by GEORGE SOUVLIS & MARIA-CHRISTINA VOGKLI
Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie
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3) How would you describe the wider context of Southern California during this period?
Like many of our neighbors, my parents were Depression refugees, hitchhiking to Southern California from Ohio in 1938. The dominant ‘ethnicity’ in our all-white town was Southwestern (Oklahoma and Texas) and the largest religious groups were the Southern Baptists followed by Pentacostals, Mormons and Methodists. Main Street roughly divided the town by wealth and popular culture. Our side was poorer and notoriously ‘redneck,’ with trailer parks, a famed country-western ballroom and a nearby rodeo. The other side – south of Main – was marginally more middle-class, Methodist and oriented to beach culture. We were inclined to label ourselves first as ‘Westerners’ and had an envious antipathy to surfers. Racism and rabid anti-communism were all pervasive but because of the large number of unionized aircraft and skilled construction workers who lived there, our area elected Democratic representatives. The John Birch Society was very active and paranoid, but in the last instance the Machinists (aerospace) Union was politically more influential.
4) An argument that you make in your study about the American working class is that the Democratic Party cannot be the political organization that will bring significant social transformation in favour of interests of the subaltern classes. Do you continue to believe it? Did Obama make a significant difference among the other leaders of the party or was he one of the same?
The evil (I use this word precisely) of Clintonite neo-liberalism screams back at us from every Trump rally. Jessie Jackson’s exciting Rainbow Coalition campaigns in the 1980s proved that it was entirely possible to ally the rustbelt and the ghetto but his center-right opponents in the Democratic Party – Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council – blew up all the bridges of progressive economic unity between imperiled white manufacturing-sector workers and the working poor of the barrios and ghettoes. Consistently championing global free trade, information elites, and financialization over manufacturing, the Clinton and then Obama White Houses have presided over the death of the industries and industrial unions that were the backbone of New Deal Democracy. Under Obama, who has continued the teacher-bashing and government-job-slashing policies of Bush, public-sector unions now face a similar decimation.
Perhaps most shocking has been the passivity of the Administration and the Democratic leadership in the face of Koch-financed offensive to destroy unions and slash public budgets in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. Less dramatic perhaps, but no less consequential, has been the absence of any initiative to address catastrophic job loss and the disintegration of social fabric in the industrial and mining belts of the piedmont and mountain South, including the once impregnable Democratic stronghold of West Virginia. (If you will, this is the American East Germany). The conservative religious agenda has gained such electoral salience in these areas precisely because the Democrats offer no serious counterbalance in the form of economic policy.
5) How do you comment on the Trump Phenomenon?
The Trump phenomenon considering what I said above should not have been such a surprise. For years, the ex-Nixonite demagogue Pat Buchanan has advocated a nativist economic nationalism with an America First foreign policy. A star-spangled Le Pen with a long pedigree. As a presidential candidate, Buchanan won some spectacular Republican primary victories but without the support of the mega-churches or the billionaires, faded quickly. Trump, with a vast personal fortune and a shrewd use of the outrageous to stay at the top of the news, is independent of the far right establishment and its ideological scriptures. His success partly answers the famous question of Tom Frank in his 2004 book ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas:’ why do white workers support conservative crusades whose economic policies are totally opposed to their own interests? The Trump campaign, with its demagogic emphasis on jobs, clearly shows that false consciousness has its limits and that downwardly mobile whites are no longer robotic followers of the Heritage Foundation or the Christian Right. If Trump, like the satanic George Wallace in 1968, mobilizes the dark side, he also exposes a degree of alienation amongst former ‘Reagan Democrats’ and their offspring that may well destroy the post-Reagan Republican Party brought to power by Newt Gingrich in 1994.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)