’d ever met. There is a lesson here about the performance of transgression substituting for political commitment. For Neiman, Foucault’s genius was to marry a radical style with a message that “was as reactionary as anything Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre ever wrote.”

Whither Wokeness or Wokeness Withering?

While Neiman offers a great argument for rescuing the progressive tradition from the clutches of woke stagnation, she doesn’t explain how so many people on the Left came to fall for the ideology. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s metaphor about the Owl of Minerva flying at dusk suggests that understanding and wisdom arrive only after events have unfolded. Given the truckload of books published in the last two years that try to make sense of wokeness, we might be tempted to think that the twilight of woke is at hand. And yet the lack of an explanation for the roots of woke — where this ideology came from, why it caught fire, whom it serves, and where it might be going — suggests that maybe the thing it has not reached maturation. Maybe we still haven’t hit “peak woke.”

It seems obvious that, for at least a short period, wokeness had reigned supreme. It also seems as if that period has passed or is passing. The New York Times opinion section on May 17, 2024, declared: “Wokeness Is Dying, We Might Miss It.” Is it? Will we? If we understand wokeness to be a kind of public mania that gripped liberal democratic opinion for a period, it’s easy to imagine that the grip is loosening. But this only pushes the question back one level of abstraction. Naturally, we should ask, why did such a hysteria take hold in the first place?Karl Marx’s dictum that the ‘ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ might go some way to understanding what this phenomenon is really about.

One reason it’s so hard to make sense of the thing is that defenders of wokeness almost never substantially engage with critics like Neiman. Indeed, many of today’s woke sympathizers deny that wokeness is, or ever was, an identifiable set of influential ideas. Wokeness takes its self-conception as natural. Its advocates do not argue for their position, they merely mock.

Consider that, whenever a critic of some woke supposition lays out the case for, say, why defunding or even abolishing the police is a terrible idea (as Neiman ably does), former advocates of said idea will respond with a laugh that no one ever really cared about that, or that it was never really part of the woke agenda even if those same individuals were explicitly championing that cause as little as a few months prior. Bad faith or post-hysteria amnesia? It’s increasingly impossible to tell.

This bolsters Neiman’s point about the dangerous woke aversion to reason and argument, their knee-jerk reflex against persuasion. But, worryingly, it does make it hard to undermine these ideas. For, if they present themselves as natural, and if many people invoke “woke” arguments in a kind of organic, unthinking way, then we have left the realm of reason and entered — as Slavoj Žižek might say — the domain of pure ideology.

However, if we view wokeness as an ideological project, instead of a passing bout of social psychosis, then Karl Marx might be of some help. His dictum that the “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” might go some way toward understanding what this phenomenon is really about. Dominant ideas, and their peddlers, in every age, present their notions as part of the natural order of things, when really those ideas serve the class interests of the peddlers themselves. In that regard, wokeness must serve a very useful function in contemporary capitalist society, which means it will be much harder to leave behind than it may seem.

The story of how exactly it serves that function has yet to be adequately written. It probably has something to do with the immense (and immensely wealthy) “nonprofit” sector and the revolving door between large influential corporate foundations, the Democratic Party, the media, and the government. A self-reenforcing circuit that surely operates in ways similar to the military-industrial complex. Or, as Tom Holland has argued, it may be a bizarre Christian mutation for an increasingly unbelieving elite in desperate need of a way to satiate a religious impulse, in its rhetorical commitments to empowering the powerless. Still, the fact that the affinity between wokeness and capitalism has been more often remarked upon by the political right, should be a source of shame for the Left.

Can Woke Get Worse?

Perhaps the most powerful part of Neiman’s book is also its most worrying. Neiman brilliantly demonstrates the affinity between wokeness and the thought of Schmitt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Foucault. These are the thinkers that offer us a real glimpse into the profoundly cynical worldview of wokeness. And she shows how these theorists — conductors in the “symphony of suspicion that forms the background music to contemporary Western culture” — lack any coherent argument for how society ought to be organized. While they are gifted critics of liberal hypocrisy and modernity, their failure to offer a convincing alternative, or even orientation, marks them as contemptuous of any pursuit of the common good. If Foucault, Nietzsche, and Schmitt are indeed the not-so-secret inspiration for the opinion makers and ideologists of our age, we’re in trouble.

As bad as wokeness is, what’s next could always be worse. If Foucauldian-Schmittianism wrought havoc on the Left, this “mind virus” is likely to cause even more trouble if its tenets become widely adopted on the Right. Consider that the major impulse of wokeness was a kind of reflexive pity for victims. Often, this pity was misplaced, and real economic victims (like poor white men) were scapegoated as the holders of privilege by well-heeled activists.

Yet the “victimology” mindset can go both ways. If the woke have insisted that characteristics like a person’s skin color, or their gender, or whatever else, marks them as fundamentally different in a grand metaphysical way and have made that point central to political appeals, then what happens if the Right takes up the charge by simply reversing the friend-enemy polarity? They will say to young men that their loneliness is not a function of “toxic masculinity” but instead the result of women’s claims to equality. And they will say to poor whites, who are adrift and frustrated, that they don’t need to “abolish ‘whiteness’” — instead, they should embrace it. We already see this beginning to happen — a reversal of the Left’s hard-fought victory in the civil rights era.

What is common in these appeals is that neither the injunction to destroy one’s whiteness or masculinity, nor the injunction to embrace those features, appeals to any higher order common good. The game is all horizontal. The woke shift has already established that democracy, equality, and progress are just concepts used to mask power. They have already dispensed with persuasion in favor of hyperbolic injunctions. The Right could very well do the same.

We should be worried about the fact that the woke paved the way for a hard right in more ways than one. Not only has particularly outlandish woke rhetoric offered right-wingers a set of increasingly easier political layups, their mocking rejection of patient democratic persuasion offers them a playbook for how to do political combat in an age of ideological nihilism.

We may yet see an even colder winter of tribalism to come.

CONTRIBUTORS
Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia.

Mexico’s Lessons for the International Left

Claudia Sheinbaum won Mexico’s presidential election thanks to her party’s record of passing universal social policies, respecting working-class voters, and rejecting biased media narratives.

By Kurt Hackbarth

July 22, 2024

Source: Jacobin



National Meeting of Women, La Plata, Mexico 2019 | Image credit: Gisela Curioni

On Sunday, June 2, former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum won a resounding victory to become the first woman president in Mexican history. The thirty-two-point drubbing of her conservative opponent, Xóchitl Gálvez — the second landslide in a row for the barely decade-old Morena (National Regeneration Movement) party — was even larger than the one that swept Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to power in 2018. Outstripping final poll averages by some ten to fifteen points, Sheinbaum won from north to south, in urban and rural areas alike, and in every state but one. Crucially, the MORENA coalition also reached the supermajority threshold of two-thirds in the Chamber of Deputies and came close enough in the Senate that it will be able to pass constitutional amendments virtually on its own, without the need to negotiate with the opposition.

A closer look at exit poll results reveals how the victory was constructed. Sheinbaum won 56 percent of women and 62 percent of men, belying the “machismo” label so beloved by the foreign press and the correspondents who swooped into the country in the days before the election in search of easy sound bites. She won across age ranges, income strata, and educational levels, carrying those with no schooling or elementary education by large margins but also the college educated by seven points. Similarly, she did not only win a thumping 71 percent of voters in the lowest socioeconomic strata — indicative of the class realignment that has taken place over the last six years — but also beat out Gálvez among the upper-middle class, 49 percent to 41 percent. Sheinbaum prevailed across trades and professions, losing only those who identified as “owners,” and even won a sizable plurality (42 percent) of those who consider themselves to be on the Right. 

How did the MORENA coalition not only equal but build on its 2018 victory? Let’s break it down.

Worker-Friendly Legislation

Wielding its congressional majorities, MORENA in government passed a raft of worker-friendly legislation over its first term. This included increased employer contributions to the AFORE system of individual retirement accounts, union reform providing for secret-ballot elections and the mandatory renegotiating of contracts, an outsourcing law prohibiting companies from contracting out their core functions and increasing the formula paid in profit sharing, disability benefits, and a doubling of vacation days and the minimum wage. Although many of these reforms started from a low bar and were insufficient on their own, they showed momentum in the right direction.

Among the new set of constitutional reforms AMLO wants to pass before leaving office is a further pension reform allowing workers to retire with 100 percent of their last salary up to the average salary of formal-sector employees. Meanwhile, boosted by the knock-on effect of minimum-wage increases, wages for salaried workers are outpacing inflation by 32.6 percent.

Not Throwing the Poor Under the Bus

Unlike the US Democrats, who have exorcised the poor from their rhetoric since the 1980s, AMLO never distanced himself from the slogan of his first presidential campaign: Por el bien de todos, primero los pobres (“For the good of all, the poor come first”). In policy terms, this took the form of a universal senior pension, stay-in-school scholarships for public-school students, benefits for working mothers, farm supports and a tree planning and husbandry program, and road-building works using local labor and materials in poor states such as Oaxaca, among others. Avoiding the means-testing trap advocated by elite policy centers, key programs such as the pension were made universal and locked in at the constitutional level. In the depths of the pandemic, when the international financial press was excoriating AMLO for not indebting the country to subsidize business payrolls, these programs provided a lifeline for the half of the country that works in the informal sector and would not have been reached by said subsidies.

The strategy worked: according to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), some 5.1 million Mexicans were lifted out of poverty from 2018 to 2022.      

The Mañanera Against the Media Scrum

Refusing to be kneecapped by the same national and international press that attempted multiple times to put a premature end to his career, AMLO instituted what was soon to become the set piece of his administration: his morning press conference, known as the mañanera. Equal parts information session, debate club, history lesson, and stand-up routine, the two-to-three-hour daily sessions provided the president with the opportunity to go over the heads of the corporate media, set the agenda, and turn his batting back of a never-ending series of attacks into popular entertainment. Over time, the mañaneras became a social-media phenomenon, with the president hitting the top ten of Spanish-language streamers, beating out YouTubers a third of his age with massive platforms of their own.

And although a gaggle of ancien régime pundits attempted to tar the sessions as attacks on the free press, the president’s daily sparring with the oligarch-aligned fourth estate penetrated into political consciousness at every level of Mexican society. One need only recall the viral photo of an elderly man in Sonora watching the mañanera from an internet café to grasp how important of a communication vehicle the sessions had become.

Reappropriating “Anti-Corruption”

Another building block of MORENA’s victory came at the level of discourse. Whereas in country after country the Right has hijacked the discourses of “values,” “anti-corruption,” and “patriotism,” AMLO deftly found the way to turn all of them on his opponents. First, he focused on the need to live within one’s means, both on a personal and governmental level, in order to prioritize those less well-off. The “pharaonic” state he inherited, in which a golden caste of agency heads, top-level bureaucrats, and judges showered themselves with eye-popping salaries and benefits, gave him endless opportunities to go to war against excess under the battle cry, “There cannot be a rich government with a poor people.”

The second, infused with the fervor of the first, took the form of a crusade against the corruption that, in conjunction with the mass privatizations of the neoliberal era, hollowed out the state from within, making it easy prey for the infiltration of drug cartels while creating a class of nouveau riche multimillionaires. Finally, with his regional accent, love of colorful phrases, endless tours of the country, and extolling of the nation’s history, culture, and cuisine, AMLO could portray himself as the quintessential Mexican, in contrast to an opposition all too willing to run off to Washington at the slightest pretense in a desperate attempt to provoke Uncle Sam into intervening at its bidding.

Maintaining Party Unity

As MORENA faced its first competitive presidential candidate selection in 2024, the youthful party underwent a major test that a number of pundits predicted would end badly. Mindful of the internal election process that tore apart MORENA’s predecessor, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the party adopted, on AMLO’s urging, a candidate selection process based on opinion polling instead of primary voting. MORENA thus designed a system of five national polls, one conducted by the party and the four others by firms chosen by the different candidates; in all of them Sheinbaum won by an average of 13.5 percent. This did not stop her main rival, former foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard, from crying foul and nearly bolting the party. The force of gravity within both party and movement, however, together with Sheinbaum’s presence and diplomatic skills, was enough to force Ebrard to return to the fold, and he has been named secretary of economy in the president-elect’s cabinet.

Selection by polling is clearly a fudge and by no means constitutes a long-term solution for MORENA, which was criticized in a series of downballot races, moreover, for applying it with a lack of transparency. But in a context where Mexico has scant experience in organizing primaries, it spared a youthful party from an acrimonious process, either internal or external, for which it was arguably not ready.

Embracing Continuity With AMLO

Despite concerns that she was not “charismatic” enough to sustain a presidential candidacy, Claudia Sheinbaum played to her strengths, running a tight-ship campaign that combined a staggered rollout of policy proposals with a heavy travel schedule. The organizational discipline of the campaign contrasted favorably with that of Gálvez, who lurched from proposal to proposal and insult to insult with seemingly no rudder or bearings. In the debates, Sheinbaum faced off attacks with a combination poker face and ability to deflect back to her own line of argument.

And faced with calls to distance herself from AMLO and prove that she was “her own person,” she refused to take the bait, explaining repeatedly that she represents a movement and that her administration will be dedicated to building a segundo piso, or second floor, on top of the first (in a similar fashion, she has repeatedly declared that she will not be attaining the presidency as an individual woman, but that all Mexican women will be arriving with her). With a majority of voters now expressing confidence in the federal government — up from barely a quarter in 2017 — the continuity strategy was clearly the right read on the situation.

Blackmail, Inc.

In the days following the election, the usual media suspects attempted to play the panic card for all they were worth. If voters had so resoundingly rejected their years long narrative by exercising their democratic prerogative, then the undemocratic, unelected, and unaccountable financial markets were going to have to step in and correct their excesses. “Mexico’s Leftists Won Big. Investors are Worried,” screeched the New York Times, adding menacingly that the peso had had its worst week since the pandemic. “Is Mexico’s democracy dying?” worried Fareed Zakaria on CNN. “It really is a testament that Mexico’s democratic system is reversing into a single, dominant hegemonic party,” the Wilson Center’s Lila Abed warned in Politico. “Why is this important to the United States? Because if Mexico doesn’t have a democracy, forget about security cooperation, forget about nearshoring, because companies are not going to want to invest in a country where there’s no separation of powers, where there’s not an independent, autonomous judicial branch, where there’s no clear rules of the game.”

But the old tricks just don’t seem to work like they used to. After some brief postelectoral jitters, stocks calmed, the peso began gaining ground again, and the media narrative moved on. For now. Once the Sheinbaum administration’s battles begin — on energy sovereignty, on migration, on banning GMO corn and glyphosate, on reforming the judicial system — the sensationalist headlines will be back. As they showed on June 2, however, Mexican voters are singularly unconcerned.

FacebooTwitterReddit

Email

Kurt Hackbarth

Kurt Hackbarth is a writer, playwright, freelance journalist, and the cofounder of the independent media project “MexElects.” He is currently coauthoring a book on the 2018 Mexican election.

The Billionaires’ Party and the Union Leader

Teamsters president Sean O’Brien headlined the RNC’s opening night and praised two of the party’s leading snake-oil salesmen: vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance and Missouri senator Josh Hawley. The party of billionaires couldn’t be happier.

Teamsters president Sean O'Brien speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15, 2024. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

BYALEX N. PRESS

JACOBIN

07.22.2024

Watching International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) president Sean O’Brien headline the first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) last week raised a lot of questions. Delegates of the party, whose platform is devoted to union busting and redistributing wealth upward, were noticeably quiet during much of the union leader’s speech. The White House, which passed a $36 billion bailout to save the pensions of some 350,000 Teamster members following a party-line vote — meaning that not a single Republican voted in favor of the bill — is reportedly fuming. Talking heads sounded downright baffled in their on-air analysis.


They’re not the only ones. Some union leaders have taken issue with O’Brien’s presence at the gathering of anti-union true believers. Even as the GOP platform consists of a laundry list of union-busting policies — Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page wish list should Donald Trump retake the White House, aspires to eliminate overtime pay laws, public-sector unions, health and safety protections, and proscriptions on child labor — the party is trying to rebrand itself in a populist light, hoping to gain workers’ votes. Much of the labor movement has been united in denying the GOP the chance to use them as props toward that end, but O’Brien’s presence at the RNC, even without offering an official endorsement, gave the party precisely the type of photo op it had been looking for.

“It’s disappointing to see a national labor leader speak like that at the GOP convention,” Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, told the Washington Post. As AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler put it, “Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are on the bosses’ side.”

But if the politicos aren’t happy with O’Brien, what of the rank-and-file members who elected him? Some are undoubtedly thrilled: the IBT’s internal polling suggests that around one-third of members are Trump supporters. O’Brien’s engagement with the former president, whom he first met with in January, is not only motivated by a belief that Trump may win and that access to the president matters — a questionable perspective, to say the least; just look at what good endorsing Ronald Reagan did for the union — but an attempt to shore up support among these members for his own reelection campaign in 2026.

Yet while the Teamsters have always forged their own path, endorsing Republican presidential nominees in the past — they backed Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan in both bids, and George H. W. Bush — every Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton has received their backing. For members who understand the threat the GOP poses to their union, long-simmering discontent with O’Brien has now boiled over.

It’s not just about O’Brien’s speech at the RNC. The members I spoke with agreed with the union leader’s assertion, delivered at the convention, that elected officials should have to earn their endorsement. But they view a number of his recent actions as unambiguous endorsements of the Republican Party rather than an assertion of independence.

Members elected O’Brien as a rebuke to James P. Hoffa’s regime, which oversaw decades of concessionary contracts. They did so in the hopes that O’Brien might change the union, reforming it in a more democratic, inclusive direction. It’s hard to square that vision with O’Brien’s behavior as of late.The party of billionaires is hoping to build a base among working-class people. It’s a strategy of convincing workers to pick up the shovel to dig their own grave.

Those members point to a host of examples: O’Brien’s positive comments about Senator J. D. Vance, who has a 0 percent rating from the AFL-CIO and has cosponsored Senator Marco Rubio’s bill that would legalize company unions, giving employers a new means of fending off democratic representation in the workplace by letting them set up phony unions controlled by management; his praise for and donation, through the union’s political action committee, to Senator Josh Hawley, a fierce opponent of the union’s members in his home state of Missouri who is being challenged by a Democratic candidate endorsed by much of the state’s labor movement; and the union’s $45,000 donation to the RNC, the first major such donation since 2004. These members worry what message O’Brien’s praise for a party pushing for not only weakening unions but for mass deportations and extreme abortion bans sends to immigrant and women workers — both fellow members as well as other workers around the world.

Taken together, a growing number of members believe their president is offering a straightforward, if not always explicit, endorsement of a political party that wants to destroy them.
By and for Billionaires

Donald Trump’s GOP is as pro-corporate as ever, which is fitting for a man whose catchphrase is “You’re fired.” But even as the party plots to outlaw unions and lower workers’ standards of living, the party is making a play for working-class voters, taking advantage of the Democratic Party’s failure to prioritize that constituency, either unaware or unconcerned that Republicans are determined to peel off those votes.

The GOP ticket has the support of a vast array of billionaires: last month, Trump met with more than seventy CEOs to assure them that he plans to lower the corporate tax rate even further than he did in his first term. The former president described the meeting as a “lovefest.” But even as they continue to receive support among the ultrarich, the beneficiaries of their policies, the party of billionaires is hoping to build a base among working-class people. It’s a strategy of convincing workers to pick up the shovel to dig their own grave.

For Teamsters members who understand it as such, many of whom devoted countless hours to helping O’Brien win the union’s presidency over James P. Hoffa’s chosen successor, watching their elected president assist in such a project is excruciating.

“I am for us voting for our endorsements and I am for us not just giving an easy endorsement to the Democrats or any politician,” a part-time worker at UPS who requested anonymity to speak freely told me after watching O’Brien headline the RNC’s opening night. “But I truly do not understand how you compliment right-wing politicians on a national stage without at least getting them to agree to something we are supposedly demanding. For example, I was told we are attacking right-to-work politicians, but here we are donating to Josh Hawley and praising J. D. Vance? And for what exactly?”

“Sean has the right instinct that we shouldn’t have blind allegiance to the Democrats, but without a strong set of politics, he ends up making bad calculations,” another member, who likewise requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said. “Instead of denouncing the two-party system and demanding that workers start exercising their own political power, Sean’s perspective is, ‘Well, Democrats aren’t great, so I should also talk to Republicans.’”

There’s no doubt that unions’ knee-jerk deference to the Democratic Party has played a role in their decades-long decline, even as the GOP has led the charge to stamp out unionism and immiserate workers. Rather than conditioning union support on elected officials reforming labor laws, reining in corporate power, and protecting members from employer attacks, organized labor has often surrendered its leverage in advance, a junior partner in the Democratic coalition whose unflagging support for the party is rarely rewarded by the Democrats in kind.

But while O’Brien spoke of making elected officials of either party earn the union’s endorsement, certain absences in his speech fueled workers’ concerns. The union leader did not mention that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who saved his members’ pensions, nor did he note the GOP’s united refusal to support the PRO Act or the vastly improved playing field Joe Biden’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has offered workers over the pro-business judges Trump appointed.

Working-class independence is indeed the only way workers will wrest power and resources from employers and the many elected officials who do their bidding. Flattering the GOP, however, is anything but that.
“You Ought to Be a Leader”

The matter is particularly bothersome to those who fought for more than a decade to save their pensions. Wesley Epperson, a retiree who has been a Teamsters member for more than forty years, spent seven years meeting monthly with fellow retirees in Local 41 in Kansas City to fight for the pension he had earned.


In 2019, as Epperson and his fellow members were still trying to wrangle enough political pressure to get their pensions bailed out, the United Auto Workers (UAW) struck General Motors, and Biden came to the nearby Fairfax GM plant to speak with the autoworkers. Epperson attended the rally. Afterward, he shook Biden’s hand and delivered a message.


I said, “Vice President Biden, thank you for coming to Kansas City. I’m not a UAW member. I’m a Teamster. And I stand to lose half of my pension — our pensions are in trouble.” He looked right at me and said, “I know all about your pension, and I know all about the Teamsters, and I want to tell you this: when I win the election, the first thing I’m going to do is fix your pension.”

The way Epperson sees it, Biden followed through on his promise, and O’Brien’s comments equating the parties is not just a failure to follow through on his end of the bargain but an abdication of union leaders’ responsibility to educate their members about politicians’ records. That many of his fellow Teamsters support Trump does not negate that duty; if anything, it makes it more important.‘You ought to be warning the membership about Trump the same way Shawn Fain is. They’re not splitting hairs; they’re telling the truth: this guy’s a real threat.’

“Other union leaders haven’t shirked their duty to educate their members, and even though a lot of their members are going to vote against themselves, at least their union presidents aren’t failing to inform them that they’re making a mistake,” Epperson explained. “We all know that if Trump gets elected, the labor movement will suffer, especially now that the Supreme Court has overturned the Chevron deference. What’s going to happen to the NLRB and all the other departments that are not going to have any power to defend the American people?”

When I asked Epperson for an example of the type of leadership he had in mind, he mentioned Ron Carey, the former IBT president who led a truckers’ strike in 1993 and then a nationwide UPS strike in 1997, with the latter winning much-needed gains in the union’s largest contract. Carey won the IBT presidency in 1991 and pushed for the union to break from endorsing Republican presidential candidates, instead backing Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. But once in office, Clinton supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a policy the Teamsters vociferously opposed.

So the union, led by Carey, declined to endorse anyone in the 1996 campaign, believing that neither party had earned their support.

“That’s the big difference between a real Teamster leader, a guy who looks at what’s good for his membership and their families and the working people in this country,” said Epperson.


You take a stand, you don’t play the patsy. Getting the two parties together sounds good, but it doesn’t work. You ought to be a leader. You ought to be warning the membership about Trump the same way Shawn Fain is, along with a bunch of other labor leaders. They’re not splitting hairs.; they’re telling the truth: this guy’s a real threat. He’s a threat to America and he’s a threat to the labor movement.
Not Your Friend

O’Brien says that he told both the RNC and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that he would speak at their conventions, and the latter’s reported failure to jump at that offer is an example of Democrats’ inability to grapple with the predicament that they’re in. But the Democrats’ shortcomings don’t mean the GOP isn’t still committed to destroying union members’ livelihoods. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

“As a negotiator, I know no window or door should ever be permanently shut,” O’Brien said on the RNC stage by way of explaining his presence. But the RNC is not a bargaining table; his attendance there was a photo op for a party desperate to use workers as props in its rebranding campaign. There is a clear reason he was given prime-time billing, and there’s a reason Trump and Vance were beaming as he spoke. They realized they had just pulled off a huge coup solely by the fact that O’Brien was there; it didn’t really matter what he said.

O’Brien may think he’s using the GOP to spread his message — his comments included accurate criticism of the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and corporations like Amazon, a critical Teamsters target given the existential threat it poses to the membership. But speaking at the RNC is not like appearing on Fox News. As Alexandra Bradbury put it in Labor Notes, “The convention is not a forum where policy is debated. It’s a coronation pageant.” O’Brien is not using the GOP; they’re using him.

For evidence of how eager the Republican Party is to use union members as props, think back to the UAW strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers last fall. The new reform leadership of the UAW, led by international president Shawn Fain, has refused to throw a bone to Trump, who wants union votes in swing states like Michigan while offering nothing to earn them. As Fain often puts it, Trump is a “scab,” having crossed workers’ picket lines and stiffed them as an employer. So when the union struck, and Biden became the first sitting president to walk a picket line, the Trump campaign was in a panic.O’Brien is not using the GOP; they’re using him.

The former president responded with a political stunt for the ages. Trump’s campaign has no ties to the UAW, and members refused to help him. So he traveled to Michigan at the invitation of a nonunion auto-parts employer, who had been put up to hosting the rally by his fellow automakers. There Trump spoke to a room of people as if they were striking autoworkers, even though none of them were.

No one would’ve known that all this was a stunt had members of the area’s labor movement not been willing to state it on the record. Many still do not know, because the mainstream media — from the New York Times to CNN — credulously repeated the Trump campaign’s version of events without bothering to investigate it. O’Brien handed over precisely the type of photo op the GOP had failed to get in Michigan.
Josh Hawley Puts Lipstick on a Pig

There’s also the matter of Josh Hawley. O’Brien has lavished praise on the radically conservative Republican (Hawley supports extreme abortion restrictions, among other things); as the union leader reminded everyone from the RNC stage, Hawley recently claimed that he no longer supports right-to-work legislation, after Missouri voters rejected it.

“He has shown that he’s not willing to accept the pillaging of working people’s pocketbooks,” O’Brien said of Hawley on the RNC stage. The next day, he shared a column by Hawley on “pro-labor conservatism,” tweeting that he is “100% on point.”

Hawley argues that corporate executives are using the profits they raked in from outsourcing jobs “to push diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag.” While correctly noting that “many Republican politicians . . . have broken the backs of unions at every opportunity,” the senator marshals his apparent newfound respect for the working man to push an “America First” agenda whose first priority, per his column, is to oppose electric vehicle mandates and, in doing so, go to war with the UAW.

“Reagan was right? Corporations took factories overseas so they could finance DEI and trans rights?” one member texted me about Hawley’s op-ed. “The biggest problem for autoworkers is EVs? This is all insane.”

Even the union’s Twitter account went rogue.

“Unions gain nothing from endorsing the racist, misogynistic, and anti-trans politics of the far right, no matter how much people like Sen. Hawley attempt to tether such bigotry to a cynical pro-labor message,” the Teamsters account wrote above a screenshot of O’Brien’s tweet. “The message this sends to Teamsters of color, Teamster women, and LGBTQ Teamsters is that they are not welcome in the union unless they surrender their identity to a new kind of anti-woke unionism.”



“If anyone knows who did this, I’d like to buy them a drink,” Ryan Haney, a freight trucker and Teamster activist, wrote in a Facebook post about the rogue tweet.

“I spent years of my life and thousands of dollars to help elect a Teamster General President who would fight for all Teamsters, who would wield working class solidarity as a weapon against the white collar criminals and political entities that want to divide us by race, gender, sexuality, and religion,” wrote Haney. He continued:


Because of that commitment, which I do not regret, I also feel a responsibility to say that the politics of crypto-fascists like Josh Hawley do not represent our movement or our union. I urge my Teamster brothers and sisters to find the strength (or in Teamster parlance, “grow a set”) to hold our leaders accountable to the mission they set out on five years ago, and not continue to drift into this dead end of collaboration with the enemies of solidarity.

“As an openly queer and proud member of ALU-IBT local 1, this is heartbreaking,” said David-Desyrée Sherwood, a member of the Amazon Labor Union, which recently voted to affiliate with the Teamsters. “Our international union president should not speak fondly of politicians that have trampled on labor rights and queer rights alike.”

What do O’Brien’s members in Hawley’s home state think of the Republican senator? One published an op-ed in the Kansas City Star in March, headlined “Anti-union Josh Hawley’s picket line pandering is shameless, phony political theater.”

“In my five decades as a Teamster, former trustee of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and president of the Missouri-Kansas-Nebraska Conference of Teamsters, I thought I’d seen every kind of shamelessness there is from a politician in an election year,” wrote member Jim Kabell. “Then I saw Sen. Josh Hawley campaigning at a picket line with Teamsters — just months after he said 200,000 of their Teamster brothers and sisters who provide vital government services are ‘hostage’ takers.”

Kabell lays out Hawley’s shameful record on labor, noting that the longtime right-to-work supporter also “single-handedly cut overtime pay protections for 237,000 workers and said a $12 minimum wage was ‘out of the mainstream.’” But times have changed, and Hawley, long the butt of jokes for trading in his expensive suits for what Kabell calls “normal person” clothes on his visits back to his home state, is “on a mission to rebrand” as a “pro-union champion of the working class.”

“Can you guess if Hawley has the new record to back it up?” writes Kabell.


He voted to remove prevailing wage protections in the first major Davis-Bacon vote in more than a decade. He voted against bipartisan legislation to create union jobs in Missouri. Against raising the minimum wage. Against workplace protections for pregnant workers.

And while he meekly pretends to accept the will of Missouri voters on right-to-work, he refuses to prove it by co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize or PRO Act, inexplicably claiming it would “hurt workers more than it helps.”

Of course, Hawley is just carrying out his party’s platform; only three Republican representatives have cosponsored the PRO Act. He is currently being challenged by Democrat Lucas Kunce, a working-class Missourian who has been endorsed by many of the state’s unions. In other words, rather than either keeping quiet or backing the pro-union candidate, O’Brien is boosting and, through the union’s political action committee, donating to an elite-educated union-buster rejected by much of Missouri’s labor movement.

“We wholeheartedly reject O’Brien using his influence and platform to laud an elected representative who — contrary to the Teamsters’ President’s remarks — has weaponized his power to weaken workers’ rights and divide Americans on the basis of race, immigration status, gender identity, and sexual orientation,” the Missouri Workers Center said in a statement, noting that Hawley declined to support the Warehouse Workers Protection Act, a measure to curb Amazon’s exploitation of its warehouse workers, and, like Vance, had a 0 percent rating from the AFL-CIO last year.The UAW’s refusal to give the time of day to a billionaire scab is a major obstacle to the GOP’s grand faux-populist rebrand.

In his op-ed, Kabell goes on to note that Hawley, unable to run away from his own record, has taken to showing up at picket lines to secure photo ops for his campaign. Yet even as he does so, explains Kabell, the senator has bashed public-sector workers (many of whom are Teamsters) and voted against the aforementioned pension rescue.

“I don’t care how many picket lines he shows up to in a pair of cowboy boots and Levi’s,” Epperson, the Local 41 member, told me. “There’s nothing redeeming about Josh Hawley, so why is Sean O’Brien giving money and lip service to him?”

If Hawley is a charlatan, Trump is just that on a far grander scale. Trump surely sees in O’Brien a rough-and-tumble tough guy that he admires but which, as a child of wealth with a renowned aversion to getting his hands dirty, he could never be. O’Brien returned this flattery on the RNC stage, saying Trump “has proven to be one tough SOB.”

But O’Brien, a union man through and through, should know that being the boss’s favorite is nothing to brag about.

“We weren’t promised a perfect president or even a left president in Sean O’Brien, but we were promised a militant one done with concessions,” one member said over text following the speech. “I am just not seeing how cozying up to people who are dying to make organized labor illegal or worse is following that promise.”
Trump the Scab

During his speech on the final night of the RNC, Trump brought up another union leader: UAW president Fain, blaming him for automakers’ decades-long shift to building auto plants in other countries.

“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen, and the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every single autoworker, union and nonunion, should be voting for Donald Trump, because we’re going to bring back car manufacturing and we’re going to bring it back fast,” Trump said.

It’s far from the first time the former president has railed against Fain. The union leader is a mainstay in Trump’s speeches, sometimes coming up several times. It’s no secret why that is: as the UAW said following Trump’s speech, Trump “is a scab and a billionaire and that’s who he represents. We know which side we’re on. Not his.” It’s not only that the union supports the country’s shift to electric vehicles, a development the GOP resolutely opposes; the UAW’s refusal to give the time of day to a billionaire scab is a major obstacle to the GOP’s grand faux-populist rebrand. The UAW endorsed Biden in January; as of this writing, they have not endorsed Kamala Harris.

Why is Fain handling things so differently from O’Brien? After all, as is true of the Teamsters, plenty of UAW members are Trump voters.

Part of the explanation lies in their respective paths to power. If Fain’s ascension was a revolution, O’Brien’s was a palace coup. Fain is a member of a rank-and-file caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy, and embedded in a network of reformers. O’Brien, in contrast, was a loyal Hoffa lieutenant until breaking with him in 2018 over UPS contract negotiations. He struck an alliance with the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the Teamsters’ long-standing reform group, who were determined to defeat the Hoffa regime once and for all; he has never been a TDU member. It’s an organizing problem — union leaders aren’t saviors; usually they’re the product of the state of organizing inside a union. Members who object to the direction Teamster leadership is taking the union have only one solution: organizing to change it.

O’Brien needed TDU and they needed him. When he won the presidency, it was thanks to his ability to bring both a slice of the old guard and reformers like TDU with him. That alliance may explain why TDU has been noticeably silent about O’Brien’s antics.

Meanwhile, O’Brien’s people have been marshaling a defense, encouraging members to post support for their leader on social media and insisting the union is demonstrating his independence from both parties, not sucking up to one of them. Several members showed me their Facebook feeds, which were a wall of notably similar pro-O’Brien posts from fellow Teamsters. The union is also text-banking some members, sending an MSNBC clip about O’Brien’s speech that emphasizes his claim to political independence.

“Last night, Donald Trump once again attacked our union on a national stage,” Fain said in a statement following Trump’s RNC speech. ​“As we’ve said for many months, he stands for everything we stand against. Trump claims to be attacking us in the name of protecting American autoworkers. So tell us why, when [the auto manufacturing plant in] Lordstown, [Ohio], closed in 2019, when Trump was President, and our members were on strike for 40 days, he said nothing and did nothing.” He continued:


Tell us why Trump blamed the 2008 auto crisis on the autoworkers. We’ll tell you why. Because Donald Trump always has and always will side with the billionaire class against the working class. . . . He wants to pad the pockets of the ludicrously wealthy auto executives. He wants to cut the corporate tax rates of his golfing buddies, and keep the stock buybacks and Wall Street manipulation going. He wants autoworkers to shut up and take scraps, not stand up and fight for more. He talks about the electric vehicle transition as the reason our industry is under threat.

“Corporate greed and the billionaires’ hero, mascot, and lapdog, Donald Trump, are the problem,” the UAW leader concluded. “Don’t get played by this scab billionaire. Stand up and fight for more.”

Union density in the United States is teetering on the single digits, not one Amazon worker has a union contract, and employers, aided by conservative judges, are well on their way to having the NLRB declared unconstitutional. As O’Brien put it on the RNC stage, union leaders cannot keep pursuing the same strategies as their predecessors; their members cannot allow them to do so. O’Brien and Fain are offering two versions of what “different” entails. One is a path to greater working-class independence. The other? To greater working-class humiliation.

CONTRIBUTOR
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.