The three hardest words to say in politics

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/08/2024 (419 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT are the three hardest words to say?

“I love you”? “I am sorry”? “I was wrong”?

Well, if you’re a political party of the centre-left those three words are: “The working class.”

Yes, it’s fit for a Monty Python skit. Centre-left politicians avoid the phrase as if it were roadkill.

I was reminded of this fact recently relistening to Kamala Harris’s first public address at the campaign headquarters she inherited from U.S. President Joe Biden. To those cheering in Delaware, she pointedly avoided the phrase, indicating that her campaign would be constructed around the American middle class: “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the middle class. And if democratic politics is rooted, at its best, in aspiration, then what’s wrong pitching to the middle-class? Left-of-centre parties in North America have a long tradition of avoiding anything that smells remotely of class analysis. Peppered references to ‘working people’ and, more recently, ‘hard-working families,’ seems to be the acceptable limit.

But if one pulls back from that practice of realpolitik, the absence of references to ‘the working class’ is frankly gobsmacking. In its place, Hillary Clinton’s inopportune ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016 was taken by many working-class people as targeting them as a class; an off-the-cuff Freudian slip prompted by a disdain hiding in plain sight. Are the working class an embarrassment? Are they unclean?

Four years on, the Biden administration attempted to bring back to political centre stage the link between the Democratic Party and organized labour; historically central to the fight for increased wages for the working class. In the U.S., that link had been shredded by Bill Clinton’s ‘New’ Democratic Party of the 1990s. That act of centrist vandalism — reproduced in the U.K. by Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ — arose from careful work of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) (the 1980s/’90s version of Project 2025, but for the left).

Clinton repositioned the Democratic Party, targeting the aspirations of the educated, mobile upper middle class as he presided over the de-industrialization of U.S. manufacturing. He declared ‘the era of big government is over,’ facilitating trade policies and pink slips to much of the industrial working class. The North American Free Trade Agreement welded Canada’s future to that vision.

The cold calculation was that wage-labourers had nowhere else to go. They could vote for parties that had traditionally defended their interests, or they could stay home.

Well, that Faustian bargain has come due. And it is the political right that now feels empowered to deploy the language of “the working class,” without shame. False messiahs (Donald Trump), and class defectors (JD Vance), aside, this reversal in the body politic is still not close to being fully digested. The coming election in November will test the political potency of the right’s appropriation of this originally Marxian designation. In this sense, Vance as Trump’s VP pick is decidedly not a mistake.

If you think this ongoing reversal applies only south of the 49th, think again.

Can one find a single reference to ‘the working class’ on the centre-left NDP website? Perhaps under “Affordability?” No. Under “Economy?” No. How about in the party’s hundred-page-plus “Ready for Better: New Democrats’ Commitments to You?”

Nope. Yes, references to working Canadians, working families, but not a single reference to the working class. Instead, “A New Democrat government will bring together all levels of government, together with business and labour leaders, to develop a national industrial strategy to build an advanced low carbon manufacturing economy in Canada that will provide good middle-class jobs to Canadian workers.”

When it comes to class antagonism, apparently, for the Canadian left “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”

Not so with the Canada’s Conservative Party. Comrade Pierre Poilievre can’t say enough about the working class as he positions himself for Canada’s next federal election. He vows to deliver the working class into the promised land. His “daily obsession will be about what is good for the working-class people of this country.” Poilievre’s earlier fight to end closed-shop union dues payments is now, happily, forgotten. And much else besides. Poilievre’s new attack ads against the NDP speak to this new strategy of the political right.

If Marx was right — that history is first tragedy, then farce — then perhaps the working class can look forward to some diverting vaudevillian entertainment in the coming years while its share of wealth continues to decline.

And all this as defenders of those who systematically benefit most from the working-class ‘champion’ its cause and those claiming to deliver economic justice for the working class express a ‘love’ that dare not speak its name.

What a mad, mad, world. It must be the summer heat.

Oh, and as the absurdism of Python remind us, the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.

Who’d have thought?

Paul Abela is an associate professor in Philosophy at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S.