The Lever - Fake Populists See A Real Opportunity

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Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

By David Sirota

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“The rail workers had good reason to threaten a strike,” a U.S. senator wrote last week. “Railway workers wanted sufficient paid leave to cover illnesses, and the big companies didn’t want to provide them, despite the fact the rail companies are more profitable than ever. How have they gotten so profitable in just the last few years? By cutting the number of rail jobs and working laborers harder. The record profits of the rail industry have been a tremendous victory for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.”

If you think the senator who wrote that was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or some other Democrat, think again. It was January 6 fist-pumper Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri.

That’s right, while President Biden was behaving like a villain from Les Misérables — busting workers’ strike and then eating caviar and lobster at a black-tie dinner with the French president — Hawley was penning that essay, which culminated in him declaring: “Wall Street and Washington say this anti-worker agenda is the natural order of things. They’re wrong, as usual. We don’t have to follow this path — and we shouldn’t a moment longer.”

Many liberals will stop reading right here, insisting that Hawley is an insincere insurrectionist — which happens to be true. Indeed, Hawley, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and other fake populists are often LARPing a good game about paid sick days, the $15 minimum wage, and COVID-19 relief checks, but they’ve avoided backing legislation to strengthen union rights and routinely cast votes with the GOP’s big donors. It was the same with Donald Trump: For every decent health care initiative and direct aid program the former Republican president stumbled into supporting, he was spending far more time as a standard-issue shill for capital against labor.

And yet, laughing at the GOP’s fake populists as if they are politically irrelevant ignores a significant and dangerous trend: Democrats’ genuflections to their corporate donors — whether breaking a strike, authorizing corporate giveaways, or stalling a $15 minimum wage — have been handing conservatives myriad opportunities to court working-class voters.

And lately, polling data show those voters have been responding.