Don’t preach to the choir, the old saying goes. You preach to the sinners in hopes to save their souls.
It’s the kind of message I used to hear in my youth from my Uncle Eb at the Macedonian Pentecostal Holiness Church in rural central North Carolina. Uncle Eb was a fiery presence behind his wooden pulpit, his blazing eyes, hooked nose, and gravelly voice. “You not too young to go to hell,” he once warned my brother John and me when we declined joining everyone else kneeling at the front aisle at the end of one of his sermons.
(Teamsters President Sean O'Brien)
Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien was definitely not preaching to the choir when he made his pro-union speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this past Monday night.
“I see American workers being taken for granted, workers being sold out to big banks, big tech corporations, the elite,” O’Brien said in his amazing stem-winder. America needs a “long-term investment in the American worker.”
O’Brien took a lot of heat for accepting Republican nominee Donald Trump’s invitation to speak at the Republican convention. His union even donated $45,000 to the Republican cause. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain blasted Trump as a “scab” who’d “be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker” if he ever worked in a plant.
(Donald Trump)
Unlike most unions with their unwavering support for the national Democratic Party, the Teamsters have flirted before with the Republican Party. It’s a serious flirtation when you consider the Teamsters is the nation’s largest private-sector union with 1.4 million members.
O’Brien’s speech wasn’t the only stereotype-defying element in the Republican National Convention. Trump’s choice of U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice president running mate was another. Vance has built his career—if not always his vote--on support for the common man, the blue-collar worker, against the corporate elite in this country. He’s also taken a strong stand against U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, much to the chagrin of the party’s most rabid warmongers, such as U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.
(J.D. Vance)
What’s happening here? Is the Trump-led Republican Party trying to become the “Big Tent” party the Democrats have always claimed to be? Indeed, this week’s convention featured a row of black politicians and a major black influencer as well as a “common man” hero in wrestler Hulk Hogan.
When the Democrats convene for their own convention in Chicago August 19, they’ll likely enter the arena a deeply divided party, uncertain who their leader will be now that incumbent President Joe Biden has bowed out. Will it be Vice President Kamala Harris, or some other choice who may somehow salvage the party’s sinking chances in November?
Of course, the Democrats will have loyalists on board such as the UAW’s Shawn Fain, an early endorser of Biden despite Biden’s dismal failure in late 2022 to support a railroad workers strike to secure better working conditions and decent sick leave policies.
The recent--and now successful--push to get rid of Joe Biden in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Trump has exposed the traditional “Big Tent” party to be essentially run by “Big Donors” from Hollywood and Wall Street. They may claim to be Diversity-Equity-Inclusion liberals but in essence they are just as disdainful of unions as a Walton or as many of those in that Milwaukee convention hall listening to O’Brien rail against billionaires.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins)
Decades ago Bill and Hillary Clinton gutted the “Big Tent” soul of what was left of FDR’s old Democratic Party, deregulating the financial markets, repealing the Glass-Steagal Act that restricted monopolizing mergers. Bill's later successor, Barack Obama, would give a rousing pro-union speech at the 2005 AFL-CIO convention in Chicago—I was there and applauded it!—but he filled his cabinet with Wall Streeters once he got elected president.
Many workers—and likely a lot of Teamsters—are turning toward Trump and the Republicans because they feel abandoned by the modern-day Democratic Party with its obsessive focus on identity politics and general refusal to even use the term “working class”. They’re sadly bound to be disappointed, however, because Trump may sound populist and working class, but in his heart of hearts he’s a corporate billionaire who peopled his first administration with bankers and industrialists.
Working class people in America need a party of their own, a labor party, that is truly going to serve them, not just pay lip service during campaigns. They had such a party 120 years ago in the so-called People’s Party, better known as the Populists. The Democratic Party of that day, however, appropriated many of their issues, and the Populists gradually faded from the scene after becoming the largest third party movement in the country’s history.
Quo vadis, today’s America? I wish I had an answer.
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