Do 2015 election results show workers moving to the right?

BY SETH GALINSKY

Are workers who are Caucasian becoming more conservative? Do the off-year elections show a rightward shift in U.S. politics? Or are working people beginning to look for alternatives to crisis-ridden capitalism, including by showing interest in the 2015 Socialist Workers Party election campaigns?

“From Coast to Coast, Conservatives Score Huge Victories in Off-Year Elections,” read the headline of a Nov. 4 article in the Washington Post. This was typical of others in several liberal and conservative publications that claim this year’s mid-term election marked a big shift.

Those articles point to the defeat of Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance and to a few races where Republicans defeated Democratic Party candidates — mostly ignoring other races where Democrats defeated Republicans — to make their case. In fact nationwide there was little change in the number of Democrats or Republicans who won office in this round.

It’s worth looking at the vote on the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance — which would have extended nondiscrimination laws to gay and transgender people — to see how far off this analysis is. The ordinance went down to a crushing defeat with 61 percent voting no.

But the vote had nothing to do with alleged reactionary views of workers or a retreat in the overwhelming sentiment against prejudice and unequal treatment based on an individual’s gender or sexual orientation. Instead, the liberal and petty-bourgeois radical supporters of “political correctness” sank the proposed law by including in the initial version of the bill a clause — later deleted — that said no business open to the public could deny a transgender person entry to a restroom consistent with their self-proclaimed gender identity.

Conservative opponents of the law took advantage of this to attack the bill, including by printing signs proclaiming “No Men in Women’s Restrooms” that were prominent in working-class and other neighborhoods around the city.

The defeat of the bill was aided by the Nov. 2 decision of the U.S. Department of Education that a transgender student in Illinois had the right to use female restrooms and locker rooms.

“I got three daughters,” Houston city worker Todd Ward told the New York Times. “There’s not an equal right for me to go into a women’s bathroom. That’s common sense.”

Several articles in the Wall Street Journal, including one Nov. 6 headlined “Has the World Lost Faith in Capitalism?” get a little closer to what’s happening in U.S. politics today.

To the consternation of the Journal, a “survey found that 55% of Americans think the ‘rich get richer’ and the ‘poor get poorer’ under capitalism. Sixty-five percent agree that most big businesses have ‘dodged taxes, damaged the environment or bought special favors from politicians.’”

The article reports on a poll in seven countries — the U.S., Thailand, India, Indonesia, Brazil, the U.K. and Germany — that also shows that people in the U.S. are “gloomiest about the future. It is new-world America, where only 14% of those surveyed think that life will be better for their children, and 52% disagree.”

The liberal capitalist Post comes at the question from a different angle. A Nov. 4 article by Harold Meyerson cites a recent study by Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case that reports the number of deaths by suicide, alcohol use and drug use “among working-class whites ages 45 to 54 has risen precipitously since 1999 — so precipitously that their overall death rate … increased by 22 percent.”

The Post blames the rise on the “disintegration of the working-class white family.” The paper notes that “the share of blue-collar jobs in the U.S. economy declined from 28 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2010,” while downplaying the depression conditions that millions of workers in the U.S. are facing.

“This helped fuel a racial and nativist backlash that has driven much of the white working class (particularly in the South) into Republican ranks,” the Post asserts. In the eyes of the Post, these so-called uneducated, alcoholic, drug-saddled workers are the principal reason behind Donald Trump’s success in the presidential race so far.

Interest in Socialist Workers Party

Socialist Workers Party candidates for mayor and City Council in Philadelphia and for port commissioner in Seattle have found that workers who are Caucasian — just like the rest of the working class — are being battered by the capitalist economic crisis, including high unemployment and the slashing of wages and benefits over the last several decades. Workers — whatever their ethnicity — looking for radical solutions are often attracted to Trump and other candidates who profess to tell it like it is or who rail against “crony capitalism.”

Backers of the Socialist Workers Party have won a hearing at several Trump rallies from working people when they explain the problem is not “crony” capitalism, but capitalism period. Workers at those rallies were open to considering the working-class alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, including the SWP’s opposition to Trump’s program of deporting immigrant workers. Workers need to join together in a common struggle, no matter where they were born, to fight for raising the minimum wage and for organizing the unorganized into unions, the SWP candidates say, on the road to building a revolutionary movement capable of taking power out of the hands of the capitalist class.

Going door to door in working-class neighborhoods, communist workers have gotten a good response to their Marxist explanation of the capitalist crisis; the need for working people to organize independently of the capitalist parties and to fight for a labor party based on the unions; and the importance of solidarity with the struggles of working people and the oppressed around the world.

Related articles:
SWP campaign in Philadelphia: ‘We won because we built the party’
Join defense of SWP exemption from disclosing campaign donors

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