"Divide and Conquer"

Shawn Fain's speech at the DNC was the perfect rejoinder to the GOP's attempts to pit workers against each other

The Trump-Vance campaign have rhetorically tried to position themselves as the “populists” in this presidential election—including by proclaiming a (not particularly convincing) newfound enthusiasm for organized labor. The RNC stage was full of direct appeals to union members. Vance often likes to depict himself as the avenger of the “rust-belt working class.” And Trump, despite his plutocratic origins and first-term policies, continues to enjoy an undeserved reputation as an economic populist.

Of course, Trump himself threw a wrench into the gears of this campaign strategy last week, when he used his “interview” with Elon Musk as an opportunity to recommend the wholesale violation of federal labor laws. In the course of the two men’s meandering and ill-informed conversation, Trump at one point said of Musk’s alleged union-busting tactics at one of his companies, with apparent admiration, “they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.'"—to which Musk chuckled in agreement.

Trump and Vance are plainly hoping that these overt threats to eviscerate workers’ rights will prove less salient in the minds of blue collar workers than concerns about immigration. In order to emphasize the latter, the two GOP candidates are amping up the scapegoating of asylum-seekers to fever pitch. With Trump, of course, there are the usual depraved lines about “invasion” and “poisoning the blood.” Vance offers the more “polite” version of the same: accusing immigrants (falsely) of taking jobs and driving up housing costs.

The “working class,” then, has—throughout this election—been wielded as a prop for the MAGA movement’s nativist crusade. And yet, when the nation actually heard from a major representative of organized labor at the DNC last night, they received a very different and far more sympathetic message about asylum-seekers than the one Trump and Vance are hoping to push. Shawn Fain, current president of the United Auto Workers, made a point of saying that Republicans’ “divide and conquer” strategy would not succeed in pitting native-born workers against people newly arriving at the border:

It’s the oldest trick in the book, he said. They want to blame the frustrations of working class people. They want to take those frustrations. They want to blame it on race. They want to blame it on LGBTQ+ people. They want to blame it on some destitute and desperate person at the border. They do that because they want working class people to be divided and keep the focus off the one true enemy: corporate greed.

Fain, in making this point, was not just preaching to the converted. Voicing this argument at this year’s DNC actually required a measure of courage. After all, the Democratic Party too has made a point of burnishing its “tough on the border” credentials this election year. Harris on the campaign trail has already proclaimed her support for a Senate bill that would have severely restricted asylum eligibility. And, on the same day Fain spoke, the DNC released a new draft platform that calls for expanded presidential authority to shut down asylum processing, if the system becomes “overwhelmed” (a dangerously vague standard).

Democrats too, then, have been playing the game of scapegoating asylum-seekers (albeit in less dangerous and dehumanizing language). Democrats, too, seem to have been assuming that the interests of working class native-born Americans are adverse to those of working class asylum-seekers. But it was the representative of those same blue collar Americans last night who alone was willing to speak up for asylum-seekers—who alone went out of his way to point out the absurdity of blaming “desperate and destitute people at the border” for economic injustice—instead of the political class that has eviscerated organized labor for decades and siphoned off an every-greater portion of the rewards of economic growth for the already-wealthy.

Of course, Fain’s point—while daring in the present political moment—was not exactly original. The argument that the rich and powerful are trying to stoke artificial antagonisms within the working class in order to feather their own nests is an old and storied one on the Left. It is essentially the same point Bertolt Brecht made in his poem, the “Song of the Stormtrooper,” which imagines a fat-cat boss sweet-talking the starving workers into taking up arms against their fellow workers with the false promise of more bread—all in an effort to deprive the workers of the collective power that comes from solidarity. In other words, the poem explains right-wing demagoguery as a version of the “divide and conquer” strategy that Fain described.

Perhaps this line of analysis is inadequate to explain all right-wing populism. Maybe it is a bit glib in its political psychology. But it rings profoundly true when applied to the Trump movement, at least. After all, the contrast could not be more glaring between Trump’s endorsement of union-busting tactics, on the one hand, and his disingenuous claims to be trying to save the working class from the specter of mass migration, on the other. He is truly the “Big-Belly” of Brecht’s poem, who sidles up to the hungry worker and seeks to trick him into pinning the blame on his fellow workers—in this case, asylum-seekers at the border—so that he does not notice who is truly robbing him.

The speaker of Brecht’s poem is thus in the position of the duped Trump supporter, who accepts Vance and Trump’s lies, and blames their frustrations on “some destitute and desperate person at the border,” in Fain’s words. If Trump and Vance succeed in their agenda—slashing the asylum system, carrying out mass deportations, renewing family separation, all while they cut taxes still further for the wealthy and undercut the power of organized labor—then truly, that deceived Trump supporter will have succeeded only in harming their fellow workers and undermining their own interests in the process. As Brecht writes (Hays trans.):

It was my brother, hunger

Made us one, I know,

And I am marching, marching

With my own and my brother’s foe.

So I have lost my brother,

I wove his winding sheet.

I know now by this victory

I wrought my own defeat.