Conservatives Only Pretend To Be Pro-Union

Don't fall for it. Still, it's progress that they feel they have to make any gesture at all, however empty.

Demonstration, by Ben Shahn, 1933. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums.

You should read American Compass’s new manifesto, Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers. Some of it is pretty good! American Compass is a right-wing group founded three years ago by Oren Cass, a young and ambitious ex-Bainie who was a domestic policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The group’s mission is to come up with conservative economic policies to solidify the working class’s allegiance to the GOP. It’s holding a shindig this afternoon at 4 p.m. in the Russell Senate Office Building’s Kennedy Caucus Room, to publicize the report.

The difficulty is that helping the working class economically inevitably means confronting the fact of growing income inequality (about which I published a book 11 years ago). Until now, conservatives had two answers to incontrovertible evidence that income inequality has been growing rapidly since the late 1970s:

The first answer is: No it hasn’t! (See Phil Gramm’s 2022 book, The Myth of American Inequality, which included a straightfaced defense of Ebenezer Scrooge, job-creator. Or, better yet, read what I wrote about it.) Do not try this at home. Inequality denialism is a difficult maneuver that requires extensive familiarity with the field of economics (Gramm used to teach Econ at Texas A&M) so that you can distort it effectively. It takes considerable expertise to torture statistics in this way.

The second answer is to blame inequality on abortion, or transsexuals, or Critical Race Theory, which has become a catch-all term for any teaching of American history that acknowledges enslavement, Jim Crow, and the persistence of race prejudice. The culture-war method changes the subject from economics to race and religious faith, two reliable wedges since the Nixon presidency. It does not require so much as a college degree. Indeed, when you apply this method it’s best to pretend you never got one (though, paradoxically, the most effective practitioners typically hold advanced degrees from the Ivy League and/or Oxford).

The American Compass manifesto breaks new conservative ground. It acknowledges and documents the reality of expanding economic equality. It even recognizes that strong labor unions are a necessary prerequisite to reversing it. But a close reading of Rebuilding American Capitalism reveals that this is a bait-and-switch. The report calls for empowering labor unions in the headlines, but in the fine print it furnishes a roadmap to eviscerating them. That’s the topic of my latest New Republic piece.