Biden's Blue Collar Blueprint
I hate the State of the Union.
I loathe the pageantry; the focus-grouped talking points and the standing ovations for vague policy proposals that’ll never get passed. Just one time, I’d like a President to say what we’re all feeling, instead of predictably declaring the state of the union to be strong.
Usually, I read them the next morning. It takes less time, it’s less annoying, and I’m done before I finish my cup of coffee.
But I watched the State of the Union last night — and was surprised.
Bringing Back Manufacturing
The most surprising portion of Biden’s State of the Union was the segment on which he spent the most time: manufacturing.
To the extent Presidents since the 1980s have discussed manufacturing and offshoring, it’s been to claim minor successes in creating new manufacturing jobs and to make a timid proposal to “lure manufacturing back” through tax incentives. The one exception, ironically enough, was Donald Trump — who mentioned manufacturing more than any President in the preceding twenty years, and went so far as to criticize NAFTA and American trade policy. (His pitch, of course, was that he was a good businessman and would cut better deals.)
Biden spent significant time touting manufacturing job gains, and promising additional job growth due to legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s par for course: Presidents tout job growth under their watch, and promise more because of their policies.
But what wasn’t usual was Biden’s message to the communities impacted by deindustrialization: you were left behind.
Presidents like Obama and Clinton never acknowledged deindustrialization’s impact, or the devastation it wrought on communities. To the extent they discussed it at all, it was an economic force of nature, best solved through tax gimmicks to court specialty high-tech manufacturing companies. How we lost the jobs, and the cost of losing the jobs, wasn’t important — in part because it implicated them.
That matters. Several years ago, I spoke to a former official in the United Steelworkers who was involved in a wide number of plant closure negotiations in Western Pennsylvania. What he described was horrific: communities ripped apart, scenes between opposing camps in churches during Sunday services, acrimony and split families, desperate attempts to bargain concessions to keep facilities open, and defiant, bitter strikes.
The end result was the same in all of them: the plant closed, union jobs were lost, municipal and public school budgets were destroyed by their hollowed out business tax base, and communities were left without economic security or hope. Communities were left — and to an extent, still are — traumatized. Other, darker things came to fill the void: increasingly radical evangelical Christianity, bitter racial and anti-immigrant resentment, and far-right extremist politics.
But aside from his acknowledgement of the pain and trauma caused in communities destroyed by deindustrialization, Biden’s argument went further — and surprisingly, he rebuked both past Democratic and Republican presidencies. (One assumes that he was rebuking Bill Clinton; it’s unlikely he was taking aim at the administration in which he served.)
How he framed the question of manufacturing job growth indicated a depth to his view beyond poll-tested gimmicks. In his speech, Biden highlighted the question of fixing supply chains and creating domestic markets for American-made goods, particularly through federal programs: something that doesn’t require Congressional action. Biden’s promise to clamp down on domestic sourcing for federally funded projects — particularly infrastructure products — showed a greater level of attention to the role of state policy in supporting manufacturing sector growth, vs. throwaway lines about tax incentives.
But even more interesting was that Biden didn’t just go deeper than talking about tax gimmicks — he explicitly attacked American corporations and the wealthy for not paying their fair share, arguing that they needed to pay more in taxes, not be given additional tax breaks. Although unions have often gone after corporations for offshoring, arguing that it’s motivated by greed, Democrats have almost uniformly shied away from such criticism. It’s an important shift in Democratic thinking on industrial policy, as the reality of American manufacturing job loss has never been that taxes are too high: an invented talking point promoted by industry associations and the Right to justify slashing corporate taxes.
He coupled all of this — rhetoric and policy that mirrors, far more than any President in recent memory, the positions of a wide segment of organized labor — with an appeal to protect the right of workers to organize, while explicitly contrasting that position with the anti-worker positions of the vast majority of the Republican caucus.
Little surprise that Kevin McCarthy looked like he was sucking a lemon.
Which Workers?
But it’s not all good.
For unions with manufacturing sector workers — especially the United Steelworkers, a cornerstone of labor-industry Alliance for American Manufacturing — and unions within the Building Trades, this was a home run. And, to be fair, the vision isn’t restricted to those workers: building domestic manufacturing, if done correctly and without favoring corporate profits, would have a broader, potentially beneficial, ripple effect. On top of that, Biden hammered home “kitchen table” issues like pharmaceutical price gouging, excess service fees, and reigning in the thousand and one ways that corporations can bleed the working class, just trying to survive, dry.
But which workers are included in his vision?
Although most elements of the policy itself are positive developments, Biden’s vision is — unsurprisingly — tinged by a nostalgic image of the blue collar America in which he grew up. But the reality is that image is heavily coded, both in race and gender: undoubtedly a factor the administration considered, given the selection of a Black woman and member of the Ironworkers as one of his guests. We shouldn’t conflate the restoration of American manufacturing with the restoration of a more gendered, racist society: but we should likewise be on guard against conflation of “blue collar” with “white men.”
The return of manufacturing jobs will depend on whether they’re union jobs; there are, after all, plenty of bad manufacturing jobs in the predominantly non-union Southern manufacturing sector. Although he invoked the PRO Act in his speech — a dead letter in the current Congress — his commitment to union rights is undercut by the administration’s recent push to impose a contract on railway unions. The merits of the deal aside, the contract’s imposition reinforced a bipartisan consensus in opposition to the right to strike for workers covered under the Railway Labor Act. Even if the right to strike exists in theory, the assumption of immediate imposition means it doesn’t exist in practice.
This is a crucial question. As Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote while serving as General Counsel of the United Steelworkers, collective bargaining doesn’t exist without the potential threat of a strike. In short, whether workers can strike determines whether they can genuinely collectively bargain at all: a reality hammered home by the intransigence of rail operators that knew they’d never face economic consequences for their stonewalling. Biden can’t truly say he supports the right of workers to organize, while opposing their right to strike; bargaining without the potential for a strike is begging.
Moreover, Biden’s speech largely ignored the far larger service sector. Other than some smaller (though still positive) mentions, the healthcare and education sectors — both including heavily “pink collar” work — merited far less attention, with no mention of the nationwide problems hiring teachers or the Right’s war on public education. (On the topic of “pink collar” work — Biden’s mention of reproductive rights was cursory, at best.)
His rhetoric also slipped dangerously toward an exclusionary economic nationalism. Some of the main elements found in economic nationalism — building domestic manufacturing capacity, buying domestically (packaged as “Buy American”), and opposing offshoring of jobs — aren’t inherently problematic, and are simply good, populist economics. (Shortening supply chains is also a necessary part of building a climate-resilient economy.)
But how they’re packaged matters.
Coupling the elements of economic nationalism with promoting tough border policy should be worrying. His speech touted crackdowns on migrants, promoting a 97% reduction in “unlawful migration” from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuala, and conceded defeat on actual justice for migrants, instead pivoting to border security. (“If we don’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border.”) It reinforces much of the nativism promoted in deindustrialized areas as an answer to their economic immiseration and the opioids ripping through their communities: that migrants are to blame.
For heavily migrant workforces — many of whom are members of union, especially UNITE HERE and UFW — it’s hard to see how further militarizing the border, and leaning into the Right’s tropes about migrant criminality and drug smuggling, is a vision that includes them.
Likewise, Biden engaged in a heavy dose of foreign policy sabre rattling, attacking China, and singling out Xi Jinping in an unusually heated moment. More worryingly, he implicitly suggested potential escalated military confrontation with China, coupling a call to modernize the military with a pledge that “if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country.” Network commentators highlighted it as a “grave geopolitical shift,” while bizarrely suggesting that opposition to China presents an opportunity for bipartisan consensus.
Neither element is a particularly new development for Democrats. They’ve felt compelled, dating back to the Cold War, to sabre rattle to combat the perception that they’re weak on foreign policy. Heightened border security and crackdowns on migrants also occurred under the Obama administration, even as he touted comprehensive immigration reform. But the mixture of economic populism, sabre rattling, and wishy-washy positions on immigration policy can quickly take darker turns to economic nationalism, jingoism, and outright nativism — familiar and productive grounds for the most radical elements of the Republican Party.
Shifting Terrain
One of the unremarked elements of Biden’s speech was the implicit rebuke of Clintonism. He clearly attacked past Democratic administrations — which surely included only Clinton — alongside a direct, unprecedented appeal to those left behind by Clinton-era trade deals like NAFTA. One of the takeaways of his speech should be the burying of the Clintonite consensus that, until recently, ruled the Democratic Party.
Burying Clintonism is cause for celebration. Sabre rattling, tepid-to-hostile positions on migrant justice, and a rhetorical commitment to reproductive rights not backed by action are hardly new for the Democratic Party, and they shouldn’t be given uncritical cover for it solely because of policy improvements elsewhere. But to the extent that their economic message is one that begins to actually address the pressure felt by working Americans — albeit incompletely — that’s a positive development.
But with all of that said, there’s no reason to believe that this was anything more than the pageantry of any other State of the Union: it just played better, in parts, to an audience that I care about. It signals shifting terrain, but Washington officials alone don’t determine whether that shift in terrain is ultimately progressive, and there’s ample room for it to go down more troubling paths — whether through the Democrats, or through the overt fascism of the Republican Party’s “America First” wing.
The degree to which this means anything at all isn’t measured by the rhetoric, and the majority of meaningfully productive policy is dead in the water with Republican control of the House. Whether or not Democrats still had control, depending on solutions from on high from the Biden administration and Congress is willingly playing the role of Charlie kicking at the football. Although we can’t ignore political action altogether, the solution is not to put all our energies into electing more Democrats and trusting them to take it from there: a sure recipe for further union decline and disappointment.
“Formal” politics — what turn of the century socialists often called “parliamentary action” — matter. We can’t abandon them. But they’re not the entirety of politics, and in this moment, they aren’t the primary terrain for the true political fight. There’s no shortcut or quick fix to building working class power — and a permanent shift in the political terrain, as well as truly transformative policy, will come from organization, it won’t create it.
As Jane McAlevey has said: it’s strikes and politics, strikes and politics. One could almost call it dialectical.
Ultimately, then, the State of the Union — while containing encouraging political and rhetorical shifts in some parts — is not the entirety, or even an especially meaningful part, of doing politics, and encouraging signs shouldn’t suck us into the trap of believing that the near-term vehicle for change is through federal action that’ll ultimately fall short. The need now is what it has been: organizing workers, and letting the politics follow.