Hillbilly hegemony and the GOP's fake embrace of workers

It's a real low bar

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

Big news keeps breaking, so tonight we’ve got another story about two major and very interrelated stories. Tomorrow, I’ll send out a news roundup and analysis issue, and later this week, we’ll have a brand new feature interview.

I promise that I will do a better job in that interview than NBC’s Lester Holt, who asked such stupid questions of President Joe Biden tonight that he made the president actually look sharp here and there. Especially at the end of the interview:

Biden wasn’t particularly great during this interview, as he frequently trailed off mid-answer and started on a new thought, but Holt’s questioning was such a mess that he gave the president room to be more aggressive and show off a sharpish wit. Without endorsing his ongoing candidacy, I will say that this is the sort of flippancy against elites that I think could make a difference for Biden.

OK, let’s get to the newsletter.

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Former President Donald Trump today announced that he’d chosen Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. The decision provides critical balance to the Republican ticket, which now has one asshole with a beard and one asshole without one.

Between Trump’s latest unhinged post on Truth social and Vance’s cynical public response to the assassination attempt on Saturday, it should be abundantly clear by now that Republicans have no plans to “lower the temperature” of their rhetoric. All senior Democratic strategists that haven’t resigned itself to defeat should adjust accordingly.

You're going to hear a lot over the next few weeks about how JD Vance brings some kind of working class credibility to the GOP ticket, a reputation he’s constructed since his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, rocketed him to fame in 2016. Vance has spent his first year and a half in the Senate pretending that his book wasn’t contemptuous of the people in Appalachia and the rest of post-industrial America, which would complicate his effort to portray himself as an economic populist.

Then again, he’s been able to maintain that image despite not supporting any of the policies that would help working class people.

Vance is a leading member of the so-called New Right, a pseudo-intellectual scaffolding atop white Christian nationalism for chain-smoking young men. It consciously seeks to emulate working class populism, offering surface-level rage about systemic economic problems while offering solutions that are steeped in cultural division but rarely too different from standard GOP orthodoxy.

They don’t actually know any working class voters

Vance ultimately knows where his bread is buttered: A protege of far-right vampire and private equity billionaire Peter Thiel, he has naturally opposed ending the carried interest loophole that allows the ultra-wealthy to pay far lower tax rates.

While the Senate’s decay into uselessness has meant that Vance has not taken all that many votes over the past 19 months, he’s been anti-worker enough to earn himself a 0% legislative rating from the AFL-CIO. Vance is also all-in on tearing down the regulatory state, in January co-sponsored an ALEC-approved bill with Marco Rubio that would allow employers to pressure workers into fake company unions, and adamantly opposes the PRO Act, the legislative key to truly reviving union organizing nationwide.

Vance also voted to overturn the NLRB’s new “joint employer standard,” which makes large corporations and businesses that use third party employers more responsible for their subcontracted workers. In so doing, it also makes it far easier to unionize workers in those kinds of environments, including delivery drivers for Amazon, who the Teamsters have been working to organize for nearly a year now.

Playing for the Wrong Team

Nearly every Republican voted to overturn the joint employer standard, which is but reason why there’s so much consternation around Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien’s decision to speak at the Republican National Convention tonight.

The Teamsters have always been the most politically conservative major union, both in its leadership and membership, but it has endorsed Democrats for president since Clinton was re-elected in 1996. O’Brien was correct to note that many of those Democrats did little more than pay lip service to organized labor, but given the current contrast between the parties on union issues, his timing couldn’t have been worse.

For all his faults, Biden has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Roosevelt. He appointed a progressive, game-changing NLRB that has sent organizing back on the ascent, pushed to rebuild the US manufacturing base, saved the Teamsters’ pension fund, and became the first president to walk a picket line. Trump, upon whom O’Brien showered praise on Monday night, had a uniquely awful record on union issues, and has given no indication that he’ll change in any way.

O’Brien also highlighted Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who like Vance is a leading light of the New Right and pro-union cosplayer. Hawley’s record has been nominally better than Vance’s, though just as performative, and just in time for a re-election campaign. Earlier this year, Hawley voted against overturning the joint employer standard and walked a UAW picket line last fall, neither of which came with any political cost.

Historically, his record is far worse: In 2018, Hawley supported a constitutional amendment to implement a "right to work" law in Missouri while opposing a referendum to raise the minimum wage. In 2021, he voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Butch Lewis Act, which bailed out the Teamsters’ troubled pension program. In fact, every Republican voted against that bill, which passed on Democratic votes alone.

Last fall, even as he was walking that picket line, Hawley said he did not support public sector unions, which now represent the majority of unionized workers in the United States. The Teamsters themselves have more than 200,000 public workers.

O’Brien also shouted out Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who introduced the bill to overturn the joint employer standard, and Reps. Mike Lawler and Nicole Malliotakis, both of whom voted for it as well.

The speech has sparked an internal civil war of sorts among Teamsters’ leadership, many of whom vehemently disagreed with the decision to speak at the RNC. The union is likely to abstain from endorsing in the presidential election, but tonight was already far more than the GOP could have possibly dreamed of receiving. It’s unlikely that it will be reciprocated, either.

O’Brien may have wanted to at least taken a peek at what awaits labor unions in Project 2025 should the GOP win. His members are frequently employed in tough, physical, back-breaking work, and Republicans are openly scheming to dismantle OSHA, the agency that is supposed to police workplace safety, and make the NLRB even more toothless. The platform also calls for roll backs of overtime work and new rules that would make negotiating contracts — such as the one with UPS that O’Brien touted during the speech — far more difficult.

I cover the Teamsters as a reporter, and none of this will impact how I approach that work. Ultimately, the focus has to be on the workers, not leadership, and politics only matters in so much that they have an impact on conditions, pay, and job security. It’s the rank and file members that go to work day in and day out, and they’re the ones who deserve the attention. They also deserve a media that can distinguish posturing from politicians from reality.

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