Racist, Xenophobic, Democrats

I think that in the great political debates, one of the most powerful tools we can use to win our arguments is to use the stock, classic arguments of our opponents against them.

On the left, an obvious example of this rhetorical technique is the argument that if abortion is murder, and murder is wrong, then how is the death penalty not murder, and how is the death penalty not wrong? If you're against murder, you should be against murder, so what gives? How effective this line of argument has been in persuading death penalty advocates is up for debate, but I'm sure the argument is very satisfying to the left (if for no other reason than it validates their belief that the right is filled with heartless, irrational nut jobs who don't have the brains to make a consistent argument and are therefore worthy of our unending contempt).

On the right, more recently (and to my mind less effectively), the case is being made that the unborn are a discriminated against minority and that the leading edge of the civil rights movement is not the gay movement but the movement to protect the fetus from murder. This argument is virtually unknown in the left-o-sphere, and even if it were, I don't think it would hold a lot of water. But nonetheless, it is used by the right to bewilder themselves about how leftists can be so adamant about the rights and treatment of adult minorities, when they can be so heartless and cruel about the rights of the powerless. These arguments are again a powerful bludgeon to reinforce our own stereotypes about our ideological opponents.

And that's not likely to change.

So in the spirit of marginally constructive debate, I would like to offer the right a better bludgeon, a more powerful bludgeon, and a bludgeon that will not only fracture the left's coalition but will be infinitely harder to dispute (on the left's own terms) than the fetus-as-citizen argument which is far more problematic.*

And that argument is about unions, and it is about racism, and goes something like this: "How can the left support private sector labor unions when private sector labor unions are blatantly, boldly, and entrenchedly racist?"

Wha??? Unions are racist??? A little blue-collar for coastal tastes, perhaps, but racist???


Well, we can start with a preamble, though this is not the meat of the argument, and remind ourselves that for most of the course of the high union period, union members were almost exclusively white, Christian, heterosexual (or closeted) males. This is quite simply a fact. There was no room in these cloistered organizations for the breadth of diversity that would represent the great coalition of leftist idealists the Democratic Party has associated itself with for the past 50 years. The unions and the diversity clique have historically been totally at odds.

But that's not the point, and in fact the domestic diversity batch is not the object of modern union racism. In fact, beyond racism, we'd have to add another left vs. right bludgeon to the mix: xenophobia. Not only are unions racist but they are also xenophobic, that horrible term the Democrats use to beat down border state Republicans who wish to shoot migrating Mexicans from airplanes like wild hogs.

So what am I getting at here? Unions ostensibly exist to protect workers from injurious, inhuman labor conditions and to insure a living wage for honest work. To take the auto unions in America for example, it has been proven that labor conditions for car manufacturing are safe enough that Subaru, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and others safely build cars all over America safely and without union labor. They make a decent living and, by all accounts, a superior product- without these protections for their mortal being.

So the notion that we need certain labor unions to protect the health and wealth of workers has been proven fallacious in America.

We can also note that an AFL/CIO car maker earns a real wage in the $100,000+ a year range for a job that can be done - arguably better - by non-unionized labor. Presumably operating the machines is not so complicated that it takes special union-boosted training to accomplish. It looks more or less like anyone can do it.

And that "anyone" includes Mexicans in Mexico, Chinese in China, Indonesians in Indonesia, Indians in India, Vietnamese in Vietnam, and Thai in Thailand. Outsourcing to all of these countries will get you more or less the same car (when built to US specifications) for labor that is far, far cheaper. And while one of labor's biggest beefs is with the "wealthy," they seem to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that in any one of the above mentioned countries, someone earning low 6-figure income is *extremely* wealthy.

They are so wealthy in fact that the salary for one unionized American worker could pay the salary of 10 or more Thai, Chinese, or Indian workers. Easily. For the same work, a company (Subaru, Ford, etc.) could feed the families of 10 men instead of just 1. The only difference between those men is that the 1 is American (and probably white, Christian, and straight), and the others are generally dark-skinned, non-Christian (and probably straight).

How is this not racist? How is the valuing of a white life worth the lives of 9 dark-skinned lives to do exactly the same job? I don't understand it. The only answer I can come up with is that the unions have not just a protectionist bent but a racist and xenophobic one as well. For any college educated Western elite, this is clearly unacceptable, and the rift that runs through the Democratic party between the educated coastal intellectuals and the midwestern blue-collar union workers ought to be chiseled out by any thoughtful Republican.

This is a wedge issue for within the Democratic party. And it is one that most Democrats are unaware of, because the tent-members are so spread out geographically.

But it is there, and it is undeniably real - particularly on an intellectual liberal's own terms. Why should we prop up one white family and let 10 Mexican families starve (and then force them over the border to be shot like wild hogs by flying Republicans)?

There is no justification for this. Private sector unions are inherently racist and should be abolished by the Democrats' own cultural standards.

What Republican is making this argument? When and how are they bringing it into the Democratic camp to illuminate the differences between Democrats' own members? How will leftists deal with the internal contradictions and hypocrisy of their party? Can that but be good for Republicans?

Seems to me only so.

So I admonish the next level of Republican leaders never to mention the word "union" without mentioning "racist American unions," or, depending on the crowd, "xenophobic, racist, American unions," and wait for someone to ask you why you would call them that.

Then the door is wide open to split a camp that is in denial of its own irreconcilable differences. For Republicans who like to play hard ball with rhetoric, this is as hard as it gets.




*Problematic firstly because despite the fact that many on the left would prefer to see fewer abortions, they realize that the life prospects for most aborted fetuses are dim and dismal. They consider it a humane gesture - both to the pre-person and to the larger society - to spare both of a life that will most likely turn to crime, poverty, and despair. This is a tragic and uncomfortably realistic moral assessment, and while it is open to debate on several grounds (including the religious), there is almost certainly something to recommend it from a humanist point of view.

Second of all, the question of when "life begins" remains uncertain for many, many people. While this may be a self-serving ambiguity for some, it nonetheless remains a hard notion to pin down. And this is particularly true when we are discussing American law. As the Birther movement has so recently and vigorously reminded us, American laws and the rights of citizenship (and rights to the presidency) are contingent upon being *born* here, not being conceived here or having visited here while pregnant. A Saudi couple, for example, could have spent 8.5 months on vacation in Ohio, the wife might become pregnant here, but upon returning to Saudi Arabia and giving birth there, that child would be a Saudi citizen with no guaranteed rights to vote, assemble, speak, or practice its own religion. It certainly would not become president of the United States. Even if the family came back to the States the next day, they would still all be Saudi citizens and would need to seek asylum here if they wanted to avoid the fate being a citizen of that country implies. Thus the place one is *born* is legally the marker of the beginning of one's legal rights. To extend that into pre-birth is an argument that is interesting but very, very slippery, for this reason and for many others.