Mike Vargo and Eric Marchbein: Who Abandoned the Working Class?

This commentary on the election takes the form of a Q&A between two observers with firsthand knowledge of certain aspects. Freelance writer Mike Vargo grew up in a blue-collar family, and has covered economic and workplace issues as a journalist. Eric Marchbein, now retired, worked for 37 years as an IBEW electrician on industrial and construction projects; he also served 16 years as Democratic Party ward chair in Pittsburgh’s largest ward. 

Their conversation has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity. 

Mike: After the election I read an opinion piece by Bernie Sanders that echoed some thoughts I’ve heard elsewhere. Bernie’s opening line was: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Eric, from your experience in working-class work and in politics, how would you respond?

Eric: I like Bernie. I supported him [as Democratic candidate for president] in the 2016 primary. But it’s not the Democratic Party that abandoned the working class. It’s the working class that abandoned the working class. 

Mike: Hm! I want to hear about that. First, though, let’s check the party’s record. What are some policy areas where the Democrats have done things, or tried to do things, to help non-college and low-to-medium-income people?

Eric: You could begin with the right of workers to organize. The Democratic Party has supported that right while the Republicans have tried to undermine it.  

Mike: Yep. Just last year, in Michigan, a Democratic state legislature and governor repealed the anti-union right-to-work law that had been put in by the GOP. And yet this year, Michigan voted red …

Eric: Health care. The Affordable Care Act, which the Republicans keep trying to kill. Raising the minimum wage. Loan regulation; not allowing predatory lending and fees. Public education, which is a means for young people in working families to rise and attain more. Democrats overwhelmingly favor support for public schools, while the Republicans promise to eliminate the entire Department of Education … But a lot of these are not top-of-mind issues for people when they consider what the party does for them. 

Mike: Yeah, apparently they haven’t moved the voting needle. Now tell me about what you meant that the working class abandoned the working class. How and why did this happen?

Eric: Let’s go back to the years before there were Reagan Democrats. When I was a cub — an apprentice electrician — one of our tasks was to make mounting holes in concrete. I did it by hand, with a hammer and a star-point chisel. Electric hammer drills were available but they were expensive. It was cheaper to pay the apprentices. But eventually, contractors started buying the hammer drills, because hourly wages started to rise. 

And for some people they went very high. In the electrician ranks you have specialists called cable splicers, who are the elite. They’re brought in to splice high-voltage cables together. This is critical work. A bad splice can literally explode. So these splicers were paid well and racking up tons of overtime. They could take home paychecks three or four times above what a regular electrician made. 

The point is that in the building trades, and in other jobs we consider working-class, there were people who achieved many of their goals for income and financial stability. And then around that time, the women’s movement and equal-opportunity legislation were moving more women out into the workforce. Which many men resented, but it also meant they could be married to someone who earned a second income. They could buy boats, nicer cars, second homes. 

And as people achieved their goals or came close to them, their thinking changed. They saw diminishing returns from continuing to fight for workers’ causes, and large numbers of them flaked off from the fight. They freed themselves from having a working-class consciousness. 

Mike: What exactly does that mean?

Eric: If you no longer need to struggle and scrape, you lose the commitment to identify with people who haven’t achieved their goals. The farm workers. The checkout clerks and shelf-stockers at the discount store … You’re not like those people. You may not even think of yourself as working class. You’re middle class. 

Mike: And so the rift began? Despite the fact that during the Reagan years and afterward — with the decline of the manufacturing industries and the rise of automation and offshoring — many workers lost their jobs?

Eric: Yes it did. I worked with people who had a very well-developed consciousness of being union members and feeling solidarity with labor. But I knew many who said if the union ever failed to find them work, they would go out and scab. 

Mike: Now let’s connect this to politics. Are you talking about the kind of thing that leads wage-workers to vote against their own self-interest?

Eric: When individuals calculate their self-interest, it depends on what they think the self is. Some might see themselves as warriors of God, or of the white race or male gender.

Mike: But hold on. Help me understand this. In the recent election, lots of people said the economy was their number one issue. That is a practical real-life issue, and they were referring mainly to inflation. The Trump voters blamed it on Biden and the Democrats, when in fact inflation was global after the pandemic, and the U.S. came out of the inflation spike better than other countries did. Yet as Bernie noted in his opinion piece, even many minority persons and persons who hold the lower-wage jobs crossed over to vote for Trump. As if he had created the strong pre-pandemic economy, when in fact he inherited it from the Obama years — and as if Trump could now bring prices back to what they were previously, which he can’t. Not to mention that after the 2020 election he tried to overturn the government. What were these people thinking?

Eric: I am reminded of the story about Adlai Stevenson when he ran for president in the 1950s. Supposedly a woman said to him, “All of the thinking people will be voting for you.” And supposedly he said “Madam, that’s not nearly enough.” 

Mike: Are you implying that wage-workers don’t think? Or that they’re prone to magical thinking?

Eric: Many of us are prone to mythical thinking. It’s like when people buy a type of car they don’t really need, maybe a sports car or a big hulking pickup. They aren’t going to merely drive the car; they will wear the car like a costume. A costume that fits the mythical self-image they have constructed or aspire to. 

Mike: You’re speaking in parables, but I think I get it. Trump projected himself as a strongman and a winner, which people aspire to be. So they put on the, uh, costume —

Eric: I am also saying that we’re prone to being divided. Without a coherent identity as, say, working-class, people can be divided along cultural or other lines. Newt Gingrich understood this in the 1990s. He understood that the goal of politics is not to unite the people. It’s to divide them into bigger and smaller parts. 

Mike: In such a way that the bigger part is yours. And it seems the divisions have teetered back and forth over the past few elections, with one party and then the other getting slightly more than half of the vote, slightly more than half of the Senate. Is the real news that we are just a 50-50 divided nation?

Eric: The divisions are artificial. A number of polls have shown that significant majorities of Americans want the same policies. They want sensible gun laws; they want environmental action; they want to reduce income and wealth inequality. But the politicking artificially divides them. The right-wing media have been a very powerful force in this regard. 

And the real news about the last election was what did not happen — people not voting. This year, about 10 million fewer people voted than in 2020. Trump got about 2 million fewer votes and Harris about 8 million fewer than Biden had, with ripples on down the ticket. In an election people saw as the most important of our lifetimes. 

Mike: What do you think was the main cause of the drop off?

Eric: Narcissism. People behaving as if an expression of their personal feelings was more important than deciding which direction the country will go. Many Republicans knew the dangers that Trump posed. But instead of saying “I can’t let him be president,” and casting ballots to prevent it, they just said “I can’t vote for him.” So they voted for nobody and now the dangers are clear and present. The same held true on the other side, where people said “Gee, I can’t vote for Harris or the Democrats because of such-and-such.” They did not acknowledge the larger truth that there were only two possible choices, and their job was to pick one. They stayed home and that was a big factor in deciding the election. 

Mike: Wow. This makes me think of one more thing I’d like to mention. I sense a general malaise in the country, which is reflected in surveys that show growing rates of mental health difficulties. And I wonder if the malaise has to do with the nature of work as we now know it. 

Once, back in my journalism days, I was reporting on production problems at a General Motors plant. I wound up talking for hours with some guys at the local UAW office, and it had nothing to do with the technical problems of bending sheet metal for body parts. They wanted to talk about the human problem of working on an automobile assembly line. Most jobs were so boring and repetitive that they could bend your mind and flatten your soul. Meanwhile I’d heard similar tales about the steel mill in my old home town. One steelworker told me how he smuggled in whiskey in little baby-food jars and hid them in various places. He was all set to numb out as needed. 

My father wasn’t that way. Dad was a cheerful, resilient man, able to ride the waves of life. But he took early retirement from his railroad job, and when I asked if he had times when he missed work, he said “Not for a minute.” Myself, whenever my primary income was short in the past, I’d work stretches of a few months in places like a textile plant. Couldn’t imagine doing it long-term for a living. 

Eric: That’s why people write blogs and fire off social media posts, to at least feel that they’re players in the game. And that is part of why the right-wing media can nurture disquiet and whip up rage; they get people hooked on rage as their drug of choice. But throughout history, I don’t know that work has ever been deeply satisfying unless you’re at the highest levels.

Mike: Perhaps the difference is that now we expect it. We have an advanced society that can wipe out diseases and invent marvels like the magic rectangle you carry in your pocket. Yet somehow, there’s a feeling that the vision of the future that we were promised has gone unfulfilled. And it’s not “Where are the flying cars?” It’s “Where’s the happiness, the joy?” 

Eric: Given the election results, there is no joy in Mudville. 

Mike: I feel you. Wrapping up now, how do you see the dangers ahead?

Eric: I hear people wailing about the scary Trump monster, and the gang of loyal hoodlums he’s rounding up to help him swing a wrecking ball. Certainly you can find plenty of causes for concern there. But around the corner from the Trump monster, something much scarier is looming: the climate change monster. Try getting away from that one. 

Mike: Your bottom line?

Eric: Maybe we shouldn’t be so upset about losing our democracy. It doesn’t work, does it? Does it protect us from a mob takeover? [Laughs and shakes his head.] I’m afraid the bottom line is: How low can we go?

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Copyright 2024 Mike Vargo and Eric Marchbein.