• Episode 169: How the Right Ventriloquizes “The Working Man” to Push Pro-Corporate Policy and Gut…

    Citations Needed | November 2, 2022 | Transcript

    (Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

    [Music]

    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.

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    Nima: “Yes, undocumented immigrants take jobs from Americans. Here’s the proof,” an opinion piece in The Washington Post tells us. “Save our truckers, not affluent students seeking a free ride,” pleads longtime Republican consultant Douglas MacKinnon in The Hill. “Biden’s Student Debt Cancellation Robs Hard-Working Americans, Will Make Inflation Even Worse,” proclaims a so-called Expert Statement from the Heritage Foundation.

    Adam: There’s a warning we hear again and again, particularly from the right-wing: A policy that would actually help people must be stopped, because it’ll harm the Working Man. According to demagogues like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance — as well as many of their more liberal counterparts — immigration, labor organizing, protest rights, and student debt cancellation simply can’t be allowed, lest they harm hardworking, meat-and-potatoes plumbers and truckers.

    Nima: But these cynical admonitions disguise some very important truths. Progressive policies serve the interests of many of these plumbers and truckers, many of whom might want to organize their workplaces too or have their debt relieved as well. And the supposed menaces of job-stealing immigrants or entitled lawyers who want others to pay off their loans aren’t actually responsible for depressed wages or plummeting standards of living — no, corporations bolstered by U.S. policy making are.

    Adam: On today’s episode we’ll examine the right-wing trope of ventriloquizing an imaginary quote-unquote “Working Man” in order to divert attention from policies that serve the corporate bottom line, we’ll detail how this tactic obscures class dynamics between labor and capital, reinforces racist conceptions that harm workers of color, and ultimately suppresses the rights of all workers while absolving their employers of wrongdoing.

    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll speak with filmmaker, writer and political organizer Astra Taylor. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, director of the film “What Is Democracy?” and author of the book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.

    [Begin Clip]

    Astra Taylor: And we’ve been in a narrative war over debt cancellation now for at least a decade, and I think those tropes are, they’re pretty predictable, and they’re actually pretty easy to debunk, and I think what’s striking is that, you know, a lot of people just aren’t buying them. I mean, what we saw immediately after cancellation was announced was a significant boost in the polls for the Democrats, you know, we knew this going into it that it actually is really popular with the Republican base. I mean, people like debt cancellation, it’s not really a big surprise.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: This past August, when President Biden forgave, I guess, canceled, whatever term you prefer, $10,000 for the student loan debts for those who qualify, this led to a torrent of concern trolling by mostly Republicans and conservatives, that this would harm the working man, this was Ron DeSantis’ line, this was Tucker Carlson’s line, and then this is something we’ve talked about on the show, rather we’ve touched on it, we thought it was worthy of a full examination, which is this idea of, it’s not enough to say, I don’t like this policy because I’m conservative and I want to make sure that workers are frightened and precarious and debt is one mechanism to do that. You really can’t say that. So every single pro corporate policy has to have a faux populace framework, and so typically, and again, this is not something that’s new, as we’ll discuss, you get the sudden their hearts bleed for the Working Man, who they begin to ventriloquize by sticking their hand up their ass and saying, ‘Oh, actually, this working man over here that I’ve completely made up or I found one out of 100 or they’re, you know, secretly they work for some bullshit think tank, this guy, this sort of Joe the Plumber guy, he represents the working man and he thinks these highfalutin libs they don’t know what’s in your best interest.’

    Nima: Real Americans work hard, they pay off their debts, Adam, and no relief is worth the suffering of the Working Man.

    Adam: This ventriloquizing the Working Man very often works. It can be very effective. And so what we want to do is sort of show how it’s a trope, typically what we do in the show, by going back in history, looking at various examples of this and then we’re going to lead up to the present where this really reared its ugly head during the student debt cancellation debate, and then we’re going to pivot to our guests to discuss it in that context.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks in Jacksonville in March 2022 (Credit: WKMG)

    Nima: So, defenses of the Working Man and the weaponization of this trope have been used to launder corporate abuses for well over a century. Much of this can be traced to the Yellow Peril of the late 19th century, when Chinese immigrants were trafficked into the United States to work on railroads and in agricultural fields. Chinese immigrants were scapegoated as a threat to white workers, characterized as the cause of wage depression and other workplace abuses. This effectively absolved the industries themselves that committed these abuses of any wrongdoing.

    So, for instance, there’s actually a striking visual example of this trope. There’s a political cartoon from 1878 that shows two side-by-side images. It’s entitled “A picture for employers.” On the left is shown at least a dozen Chinese men, rendered in grotesquely stylized caricature, piled upon one another in a dark, crowded opium den, they’re sitting on the floor eating rats. But on the right, a proud white father with broad shoulders, standing astride his threshold in the soft fading daylight, welcomed home from a hard day’s work to a nuclear family, a dutiful wife, three young doting children and comfortable surroundings. Above the door is a plaque that reads, “God bless our home.” The image is captioned, as I said, “A picture for employers: Why they can live on 40 cents a day [left]…and they can’t [right].”

    “A picture for employers. Why they can live on 40 cents a day, and they can’t” (Lithograph by J. Keppler., published in Puck, August 21, 1878)

    Adam: Yeah, the idea is that Chinese immigrants are the reason why you’re poor. They’re suppressing your wages, not the boss. There’s also a pattern of framing strikes and other worker actions as quote-unquote “hurting the worker,” this goes back as far as the existence of labor actions. In these instances, strikes, not employers, are blamed for retaliatory actions of the employer like layoffs or other punitive measures. The risks incurred by striking workers are thus used to discourage any further action.

    From the Kansas City Gazette from March of 1901, quote:

    “‘Tis Time, and pity ’tis ’tis true,’ that strikes hurt the workers who engage in them; and often they lose if they win. About 200 girls employed in Swofford’s overall factory in Kansas City, Mo., were thrown out of employment Wednesday morning.”

    September 11, 1958, The Windsor Star in Canada, quote, “Major Strikes Would Hurt Workers and Others Also.” Quote:

    “A railroad strike would affect almost 150,000 workers directly and many more thousands indirectly. It would tie up this major form of transportation. That against the Nickel company would put 14,000 employees on the street, and could result in unemployment of others.”

    Nima: Fifteen years later, we saw this from the Santa Rosa, California Press Democrat from May 1973, headlined, “Congressman: Don’t Let Farm Workers Strike.” This is a syndicated piece from United Press International datelined from Washington, says this, quote:

    “A California congressman urged today Congress seek to improve the lot of farm workers by taking away their right to strike.

    “Rep. Burt L. Talcott, a Republican whose congressional district includes many of California’s biggest growers, said strikes hurt the workers even more than they do the farmers. For that reason, he said, both the strike and the secondary boycott should be outlawed in agriculture.”

    So you can see clearly here, what — I don’t know — might help workers, like striking, solidarity is deemed here to actually — you know what? — this is going to hurt them, and it’s also going to hurt the farmers whose land the workers labor on.

    Adam: Since the beginning of strikes, we’ve been told that strikes hurt workers themselves by taking them out of work and then making them fired. Of course, that’s not the corporation’s fault, and has downstream effects where it hurts the average working man who’s out of whatever this particular service happens to be, right? And we saw this, which we’ll get to later with the railroad strike, there was tons of concern trolling on Fox News about how a railroad strike would hurt the average everyday American by disrupting our supply chains, again, suddenly the heart bleeds for the worker when it helps capital. So for years we’ve been wanting to do something on Right to Work. Right to Work is pretty much the propaganda verbiage manifestation of what we’re talking about where Right to Work sounds like you’re empowering the worker, it’s got to be all time top three, if not the all time greatest propaganda phrase.

    William Ruggles (Dallas Morning News)

    Moving back to the 1940s. Amid this anti-labor sentiment, the idea of Right to Work — a legal framework designed to weaken unions under the guise of giving workers a quote-unquote “choice” to reject unions and union dues — began to surface. The idea is attributed to a 1941 piece by Dallas Morning News editorial writer William Ruggles — which is pretty much the most quintessential 1940s Dallas news writer name you can come up with — that called for the prohibition of closed or union shops, meaning that workplaces couldn’t require hires to join unions. But the most prominent Right to Work evangelist was Texas lobbyist Vance Muse — again, another great Texas name that sounds evil — whose antipathy toward unions was rooted in a fear that they’d threaten the Jim Crow order, which of course they were. Ruggles reportedly coined the euphemism “right to work” and successfully pitched it to Muse.

    Nima: Synergy, Adam, synergy.

    Adam: Yeah.

    Vance Muse (left), a member of the racist, right-wing Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, established the “Right To Work” movement in order to maintain the South’s racial order.

    Nima: Indeed, the racism was front and center in this decision and I do have to give a content or trigger warning before I read this Vance Muse quote, it is truly awful. Muse reportedly once stated, quote:

    “From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

    Muse’s own grandson described him as, quote, “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.” End quote. Over the course of his entire career, Muse was consistently anti-worker. He sought to defeat the constitutional amendment prohibiting child labor, he lobbied for high tariffs, and worked to repeal the eight-hour-day law for railroaders.

    Adam: So the very origins of this term Right to Work, which exist in 28 states, which again is such a great term, Right to Work, you have the Right to Work, or not work, whatever you choose, which effectively makes the unionization well, very, very difficult, if not impossible. Its origins exist with explicitly racist Jim Crow terms by the people who coined the term because they didn’t want white people and Black people uniting as part of a union because that undermines the racial order of the South.

    Someone cut from the same cloth, George Wallace, a couple decades later, engaged in similar type rhetoric. George Wallace, who was the long serving governor of Alabama, whose infamous quote:

    [Begin Clip]

    George Wallace: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

    [End Clip]

    In his 1963 inaugural address after winning the Alabama governorship, courted what we now know as the mythical “White Working Class” in a series of political campaigns, suggesting that white workers bore the financial burdens of civil rights gains and welfare programs.

    In a speech during his 1968 presidential campaign, Wallace claimed to speak to the anxieties of the, quote, “the average man in the street, the man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this barber, this beautician, the policeman on the beat.”

    As we’ll also see in some subsequent examples, this lumping together of the “average” worker and “the policeman on the beat” necessarily obscures the class conflicts between those two groups, as if the racialization of his concept of a worker, right? The white textile worker, so he defends not the Black textile worker. Wallace, too, was above all interested in pro-corporate legislating; as governor of Alabama, he made “industrial development” and low corporate taxes cornerstones of his policy. So again, you see this man who speaks in the affects and appeals to the racism of the so called white working class, to serve corporate interests in a very, very effective way, because he did have a lot of base support from the white working class. But of course, his actual policy prescriptions didn’t really do anything for them, and very much opposed unions, unionization, and high corporate taxes, all of which he viewed as some kind of Jewish-Black-Communist plot.

    Nima: So, you see this consistency, right, of speaking on behalf of, this idea of, ‘It’s not in my interest object, you know, look, the people I know, the people I serve, the people in my community in my neighborhood,’ which necessarily for the people speaking, are not working class, are not anything other than white, and yet they are spoken for, the white working man is spoken for by politicians that want nothing but no unions, better tax breaks for corporations, and of course, a destruction of all kind of labor law.

    Adam: Another topic that is extremely popular is immigration. Again, it sort of sounds bad to say I want to keep non whites out of this country because I’m a white supremacist and I want to maintain a white supremacist stranglehold in our politics, or I want to have white working class voters vote against their interests by appealing to their reptile fucking brain about race. So they pose immigration as an assault on the working class, which again, these are the same politicians funded by think tanks and foundations and organizations and political donors who all make up the fortune 100 of this country, plenty of mainline outlets have published studies debunking the age old myth that immigrants, which is usually coded as Mexican or Latino or Guatemalan, etcetera, are stealing our jobs that would otherwise go to capital W, capital W, capital C, “White Working Class” workers, working class immigrants, i,e., those who are the targets of white nationalist rhetoric are often forced into grueling, severely low wage jobs. Still, the stealing jobs argument continues to arise among major right-wing media outlets and demagogues.

    Nima: So, for instance, George J. Borjas, a Harvard economist who regularly sang the praises of, and in fact influenced in turn, Trump’s immigration policy during Trump’s presidential term, is continually published in major outlets. Here are just a couple of examples:

    From Politico in the Fall of 2016, Borjas wrote an article headlines, “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers,” in which he writes, in part, quote, “We’re worrying about the wrong things, with policy fights focused on how many and which immigrants to accept, and not enough on how to mitigate the harm they create along the way.

    Here’s another from late February 2017, this in The New York Times Opinion section, headlined, “The Immigration Debate We Need,” this is another anti-immigrant screed masked with populist rhetoric.

    George Borjas on C-SPAN, talking about his book “We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative.”

    These pieces make a pretty bog-standard anti-immigrant claim: that workers in jobs sought by quote-unquote “low-skill” immigrants are suffering from wage depression. Borjas cites his own work for the extremely right-wing Center for Immigration Studies to support most of his claims. Borjas also makes a faux-populist appeal, acknowledging that businesses take advantage of immigrants in the form of lower pay and other abuses, but places the blame, not on the employers, but on immigrant workers themselves.

    Adam: Key difference we will keep re-emphasizing during this episode. So rather than telling workers they need to unionize with immigrant workers and create a more powerful working class, we’re told that the immigrants who are, again, have a different language, have different cultural customs, they look different, they’re scary, got to get rid of them, we get rid of them, your wages are going to go up. Rather, why don’t you increase the scope of the working base through unionization and through organization. So it’s a classic kind of divide and conquer strategy. Tom Cotton, again, whose entire career is based on promoting tax cuts for the rich and doesn’t support ProAct, doesn’t support any pro labor legislation, said the following in December of 2017, quote:

    “I joined my colleagues yesterday in introducing legislation to protect and provide certainty to DACA recipients, improve the lawful immigration system by targeting illegal immigration and criminal aliens, and protect the American worker.”

    Tom Cotton speaks often of his love of the American worker, but again, it’s only when he wants to push pro corporate racist policies. Otherwise, he doesn’t support a higher minimum wage, he doesn’t support unionization. So I think he gestured towards one of these like, Oren Cass, fake collective bargaining things that no union support. He doesn’t support, again, the PRO Act and other federal legislation that will protect the right to organize, but his heart bleeds for the worker when it comes to pushing his agenda because again, nobody wants to look like some country club Republican, right? We all want to look like salt of the earth, beer swilling, football watching every guy so everything has to take on this puppeteering of the working man.

    Nima: And so you see this from Washington Post opinion writer Henry Olsen, who in August of 2019, wrote the piece, “Yes, undocumented immigrants take jobs from Americans. Here’s the proof,” in which Olson cites multiple instances of chicken processing plants paying undocumented workers less than US born workers. In Olsen’s mind, just like in George Borjas’, it’s the immigrants who should be punished for this, not the companies making these decisions.

    Adam: Yeah, so J.D. Vance, a favorite of the show, who sort of mastered this total smarmy rhetoric, when responding to Biden formerly ending Trump’s Remain in Mexico immigration program — which he sort of brought back anyway — he said, quote:

    “Just idiotic. ‘Remain in Mexico’ was one of the smartest immigration policies of the last 30 years. A president who cares about his own people dying of fentanyl overdoses doesn’t do this.”

    So suddenly, J.D. Vance is really concerned with white working class fentanyl overdoses. Only in the context, again, someone who doesn’t support the PRO Act, doesn’t support unionization, doesn’t support a higher minimum wage, who doesn’t support higher taxes on corporations, higher taxes on the wealthy, suddenly, when it comes to pushing racist policy prescriptions, his heart bleeds for the working man, and there was nowhere recently where we’ve seen this worse than over the student debt quote-unquote “cancellation.”

    Nima: Yeah, which we teased a little earlier, but really does hammer home this entire point, the idea of who is deserving, who needs to be protected, and the idea that there is not one kind of working class that should be unified, that should all support each other ,that should all get, you know, whatever benefits and solidarity they can, but no, they are divided into there are these kinds of workers over there and there are these kinds of moochers over here.

    Adam: Yeah, in the Spring of 2022, word began circulating that the Biden administration would quote-unquote “relax” certain student debt repayment plans with plenty of strings attached. Bill Maher, a favorite punching bag on this show, of course had opinions about this on his HBO show Real Time — where he talks about how he constantly is getting silenced and canceled, his prime time show on HBO — Bill Maher characterized student debt cancellation as an elite issue affecting only a very small percentage of people, most of whom are destined for high salaries anyway. Here’s a clip from a May 2022 episode of Real Time in which Maher is speaking with DNC hack and CNN contributor Paul Begala, complete with his patented soulless smile.

    [Begin Clip]

    Bill Maher: A lot of people were saying this is a loser issue. I’ll give you some brief numbers here why that is. 13 percent of Americans have college debt, federal college debt. So that’s not a lot of people you’re working to. 65 percent don’t go to college at all. 50 percent of the college debt goes to people going to grad school, which come on, a lot of that is just bullshitting around. They don’t know what to do, and you can keep going to school for free. So it just looks like a loser issue for the party that is trying to win back the working class, that we’re going to subsidize, we who didn’t go to college, and didn’t benefit from that are going to subsidize you to get your degree in gender studies and sports marketing and all the other bullshit that they take. I think it’s a loser issue for Biden. What do you think?

    Paul Begala: Yeah, well, and this is revealing a big secret so don’t tell anybody. We Democrats have a lab, two labs actually, secret labs, one in Berkeley and one in Brooklyn, where we come up with ideas to completely piss off the working class and it’s working wonderfully.

    Bill Maher: Labs you say, actual labs.

    Paul Begala: Oh, yes, and they all have Ph.D.s

    Bill Maher: Right.

    Paul Begala: In pissing off the working class. Somehow, in my lifetime, the Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge. I went last week, I spent Wednesday last week in Chicago with the machinist union. Hung out with the machinists all day, great guys, not one of them came up to me and said, ‘Gee, I really hope you take my tax dollars to pay off the debt of somebody who went to Stanford.’

    [End Clip]

    Adam: So again, this is all the tropes, gender studies, your degree is gay and stupid and feminine and gay and feminine and gays, gender studies, super gay, super feminine.

    Nima: Mostly, it’s gay, because you’re not working in coal and oil and copper mines.

    Adam: Yeah. Bill Maher, who presumably just entered the studio wiping the coal dust off his face, understands the working man more than you and I. Of course, none of this is true. The very obvious point being is that from day one, Biden was always going to means test student loan forgiveness, which was a huge criticism that people had, but this is only for people whose income is below a certain level. So that part is just obviously not true. It is not true that rich people have student loan debt for the very, very obvious reason, Nima, that if you’re rich, you pay for school with your black American Express card, you don’t take out loans, by definition.

    Nima: You don’t need to have those loans. Also, I love the idea that he, you know, cites a percentage that he says is low, 13 percent of Americans. Okay, first off, he’s talking about all Americans. So that includes like toddlers, and elderly people, so 13 percent of all Americans, he says that incredibly low number, avoiding the fact that what we’re talking about is federal student loan debt that exceeds one and a half trillion dollars, that these cancellation policies can change the lives of 45 million people. But he just laughs it off as being a tiny number, an insignificant number.

    Adam: Months later, in August of 2022, when news broke that the Biden administration would implement a means tested student debt quote-unquote “forgiveness” plan, the plan was chock full of caveats and asterisks that would cancel up to $10,000 for non-Pell Grant recipients and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, but only those who earn less than $125,000 per year. Meanwhile, there were still hoops to jump through like an application process and the pause of federal student loan repayment, according to the administration, would resume in 2023. So there were caveats. Still, of course, the media engaged in a full blown, apoplectic meltdown over what was perceived as a handout for rich kids, arguing that it would hurt workers who are somehow, through some mysterious force that’s never quite explained, like all welfare fraud complaints, it’s not clear how they’re paying for it, I guess with their tax dollars, even though it’s not how this works at all, and of course, again, as we’ve talked about elsewhere, with the fare evasion story, is not a standard that exists for the trillions of dollars that just go missing in the Pentagon every year or the hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on overtime for police officers or other these kinds of —

    Nima: Not important.

    Adam: Not important. Or the interest free loans to banks or whatever it is right. But suddenly, if we help working people, everyone becomes very concerned about taxpayers, the sort of mysterious taxpayer being burdened with this, and that the average hard working put upon taxpayer who’s a waitress or a auto mechanic is going to have to pay for some rich bisexual DJ at NYU to go explore themselves and this is the sin of sins, and this was the trope we heard over and over and over again.

    Nima: So for instance, there’s this campaign ad run by Florida’s own Rick Scott, this is from late August 2022.

    A still image from a Rick Scott campaign ad, August 2022

    [Begin Clip]

    Rick Scott: How do you destroy America’s economy? Look around, Joe Biden and the woke Democrats are doing it, driving up debt, spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need. Now Biden wants to cancel all college loans, forcing a plumber, who decided not to go to college, to pay off loans for a lawyer who did. It’s crazy. I’m Rick Scott, I’ve got a plan, read it at rescueamerica.com. I approve this message.

    [End Clip]

    Then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott visits a steel factory near Gibsonton, FL in August 2015. (James Borchuck/AP)

    Nima: Now, this kind of framing made its way across media most often in the form of opinion pieces. There was, for instance, this Politico opinion piece from late August of 2022, written by none other than Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass and also the author of the book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America — we don’t work anymore, Adam, Oren is going to set us straight. So he put out a piece headlined, “Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness is Wrong. Here’s How to Handle College Debt Instead.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board chimed in just the very next day August 25, 2022, with their take, quote, “Biden’s Half-Trillion-Dollar Student-Loan Forgiveness Coup.” The subheadline of which read quote, “His student-loan write-off is an abuse of power that favors college grads at the expense of plumbers and FedEx drivers,” end quote.

    Adam: And here’s a clip of J.D. Vance talking about the debt quote-unquote “forgiveness” on Tucker Carlson, again, a friend of the working man, Tucker Carlson, from August 25 of this year.

    [Start Clip]

    J.D. Vance: If you want to give student debt relief, you should penalize the people who have benefited from this very corrupt system, not ask plumbers in Ohio to subsidize the life decisions of college educated young people, primarily young people who are going to make a lot of money over the course of their lifetime anyway.

    [End Clip]

    Nima: It’s always the plumbers. Somehow, all of this also, incidentally Adam, nods to this idea from Republicans that plumbers are just uneducated idiots, which is also not true, and also the plumbers somehow don’t make any money, which is also not true.

    Adam: Also, a lot of plumbers do go to technical school and other people have similar kinds of, what we typically associate with working class jobs, they themselves also can have student debts and a lot of plumbers went to college. Plumbers aren’t just sitting around swilling Miller Lite and watching football like they’re stereotypes.

    Nima: ‘I chose not to go to college because I’m a plumber just like my daddy and his daddy and his daddy and his daddy.’

    Adam: Yeah, there’s and again, it’s like plumbers, because we sort of intuitively understand that a plumber is someone who does something valuable for society, right?

    Nima: But also is somehow lowlier than you.

    Adam: Right. And of course, is going to be paying off this sort of gender studies-LGBT-communication-theater-underwater basket weaving, blah, blah, blah. It’s all this anti-intellectual posturing dogshit.

    Nima: Yeah, exactly. Why would the guy come home on the, you know, commuter train with his briefcase and hand, walk into his expensive house, and the guy who’s stuck under the sink has to pay off that guy’s loans. That’s the image that is constantly put in front of us.

    Adam: You don’t know this, but every plumber has to personally write a check to every high status, because it’s weird, because at the same time to have these frivolous degrees, we’re told, like gender studies, but they’re also rich lawyers. So which one is it? Are they barista underwater lesbian basket weaving or are they high powered? Rich? It’s not clear. I guess the woke economy has given them a place to go.

    Nima: That’s right.

    Adam: So their degree is both useless and they’re super rich. And Ron DeSantis, of course, jumped on this bandwagon, couldn’t help, again, gender studies, right, everything has to be coded as feminine and gay and and therefore frivolous and so let’s listen to that here.

    [Begin Clip]

    Ron DeSantis: It’s very unfair to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan from somebody that got a PhD in gender studies. That’s not fair. That’s not right.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: Oh, wow. No one’s ever heard that one before.Gender studies.

    Nima: Good one. Solid, Ron.

    Adam: Good stuff.

    Nima: Yeah. Meanwhile, is just one example to show how much contempt all of these commentators actually have for workers. Of course, Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis have both been on anti-teachers union crusades for years.

    Adam: Yeah, you know, they keep talking about these frivolous degrees, but you know, philosophy majors are the highest paid majors of any major. Philosophy majors make more money than business majors, economics majors, or computer science majors. So it’s like even their sort of go to punching bag is not, it’s not really how undergraduate degrees work.

    Nima: Yeah, I mean, blue collar workers and student debt are not mutually exclusive things, right, like many truckers, plumbers, other embodiments of the right-wing working man, right, have their own student debt. As we’ve said, community college, training programs, everyone would benefit from the cancellation of student debt. Also, this idea of just because someone else can maybe not be in debt for the rest of their lives doesn’t need to negatively affect you. That’s okay.

    Adam: Yeah, so some philosophy major can go backpack around Europe or whatever bullshit they come up with. I mean, obviously, this is all seething with anti intellectualism, which we’ll get to with our guest, but you know, the thing that makes all this mugging so frustrating is that like, literally every single one of these people we’ve been quoting today, literally every one of them got a bullshit degree. They went to law school, they were history, you know, undergrad majors or communications majors. The thing is, all these actors on the stage of politics, whether it’s Bill Maher or Ron DeSantis, all these people either had their education paid for them in the case of Ron DeSantis, is that they themselves get the same degrees that they mock. I mean, they get degrees that are not, you know, sort of the manly plumber degree or the STEM degree or the kind of thing that’s seen as practical.

    Nima: Yeah, Tucker Carlson has a degree in history from Trinity College in Connecticut.

    Adam: Right. And so like, this whole thing is literally just posturing. It’s liberal arts education for me, but not for thee, and if you do have it, you deserve to be saddled in debt for the better part of your adult years. And of course, when all these people went to school, college was 1/5 of the cost that is today. And that’s the huge, you know, this is something our guest is going to talk about, who has talked about many times, is that there’s nothing natural or organic about the obscene amount of debt the average person takes on, and again, I know we’re pandering here, because our average listener is overly educated and downwardly mobile. So I’m well aware of that. But this is not a law of nature. This is a new phenomenon, it’s creating new problems for our society, and it’s one that the Democrats are addressing even a very, very little amount, because they know it’s popular, and they know people want this and they know that all these cartoon caricatures of the average hard working plumber, construction worker, farmer, who’s bitter about having to pay this is almost entirely manufactured. Now, if they repeated enough over a longer period of time without proper pushback by Democrats, people will begin to believe it. But there’s not a ton of organic base to oppose this. It’s kind of a political loser, and that’s why they have to keep ventriloquizing the working man because they can’t find a real one anywhere who believes this shit.

    Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Astra Taylor, filmmaker, writer and political organizer and co-founder of the Debt Collective. Astra is also the director of the film “What Is Democracy?” and author of the book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. Astra will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.

    [Music]

    Nima: We are joined now by Astra Taylor. Astra, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.

    Astra Taylor: Thanks for having me.

    Adam: So you’ve discussed this quite a bit at great length. It’s something that you’re very passionate about, very deeply important to you. So if you’ll indulge us, I want to talk about some of the bigger media narratives that you’ve encountered, I’m sure from your years of advocacy, we want to kind of expand upon those. So let’s begin immediately after the Biden White House announced forgiveness for $10,000 worth of federal student loans, terms or conditions apply.

    Nima: Not sold separately.

    Adam: The narrative war kind of began right away, right-wing media quickly settled on, I think somewhat coordinatedly, on a standard argument that debt forgiveness kind of harms the working man who we are told and has played by the rules, that debt forgiveness was effectively a wealth transfer from nurses and plumbers and whatever kind of job they kind of clearly, just quickly Wikipedia’d to this very sort of gendered, racialized, queer-barista-Starbucks-sociology-gender-studies-major, right? And that the Republicans were the true defender of the working man and that Democrats were simply doing a giveaway to over-educated elites, right? Okay. So aside from the sort of sexism and anti intellectualism buried in all these kinds of DeSantis, Tucker Carlson talking points, what is wrong with that narrative starting off with the kind of big picture?

    Astra Taylor

    Astra Taylor: I mean, it’s empirically wrong. That’s the main problem. It’s also politically and morally wrong. You know, the narrative war didn’t start that day. I mean, these are old tropes. They’re just kind of leaning into them, and we’ve been in a narrative war over debt cancellation, you know, now for at least a decade. I’m a veteran in this long war for sure, and I think those tropes are pretty predictable, and they’re actually pretty easy to debunk, and I think what’s striking is that, you know, a lot of people just aren’t buying them. I mean, what we saw immediately after cancellation was announced was a significant boost in the polls for the Democrats. You know, we knew going into it that it actually is really popular with the Republican base. I mean, people like debt cancellation, it’s not really a big surprise. So, one of my favorite media clips was this long CNN 10-minute segment, where they were obviously hunting for anti debt cancellation commentary. So they went to, you know, a real American community in rural Pennsylvania and stood around at this, you know, farmers market.

    Adam: Farmers market. Right.

    Astra Taylor: Yes. But it wasn’t a Brooklyn farmers market, right? There was no cashew cheese, and they couldn’t find anybody who was against debt cancellation, they actually had to go off site to find somebody, an interview they’d obviously lined up. All these Republicans, all these old white guys saying, ‘Yeah, you know, I don’t really like welfare, but I like student debt cancellation, you know, I need it, I have student debt, my daughter needs it, my friend needs it.’ So there’s something this is why material, like sort of pocketbook issues are actually really, really powerful. But obviously we’re seeing a lot of bullshit tropes out there. I mean, you have to be really out of touch with the working class to say things like working class people don’t want student debt cancellation. I mean, there’s basically not a job out there where you don’t need to go to some kind of trade school or college. I mean, truckers have student debt, nurses definitely have student debt, you know, plumbers have student debt, working people have student debt, because in the United States labor policy for the last whatever three or four decades has been, hey, the fact you aren’t making a living wage is your fault, go get credentialed up, go get skilled up. This is a place where some of the BS, right-wing talking points don’t have as much traction. But I think it really is about those subtexts that you alluded to, right? These are, you know, they’re playing into the kind of anti intellectual, anti college frame. There’s a lot of racism in that, right? You know, college is where people learn to be woke and all this stuff, they learn about history, that’s obviously a problem. But the narrative war, I think it’s one that we on the left can win, I actually think we’re winning it, which is why now what they’re leaning into is, you know, a bunch of specious lawsuits to try to block it just using their unjust, unfortunately, possibly powerful legal mechanisms, you know, and the courts aren’t fair, the courts aren’t just, and so we’ll see what happens.

    Adam: Yeah, you’re right. Anyone who knows anything about Vox Pop knows that if you go around with a camera, you can interview more than, statistically more than 20 people you’ll get any opinion. So the fact that they had to go off site from a market in rural America.

    Nima: Even Real America.

    Adam: Right, e.g. white America, because you touched on it when you talked about, I mean, because several of the people in the CNN segment, which we talked about at the top of the show, they say, ‘Oh, well, my son has, I’m paying off my son or daughter’s debt, or someone, you know, my sister had to move into my apartment to help pay for her daughter.’ You know, it touches everybody, even if they themselves don’t have debt. It’s one thing I think the pundits kind of missed, even the kind of concern trolls like Matt Yglesias, they always show these stats about who doesn’t doesn’t have debt, it’s like, yeah, but it touches every facet of people’s life, that even if it’s not personally affected them, everybody’s at least one or two degrees removed from this problem.

    Astra Taylor: Yeah, 100 percent, and I think there’s an interesting conversation that we had about why the Matt Yglesias’ of the world are so anti debt cancellation, you know, what are they actually invested in? Because he certainly didn’t have to take on student debt to go to college. Many of the neoliberal economists who have been so angry about student debt cancellation, you definitely didn’t have it, but one would presume they’ve met people in their lives who have student debt, you know. So there’s also, I think, on the liberal side, right, I mean, to flip over from discussing the right, there is also a psychic investment in debt, and especially in regards to higher education, and it touches on their illusions of meritocracy, I think, and their sense that somehow, you know, they deserve their place at the top of it all.

    Nima: Well, yeah, I actually really want to talk about that aspect of it, this kind of psychology of debt, and you’ve written Astra about how conversations and then narratives about debt are never just about money, right? It’s not just about economics. But there are elements of, you know, as you just said, deservingness, fairness, pride, power, shame, morality of this kind of, you know, we work for everything we have, and if you take out a loan, well, then you gotta pay it back, right? Can you talk a little bit about how this deeply embedded narrative of kind of anti-social welfare, but also just like, once you do something, you are locked into that and any other alternative, even if it is, you know, moral, reasonable, right? Helps people live their lives, as opposed to corporations or creditors just making money hand over fist, why is this so deeply ingrained in us, and is this do you think mostly an American phenomenon that’s been with us for decades, if not now, centuries?

    Astra Taylor: It’s interesting. I mean, the oppressive morality you’re talking about was actually in your first question, because you referred to loan forgiveness. And you know, that’s a term that we at the Debt Collective really take issue with and constantly push back on because that phrase is loaded. Why do debtors need to be forgiven? They didn’t do anything wrong. You know, and especially if you are of the mindset, you know, as I am, as I know, both of you are too, you know, we should publicly provide the necessities of life education, healthcare, there should be beautiful green social housing, right? People deserve to live. And so when you are forced, because of the way the economy is structured, to finance the necessities of life, there should be no shame in that, and there should certainly be no shame in debt abolition and the abolition of those debts. So, you know, we are pointing towards a bigger restructuring of the political economy, and the reason I organize with my comrades that the Debt Collective is not because I’m fixated on student debt, or even on college, per se. I mean, I’m actually, you know, I’ve spent a lot of my life in the university compared to the average person, but it reveals something very fundamental about the way our economy is structured. I mean, capitalism runs on debt, and part of the erosion of those public goods, the denial of those essential public goods is the individual debt financing that we use instead, right? And so by organizing around debt, you really get people to jump pretty quickly to the need for these public goods, right? So hey, you have student debt, because there’s no free college, hey, you have medical debt, because there’s no universal health care, you can’t pay your rent, right? Because housing is not a right. It’s not something that you actually, you know, can be secure in, in this society. So I just need to say that is the bigger picture that we’re aiming at, and why I’m so, so passionate about this. But yeah, I mean, these questions of economics are always also emotional questions, you know, I mean, political economy is also psychological, and debt has a very unique way of making people feel bad, and that has to do with this frame, right, this frame of the debtor is guilty. As my old friend, the late and great anthropologist David Graeber liked to point out, the word schuld in German means both debt and sin or guilt. And that’s actually, it’s not just an American thing. That’s actually the case in a lot of languages. I mean, there’s a lot of religions where you can argue that actually, in Christianity, it’s not debtors who need to be punished, but actually creditors. But at the same time, there’s also a long history of that some reverse where it, you know, debtors are viewed as shameful, and that was something that was really deep at the founding of this country, the founding fathers. It’s not talked about much, but part of what they were acting against was a kind of populist revolt against landlords and lenders, and so you can go back and read your Federalist Papers, and Madison is like, ‘Oh, my God, we need to block the wicked project of debt abolition,’ right? Or they’d be warning that if democracy got too powerful, if the country was too representative in its political structures, then what would happen? Well, people would want their debts canceled. So, I mean, this is really foundational stuff.

    Nima: Heaven forfend.

    Astra Taylor: And I’m like, you know, it’s a wonderful thing to be, you know, Madison’s worst nightmare, right? Like, yes, here we are with your wicked project, and because they saw, they saw it was tied to working class power, they saw that it was about small ‘d’ democracy, and so what did they do? Well, first, they set up all the rules and laws so that they favorite creditors, and then they add on this ideology of shame, ‘Hey, it’s actually your fault you’re poor, hey, it’s actually your fault you’re in debt,’ and so the thing is, though, again, there’s power in this because a our debts are somebody’s assets, like it’s actual money that creditors are depending on and sometimes under neoliberalism, the creditor is the state because these things are so intermingled the private sector and the public sector. So there’s actual power there. But also, the second point is that when you give people this opportunity to reframe their self understanding, if we band together and fight, we may or may not win material debt abolition, and if we win it, because as we’re seeing they still might fight us on it, and try to deny it, but we can reduce some of that psychic burden, right? So that, hey, you might still be in debt but you don’t have to beat yourself up about it, right? Because actually, the people who are to blame are them, the people who are profiting from your poverty, you know, and this is not your fault, and that’s the path to solidarity.

    Adam: You touched on an important point, which is that all debt, by definition, is a failure of the social state, and that one thing you write a lot about, and you’ve talked about in other interviews, is that you note that a ton of student debt, a ton of medical debt, these are all sort of recent phenomenon. There are political phenomena, they don’t exist in other countries to a great extent, many other countries, with obvious exceptions. And so, you know, that which is created by people can be destroyed by people. And there’s this sense that the system we were born into, I think, is this kind of static state that it’s always been that way that there’s some natural law to that, and one thing I think your work does a really good job of doing is saying, no, no, no, this is all new, right? It’s sort of like the pledge of allegiance has only been around for 60 years. It’s not, you know, been around since time immemorial. And I think that that really does show that debt is political, again, this is not a new idea, right? Something you’ve talked about, others talked about, but debt has a very specific political purpose, which is to say one of the things it does is it makes people, like you said, shameful and scared and compliant. And one of the, you know, the sort of Mike Rowe of the world and the other kind of right-wing demagogues, they always give this line about, ‘Well, in my day you had a debt you paid it, simple as that. I’m not one of these complicated guys who believes in a free lunch.’ And it’s like, but there was no debt in your fucking day.

    Astra Taylor: Because you had a free lunch, you had a publicly subsidized education and a government subsidized mortgage at 3 percent.

    Nima: College was $15.

    Astra Taylor: Yeah.

    Adam: But there is something I think genuinely appealing about that line to a lot of people and I want to talk about that, and one thing you do is try to fundamentally rewire people’s brains, which I think is really important around this because I think you can do it in a fairly short period of time. But I want you to comment, if you can, about how you think maybe Democrats can do a better job framing this issue. Obviously, you’ve done it yourself, and you’ve done it in this interview, what are some of the weak spots about how liberals have kind of framed this issue? I know, it’s a little bit disjointed, because even within Democrats, there’s all kinds of disagreements, but how do you think that one can appeal to that kind of innate sense of responsibility and fairness, while saying like, ‘Hey, by the way, this is all a fucking scam.’

    Astra Taylor: Yeah. So one, and this is a challenge, but it’s always worth trying to do is give them that sense of historical perspective. Hey, you know that things used to not cost so much. I mean, people know that the ticket price of college has skyrocketed, and to articulate the fact that that is unfair, right? I mean, their kids and grandkids are paying through the nose for something that was generally accessible, that didn’t leave people saddled with a lifetime of debt. I think people can get that. I think that’s why there’s Republicans at that all American farmers market were sympathetic to the idea of debt cancellation. I mean, a lot of them were old enough to remember when you could take a part time job and pay for college or maybe it was free. So I think that sense of historical perspective, and then there’s also the kind of quip, but I think it’s a legitimate one, which is, look, maybe you paid off your debt, but just because you suffered doesn’t mean other people should have to suffer. If I die of cancer, I’m not going to come back from the grave like a zombie and be like, ‘Oh, my god, future generations don’t have to die when I did,’ you know, because there’s, like, some accessible treatment. So it’s a sense of, I think, appealing to people’s better angels that, you know, we actually want progress, we actually want people to be better off. And there’s also appealing to people’s basic economic sense. I mean, it’s like, hey, do you actually want all of this money, month after month going to the federal government so that people can pay back these loans, which are structured in such a way that people are stuck in a debt trap, right? It’s not like they’re just paying their principal off the way interest works they’re paying much more than they originally borrowed in most cases, hey, when that money could be circulating in your community, you know, it could be going to local businesses, it could be freeing people up to start their own businesses so they can be more entrepreneurial, like you actually will be richer if this money stays in the community instead of going to the Department of Education, which should not be acting as a bank in any case. The problem, though, is that a lot of the misunderstanding, a lot of the misinformation, you know, comes from Democrats themselves, and I will actually call out both camps. I mean, look, Bernie Sanders is great, and says, cancel it all, you know, make college free again, and there are a lot of folks in Congress who agree with him, not enough other people in the Senate. Elizabeth Warren has been a big ally in many ways, and good, really good on some of the nitty gritty of policies and the legal authority. But by digging into $50,000 as the threshold of cancellation, I think she actually harmed the movement. Why? First up, that number was settled upon because it was supposedly the number at which you would narrow the racial wealth gap, even then that was under debate from other economists. But the people who came up with that number, it was from 2016, updated it two years ago, and were like, oh, actually, student debt has grown so much, we need to cancel $75,000. So the math was always wrong. I think the morality of it was wrong, because the real question is, like, why does anyone have to go into debt at all, you know, we shouldn’t be engineering semi equality through student debt cancellation, we should be treating education as a public good and canceling this damn debt. But anyway, I think politically, strategically, you don’t meet people halfway before you need to, we would have been a stronger coalition if everybody and not just the Debt Collective and a couple other groups were arguing to cancel it all. So that was one problem. And then, you know, Joe Biden was really leaning into the stereotypes of the Ivy League debtor, until the last minute, I mean, until like last week, basically. And, again, that’s just so off base. I mean, something like 99.7 percent of people who attend the Ivy League graduate debt free. Why? Because either their parents are rich, or they get the subsidy from those huge endowments, those hedge funds that have universities attached have to offer them. So some of the most damaging and misleading stereotypes that we have to debunk came from people who ostensibly are on our side and who we did eventually remove through organizing, and ultimately, you know, I’m less concerned with trying to correct them as individuals and get them to get the details right than I am with talking to the broader public, building a base of people who understand that it’s a lot of hogwash, and actually it all needs to go.

    Adam: Well, yeah, one thing they did is they did the why don’t you cancel this instead? It’s like, but you don’t support that either.

    Astra Taylor: Oh, yeah, we have a file at the Debt Collective that’s like right-wingers who are allies on medical debt, you know, right? But it will be like, yeah, Mitt Romney will name the medical debt cancellation bill in your Honor because obviously you support it.

    Adam: Why have you not done this other really great thing that I don’t support?

    Astra Taylor: Yes.

    Adam: That must have been a frustrating few days.

    Astra Taylor: Well, I know. So I mean, it was political because the point, I mean, it was a political strategic decision because medical debt is there are ways to cancel it, but we have a piecemeal patchwork system, it’s held by hospitals, insurers, debt collectors, that brokers, right. The Department of Education has unique authority over the vast majority of student loans, which are federally secured. So it was like one target, you know, we knew that the legal authority to cancel it was there, and so that’s where we begin.

    Nima: When you talk about that Democrats are definitely not always allies in this, and always is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, the idea that the kind of typical Democratic Party opening gambit to any debate or discussion or negotiation is actually like, starting from, oh, we’re going to meet you more than halfway to start, right? I know we’re here to talk about debt cancellation, but we love debt, you know us, we love debt, but here’s the thing, and then they kind of go from there. But in your work, Astra, you’re talking about these overarching frameworks, right? You earlier were talking about specific messaging, specific words, language that’s used to really frame all of these discussions, right? You talked about avoiding saying debt forgiveness because of the narrative that that really plays into. What are other kinds of frameworks like that either negative or positive that you at the Debt Collective are working on, either to challenge and shift, bury forever, or possibly introduce into the way that we understand this, lift up, really kind of embed a new way of understanding this? What are some of those frameworks that you want folks to really understand?

    Astra Taylor: Yeah, well, one that is sort of flipside of debt, and I think is ultimately what, you know, both the right-wingers and the corporate Democrats are afraid of is, you know, we don’t want people to see themselves as debtors who are guilty, who need forgiveness, we want people to see themselves as creditors, as entitled to collect, what do we owe each other as a society? You know, what are our true debts? And how do we pay those? I mean, I would argue that it’s by taking care of each other, by paying reparations, by paying climate debt, and so I think that’s also a pivot is yes, an entitlement society is good. Yes, we are entitled, and we’re coming to collect. Another frame that we endlessly have to push back on, and we’re not unique in this, and it happens every time you’re trying to push for progressive reform and legislation is, you know, ‘how are we going to pay for it?’ Of course, we have money for the military, and of course, Joe Biden’s up there going, like ‘we have to fund the police,’ you know, but we are constantly having to say, no, debt cancellation doesn’t have to cost you anything, and no, the government’s finances are not analogous to the households finances. Yes, you have to balance your budget as an individual, and states have to balance their budgets to a degree, but the federal government has the unique ability to deficit finance things and the question around debt for the government —

    Nima: Yeah, they get to print money.

    Astra Taylor: They can print money, and deficits are about power, and the question is, what is that deficit being used for? Is it being spent on public goods that will make us all richer, that will make us secure as the climate destabilizes? Or are we deficit financing ways that just enrich the private sector and these private contractors and elites? And so that is, I think, something we’re constantly pushing back on is like, no, your budget and the government’s budget are not the same, in many ways they’re actually mirror images of each other. They’re opposites. This idea that debt cancellation is a ridiculous idea, that it’s pie in the sky, that it’s idealistic, we often go back to the early media response to an action we had in 2012 that was called 1T Day, it was the day student debt surpassed $1 trillion. So you know, almost 10 years ago, exactly. And NPR and Reuters and various other outlets were like, can you believe these freaks that Occupy Wall Street are saying the government should cancel student debt like that will never happen? You know, and it’s happened. And we’ve made that real to the point where now, to me, one of the biggest signs of our successes and movement was like, how angry a lot of people were that Joe Biden was only canceling $10K or $20K. You know, five years ago, those people did not know debt cancellation existed, and if they heard about it, they would have been like, okay, that’s ridiculous, or good luck, folks. And now they’re out there on Twitter or on Facebook, wherever, you know, at the dinner table saying, ‘God, can you believe this guy’s only canceling $10k or $20k? I deserve more, I want more,’ and so that is, I think, a real sign of a shift in public consciousness and to me as an organizer, that’s something we can work With this increasing sense of entitlement, so yeah, it will be Madison’s worst nightmare and Joe Manchin;s worst nightmare too, you know, it’s like, yes, we’re trying to organize to win an entitlement society, where people are like, you know what? Yeah, I want to study and maybe I shouldn’t have to destroy my life for that.

    Adam: I want to circle back in about this right-wing caricature of the American worker, like you talked about. It’s obviously, there’s real manly men who work and then there’s things that are kind of eggheads or gay or feminine. There’s an article every week about other Republicans that now represent the worker somehow, even though it’s the same recycled like Bircher bullshit. I want you to talk about what the actual worker who benefits from debt relief, whether it be student or medical, like what do they look like? What does the worker look like? Versus this Joe the Plumber character, even though of course, Joe the Plumber was a small business owner.

    Astra Taylor: His name wasn’t even Joe, I don’t think, right?

    Adam: What was his name?

    Nima: It was Samuel. Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, obviously.

    Adam: Oh. I wasn’t sure if he studied drama at Cambridge or something. But yeah, so talk about what the sort of median worker looks like, and how it kind of undermines this somewhat cheesy narrative that, you know, has like, that a seeped into even liberal or even kind of centrist are seen in discourse.

    Astra Taylor: Yeah. I mean, it’s not only reactionary right-wingers who are saying that, you know, this is not fair to the working class. I mean, it’s Jason Furman, the Obama Era economist. It’s Larry Summers, as though he’s on the side of the working class. So it’s a total trope. I mean, I think what’s so interesting about organizing, and again, you know, why I stick with it, I don’t have student debt. I’m not in this for debt relief for myself. I mean, I think it would be fine if I was, I think self interest can actually be a really good catalyst for social change. But you know, it’s because I want to help build power for the working class. I mean, I don’t think we can afford to leave any kind of power on the table and organizing debtors is complementary to the labor movement, because a lot of workers are debtors, complimentary to racial justice organizing, because that has long been a tool of racial domination. It’s complimentary to housing organizing, we are working really closely with various tenant unions right now on some rent debt strategies. So I see it as something that can just sort of augment things that the left is doing overall. But in our actual work, I see the diversity of people impacted by this. Our members are from all over the country, they are young, they’re old. I mean, in terms of student debt, you know, most people are kind of hit by the tragedy of the debt they’ve taken on a few years out of college. So people tend to find us when they’re sort of in their mid 20s when they’re like, oh, this isn’t going to go exactly how I thought it would. But our members have all sorts of debt, you know, they have medical debt, again, they have rent debt, they have carceral debt. They’re young, they’re old, they’re Black, they’re white. I mean, they have all kinds of jobs. They are educators, they work at gas stations, they’re physical therapists, some work at nonprofits, I mean, it’s a portrait of the American population, we have a growing debt strike of people who are over 50. So older debtors are the fastest growing demographic of student debtors in particular. So contrary to stereotypes, student debt is not a young person issue. I mean, that’s a frame that the media really pushes that we’re trying to debunk, and there are truck drivers in that, there’s substitute teachers, there are people, I mean, you know, my mind is almost going blank because people just have all the kinds of jobs, people work in coffee shops, yes, we have some baristas, I don’t know if they’re slackers —

    Adam: Oh no.

    Astra Taylor: Being a barista is actually a tough job. So there’s a real diversity, because that doesn’t impact everybody the same. I mean, debt has very stark racial and gender dimensions. And obviously, as a class dimension, I mean, rich people, when they have debt are using it strategically, more often than not, but it binds all kinds of people, and we’re trying to build the kind of economic solidarity out of that, and so this is why I think the Republicans are playing with fire when they tried to block student debt cancellation, and certainly we’re digging more into medical debt if they try to get in the way of that too I think it’s going to be a deeply unpopular move, because this affects all kinds of people, and it’s something that has the potential to short circuit those ideological and cultural divides that were otherwise so locked into in this country. I mean, there’s a kind of populist current to it, and I use populist in a good sense, right? I like that word. It’s popular, it actually touches people, and these technocrats in Washington don’t get it, and what we’re going to have to do is, you know, force them, force them to get it, and I think we can build the people power to do that.

    Adam: Are you suggesting that when you materially and significantly impact people’s lives, they will reward you politically?

    Astra Taylor: I think I just like this idea that if you do popular things that people like, that helps them —

    Adam: Telling them good things are impossible and to vote harder.

    Astra Taylor: Yeah. But I think one thing about student debt cancellation, sets it apart, for example, from the Child Tax Credit, there wasn’t a movement fighting for that Child Tax Credit for 10 years, and there wasn’t a movement to fight to have it extended. We forced them to extend the student loan payment pause seven times and we have galvanized a base of people and also organized a coalition so groups like the NAACP, and a lot of labor unions are also in this, and that’s important. It’s not enough, I think, for politicians to just kind of spontaneously do something that seems good because the public’s not invested in it. They’re like, ‘Oh, the people who run things gave me something nice, and now they took it away,’ you know, you have to organize people so that they’re like, ‘You did that because of us, and we’re not gonna let you back down,’ and that’s why it’s so important to have social movements and to have organization.

    Nima: Well, yeah, because I think so often, there’s this idea that some economist wrote an op-ed, and it was really compelling, and Joe Biden changed his mind, and then the next day made an announcement, as opposed to, these are long standing movements of all sectors of society, all these different kinds of people that you’ve been describing, and I think that is often missing from the way that these stories are told.

    Astra Taylor: In fact, there was a story about how Larry Summers went to the White House and spoke privately with Joe Biden, and I mean, I’m absolutely certain that he was saying, do not cancel student debt, do not cancel student debt, because that’s all he has been saying for the last few months, and then Joe Biden, the same day canceled student debt, and so I think that’s also, you know, the way to overcome those stupid economists and they’re stupid op-eds, and their incredible access to the people who have power is to out organize them. That’s all because otherwise those op-eds work, and that’s a tragedy.

    Nima: Well, I think the tragic efficacy of certain op-eds written by certain people is a great place to leave this. This has been fantastic. We’ve been speaking with Astra Taylor, documentary filmmaker, writer and political organizer. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, director of the film “What Is Democracy?” and author of the book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. Astra, thank you so much, again, for joining us today on Citations Needed.

    Astra Taylor: Cool. Thanks for having me.

    [Music]

    Adam: Yeah, I mean, generally, you know, it’s something we talked about on the show, we’ll talk about the future, but it’s like, people can’t just say, I believe X, they have to say, on behalf of this party, I think X. Just say what you want.

    Nima: Right. Stop laundering your thoughts.

    Adam: Yeah, it happens all the time. Again, I’ve written about it in different, we’ll have new episodes about different ways in which these things are laundered, because it’s sort of seen as unseemly or didactic or preachy to have an opinion. So people constantly have to say, ‘Well, I’m an objective neutral observer, but you know, the working plumbers don’t want these gender studies degrees’ and it’s like, okay, well, clearly, you just hate women and hate gay people and hate people with educations because you view them as a threat or view them as non compliant. And so this is why we get this schlock every five seconds, and you know, one of the things that Astra brings up is that when you actually do real retail politics, door to door politics, which of course we never do, I never leave my recording studio. I’ve never met another human in my life. I don’t know what they look like. I’m just the Cheeto dust, right?

    Nima: Organizing scares me.

    Adam: Yeah, organizing scares me, I have to talk to people? Can’t stand them. No, so when you actually do these real kind of interpersonal organizing and retail politics, you realize that people don’t believe this shit, like working people, to the extent they have any kind of uniform view, don’t really buy this, or they have more complex or nuanced views of it, or often times contradictory views of it. And it’s a fight that can be won, which is the point she’s making, and it’s a fight that they did win. I mean, again, it’s not like, you know, we don’t need to spike the football here. It’s very qualified. It’s only $10,000. But that was unimaginable 5, 10 years ago.

    Nima: I would say maybe two years ago even.

    Adam: Yeah, and it just goes to show you that the quote-unquote “working man” can have his mind changed. They can be convinced of something. I mean, CNN.

    Nima: That’s right.

    Adam: CNN went around what they thought was going to be like Cletusville, USA at a farmers market —

    Nima: And they were like, “Oh yeah, this sounds really great. My daughter has a lot of loans.”

    Adam: Yeah. And they’re like, oh, yeah, you know, I personally don’t have loans. But then again, school was cheaper for me. But you know, my grandson, he’s, you know, he’s going to University of Iowa and is like, well, wait a second. Oh, right. Because this doesn’t matter just to people that directly affects it matters to people who know people, who were friends with people or loved ones, and so it just goes to show you that these caricatures have no basis in reality and don’t really, they kind of break down when you start doing real person to person politics, again, something you and I have never even thought about doing.

    Nima: I like how you’re ascribing me to that.

    Adam: I’m bringing you in with me on this one baby.

    Nima: Okay, cool. I mean, yeah, it really has so much to do with the stories that we are told so often, and then replacing those stories with more accurate stories, right? There are deep deep narratives that are reinforced about paying debts and don’t take out a debt if you can’t pay it back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, having nothing to do with the systems that are in place to actually keep people in debt, or the fact that we’re actually not even ever talking about paying off a principal and that it’s all about interest and that capitalism is born of interest. But like, there’s all that kind of garbage, but we just keep hearing again and again, and we’ve heard for so many decades, how could you quote-unquote “forgive,” right, “forgive” people’s debt when, you know, well, my debt didn’t get forgiven, like bah, bah, bah, bah. But once you start replacing those stories with more common, more relatable, more accurate stories, and change the number of stories, just one story that has a counter narrative against all the dominant narrative stories isn’t going to do much but once that weight is shifted, that’s when the media doesn’t know what to do. They’re like, what?

    Adam: It’s also because people’s self impression is always kind of bullshit right? It’s like what they teach you in sociology 101 where in terms of how to do research where they ask people like what radio station do you listen to? And you know, 40 percent of people say NPR but then they go into used cars, the same scientist going to used cars and they look at what’s on the preset radio stations and it’s like pop music. Yeah, it’s like everyone’s going to say if you poll them like what do you think about, ‘I believe you should pay off your debt, man’s got to pay off his debt as a man of honor, you know, man, manly man, man, man paying off many many debts,’ and it’s like in reality do you want $10,000 removed from debt? It’s like, yeah, yeah.

    Nima: Yeah if you want to live your life and not have to do that as much anymore, and they’re like, ‘Yeah I’m going to do that.’

    Adam: Yeah. Who’s going to be like,’ No, no, I’m good,’ which is what the White House has been saying, because they couldn’t find anyone who had any standing because the White House is like, ‘Well, look, if you don’t want to pay off your loans, don’t pay them off, you don’t have to fill out the form.’

    Nima: Right. Feel free not to do that.

    Adam: That’s, I think, part of what’s going on here. I think, and this is why I think when you really get past the slogans because, again, if you ask people in the abstract, they always give you these very lofty, very self righteous answers, but when you get down to it, it’s like, ‘Well, yeah, clearly I don’t want to pay, I don’t want to flush $10,000 in the toilet for no reason so yeah, fuck yeah, where do I sign up?’ And that begins to kind of erode that posture.

    Nima: Well, I think that’s actually a great place to leave it Adam. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Citations Needed. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of our work through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we really are 100 percent listener funded. And as always a very special shout out goes to our critic level supporters on Patreon. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Morgan McAslan. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again everyone. We’ll catch you next time.

    [Music]


    This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, November 2, 2022.

    Transcription by Morgan McAslan.

  • News Brief: Young Turks’ Misleading Anti-Bail Reform Demagoguery

    Citations Needed | October 5, 2022 | Transcript

    The Young Turks hosts (from left) John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, and Ana Kasparian.

    Nima Shirazi: Hi, everyone. This is Nima Shirazi.

    Adam Johnson: And I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Before we get to this News Brief, we’re excited to announce that later this month, we’ll be hosting a Citations Needed Begathon, and by Begathon, we mean, a podcast fundraiser with amazing guests and fun prizes.

    Adam: We’ll be livestreaming two interviews on YouTube on Thursday, October 20, at 8:30pm Eastern Time. And here’s the deal. We want more Patreon supporters, we need more Patreon supporters. On each episode, we asked folks to sign up to support the show and a bunch of you do but also a whole lot of you don’t.

    Nima: Tens of thousands of you amazing people listen to Citations Needed each week or so. But a tiny fraction of listeners actually sign up to support the show.

    Adam: So we are reaching out and we are begging, as it were, at the beginning of our sixth season to ask you directly to support the show on Patreon, and to promote this, we’re going to do a livestream show on YouTube.

    Nima: And the show is going to be fucking great. We’re going to be talking about some of our very favorite pop culture things. We’ll talk Star Trek with Dr. Robert Greene II, History Professor at Claflin University. And we’ll also talk pro wrestling with Brandi Collins-Dexter, Associate Director of Research at the Technology and Social Change Project and author of the brand-new book, “Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future,” which came out just a couple of weeks ago.

    Adam: All new and current subscribers will have a chance to win free Citations Needed merch and other items. Stay tuned for details and how to join the livestream. We’ll be posting more information on Patreon and Twitter soon.

    Nima: Okay, so now let’s get to the News Brief. Thanks again for listening to this, everyone, and we hope to see you at the Citations Needed Begathon on October 20.

    [Music]

    Nima: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated and necessary as we are 100 percent listener funded.

    Adam: Yes, as always, please if you can, support us on Patreon. If you like the show, it helps keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable.

    Nima: So we do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes and today, Adam, we want to dig into something that you’ve been tracking for a little while now, the phenomenon of ostensibly progressive commentators with massive audiences really loving putting people in jail and prison.

    Adam: Yeah, so I try not to start like intra-left beefs, like media beefs with media people because I feel like it’s always this kind of, it can come off as sort of cloud chasing or trying to stir up controversy. So I’ve gone seven years, I’ve never really criticized the Young Turks, I have no particular beef with them, they seem, I mean, they’ve had some dicey takes here and there but they seem like mostly a kind of whatever generic Bernie, MSNBC kind of bridge.

    Nima: Yeah, the host Cenk Uygur actually was a short-lived MSNBC host and then was far too progressive for MSNBC. So they booted him off. Pretty solid progressive cred there, I guess, right? Moderately. But over time, there have been some revealing takes that they’ve had.

    Adam: Yeah, well, what does it mean? First off, they busted unions a couple years ago, that was probably a first sign, but without getting into the sort of purity or what the word progressive means or getting into these kinds of category discussions, I do think that their turn around criminal justice was worth highlighting and worth criticizing and pushing back on because I actually think it’s quite dangerous. I think it’s quite dangerous because of the credibility they have in those circles. It’s important right now because there is a full-blown right-wing onslaught on bail reform. So real quick, for some context for our listeners, what is, bail reform, bail reform, generally speaking, is this idea that of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in this country, roughly 400 to 500,000 of them on any given day are in county jail pretrial, which is to say pre-guilt, they’ve been convicted of nothing, they’re simply in jail because they cannot, for the most part, because they cannot afford bail. So the day after Harvey Weinstein was arrested, for example, he was out of jail despite being accused of multiple counts of rape, because he had the money to get out. So, for every Harvey Weinstein, 99 percent of them, typically Black and brown, cannot afford to leave. And so the bail reform effort is a way of saying we cannot tether one’s pretrial freedom, and incarcerate them simply because they’re too poor to afford bail. That judges have to consider other things, other algorithms, other factors, dangerousness, whatever, which we can interrogate later, but basically speaking, you cannot be put in jail because you’re poor, was the reform we did because 20 percent of people incarcerated in this country are pretrial, which is to say they have been found guilty of nothing. And so a few states did modest and various forms of bail reform: Illinois, New York, California, among them, several other states.

    Nima: Well, there was an effort instantaneously.

    Adam: Yeah, instantaneously, and those bail reforms have been pushed back in many states or watered down in many states, and the fundamental moral hazard of bail reform, as we discussed on our episode on the right-wing pushback to bail reform in, I think 2020, so almost two years ago, almost three years ago — wow, I’m getting old — is that if you do have, you know, 100,000 let’s say less people in jail because they haven’t been found guilty of anything or they’re pending their trial that invariably some small percentage of them will go on and commit a crime.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: And then that crime will be sensationalized and people will say look at what happens when you let dangerous criminals arrested for X, Y and Z out of jail.

    Nima: The anecdotal evidence is then taken as the systemic and the reason why no one should be let out of jail pretrial if they can’t afford it, because therefore more crime can happen, right? Theoretically, more crime happens.

    Adam: Theoretical, right. So, yeah, we’re gonna listen to some clips from the Young Turks in their coverage of bail reform over the past few months.

    [Begin Clip]

    Ana Kasparian: A man with an incredibly lengthy criminal record was released without bail in New York after he smeared his own feces in the face of a victim sitting at a subway station waiting for a train. He somehow gets let go, because of the bail reform policies that have been implemented in New York, and California has similar policies.

    Cenk Uygur: But the more important thing is reality. Reality. People are actually getting hurt and the guys are walking out of the court system. That guy was bragging about how he knew he was going to walk, yeah.

    Ana Kasparian: Yeah, just let them go. No bail, you know, not a threat to society whatsoever. That is insane, and if there are progressives who have been advocating for this, I guarantee you it is a losing strategy.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: So just to be clear both Cenk and Ana Kasparian repeatedly say someone’s “let go” that they’re “let go” out of jail. But I want to be very clear because they never follow this up, which I think makes it go from being misleading to an outright lie, that the vast majority of people they’re talking about are going to spend many, many years in prison.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: When they say “let go,” what they mean is they’re not subject to pretrial detention. But once they have their trial and are found guilty, they will no doubt go to prison for several years.

    Nima: That they are free while they are still being presumed innocent, and then they will still have a trial.

    Adam: Right. And this is one of the primary pillars of evidence that they’re demagoguing, that they’re not sort of genuinely concerned with the issue of pretrial detention because they consistently lie by heavily, heavily implying to the viewer who doesn’t know any better. And this is a common anti-bail reform trope–it’s the most common anti-bail reform trope–is to give you the impression that when they say they’re released, or let go, that they don’t face any subsequent consequences.

    Nima: Like it’s a leftist-imposed jailbreak.

    Adam: But that’s just not true. What it means is the government cannot kidnap you and hold you in incarceration simply because you’re poor in anticipation of a trial. Because again, all of these people they talk about and mentioned, for the specific cases they’re mentioned for, have not been found guilty of anything, by definition, they are innocent till proven guilty. And bail reform is supposed to say, well, you have to actually find someone guilty before you can cage them indefinitely, which again, can sometimes be as much as two, three years. I mean, look at people who rot away at Rikers, right? That happens quite frequently. And so it’s important to understand that these people are still going to go to prison, and that part is conveniently always left out of these hysterical narratives.

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: This fundamental moral hazard is the single biggest driver of mass incarceration in this country. It is driven by the media, it has been since the ’90s when mass incarceration really began to pick up in the ’60s and ’70s, Willie Horton 1988, right? He was on furlough in Massachusetts, and he went out and raped and attempted to murder someone that basically ended the furlough programs across the country in a matter of years.

    Nima: And ended Michael Dukakis’s shot to be president.

    Adam: Yeah. And so one of the drivers of mass incarceration is that if you lock up 100 percent of people —

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: You lock up men between the ages of 18 to 25 you can meaningfully reduce crime and limit the amount of people you therefore release.

    Nima: Right. You also then have a carceral fascist state.

    Adam: Right, and so because 100 percent guaranteed way of having no one commit crime is to basically monitor everyone in real time and keep them inside of a dungeon. There’s always going to be risks in a free society. This is the argument that reformers have always tried to make but it doesn’t play well in the media. So for example, three weeks ago I sit down to watch the first Bears game of the year, as one does, I turn on the TV, and the first commercial break is a commercial sponsored by Playing by the Rules PAC, which is a right-wing, one billionaire funds these ads, is their anti-Pritzker ads. It’s a 32nd video of a Ring camera of a woman being beaten with screams, no music, just her screaming as she gets beaten severely, and then it cuts to a darkened picture of Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, and it says Pritzker/Lightfoot bail reform or whatever. This is the context in which the Young Turks are doing this. This is everywhere. New York City has these ads, Long Island as these ads, upstate New York as these ads.

    Nima: Just pure fearmongering with added racism.

    Adam: They’re sending flyers and these fake newspapers to all these people in the Chicagoland area talking about how there’s this new purge law that’s going to come into effect in 2023, and so when you wake up, you say, ‘Oh, I’m going to have a cup of coffee and get my nice progressive news today, I’m going to turn on The Young Turks and hear about Bernie and Elizabeth Warren trying to push back against Amazon monopolies, and what’s the latest labor struggle that’s going on, and I’m going to get the real sort of good progressive Bernie news,’ and then I turn it on, and Ana Kasparian is doing her best impression of Glenn Beck circa 2009 with the Knockout Game videos. This is a popular staple of Breitbart, which is random videos of Black people attacking white people calling it the Knockout Game, and they’re sharing videos of horrendous attacks, and then talking about how how can this person be out on bail? Now, what they’re doing is they’re picking one off salacious and lured examples that are not representative of 99.9 percent of bail reform, to demagogue bail reform as such, and this is a complex topic, because some of their fanboys, of which there are many, which is to say, I would argue to be kind of relatively, fairly blind followers that they can sort of do no wrong, say, ‘Oh, they’re just talking about the extreme cases.’

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: And it’s like, well, okay, so am I to believe that George H.W. Bush really cared about the Willie Horton case? That he woke up one day and was very concerned about the Willie Horton case. Am I to think that in 2016, when Bill O’Reilly every night on Fox News demagogued the case of Kate Steinle, who was killed by an immigrant in San Francisco —

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: Blaming Obama for opening the borders, which is, let’s be clear, is absolutely no different than what the Young Turks are doing around bail reform.

    Nima: Yeah, I don’t think that Bill O’Reilly actually cared about that case. Obviously, the whole point is demagoguery.

    Adam: Right. Now, when the right-wing media does it, we can look at that and be like, oh, well, obviously, that’s a cynical and disingenuous tactic to emotionally manipulate people, that they’re not really concerned with the case as such. They’re using it as a bludgeon to go after broader reform efforts, both bail reform and these so-called progressive prosecutors, which Ana Kasparian has criticized at great length. Specifically, she went after the district attorney of Los Angeles, well she went after Chesa Boudin, the now since recalled District Attorney in San Francisco, quite often she did an interview with him where she sort of somewhat smarmily asked him a bunch of loaded questions but she’s specifically been critical of Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who just survived a very failed and pathetic recall effort.

    Nima: But over similar things, this is what’s happening right now, any moves, and let’s be clear, there have been more moves to reform the cash bail system than there have been to defund cops, right? So, there actually has been a tiny bit, a tiny bit of real movement there, and the backlash has been so severe that you have, what we hear are, you know, progressive DAs, under threat of recall, and in the case of Chesa Boudin, actually getting recalled for, I mean, some of the most minor, I mean, much needed, but most minor changes to a clearly unjust system. Now, you know, I know Adam, we like to sort of lay out the stakes and set the table as we say up front, right? As we get into this, I just want to be clear that every study, pretty much, that comes out on bail reform demonstrates that it reduces crime, it does not add to crime statistics when you look at the numbers, right, and I’m not doing the like, ‘Oh, my God, we got to data driven,’ but when there are studies about this shit, bail reform is shown time and again, to actually make people’s lives better, make neighborhoods safer, reducing crime. The most recent study, an exhaustive research study by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at University of Pennsylvania, repeated this recently, and yet nevertheless, what we keep hearing from of course the right-wing and now also from very influential progressive voices is the same kind of refrain about how can this, you know, lax bail system now keep us safe when that person got assaulted, and it’s like, well, yeah, that’s awful, that’s terrible, that is also one in — how many? — what are we talking about here?

    Adam: So let’s explain why bail reform reduces crime. Again, this was an exhaustive study done of Harris County bail reform that resulted in fewer lower-level offenses in jail and improved public safety. The bail reforms in that county, quote, “that includes Houston ordered five years ago as part of a consent decree resulted in 13 percent increase in people released within the first 24 hours of misdemeanor arrest and a 6 percent decrease in new prosecutions over three years following arrest, indicating that the release of these defendants doesn’t increase recidivism,” according to the study. So let’s explain. There are three reasons why, and this is something that people, because people intuitively say, ‘Oh, wouldn’t locking people up prevent recidivism or prevent criminality, future criminality,’ and it doesn’t for a few reasons. Number one, the biggest predictor of future criminal activity is the loss of a job or loss of education, and when you’re locked up in jail for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 months, some as much as two or three years, you basically have to drop out of school. Now, obviously, a lot of people who are arrested already are not in school, but many of them actually are. Two, a loss of a job, and those who are arrested lose their job. That is a huge predictor of future criminality. And three, and this is the one that people are studying more intensely of late, is that, and you ask anyone who’s gone through the carceral system they’ll tell you this, is that the biggest way you meet other quote-unquote “criminals” is by being in jail for a long period of time.

    Nima: Right. It’s who you’re surrounded by for long enough, right?

    Adam: Right. So you lose your job, you lose your home, you lose your education, and you’re surrounded by people who have peer pressure, who also have ties to other criminal action.

    Nima: And are going through the same thing you’re going through, by and large, right?

    Adam: Right, and so this is why pretrial detention, again, maybe it’s somewhat counterintuitive to a lot of people who are sort of raised in this kind of law-and-order mentality, actually increases crime, or it causes future criminality, and why every study and meta-study of bail reform shows that it reduces criminality. It seems counterintuitive, but there’s a reason for it. And this is one of the arguments bail reformers are trying to make that it’s by its own criteria, it doesn’t fail. But of course, the criteria isn’t necessarily a reduced crime. Because if we were concerned with the rates of crime we wouldn’t do 90 percent of the stuff we do, right, we wouldn’t gut mental health care services, public schools, after school programs, et cetera, et cetera. We would house people, we would provide a social safety net, high guaranteed income. Now, what Uygur and Kasparian would say is, ‘Oh, no, no, no, we support all that social stuff too, but before that happens, in the meantime, we have to go back to locking people up.’

    Nima: Right. In the meantime, the reality is, Adam, the reality is —

    Adam: To which I say, and I wrote in the article, is that okay, so let’s take this thought experiment to its logical ends here. If you agree that the system is racist and violent and punitive and destroys lives, and is horrific, and my follow up piece I wrote for my Substack I specifically cite a recent lawsuit by the ACLU of California about the Los Angeles County jail system. This is the same Los Angeles jail system that Kasparian was criticizing the district attorney of Los Angeles for not sending enough people to by tacking on gun charges, okay? Adding five years or 10 years for gun charges is probably the single most or top five biggest drivers of incarceration, and we’re not talking about a violent crime with a gun, we’re talking about a crime where they incidentally find a quote-unquote “illegal gun.”

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: Again, you didn’t fire it, you’d have to do anything with it. Kasparian believes that if you possess a gun that is quote-unquote “illegal,” which is to say, you live in 90 percent of places where African American and brown people are, therefore the guns are illegal, right? Where Cletus lives, guns are legal. If you possess that gun, by definition, that’s a violent crime, or rather, that should be treated as a violent crime, which is, I think, patently absurd, because it’s not a violent crime. You didn’t commit any violence with it, right? It’s the sort of pre-crime, and this is why bail reform activists have been pushing prosecutors to not just give everybody the maximum penalty for gun possession because a lot of people in poor communities, they have guns for protection, they have guns for various reasons, because of the sort of nature of gang violence, it should not be per se effectively ruin someone’s life. You take 5, 10 years of their life. So she’s arguing for more people to go into this jail and the ACLU released this report that said quote, “Most of the inmates are recently arrested suspects who have not been convicted and they’re routinely denied clean water, functioning toilets, a shower, adequate food, or medication they need to treat schizophrenia and other serious conditions.” According to the ACLU, and attorneys who visited the center cited, “cuts, swelling and bruising consistent with prolonged handcuffing on the wrists of a man stuck on a bench for 99 hours.” They saw one inmate chained to a bench urinating on the floor and another lying in a puddle of urine. An inmate recalled seeing a man defecate in a trashcan. They said quote, “When I was on the front bench, the man chained to the chair next to me pulled his pants down and pooped on the floor.” In May, Tony Jones said in a sworn court statement filed by the ACLU, quote, “The feces stayed on the floor for two days. No one comes to clean the front bench area. I saw people pee in orange juice boxes. The areas stink from the feces and pee,” unquote. So this is a normal day in LA county jails.

    Nima: Again, pretrial.

    Adam: Pretrial. Not convicted of anything. And these are the conditions these are the, quote, “barbaric” conditions that our progressive commentators are insisting people need to go into because crime is, because we need to get quote-unquote, you know, these sort of “bad guys” off the streets, and they’re so concerned with, you know, the people being assaulted by these sort of Knockout Game videos they routinely share, but the reason is that these horrific crimes that we see routinely in our prisons and jail system, they don’t make viral videos, they don’t make Ring camera videos, they’re not put on TV every day. It’s a form of routine violence that’s largely unseen, and so it’s difficult to generate that kind of demagoguery, and so you saw this when reporter Tana Ganeva criticized the Young Turks for their sensationalist criticism. Ana Kasparian on Twitter shared a video of a person randomly assaulting an old lady saying, quote, “This is a man who was arrested 41 times. After the incident, he was released and went on to send a subway worker to the hospital with a broken collarbone but according to the crime reporter, the man committing assault with broken bones is a real victim.” So that’s a really fucking gross way of actually framing —

    Nima: Yeah, the crime reporter referenced by Ana there is Tana Ganeva, just to be clear. She’s literally responding directly.

    Adam: So these people are a pro, and then her co hosts responded to another criticism with an equally disingenuous and bad faith tweet saying, quote, “Are you insane? Do you want him to go on so he can punch more innocent people in the face? You don’t think 41 times is enough of a pattern? Do you have a single ounce of compassion for the victims? Is not a progressive position being different to the injustice victims suffer.” Ah, so they’re —

    Nima: Right. So now it’s about the victims and now it’s about why is your heart bleeding for this clearly violent person who should not be on the streets.

    Adam: And again, their argument is so manifestly self-defeating, he has been sent to Rikers 40 times, by the way, the vast majority of which was pre bail reform. So it’s not exactly clear what that even means, right? Because he was released from jail several times, for the vast majority was 41 cases where, you know, in the ’90s, and 2000s, this is a person who has chronic mental illness issues. So clearly the system failed, right? This person didn’t get sufficient treatment and was continually arrested and locked up and gone through the carceral system. So obviously, because again, all right-wing demagoguery is predicated on an existing left-wing status quo. These people want you to believe that we somehow live in a kind of kumbaya, far-left, socialist —

    Nima: Where everyone is just let out of jail, and there’s no law, there’s barely any cops around, our jails and prisons are sitting pristine and clean, empty, just, you know, waiting for maybe, if we’re lucky, someone will be in the drunk tank of the local police station. But other than that, Adam, like I don’t think we lock enough people up in this country.

    Adam: As a matter on its face, we have 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population, 5 percent of the population, and the US locks up between three and five times more, on average, than other quote-unquote “developed countries.” It is shocking how many people we lock up in this country. So Cenk does the whole thing where he says, ‘I’m in favor of releasing people of nonviolent offenses,’ which we know is not true, because gun possession is a nonviolent offense. And by the way, one of their first rants they did when they did this right-wing pivot, this is what they auctioned off before they went to the whole salacious Breitbart video thing, which is a little bit more compelling, is they were ranting about homeless camps, which is really what this is about, if you want to know my opinion, this is about locking up homeless people in jail for committing things like quote-unquote “open air drug abuse” or defecation or anything they find vulgar.

    Nima: Which is hard to do behind closed doors, Adam, I should point out, when you don’t have a home.

    Adam: Right, so let’s listen to this clip here from June of last year.

    [Begin Clip]

    Ana Kasparian: I do think that there are progressive, progressives, I don’t know if it’s progressive policy, but progressives in places like California who have made terrible decisions, and so one of those terrible decisions is essentially doing away with anti-camping laws, right? Allowing people to camp out wherever they want, whenever they want, and if, we have a homeless problem in California, we have it all throughout the country, but it’s particularly bad in California, and so the argument is, well, if there isn’t public housing available for people, they should be allowed to camp out. Okay. But there’s also a problem right now, where there is public housing available, and individuals will say, ‘No, I don’t want to take it. I don’t want to follow the rules in public housing, and so as a result, I would rather camp out.’ Progressive lawmakers are like, ‘We should allow them to camp out,’ and you know what happens? Crime happens. Open air drug markets happen, and it’s the truth. These are the facts of the matter. In fact, it was addressed in this Daily Beast article, and honestly, it was cathartic to read it because everyone denies that this is happening.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: So it’s worth noting that one thing many people have brought up is that Jeffrey Katzenberg in 2017 invested $20 million into the Young Turks and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the billionaire media mogul who started Quibi, he was also the central player in —

    Nima: Among other things, that’s such a cruel description.

    Adam: Yeah, among other things, he was the primary driver of a ban on encampments in Los Angeles earlier this year, which ended up passing the ban and camping in effectively 20 percent of the city.

    Nima: Which is just an anti-homeless policy like that’s, you know, it’s out of sight, out of mind.

    Adam: Out of sight, out of mind, which is a whole other episode we can work on. But it is worth noting that, like their primary investor also supports these policy outcomes, whether or not that’s what motivates them who knows, you know, maybe Ana said she’s had issues with homeless people harassing her, I don’t doubt that at all, that happens all the time, it happens, it’s happened to me, the second I got, literally got off the plane in New York to me and my family, these things happen all the time. The solution, however, is not to say, ‘Man, I really want these people to go to jail.’ The solution is, how did society fail them? This is what I wrote in my article on visible poverty in our society, when you get harassed and harangued by someone who’s clearly mentally unwell outside of a Starbucks, the first response is not why is this person not in jail? It should be, how has society failed this person? How are our mental health institutions?

    Nima: And how can we support policies that then actually —

    Adam: Get to the root of the issue.

    Nima: Get to the root of these issues and help people, right? So, you know, whether it’s supportive housing, or making sure that people aren’t just swept up and put in jails and prisons, but actually have services that allow them to have jobs and homes and get the medical attention that people need, get the mental health services that people need. These are always either secondary or kind of, you know, oh, just progressive, or, you know, lefty, wishlist things. But then, Adam, we are told to come back to reality, and the reality, we’re told, is that there are victims of crimes and what you have to do to respect the victims of crimes is to lock more people up, because otherwise you’re not respecting the victims of crimes. And so, basically not looking systemically, looking individually, looking anecdotally and saying, ‘Well, oh, what do you mean like so this person should just be on the street? Look what he did to that woman, or look what he did to that guy?’ You can see videos all day of shitty things happening to people.

    Adam: There’s a widespread systemic failure of taking care of the poor people in this country that has gotten so much worse and so much more acute in the last couple years. You have a massive housing crisis, you have, nobody can afford a home, rent has skyrocketed, evictions have skyrocketed since the eviction moratorium gone, and we turn around and we say, again, they’re not lobbying President Biden to give a speech where he announces he’s going to spend $100 billion on new homes for the poor.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: There’s no Manhattan Project for dealing with homelessness. Biden reissued some white paper a year ago and never talked about it again. It’s never mentioned by the White House, and this needs a federal intervention, the states and cities just don’t have the money to handle it, and there’s no one lobbying for any kind of robust policy to handle things like homelessness, to handle things like the root cause of violence, to talk about basic income, there’s a pilot program in Chicago to give people money, you know, to live on and — guess what? — crime goes down. The biggest predictor of criminality is poverty, and yet we let we have, again, we talked about this show a lot, we treat these things as if they’re laws of nature, and they’re not. They’re policy choices. And so instead of handling these things from the root —

    Nima: Homeless encampments just appear.

    Adam: Yeah.

    Nima: And needs to be dealt with, right? The reason behind why they appear, why also people who are living in tents like to be with each other and congregate to the same place is often for safety, right? So you’re not all on your own.

    Adam: And so people like Cenk, they’ll say, ‘Oh, well, you know, that’s all well and good, all that pie in the sky, far-left stuff, but I’m a realist and we have to deal with the problem now,’ and to which I said in the article, I said, okay, so let me get this straight. You acknowledge that our county jails are hellholes, where people live in their own fecal matter and throw up and piss and are treated like fucking cattle, you acknowledge that they’re horribly racist, you acknowledge that they’re by definition classes, because otherwise you would just bail out of jail if you had money, right? And yet, you say it’s what we have to do because it’s the reality, and I proposed this question to him, I said, well, let me let me get this straight, let’s do a thought experiment. If LA county jails randomly killed one inmate a night by a beheading, would you still then say, ‘Well, it is what it is but we still have to send people there.’

    Nima: But they’ve been doing it for 30 years, Adam, it’s their beheading time.

    Adam: Yeah, people are being chained to metal chairs for three days, three, four days at a time, they’re denied their medication for things like schizophrenia and diabetes, you have quote-unquote “inmates” sleeping in their own filth, other people’s piss and blood. This is not remotely humane, and yet we routinely send people there because, ‘Oh, shucks, we have no other option.’ This actually reminds me a lot of their rhetoric when they busted their union a couple of years ago, back when Cenk was running for Congress. They had a union drive and they blamed it on a basically a conspiracy by a union trying to unionize their shop while he was running for Congress because the union supported his primary opponents so they sowed this wild plot about how they were, and then both him and Ana Kasparian said, ‘Oh, we support unions like we’re big supporters of unions, just not this one.’ ‘So we’re big supporters of reform in this abstract — ’

    Nima: It’s never the right time.

    Adam: It’s never the right policy. So again, you can support reform in theory, but you do not support district attorneys and policies and bail reform laws that are the actual reforms that are actually on the books, and so you could theoretically gesture towards it, but when push comes to shove, right, you can never actually support the thing that really matters, which is extremely convenient.

    Nima: Well, right. I mean, I think that this is maybe a fundamental difference between, say, like, progressives, and maybe the left, which is that progressives want good things, but maybe it’s just not the right time ever, you can’t ever really get the right policy. So you take what you can get, and then you try and squish on the margins, but generally, you’re maintaining the status quo, because it’s just never the right time, and you know, what? Reality will intervene. Whereas on the left it’s been the fucking right time to fight for what is better, and that’s the key thing. You don’t need to just say, ‘Oh, this is the reality,’ because it is already the reality, that is any movement to anything different is going to have to account for that current reality and try to shift it. That is the entire work. That is the work of making the world better-slash-different.

    Adam: Yeah, because they’re not politicians, right? I mean, albeit Cenk’s a failed one, but they’re not, you know, their role ostensibly the role of pundits, which is what they are, it’s what we are, it’s what I am, I will wear this ‘P’ proudly, is to push the conversation, is to challenge the status quo and to broaden people’s political horizons, to simply say, ‘Well, the jails can’t get fixed and people got to swim in their own shit and piss and vomit and be denied medication but that’s just the way it is, so, you know, we can’t wait around for a perfect lefty position.’ It’s like, well, no, you’re supposed to articulate a moral vision for how you address crime that doesn’t involve just shoving people into these fucking gulags every five minutes.

    Nima: Because otherwise you’re just carrying water for the Tucker Carlsons and the Bill O’Reillys, and you’re actually doing no other work.

    Adam: Well, that’s really the issue, and I think that was the primary driver of the pushback that got even aside from my pushback was that there was a real sense that, okay, this is what Breitbart did with Knockout Game stuff. I mean, showing these lurid videos out of context. I mean, again, it’s not like they’ve reported on this assault, it’s not like they know the nuances of the cases, and in fact, she actually made an error. She said he had arrested 40 times for assault, when only some of them were assault and the vast majority of them were for drugs and vagrancy and other kinds of small —

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: So there’s this like, nobody cares about the person in the video, right? That’s just a bludgeon.

    Nima: No, exactly. The entire point is to say, ‘Oh, this is what you want? Oh, this is the new reality you want?’

    Adam: Right. It’s again, it’s Bill O’Reilly saying, ‘Well, why does Obama like it when white women get killed by Guatemalan immigrants? Why doesn’t he toughen up the border? Why does Michael Dukakis not care about, you know, white victims of rape and here’s a picture of Willie Horton.’ It’s the same shit. It’s, you come up with the most salacious, most racially charged, most emotional pitch you can possibly make and then build policy around that rather than, again, 99.9 percent of the cases that bail reform involves, which have nothing to do with that and that is the definition of demagoguery. I mean, that is the textbook definition of demagoguery.

    Nima: Well, and because when you have the platform that some people have, and certainly Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian have a massive platform, what you choose to do with that is incredibly important, right? Some people use it to be demagogues about tough-on-crime bullshit, where not only is that unjust and racist, and we know this, it is also from the kind of boring standpoint, it doesn’t work, right? That stuff doesn’t work. As we were talking about earlier, Adam, keeping people in jail pretrial, because they simply can’t afford to be free in the interim, has worse outcomes, not only for those individuals, but for their communities and their families at large. We see this. And so what you choose to do with the platform you have, you articulate a different kind of future, right? If nothing else, they are there to comment on not only view reality and just be like, ‘Oh, well, that’s the reality,’ but to explain why maybe that is not okay, and maybe how things can actually be different, and if they are just leaning into this, ‘Hey, that’s the way it is. We wish things were different, but on the way to different we have to keep the status quo and hurt way more people.’ Structurally systemically entire populations rather than focusing on one fear mongering gotcha anecdote. Do you know what I mean? Then what are you doing with that platform? How is that helping? How are you helping?

    Adam: It has far more of an impact when you talk to these so-called progressives, this is why I intervene, I don’t, again, I really try not to like, I try not to sort of go after people in the sort of progressive media space unless I feel like you really have to because it’s intervention that I think can be sectarian or viewed as being self-promoting, and it’s just like, I would never intervene unless I thought, holy shit, this is straight up right-wing propaganda being spoon fed to people who are potential allies, and that’s, you know, when it was trending in 2020, when everyone acted like they cared about racism for five minutes, you had people like Bernie Sanders support bail reform, they proposed a pretty decent bail reform bill on the federal level, of course, went nowhere, because it never does, but to see the same media outlets do a right turn, you know, a very cynical person, of which, of course, I’m not —

    Nima: No, of course not.

    Adam: Would say that, you know, in the run up to any kind of Bernie or Bernie-adjacent candidate running for president 2024, that they want to avoid any of the sort of taint of defund or any of the radical abolitionists and so what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to basically prime progressive viewers, quote-unquote, “progressive viewers,” to have an out where they don’t have to necessarily take any kind of difficult position in support of bail reform, because it’s viewed as being not broadly popular, viewed as being kind of wedge thing that can undermine them in various, you know, that’s one possibility. It could be part of a broader political calculation from people within that media world. I don’t know. I have no inside information about that. But that is one potential logic for why we’re doing Breitbart stuff on ostensibly progressive media, because again, you have to square the circle, you have to, people have to reconcile their progressive self-image and self-branding with supporting sending more people to jail and the way they do that, and of course, as we’ve discussed at great length here, the way they do that is they say, ‘Oh, no, no, I support these theoretical reforms, but all the reform DAs who are actually trying to actually reduce the prison and jail population in reality, oh, they’re all bad people, and they’re too soft on crime, and we need to replace them with this vague alternative.’ This is what made the San Francisco recall so effective. Unlike other recalls, they did not have to present an alternative candidate. So they were basically, you were running against an abstract idea which led to a very broad political coalition.

    Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. (Sheraz Sadiq / KQED)

    Nima: And the abstract idea was fear and crime.

    Adam: Yeah, and the second that Chesa is out of office, then okay, well then now we’re just going after rainbow fentanyl and drugs and homeless people, which is of course what they really wanted the whole time, and that’s the reality of what we live in. That is what’s going to happen when you demagogue these things.

    Nima: Well, that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you everyone for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, or become a supporter of the show, please do consider that, at Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. Stay tuned for a new full-length episode coming your way very soon, but until then, we cannot thank you enough for listening to Citations Needed. Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Morgan McAslan. The music is by Grandaddy. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Thanks, everyone, for listening. We’ll catch you next time.

    [Music]


    This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, October 5, 2022.

    Transcription by Morgan McAslan.

  • Episode 168: How Faux Folksy “Real World” Advice is Employed to Limit Political Possibility and…

    Citations Needed | September 28, 2022 | Transcript

    “Real world” exemplar Mike Rowe (right) chats with billionaire Charles Koch.

    [Music]

    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded.

    Adam: Yes, and as always, you can rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast and you can sign up for our Patreon which helps keep the show sustainable and keeps the episodes themselves always free.

    Nima: “Increasing Numbers of US Students Look for a ‘Real’ World,” read a 1965 headline from the magazine Moderator. “Academics: Get Real!,” the Harvard Business Review implored in 2009. “‘Defund the police’ runs into reality,” warned the Washington Post in 2021. “As Latin America Shifts Left, Leaders Face a Short Honeymoon,” declared the New York Times just this year.

    Adam: Very frequently, we’re reminded that anyone who espouses some degree of left-wing politics — whether a student, activist, political leader, or anyone in between — is at odds with the quote-unquote “real world.” Academics, especially those in the humanities, sit in their ivory towers. Organizers and demonstrators against state violence, they have their heads in the clouds. Elected leaders campaigning on elevating living standards and creating social safety nets like universal healthcare, they just don’t know what they’re in for.

    Nima: But who’s in charge of determining what’s ‘realistic’? Why is studying theory, fighting for better healthcare or working toward poverty reduction any less ‘real’ than plugging away at a spreadsheet for a weapons manufacturer or venture capital firm? And how did this pat and folksy concept of the “real world” emerge as a go-to dunk on eggheads and activists?

    Adam: Today we’ll seek to answer these questions as we examine the canard that anyone to the left of a Goldman Sachs executive isn’t living in or contributing to the so-called “real world.”

    Nima: Later on this episode, we’ll be joined by Bryan Quinby, host of Street Fight Radio.

    [Begin Clip]

    Bryan Quinby: We’ve been taught that history is like an objective truth, that the history we learn, you can learn history in an objective way, and I don’t even know if you can do that. But the real world makes it so, this real world narrative makes it so you learn a version of history in high school, if you don’t go to college, that’s the version of history you know, and you feel that that is an objective version of history, and that anybody else saying anything about it is wrong, and I think that really hamstrings people’s ability to even dream of something new.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: I’m excited to jump into this episode, we’ve talked about it for quite some time, if not years, this idea of the “real world” is this thing that I think universally everyone’s parents or boss, or some authority figure at some point, told them to live in.

    [Begin Clip Montage]

    Man #1: Pay first, then see what you’re getting. I don’t know, that logic doesn’t work in the real world, does it?

    Man #2: Virtual version based on virtue signaling and virtually useless in the real world.

    Man #3: They prepare them for challenges of the real world. And they don’t make excuses.

    Man #4: When you bubble a child like that, when you put a protective layer on and you coddle them, they’re not prepared for the real world. There’s bullies out there.

    Man #5: And in the real world, they don’t get to retake tests if they score less than 80. You know, in the real world, achievement and reaching goals is actually relevant.

    Man #6: They’re learning all the wrong things, then they get out into, into the real world. And as Ted Cruz said, You get out to the real world, you have a real job.

    Woman #1: I mean, I cannot wait to see these people in the real world when they leave college and they’re suddenly faced with a reality.

    Man #7: I think that this really comes from the academy, comes from elite colleges where a lot of these journalists come from, and it’s there that they drink in this stuff. They haven’t really had to contend with the real world and what’s out there waiting for us.

    Man #8: I think that what this country needs at a very dangerous time, is responsible leadership in the real world, not a fantasy world, but in the real world.

    [End Clip Montage]

    Adam: Now, I want to acknowledge that as a professional podcaster, I don’t live in the real world. I mean, obviously I do. Although I do think it’s funny, whenever I talk about abolition, or any kind of carceral nature of our system or how crime is being hyped, I always get a thousand People in my mentions being like, ‘Well, you know, Mr. Blue-check Man, for those of us who have to live with crime,’ and it’s like, I live in Chicago. I live in a neighborhood with fairly high crime and fairly high, like a lot of houselessness, it’s not like I don’t live in these things I write about.

    Nima: You don’t live on Podcast Island?

    Adam: It’s funny. I think people assume if you have a blue checkmark, you’re rich, but I’m not at all, you know, I have a toddler.

    Nima: You’re just a Regular Joe.

    Adam: I mean, I am remarkably, I mean, I’m wearing a Chicago Bears shirt. I’m like Mr. Chicago. But like, there’s this belief that if you, again, I stress that my job is kind of fake, but there’s this idea that those who talk about these issues don’t live in the real world.

    Nima: Yeah. If you’re not like Mike Rowe-ing it up then you don’t live in the real world.

    Mike Rowe

    Adam: Yeah, if I can position my opponent as not living in the real world, by definition that makes me more authentic, I occupy this space known as the real world where I have bills and budgets and responsibilities and obligations.

    Nima: You have to tighten your belt to just every Tom, Dick and Harry.

    Adam: Right, and it’s like this go to trope and I’ve heard it my whole life, again, granted, I’m 38 years old, and I talk on a microphone for a living, but like 98 percent of my life though is fairly real world. It’s very normal, as is most people’s. But it’s this way of kind of trivializing or dismissing that which one disagrees with.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: And so, again, I know we’ve talked about this a lot, this idea of the real world, the left versus the real world reality. So we’re excited to jump into it today and talk about its origins and what function it serves.

    Nima: Yeah, the idea’s origins really can be traced to some of history’s most reactionary forces — surprise, surprise — pro-business, anti-revolutionary or anticommunist policy makers namely in Europe and then later in the US in the nineteenth century.

    Let’s start with the oft-repeated, oft-memed right-wing adage, quote, “If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head,” end quote. Now, other versions of this quote substituting the word small-r republican in a French context often or socialist in a British construction substituting those in for the word “liberal” in the quote I just read. Those are found all over these, quote, “websites” online.

    Now, to be sure, quotes that circulate online are misattributed all the time, sometimes totally apocryphal, and this one may be no different. But let’s dig into this a bit. The sentiment behind the adage has been credited to people like Winston Churchill, King Oscar II of Sweden, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and British Prime Ministers Benjamin Disraeli and Lloyd George among others.

    According to the indispensable website Quote Investigator, the statement’s origin may be found in a 1799 line by second US President John Adams, who wrote to Thomas Jefferson this, quote, “A boy of fifteen who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at twenty,” end quote. Now, that’s democrat with a small-d, democrat.

    The more common version’s earliest attribution lies perhaps with French politician Francois Guizot during the first half of the 19th century, before his overthrow in the French Revolution of 1848. Now, famously, Karl Marx name checks Guizot in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto as one of the powers of old Europe seeking to exorcize the, quote, “spectre of communism,” end quote, haunting the continent.

    In an 1861 book called La Loi des Revolutions or The Law of Revolutions, Guizot is pondering, quote, “why a man under the age of twenty-five, would not be a republican, nor why a man having exceeded that age would still be one,” end quote.

    Now similarly, in a later French book about the Paris Commune and the War of 1870, historian Jules Claretie’s reprint of a 1872 letter from academic and politician Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, — yeah, that’s real — declared this, quote, “Anyone who is not a republican at twenty casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after thirty years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.” End quote.

    Adam: Early 20th Century French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau paraphrased the quote a number of times, quote, “Not to be a socialist at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.” And one anecdote tells of the time he was told that his son had joined the Communist Party, to which Clemenceau replied dryly, “Monsieur, my son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.”

    The quote passed into English through a 1923 Wall Street Journal article attributing it to King Oscar II of Sweden and inspired the title of a 1929 play by Keynon Nicholson, called, Before You’re 25.

    In 1970, Ford Foundation program officer Mario D. Fantini wrote an essay entitled, quote, “The Student Movement and School Reform,” which was published in a collection about the 1960s activism on college campuses, called, “Student Unrest: Threat or Promise?” In it, Fantini swapped the term, quote, “liberal” for, quote, “socialist”:

    Adolescent rebellion has been tolerated, and even sanctioned, as a ‘normal’ stage of human development. After all, ‘if you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head.’

    Nima: Yeah, exactly. This notion that the frivolity of youthful ideology evaporates once you hit adulthood because of work and responsibility, and so this idea had long before morphed into this notion of the hardscrabble “real world.” At the turn of the 20th century, the “real world” framing would be applied to schools, informed largely by the interests of industry. In 1908, Chicago Public Schools educator and later superintendent William McAndrew penned a criticism of public high schools for the magazine World’s Work, positing that public high schools were too academic in character, influenced by what he called quote-unquote “aristocratic” colleges. Here, in World’s Work, from 1908, is McAndrew’s remedy, quote:

    The high school should abandon its idea of being an ‘institution’ with traditions, cults, doctrines and holier-than-thou proclamations; it should get down to a humble endeavor to serve all children. It should cease maintaining that its mental food, cut and dried by experts of unproved fitness for life here and now, is the only proper nourishment for growing boys and girls. It should study the real world about us and try to reproduce the best of it under the best conditions in the class-room.

    End quote.

    Adam: This all sounds well and good of course, like a more egalitarian and democratic approach. But it seems McAndrew’s chief motivation in incorporating “the real world” into the classroom was to train students to become compliant workers, and to an extent, to model schools after businesses. Throughout his career, McAndrew was an adherent of Taylorism, or scientific management, a largely dehumanizing form of management that drew the ire of unions and activists.

    According to a 1992 academic paper by Arthur Norman Tarvardian, quote:

    The influence of Taylorism which McAndrew brought to Chicago was evidenced in his vicious pursuit of educational cost accounting. Since McAndrew regarded students as ‘per capita expenditures,’ he despised traditional professionals who were reluctant to accept business criteria in education. ‘We are accustomed,’ McAndrew wrote, ‘to regard ourselves as above business and incapable of measurement by dollars and cents, yet the past ten years have made it more clear that one of the best things that can be happen to us is the realization that education is public business and that a dollar-and-cents measurement is inevitable.’

    Nima: Yeah. So here’s another example that came from the following decade after McAndrew wrote that article in 1908. This is from 1916 from the Oklahoma Daily Live Stock News, and this article promotes a skill building and community service club for college students. Here is an excerpt. The headline is, “Making College Practical,” with the subhead, “New Experiences Will Be Added to the Ordinary Curriculum.” The article says this, quote:

    The college student of other days lived in a little world of his own apart from the real world about him. Nor was the course of study designed to fit one for practical life.

    End quote.

    The article touts skills include helping farmers with apple raising and forestry, the, quote, “investigation of water and milk supply,” end quote, and the following, quote:

    …instruction of foreigners in the customs and ideals of the country, working for prohibition, law enforcement and town improvement, and helping boys through the ‘Big Brother’ movement.

    End quote.

    Now, much of the skill building mentioned is totally fine, sure. But the implications that (1) indoctrinating “foreigners” with US ideals and (2) aiding cops help cultivate valuable practical skills raise some serious questions about who gets to define what the “real world” is.

    Adam: This messaging would escalate in the decades that followed, starting in the 1960s. Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol and “godfather of modern conservatism,” as the New York Times puts it, famously repackaged the 19th-century quote we cited earlier, defining a neoconservative as a liberal who had been, quote, “mugged by reality,” unquote. Kristol, once a New Deal Democrat, cut his teeth working for liberal anti-communist and CIA-funded magazines like Encounter. He channeled his more baldly right-wing sentiments into his own magazine, The Public Interest, which published invectives against modest of social reforms, among other things, in the 1960s and 1970s, things like immigration.

    Irving Kristol

    In 1964, inaugural Peace Corps director, and JFK’s brother-in-law, and Arney’s father-in-law, Sargent Shriver delivered a speech entitled, quote, “Should We Encourage College Dropouts?” The excerpt reads, quote:

    In our trainees we notice an overwhelming desire to get out and do something. Many of them suffer from campus fatigue. They are in search of reality and are fugitives from the grove of academia. When they return from two years in Africa, they are likely to be concerned about the relationship between studies and the problems of their own lives and the problems of the world. The pace and sophistication of their school work will be edifying and exhilarating to their teachers and rewarding to their fellow students.

    There’s no room in the 20th century for the tender turtles who sit at rest while others take pains. So drop out if necessary.

    In October of the next year, 1965, the magazine Moderator polled college students who’d left school temporarily or permanently to gauge their motivations. Moderator ran a widely republished article noting its findings with the headline, quote, “Can a University Drop-Out Find Happiness? Increasing Numbers of U.S. Students Look for a ‘Real’ World.” Here’s an excerpt:

    Says one boy who quit school to become a dishwasher on a freighter bound for Buenos Aires: ‘I felt that there was a vitality in life which couldn’t be found in a textbook. I was certain that there was something more exciting to life than attending classes and going to fraternity parties. I wanted to live in the real world, not a vacuum. Education means a combination of formal learning and true-life experience; I was getting plenty of the former and a deficiency of the latter.’

    Nima: Now, this article was accompanied by a series of illustrations, four panels next to each other all showing basically what is described in the captions:

    Even ‘A’ students quit college —

    Some go to Israel and plant trees —

    Others work and teach in slum areas —

    But many eventually return to the campus.

    Now, look, this isn’t to say it’s not good to ask all of these questions; the one boy in the quote, Adam, that you read, right, get out, get real life experience. This is great, vital to measure factors like school effectiveness and student satisfaction, mental health, what people want to do with their lives, don’t just be stuck in academia, you know, expand your horizons, sure. But this article also reinforces the notion, as I just said in those illustrated panels, that places like say Israel and or post-colonial nations in Africa should be playgrounds for the soul-searching US college student, right, that somehow those experiences are real, at least more so than what happens when they then return to campus, and God forbid, become activists on campus.

    Adam: There’s also a sense of irony here of course too, because students making these trips may build skills or learn to appreciate their own lots in life, but, these quote-unquote “real-world” experiences, they’re also spared the realities of apartheid against Palestinians and plundering of African resources, to name just a couple of examples. But since then, there has been this idea of academia versus the real world. The assumption being is that academia doesn’t really interface with the real world, and also is a place of fantasy, what is the opposite of the real world, a fantasy world, right? It’s a place of imagination and unicorns and rainbows.

    Nima: And no accountability, right? You’re kind of free, free to explore, free to think, whatever, but then when it comes down to it, you’re not accountable to anything, you can kind of get away with everything. Unlike the real world, Adam, where obviously your decisions have consequences.

    Now, little has changed since the ’60s in this idea that there’s the real world versus the academic world, but even less so the academic, than the activist world. Now, this really came into focus when activism, say, during the Trump administration was much more public, maybe it was much broader, right? People who hadn’t usually felt that they were advocates of social change became more activated in that or energized and engaged. And So lo and behold, of course, we have the Washington Post Magazine come along with an opinion piece by John Judis, this is from the heady pre-pandemic days of January 2020, the article entitled, quote, “A Warning from the ’60s Generation,” claiming that contemporary activists must learn from the mistakes of the 1960s left, which, quote, “succeeded in captivating a noisy subgroup of Americans but never came close to commanding a political majority,” end quote. The article was even originally headlined like a Pitchbot come to life this, quote, “I was a ’60s socialist. Today’s progressives are in danger of repeating my generation’s mistakes,” end quote.

    Now, the article essentially laments that movements for feminism, Black liberation, immigration rights, and plenty other issues, according to Judis, are unrealistic, as they alienate the majority of people in the United States. Here are a couple of choice excerpts from the article, quote:

    Much of what these separate groups fought for was entirely justifiable and contributed to racial and sexual equality. Yet some of their stances pressed their causes to the extreme: radical feminists casting doubt on the moral legitimacy of the family; black nationalists advocating armed struggle and calling for African American communities to be subject to the United Nations rather than the U.S. government. These positions put them at odds with much of America.

    And later in the piece:

    At the Democratic Socialists of America convention I attended over the summer in Atlanta, delegates identified themselves on their name tags, and when they spoke, by their preferred pronoun (‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘they’) and signaled their approval by twirling their hands. Someone who used the colloquial ‘guys’ to refer to the audience was sternly rebuked. There were charges of ‘ableism’ and of ‘triggering’ due to loud talking. These kinds of moral stances are fine for a church congregation, but not for a political organization that wants to win a majority of voters. The reality is that 80 percent or more of Americans who wandered into such a gathering would think they were on another planet.

    End quote.

    Adam: Yeah, it’s this idea that, I mean, again, without knowing the legitimacy or specifics of what he’s claiming at the DSA meeting, it’s this idea that there’s this real world and these activists are not living in it, because they apparently made the same mistake in the ‘60s? So I guess it’s not, this is kind of the Aaron Sorkin, Chicago 7 argument, our politics needs to be approachable and wear a suit.

    Nima: We can’t be like the real Abbie Hoffman. We have to be like the Sacha Baron Cohen Abbie Hoffman that loved democracy and Abe Lincoln and voting.

    Adam: Correct. With the assumption being that the things like people’s preferred pronouns are these kinds of whimsical preferences like one likes ice cream, like chocolate versus vanilla ice cream, versus something essential to their identity. That aside, it’s sort of a classic, again, pitting this idea of that which is maybe new and trying to change, you know, or sort of have a more inclusive language as being not in the real world.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: Meanwhile, again, at least personal experience, barista at a Starbucks, work as a waiter at a restaurant, ‘Hey, you know my pronouns are she/her,’ no problem, sounds good, move on with their lives. But this is seen as being hostile and foreign and smug according to this particular person, as opposed to the real world where everybody is Joe sixpack, and salt of the earth and doesn’t have those fancy-schmancy pronouns.

    Nima: Yeah, exactly.

    Adam: The next year, in December of 2021, The Washington Post published an opinion piece by conservative pundit and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Marc Thiessen, of the in defense of torture fame, he wrote, quote,” ‘Defund the police’ runs into reality,” maintained that “reality” is forcing US mayors to eschew calls to defund the police, the assumption is that these mayors really wanted to defund the police but “reality” asserted itself onto them.

    Nima: They would have, but you know what? Reality happened.

    Adam: “Reality,” in this piece, is the false notion that they cut police budgets and crime skyrocketed, of course that’s virtually never true. The article uses San Francisco and its mayor London Breed as a case study, arguing that Breed’s proposed police cuts were to blame for a rise in crime. But of course the piece neglects to mention that Breed never slashed police budgets, but rather increased them, as was the case with virtually every major metropolitan area in the United States since the George Floyd protests. The piece also opens with the infamous, the obligatory fake smart guy conservative quote about, quote “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.”

    This argument has appeared elsewhere, NBC News Opinion from August of 2020, quote, “‘Defund the police’ is a slogan that doesn’t help real people who need safe neighborhoods.” These are real people, versus fake people. KRON 4 Oakland, November of last year, quote, “‘Oakland’s sad reality’ result of defunding police, POA union says.” Police officer union. The ‘sad reality’ referred to a couple of murders, of course the police budget wasn’t actually cut.

    Nima: Right. Now, I mean, we see this also widely when it comes to media covering our declared official enemies, right? So, enemy states have been similarly, if not even more aggressively, targeted in news media for their lack of “reality,” for enemy government’s — uh oh! — running up against reality when they try to do things that are on their policy agenda. Consider these few examples from the last dozen years.

    A June 2, 2010 Reuters article was headlined, quote, “Twitter returns Chavez to Venezuela’s reality,” end quote, and it detailed the supposed popular reaction to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s then-new Twitter account. The story cautioned that, quote:

    While Twitter has helped Chavez reach supporters, analysts warn it could be a double-edged sword for him at a time when the economy’s poor performance and a power crisis are denting his popularity ahead of legislative elections in September.

    End quote.

    Now, of course, we’re not told who these “analysts” who are doing all the warning are, there is very little context about the Venezuelan economy, but we do know that when faced with the popular opinions voiced back at him on Twitter Adam, Chavez faced a grim reality.

    Adam: Yeah, fast forward a decade you have Reuters June 2022, quote, “Chile’s new leftist president gets reality check as support wanes.” So anytime a leftist goes up against a little bit of pushback or reactionary pushback or any kind of like, you know, the natural ebb and flow of popularity, it’s a reality check from their pie-in-the-sky, left-wing wishlist.

    Nima: A month later, in January of 2022, The New York Times published this article, quote, “As Latin America Shifts Left, Leaders Face a Short Honeymoon.” End quote. The article says this, quote:

    After years of tilting rightward, Latin America is hurtling to the left, a watershed moment that began in 2018 with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and could culminate with a victory later this year by a leftist candidate in Brazil, leaving the region’s six largest economies run by leaders elected on leftist platforms.

    A combination of forces have thrust this new group into power, including an anti-incumbent fervor driven by anger over chronic poverty and inequality, which have only been exacerbated by the pandemic and have deepened frustration among voters who have taken out their indignation on establishment candidates.

    But just as new leaders settle into office, their campaign pledges have collided with a bleak reality, including a European war that has sent the cost of everyday goods, from fuel to food, soaring, making life more painful for already suffering constituents and evaporating much of the good will presidents once enjoyed.

    End quote.

    Adam: Yeah, we see this oftentimes anytime a president runs on a semi progressive platform and then immediately shifts to not doing anything. The New York Times comes in to cover their ass by saying ‘Joe Biden runs into reality,’ ‘Joe Biden’s legislative agenda runs into reality,’ right?

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: In March of 2020, Joanna Weiss, of WBUR wrote, quote, “Joe Biden Lives In The Real World. Bernie Sanders? Not So Much.” We saw ‘Bernie Sanders not living in the real world’ articles a thousand times over his seemingly 25-year campaign to become president. ABC News January of 2016, “Hillary Clinton Jabs Bernie Sanders for Ideas That ‘Will Never Make It in the Real World.’” The article would quote Hillary Clinton saying, quote, “Rather than build on the progress we’ve made, he wants to start over from scratch with a whole new system,” Clinton said, referring to Sanders’ single-payer health care plan. “Now in theory, there is a lot to like about some of his ideas. But in theory, is it enough? A president has to deliver in reality.” “I’m not interested in ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world,” she added.

    So this was a similar line that Joe Biden used about how he said, ‘I support public option to Obamacare, because single payer doesn’t exist in reality.’ So Joe Biden has been in the White House for about a year and nine months, how many times has he proposed public option healthcare? Zero. Because guess what? He seems to have abandoned it. Was that because of reality? Or because he never believed it in the first place?

    Nima: Who gets to define what that reality is, especially when new things are often not tried but they’re just blamed on being impossible because of reality. So this kind of reality discourse has everything to do with what the Overton Window allows.

    Adam: Right. So this is a straight news report, ostensibly in the New York Times. This was widely criticized at the time for being basically just a thinly veiled editorial bludgeon. This is from November of 2019, the headline reads, “Sanders’ Climate Ambitions Thrill Supporters. Experts Aren’t Impressed,” in which they hand selected three experts to say, to provide criticisms of it.

    Nima: Those real-world experts.

    Adam: Those three people become the magical experts. David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California San Diego and a climate adviser to Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also running against Sanders in their primary, he called climate change, quote, “the big challenge for serious policy in the Democratic Party.” “The progressive wing wants radical change, and climate change is one of those areas where this has really been the most palpable,” he said. “The Sanders plan claims to deliver radical change, but it can’t work in the real world.”

    So there’s this real world that exists that is independent of human agency or decision. It’s just this thing that is intractable, and it’s like gravity or geology or Newtonian physics.

    Nima: You know, what’s not impossible in the real world, Adam, obliterating Roe v. Wade.

    Adam: Right.

    Nima: That is possible, that happens in the real world, but progressive change, things that would actually improve people’s lives instead of harm them, those are often deemed to be impossible, not part of reality. Whereas, I think, you know, this is used pretty routinely as a bludgeon for the left, and of course, the “reality” gets to be created by centrists and the right, that’s just a reality that gets to be manifest, nothing is off limits, but if you try to improve people’s lives in any substantial way, well, you know what, you’re going to be up against? The real world.

    Adam: Right. But of course, the New York Times, again, we talked about this before, but the New York Times is the king, they do this on criminal justice, they did this with Bernie Sanders, they did this with the single payer healthcare, of spending six months to a year talking about, doing thinly veiled editorials as reporting, and even straight editorials or op-eds, telling you how bad these policies are, how unpopular they are. Because, again, you could actually watch during the 2020 primary support for Medicare for All among all voters and Democrats started trickling down, because they started spreading lies, both Buttigieg and the Biden campaign started spreading outright lies that they were going to get rid of your private insurance overnight and that we were going to then somehow have a transition period of several months or several years, I think even one implied two years, where basically nobody would be insured until he passed the single payer plan. It was absurd, right?

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: And Joe Biden deliberately said this, explicitly lied several times, and so you started to see after these commercials ran nonstop about criticizing single payer healthcare —

    Nima: People are like, ‘Well, that’s not realistic. I don’t support that.’

    Adam: The numbers would go down and then the second they tipped to 60 percent, they say, ‘Oh, well, the single payer runs into political reality. It’s just not popular.’ It’s like you just created reality, like you’re in the reality creating business. That’s what the New York Times does. The New York Times curates what we perceive as being “reality” or what is political reality or what is the real world, and that’s of course, how the game works. You spend years or months to years demonizing a concept or demagoguing it or misconstruing whether it, again, whether it be crime or single payer healthcare, a number of issues, and then you turn around and say, ‘Oh, the politician you’re supporting ran into reality.’ It’s like no, they ran into this right-wing media campaign that you helped prop up.

    Nima: To discuss this more. We’re now going to be joined by Bryan Quinby, host of Street Fight Radio. Stay with us.

    [Music]

    Nima: We are joined now by Bryan Quinby. Bryan, welcome back to Citations Needed.

    Bryan Quinby: It is a joy to be back at Citations Needed. This is the guest spot, it would have to be either this or Chapo that I get the most like, ‘Hey, I heard you somewhere.’

    Adam: Yeah, to some segment of internet you’re one of those that guys like Xander Berkeley or, wait, I remember, you know, since you of course, were the primary feature on our Mike Rowe episode several years ago, it only made sense to have you back for the spiritual sequel, which is discussing this kind of broader trope of the real world or reality as this rhetorical bludgeon. And Mike Rowe sort of is the epitome of that, as we discussed at the top of the show, that kind of just shooting it straight, giving you the facts, no sugarcoating. So it’s no coincidence that appeals to the real world are a popular mainstay of conservative media. After all, the real world is this kind of fixed, ordained by nature, that our British cruel, austerity economy is kind of just the way things are. So I want to begin by discussing, starting off on a personal note, which we don’t always do, but I’m sort of curious from your experiences, because I know that I heard it all the time, pretty sure everyone has, from your experiences, what were your experiences hearing from authority figures growing up in your life about the quote-unquote “real world,” in which context was evoked and to what extent was it given this, it sort of portended this immediate and inevitable suffocation of your dreams and your political aspirations or any ember of optimism and your life?

    Bryan Quinby: Well, okay, I’ll say this, I had a science teacher that told me, earth science teacher, not like a sociology teacher or anything, that, so there was a prison riot at Lucasville Prison in Ohio in the early ’90s, and that’s what I was in ninth grade in like ’93 or ’94, and I had a teacher tell me that I was going to spend my adult life in Lucasville so that always sort of wore on the back of my brain that I was definitely destined for prison because a teacher told me I was destined for prison, but I think the best —

    Adam: That’s wholesome.

    Nima: Kind.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah, it was great.

    Adam: To be fair, I did burn down the school. But yeah.

    Bryan Quinby: I think the best example I’ve ever given of this is that when I was growing up, I would sort of tell my dad things I wanted to do. So, I go to see The People vs. Larry Flynt, in theater, when it comes out, and I tell my dad I want to be a free speech lawyer, and he was like, ‘They don’t make any money.’ Which, fucking probably, I don’t, I believe that free speech lawyers probably don’t make a ton of money, but he just said that. So then I would say, I want to be a DJ, and he would say, ‘Well, you’re not’ — because I wanted to be on the radio — ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to do that. That’s really hard to get into. You got to know somebody.’ And then I remember I said, ‘I want to be in a heavy metal band. I want to be the singer.’ First he says you can’t sing. Which is crazy to say when you’re talking about a heavy metal band, you don’t really have to know how to do that, and then he said, ‘You know what you ought to do? You ought to go to this recording workshop and learn how to run the soundboard,’ and I was like, that’s like really not the same thing as being in a band.

    Bryan Quinby

    Nima: You’re like, ‘I don’t think you’re really understanding the dream here. I don’t just want to be at a venue at work. I want to be on the stage doing something, performing, being creative.’

    Adam: Yeah, well, kids are different these days. Because again, to refocus on the kind of political formation or political rhetoric, right, because it seems like on a micro level, the concept of a real world again can be suffocating but in many ways it’s kind of like a kind of practical wake up check, to get your head out of the clouds, you know, doofus you know, the odds of you becoming a professional comedian or a bassist are nil, whereas if you go work at the at the sparks and steam factory down the street like your old man, you know, it’s October Sky shit, right?

    Nima: But it also forecloses notions of change and hope, right?

    Adam: It’s a political rhetorical device, you take that idea which can, again, in a certain context makes sense? And then it gets blown up in a Fox News, Mike Rowe context as a kind of folksy device. The reason why people like Mike Rowe is he kind of reminds them of their dad, right? He reminds them of their no-nonsense old man who, well, yeah, your father worked in film. Yeah, he was one of those New York types, but you know, salt of the earth people from Texas like me. But in general, it becomes this way of disciplining people, because what they really mean by ‘you need to live in the real world’ is they mean poor people need to live in the real world. Because the same people, again, Mike Rowe got a communications degree, right, we’ve discussed this before, right? Mark Zuckerberg spoke Greek and Latin when he was in high school, right? He was majoring in psychology. So if the kids of well off or upper middle class people, they’re not really necessarily given the real world speech and to the extent they are, it’s, ‘You need to go work on Wall Street,’ right? Whereas it’s sort of this horizon closing truism that when it gets blown up, it kind of poses as practical advice that seems like it makes sense. Because after all, like you don’t want to give a bunch of poor kids false hope, you know what I mean? And so this is why the sort of Charles Koch war on higher education that we discussed in detail is so predicated on this faux folksy suspender slapping every man routine, because when you’re old man says ‘You need to live in the real world,’ he’s trying to protect you from being, you know, wasting your life or being an idiot, right? Whereas when a high paid multimillionaire media celebrity tells you ‘You need to live in the real world, don’t worry about going to liberal arts college,’ it’s a way of saying ‘We don’t want the poor people to go learn about unionism and Marxism.’ It’s kind of, it’s a bullshit bludgeon.

    Bryan Quinby: I do feel like, as far as this real world thing is also about, we all know that we need people to do the jobs. I mean, we need people to make our coffee, we need people to make food for people and stuff like that. And the way to get somebody to just accept that that’s what they’re going to do is to tell them, ‘Look, I can’t send you to college and you need to do something you hate, because I’m doing something,’ because like I grew up is that you were supposed to hate your job.

    Adam: Yeah.

    Bryan Quinby: I have friends that make a lot of fucking money that are truly miserable Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. These people are just really sad and really miserable, and just not doing what they want to do. But then three days a week, they get to go crazy and have a whole bunch of fun and do stuff. So, when you see people that you consider successful because of looking at the way they live, you know, you look at their house, they got a nice house, they got a nice car, they got all this stuff, but they’re miserable, then I think it’s hard for somebody who grew up in a working class neighborhood or anything like that, like I did, it’s hard to even see, you know, you got to think of somebody from like Ohio, never seeing anybody that they know succeed in any sort of show business.

    Nima: Right.

    Bryan Quinby: It’s so bad that at my high school, I’m one of like six alumni that are famous. I’m a notable alumni. You just never see people succeed.

    Adam: Really low bar there, yeah.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah. You just never see people succeed in anything. This guy he’s in a band I really love when I’m in high school, and he had to put it all away and sort of go work and it just feels like a lot of the Mike Rowe stuff is, ‘I need these things done for me, if you don’t want to be one of the people that I look down on, which is like people that work at Starbucks and people that work at McDonald’s and stuff like that, then you need to get one of my stupid certificates so you can be a plumber.’ He always is like, ‘There’s all these plumbing jobs out there,’ and it’s like, dude, I grew up in a working class neighborhood, a working class kid, all I wanted to do, all I wanted in my life was a plumbing job or something like that, where they’re like you can make, at the time, they’d be like, ‘You can make $17 an hour,’ now they’re probably saying $27 an hour. I could not get that. I did not know how to get that. And it’s like, I have a brother-in-law that is an HVAC person that he had to go to a for profit heating and ventilation and air conditioning college for three weeks, and he’s still paying that back. He’s the one crawling in attics. So even these jobs that Mike Rowe says are real things —

    Nima: But did he sign the sweat pledge?

    Bryan Quinby: He would. He would have definitely signed it. He’s very anti union because he worked at a place where some people were union and some people weren’t. So that is another thing that a lot of these companies do to turn people against the union is that, ‘We’ll have a union, but we’ll also bring in some temps.’ The temps aren’t in the union. So they hate the people in the union, and they do that a lot. Yeah, it does feel like the real world thing is trying to filter people into things that they don’t want to do because they don’t deserve more, I guess.

    Nima: Well, I want to also talk about the kind of political utility of this rhetoric and of this trope, right? The idea that we would see endless appeals too through opinion pieces or punditry saying, we mentioned some of this earlier on the show, stuff like “Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All runs into political reality,” right? or, you know, a piece headlined, “‘Defund the Police’ runs into reality,” right? This patronizing way of deliberately limiting political horizons, this reality is obviously fixed in place, and it exists to make sure that, you know, good shit can’t happen.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah.

    Nima: And so also the way that people like political pundits or, you know, opinion writers, the way that it’s used in the media also, is this idea of whoever saying, ‘Oh, well, that’s unrealistic,’ winds up sounding to them, I guess, and whoever publishes them, or believes them, that they’re savvy, they’ve got it figured out, right, they know what reality is, and how far people are going to actually be able to move towards something better, and actually, let’s just be realistic here about what we can actually achieve collectively, because, you know, hey, reality is reality, and that is a fixed, permanent, timeless thing. So Bryan, can you kind of talk about this go to head patting, New York Times framing of political reality, like all these good things that we could have, well they’re going to run into the political reality. What does this do to the way that we understand and discuss politics?

    Bryan Quinby: Well, I do feel like that people understand what each party is supposed to do. They don’t understand what they do, I don’t think, but I think that people look at Democrats, and they say, ‘Well, they’re the ones that want to give poor and working people healthcare and stuff like that,’ and then when they elect them and nothing happens, that becomes a thing where it’s like, ‘Well, that’s not real.’ I think eight years of Obama with hardly anything to show from it, I think that creates what reality is for people.

    Nima: Right. That was a stark reality.

    Bryan Quinby: Which is like nothing, we can’t really do anything. It sucks. I know. It’s horrible. And we’re not going to use any political capital to do anything and we’re just going to let people think, okay, so you can have the Republicans who are evil, outwardly evil and would love to eat poor people or you can have the Democrats, they’re supposed to want to help poor people, but they never really actually get anything done.

    Adam: Well, yeah. The one thing that frustrates us is that, you know, as media critics, you’ll see this happen in real time, where it’s like, The New York Times will publish nine articles about shoplifting in New York, you know, and publish all these lurid tales of old ladies being having their purse snatched, and then, literally a week later be like, ‘Oh, reform efforts run into political reality as Democrats sour on,’ it’s like, well, you just did the thing, you just made reality. People who are in the reality making business aren’t allowed to just act as if reality is this thing outside of their control, now clearly, they don’t completely manufacture reality, there’s elements of underlying truth or other media, but to a large extent, you know, institutional media can create realities, they can create panics around certain things or, you know, emphasize certain stories over others, and so, there’s this sort of idea that this topic we’ve been demagoguing in our pages, of course, we saw this with all the intelligence laundering building up to Iraq, where they say, you know, ‘Democrats have no choice but to vote for the war because of reality,’ it’s like, because you’ve been publishing leaks from Dick Cheney for the last year. That’s the reality you created. I know, this is probably the entire theme of our whole podcast, but you know, and so this quote-unquote “reality” becomes this non-negotiable political thing we’re not supposed to, for which emerged entirely out of, you know, it’s like inflation. It’s this mystery for us that just came out of nowhere and it just sucks we can’t have nice things because of reality.

    Bryan Quinby: I also think that the reality thing, political realities, or putting yourself in reality is the thing that they decide what is important, but it was critical race theory, over a certain amount of time, and like, my father-in-law was obsessed with it. Obsessed with critical race theory. He spends all day watching YouTube videos, by whoever, I don’t know who he watches, I think it is Steven Crowder, and guys like that. It’s very weird for a 70-year-old man to be watching that stuff. But I started to talk to him because he knows I have a sociology degree, and he also knows what I talk about on my show and what my politics are and stuff like that. So he sees me as his dream opponent, I guess. This guy sits all day listens to Alex Jones talk about what the leftists and communists are doing —

    Nima: He has a leftist and communist right there.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah. So he’ll argue with me and I remember during the critical race theory stuff, I said, do you know what it is? And he was like, ‘It’s saying that white people are bad,’ and I’m like, well, I mean, that’s true, but it’s also just the idea that critical theory is just the idea that things look different depending on where your station is in society. That to me seems like an inarguable thing and he said the same thing. He said, ‘That’s, oh, well, that makes sense,’ and then I said, don’t you think historical things would look different if you’re Black than if you’re white? And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t think so. That’s the objective truth.’ I just was like, he’s unreachable, and that is the problem is we’ve been taught that history is an objective truth, that history we learn you can learn history in an objective way, and I don’t even know if you can do that. But the real world makes it so, this real world narrative makes it so you learn a version of history in high school, if you don’t go to college that’s the version of history you know, and you feel that that is an objective version of history, and that anybody else saying anything about it is wrong, and I think that really hamstrings people’s ability to even dream of something new.

    Nima: Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s this idea that, as we were putting this episode together, you know, I was thinking about how, even like the MTV show The Real World, the use of that term, and it’s obviously tongue in cheek, because clearly, a bunch of young people in a house that’s paid for it, and they don’t have to really do anything except, you know, bitch at each other, that’s not the real world, but the idea that there’s this kind of fantasy after, you know, after high school, right, that this almost Friends sitcom version of the real world to some people, if that’s an attractive way to live, right, and that there is a real world that you’re going to inevitably have to contend with.

    Adam: It’s constantly looming, it’s constantly menacing you. The real world.

    Nima: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. At some point, you know what, reality is just going to come crashing down, and you’re going to have to give up all of that silly nonsense about, you know, what you actually want to do with your life or what kind of policy changes can actually be made, how people can actually live together or fight for one another or be in solidarity, but the real world is that honestly we’re just trying to pay rent or buy this house or find time to mow the lawn or go see a movie, and that’s the real world, and there’s no time for anything else, and therefore, we shouldn’t even really think about what to aspire to because even that kind of aspiration, right? Even reading poetry or having a book club or painting, well, those are escapes from reality, those can’t be something you do for real, and if you do, then you are escaping reality, right? ‘Oh, I’m just gonna go to a movie because I escape reality,’ it’s like, or, actually people work to make that movie and you going to a movie may be actually part of how you then understand the world. That’s how pop culture works. That’s how culture works, right? All of this is going to inform you in different ways, and so what do you think this brand of hucksterism that, you know, I hate to bring it back to Mike Rowe, but you know, hey, I’m talking to you, Bryan — and you make me think of Mike Rowe because when we did our episode, right — but this idea that there’s the hardscrabble shit, right? There’s the dirty jobs and then there’s all the fluffy stuff, right? Never mind that Mike Rowe used to, you know, sing opera, but he’s the hardscrabble guy, and that that’s real life, that’s the real world, and anything else outside of that is just bullshit nonsense. What does that do to us as a society?

    Adam: Well, it’s not, yeah, it’s egghead, it’s feminine and it’s gay.

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: And there’s the real world, which is typically seen as being more masculine and more prudish.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah, and fake and a whole fake version, because we did talk about this the first time I was on about Mike Rowe, I think he sincerely believes that he wanted to be on TV so he went to a movie theater and got a job and learned how to run a projector, and him being on TV and being able to be rich is because he started at the bottom, the movie theater, and worked his way up to being on the screen, and I think like that to me is the weirdest thing about the guy because he, yes, he went around with people and he touched sewage pipes and stuff like that and that’s really great that he showed people what the small business owners in the country are doing, and what their employees are up to. He doesn’t talk about what they pay their employees. He doesn’t even talk about the fact that they do have employees on Dirty Jobs. I’ve watched a lot of Dirty Jobs, because, you know, he’s a charming guy, I can’t help it. When I was younger, he would come on, and I’d be very charmed by him.

    Adam: Oh, for sure.

    Bryan Quinby: And like I said, when he was just going around and like running around in sewage pipes, he was great. He was perfectly fine. It’s when he starts telling you that you can’t have what you want despite the fact that he got everything he wants.

    Nima: He moved from the soundboard to the mic.

    Bryan Quinby: Yep.

    Adam: Well, that’s the thing that cannot be overemphasized. It’s the real world for the fucking poor people and the precarious lower middle class. Everybody else gets to have their four years at Harvard or their four years at Stanford and they get to explore themselves because they can afford to do that. But for everyone else, buckle up. You don’t want to go $100,000 in debt. So go get in line at the Koch Industries’ sparks and steams Institute.

    Nima: And if you are in debt, and then there’s a chance to get out of it, well, then you’re skirting reality.

    Adam: Right.

    Bryan Quinby: Yes, yes. Yeah. The reality that you have to live with is that we can’t cancel student loan debts —

    Adam: Because of reality.

    Bryan Quinby: Yes, because of reality, I mean, where would you get all the money? And it’s like, well —

    Adam: The free money tree.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah. Yeah, I think you can just print more money. I’m not like a big —

    Adam: We’ve been doing that for a while now and it seems to be working.

    Bryan Quinby: It’s great. It would make everybody so much happier.

    Adam: It’s not the Middle Ages, you can actually do that.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah, I mean, that’s the other thing, too, is I feel like there’s a lot of people that are really because of this inflation and because everything is more expensive, I’ll say you this, I had worked my way out of living paycheck to paycheck very shortly before Trump was out of office or whatever. I had money left when I got paid the second when I got paid the next month or whatever, and, you know, I’m not anymore, I am scraping together again, and it just feels like when you’re in that middle zone there, I’m not saying middle class, because I don’t even know if I’m middle class, I don’t even know what middle class is, but when you’re in that kind of middle zone, it just feels like once you start to get ahead, the punishing reality of like, oh, well, some people have to be on the bottom so time to start pushing that rock back up the hill. That’s what the real world is, that’s what life is, and if you want good things, and you want to do something, then go get a job at the turd pipe factory or whatever it is.

    Adam: Yeah, because I think part of the appeal of that discourse, Rowe, and we talked about this with the sweat pledge, is that the one thing he was good at that I think liberals have been very bad at for a long time, and the left is good at but they’re marginalized, is being romantic about labor, that there is something, people want to be romantic about the thing they do 40, 50 hours a week, and here this guy comes along and says, You with this shit job, I’m going to make you the hero.’ Now granted, I’m actually going to make your boss the hero and never mention unions, and talk about how you need to, you know, not ever try to unionize or complain and this other kind of masochist bullshit, but there was some element there that is the reason why he was popular.

    Nima: And safety regulations are for pussies.

    Adam: Right. Because there is something, I think, inherently appealing to this idea of sucking it up. I mean, my old man always told me the definition of adulthood is doing things you don’t want to do, but because others need you to do them, right? It’s like, there is a little bit of romance to that. I think where it begins to break down is when you start to, like we talked about a lot in the show, when you take that kind of Mike Rowe, even maybe sensible life advice, and you begin to abstract it out to a political philosophy for an entire group of people, because again, there’s so much hypocrisy, where it’s hardship and austerity and stoicism for you, but for me, and again, the sort of Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance’s, all of whom went to Ivy League universities, and all of whom worked at hedge funds, right? None of this is real world shit, right? They’re allowed to do the non real world things, but the poors are destined to sort of suffer in obscurity, and then you realize that they’re actually taking maybe something on, again, on a personal level, can be a romantic view of viewing labor, and they’re using it as a way of worker discipline.

    Bryan Quinby: Right. To them, I mean, when they say these things about, ‘You’re the real heroes out there,’ but not you because there’s always an out group with them anyway. There’s workers that, again, Mike Rowe doesn’t have respect for workers, specifically workers that do what I would consider Dirty Jobs, like I don’t know, working at a fast food place and having to go into the parking lot when it’s 100 degrees outside and pick up cigarette butts and just these really hard things. I worked at McDonald’s for a period of time, and that’s the hardest job I ever had. I was a roofer. I was a cable guy. I did so much stuff and McDonald’s —

    Adam: McDonald’s was harder than roofing?

    Bryan Quinby: Yes, I still have stress dreams about McDonald’s. I still wake up in the middle of the night.

    Adam: No, I mean, I worked at restaurants, but I would never ever think, I guess McDonald’s, I mean, I worked at Chick-fil-A but you know, I just, I’ve always heard roofing was the hardest job in the world.

    Bryan Quinby: No, roofing sucks, right? But you’re not getting yelled at all day.

    Adam: That’s true.

    Bryan Quinby: You’re not getting screamed at by people that you hate all day. You’re just up there doing the thing that you want. I roofed in January in Columbus, Ohio. So it was cold and stuff, but, you know, it wasn’t an easy job or anything like that. But I felt satisfied with it, and I never felt as miserable in my life as I did when I was working at McDonald’s or when I was driving for Lyft. Those were the two periods of my life where I just felt like, you know, I’m driving for Lyft. I’m working 16 hours a day. That’s looked at as a side hustle. So I would drive for 16 hours a day and then think about the person who went to work and then jumped in their car and drove people on their way home for another six to eight hours a day and just barely getting by. These are things that guys like Mike Roweare like, ‘Well, isn’t it great that there’s Lyft because then you can take your car and make money out of it,’ and that kind of thing is, he hates everything that is in the service industry, and most of the jobs now are in the service industry. Like almost all of them, you can go roof, I’m sure they would hire you, but there are a lot of roofers’ unions throughout the country, and they pay the same amount. I know when I was roofing I made $9.50 an hour, and then when I quit I got a job washing dishes for $9.50 an hour. So, it was like, ‘Well, this is easier. I’m not outside on top of a building all day.’ So I guess it’s just to me, he ignores the jobs that most people are doing in order to tell them that they deserve whatever the punishment is, ‘Oh, you went and got an English degree and now you’re working at Starbucks? Serves you right. You should have gotten a degree in turd pipe management or something.’ I don’t know. I don’t know what the jobs he says are. ‘Welding, you should have got a welding degree.’

    Adam: Yeah, there’s 5 million welders in this country.

    Bryan Quinby: There’s 5 million welders in this country, and we need another 15 million welders, and people just don’t want to weld, which is the thing. Every guy, I’m not saying this because I was one, every loser I’ve ever met has wanted to be a welder, or wanted to do these jobs, it is hard to get those jobs, you have to know somebody to get those jobs, and so I don’t even know, these extra jobs, these excess jobs that are just out there that —

    Adam: That skills gap claptrap, it’s one of the things Charles Koch pays money for.

    Bryan Quinby: Yes. Yeah, it just doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s such a hard world to get into. We’ve had people call into the show who are doing welding, skilled labor and stuff like that, who worked for no money for years before they actually got to start making money doing it, and that’s the same thing with journalism and stuff like that. If you don’t start out with some ability to work for nothing, then you’re not going to get to do it, and you just are going to have to move on to something where one of the jobs where you work for money, which is the way that most people have to do it.

    Nima: Well, right. I mean, and so, you know, I kind of want to bring it back to this idea of real world rhetoric as being deliberately stifling. That any movement toward something different, right? And a perfectly realistic example, let’s say unionization efforts at Chipotle or Amazon or Starbucks, that we can see that things can change, right? There’s a reality for Starbucks executives one day in Astoria, Queens, and the next day there’s a union at the Starbucks in Astoria, Queens —

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah.

    Nima: And reality has changed both for say, the bosses and for the workers. So, we know that things can change. We know that the real world, the reality of the real world, is malleable, is flexible. It changes based on human action, right? And so what do you think this idea of, you know, saying, ‘Well, there’s a real world out there,’ and hearing that again, and again, and again, in the media, it is deliberately a stifling frame so that, I think, people will stop organizing, will stop organizing for something better to actually, this is going to sound hokey, but create the fucking change, right? To change reality for themselves, which can happen, but once you just say, ‘Well, you know, there’s a political reality or there’s a real world out there.’ Oh, well, status quo, therefore, don’t even try.

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah, I mean, that’s been the thing that has been so, because I am, I feel impending doom all of the time, and it’s like, I hate to be the negative guy who’s like, good things can’t happen. But I think I did feel that way a lot of times during COVID. Maybe it wasn’t something I said out loud. And like watching these first, you know, these people at the Starbucks kind of sort of agitating for hazard pay, there was a lot of agitating for hazard pay during COVID, during the beginning of COVID, and that really worked, and I think a lot of that stuff was like, hey, I think people are noticing that they have power now, and I do think that younger people, because they’ve seen what has happened after like deindustrialization and stuff like that, they understand that we’re a service economy, we’re not going to get factory jobs anymore, and during the labor movement, you know, there were a bunch of rich guys saying working in a factory is bullshit. It’s idiots’ work and they don’t deserve any money, and I think we’re, you know, now we valorize working in a factory, because there’s no factories.

    Nima: Right.

    Bryan Quinby: I think the same thing is starting, we’re starting to get to the point where people are starting to understand these jobs don’t exist, these are $30-an-hour jobs working, I mean, you can get a job on a construction site as a laborer, you’re going to make maybe $15 an hour or something like that, and I think that people are just starting to see, well, they need me, and especially what they call the labor shortage, which is really weird. I don’t think, when they say it’s a labor shortage, I’m like, what if you paid them?

    Nima: Yeah, exactly.

    Bryan Quinby: I’m watching the Starbucks unions and I really love it and I’m loving seeing other coffee shops pick it up, and, you know, I’ve seen a few like, really great initiatives when it comes to the Starbucks unions about something that our listeners, and especially just over the years, a lot of our listeners are people who work at coffee shops, and restaurants and stuff like that. I’m seeing a lot of those people saying, ‘I want a schedule that stays the same.’ You know what I mean? ‘I want to know, I want a predictable schedule. I want this amount of money per hour, I want health insurance, and I want some time off.’ Those things are very easy for Starbucks to do. That’s not a hard thing for Starbucks to do and I think Starbucks fighting that, I really feel like Starbucks fighting it is going to be the thing that galvanizes a lot of people to start pushing for it, and I’m starting to think, I’m starting to think like the sky’s the limit. I’m really starting to think like when you say Chipotle, I’m starting to think McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King, and I’m just starting to think all of these places are susceptible to this, and it’s interesting, did you catch the article on NPR where they talked about two separate coffee shop union drives, and one of the guys was like, ‘I always dreamed of working with coffee, working at a coffee shop, and I finally got to buy my coffee shop, and now there’s a union and my dream is ruined.’ It’s the best article I’ve ever read.

    Coffee shop owner Derek Lucey was profiled in an NPR article as a struggling small businessman whose woes were compounded by his employees’ unionization. (Darren Hauck / NPR)

    Nima: You know what? That guy was faced with the real world.

    Bryan Quinby: He was! There’s a new real world and I don’t think —

    Nima: There’s a new real world.

    Bryan Quinby: I think the problem we’re going to have the most when it comes to unionizing and stuff like that, I really think those middle jobs, those, we always call them spreadsheet farms or, you know, my wife works on spreadsheets all day, I think those are going to be the jobs that are very difficult to kind of agitate and organize for more, because I really feel like a lot of those people are some of the most hit with that real world rhetoric in that you got the best job, you won. And it’s like, no.

    Nima: Right. Because it’s me, I have to bring it back to the show Friends, because I’m that age, but yeah, it’s like Chandler’s job was, remember, no one knew what he did, and the guess was like, ‘What are you like a transponder? It’s the transponders, right? They’re going to have a hard time, this kind of middle management somehow, you’re on a laptop all day, and yeah, you can work from home, maybe, but what agency do you actually have? And so I think that’s right. There’s unionization efforts at a certain kind of work environment, right? But then there are those people who are not, you know, bosses, right? Are not owners of companies, but are going to have to find that solidarity and that power, and I think, you know, as you’ve been saying, the awareness that they have agency, and that the real world is something that can shift based on what people make of it.

    Bryan Quinby: Do you think that also it kind of, people have seen the world shift in a way when 10 years ago, 15 years ago, Donald Trump was not ever going to be the President of the United States. It just, it felt like the most impossible thing, he was just a goof, and he was president now and I feel like people saw it change. I’ve been beating a drum recently about, I never thought that a wrestler could be president, but I fully think that The Rock can be president now. I think he’s maybe going to be the president someday.

    Nima: Right.

    Bryan Quinby: And those guys are so, wrestlers specifically, are so able to sort of manipulate feelings and get people on their side or get people to dislike them. That’s their whole job.

    Nima: Yeah, I mean, it’s the ultimate kind of world building and kind of storytelling that motivates people to really feel one way or another, right? And it doesn’t have to be kind of like black and white. That’s what makes characters, you know, I mean, that’s what makes The Rock or Steve Austin so compelling, right? Because they weren’t just heels or faces all the time. But this idea of kind of playing a role that gets people to feel a certain way. I think that’s exactly right. Because, I mean, that’s why even though, I think we saw a lot of articles about how, ‘Oh, Trump is just doing like a WWF thing,’ and it became sort of like a media trope, but at the same time, it’s like, yeah, but also Vince McMahon wanted to be Donald Trump and Donald Trump wanted to be Vince McMahon. They kind of loved certain aspects of the other, and they kind of became each other.

    Bryan Quinby: I’ve always felt that real world stuff, especially the stuff you’re talking about with New York Times editorial page, that stuff all operates in kayfabe. There’s the kayfabe one, the one bit of kayfabe, where it’s the Democrats do this, and the Republicans do this, but neither one of them do that stuff, and it’s really worth thinking about what Joe Biden’s aspirations are, and he’s going to get voted in based on what we think he thinks he wants to do.

    Nima: Right. Whatever Michael Cole is telling us Joe Biden is going to do is what we’re supposed to believe Joe Biden is going to do. Not actually what he does in the ring.

    Bryan Quinby: We’re supposed to vote for Republicans because they are mean, and they attack the people that we don’t like, but we’re supposed to vote for Democrats based on nothing really? That Obama said he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, and we’re like, well, as long as he wants to close it. That’s fine. I guess that works.

    Adam: Well. You’re supposed to witness suffering, not do anything to fix it.

    Bryan Quinby: Yes. Yeah.

    Adam: In Democrats defense, they’ve done some things to alleviate suffering recently, right? But it’s always because they have no other choice. It’s always the last resort, right? The infrastructure bill, the NLRB stuff, it’s like, because they didn’t do that they literally would have no legitimacy at all.

    Bryan Quinby: Wouldn’t even know what to, like watching them try to run on, ‘We just kind of like didn’t do anything really at all. Sorry, that was four years.’

    Nima: But that’s still what they would do, because they could still run on, ‘Yeah, but we’re not them.’ ‘Yeah but we’re not Republicans.’

    Bryan Quinby: Yeah.

    Adam: It’s all part of this idea that despite all the sort of manifests corrupting influence of corporate money in politics, and the class interest of those in charge of the party, that anytime something doesn’t get done, you could just lay it nice and gently at the feet of reality, and it’s like, ‘Well, its reality,’ there’s this Super Bowl force. So yeah, it’s like, why would I not always use that as a cop out? You know, if I can, if I can use it as reality, you know, why did I not show up to the recording tonight? Reality. Reality got in the way.

    Nima: I ran headfirst into reality. But Bryan, it has been wonderful talking to you again. Bryan Quinby, host of Street Fight Radio, you can follow him on Twitter @murderxbryan. That’s Bryan with a ‘y.’ Bryan, it is always a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks again for joining us on Citations Needed.

    Bryan Quinby: It was very fun. Thank you for having me.

    [Music]

    Adam: I mean, there is something, again, I think on a micro level, you can sort of appreciate it, right? If I was a struggling immigrant working three jobs driving an Uber to put my kid through school, and he was like, 17, he’s like, ‘Dad, I want to be a professional trombone player,’ maybe I’d be like, ‘Okay,’ I’ll give him the real world speech a little bit, you know, I get that, I’m sympathetic to that, I get that the real world such that it exists is largely very much defined by our socio economic position in the world, right, and what opportunities we have, and people adapt to those realities. The question then becomes is that, this is a classic example of sort of descriptive statement that’s actually a normative statement masquerading as a descriptive one, because poor people should not have their options limited to what is quote-unquote “practical.” Higher education should not be an indulgence or a luxury of the rich, it should not be something that drives up, you know, $80,000, $90,000, $100,000 in debt for the poor and working class. So I think this idea of the sort of smug evocation of the real world in a political context carries a lot of weight because, again, it seems so folksy and practical because everybody got the real world speech from their dad, right? It’s this thing you always get, the real world, you know, the real world here, this is going to happen in the real world, no one’s going to give a shit about this. It’s like, well, maybe the real world should care.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: Maybe the real world should care that I have a stutter. Or maybe the real world should care that I have pronouns that I prefer, right? The real world can change and it has many, many times.

    Nima: Right, and the real world has changed. Exactly. I mean, that history is the real world changing again and again and again. And so to foreclose any notion of, ‘Oh, you want to change things for the better? Well, you know what, things weren’t better for me.’ So therefore, we have to stay in that real world, right? It’s the, ‘You can’t cancel debt, because I had debt,’ ‘You can’t be a musician or a philosopher or a poet because you got to pay the bills because your mortgage sucks,’ or because, you know, rent is really high. All these things, there should be new realities that we’re all creating to allow people to live the lives that they want to live, right, without precarity and scarcity and fear, and you know, hey, you know, maybe I’m sounding like I don’t live in the real world, but you know, I think that is part, politics are nothing if not creating what the real world is. That is the work of politics, not in the kind of media sensationalism, horse race politics, the sort of soap opera of politics, but the work of politics, it’s not just one party against another. It’s the work of changing the world in a certain way. And oftentimes, that world has changed in terrible, terrible ways because of who wields power. But there are ways to shift that, and when you shift that and you create new policies, new ways of thinking about things, new narratives in general, that change the way that people view the world, what is responsible for where we are, where we’re going, what imagination we can have about what, you know, new realities may come, that is the work to foreclose that instantly by being like, ‘Oh, well, you know, all that pie in the sky, Bernie, single payer, millionaires and billionaires shit, that’s going to run up against the real world.’ The hardscrabble real world, Adam, is that nothing can really fucking change, suck it up, just try and like put food on your kitchen table and don’t think about anyone else. I think what it really has to do is with refocusing people on their individual struggles, and limiting any idea that there’s a collective way forward.

    Adam: Yep. That’s the idea. Everyone’s atomized, you have to live in your own real world, and nothing better is possible. Don’t bother talking to the barista next to you or the construction worker next to you. Maybe you form a union. That’s not the real world. Suck it up, take the Mike Rowe sweat pledge and just adapt.

    Nima: And that’s it. Be where we are and where we will always be, and don’t try, of course, for anything better.

    That will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, you can pick up some merch through Bonfire.com, just search for Citations Needed, and of course, you can always become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated. We really are 100 percent listener funded. The way that we are able to keep doing the show is because of the support that we get from listeners like you and as always a very special shout out goes to our critical level supporters on Patreon. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Thank you for listening to Citations Needed. Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Morgan McAslan. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.

    [Music]


    This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, September 28, 2022.

    Transcription by Morgan McAslan.

  • Episode 167: The Attractive Anti-Politics of ‘Gerontocracy’ Discourse

    Citations Needed | September 21, 2022 | Transcript

    [Music]

    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: You can follow us on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded.

    Adam: Yes, as always, you can sign up for our Patreon and get goodies there. You can get access to our newsletter, our show notes, and patron only News Briefs. We have about 120 or so there for you to listen to in the back catalog. If you could help us out there we would really really appreciate it. It helps keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable.

    Nima: “Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?,” inquires The New York Times. “Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?,” wonders The Atlantic magazine. “Gerontocracy Is Hurting Democracy,” insists New York Times Magazine’s Intelligencer. “Too old to run again? Biden faces questions about his age as crises mount,” reports The Guardian.

    Adam: Though these headlines are framed as exploratory questions, news media seem to have largely made up their minds: the problem with Washington is that it’s just chock full of geezers. In recent years, we’ve often heard that US policymaking, helmed at the federal level by seventy- and eighty-somethings such as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and at the state level by the similarly aged Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, and Pat Leahy, is simply growing too old and out of touch with the electorate.

    Nima: There’s some credence to this. It’s certainly true that those occupying the most powerful positions in US government, on the whole, don’t legislate to the needs of the public — whether on healthcare, policing, education. But is that really because of legislators’ age? Why does age have to be the focus in this analysis, rather than policy positions and, relatedly, class interests, which exist independent of someone’s age? Who does it serve to reduce causes of US austerity politics and violence to pat, Pepsi marketing-style ‘‘generation gap” discourse?

    Adam: On today’s show, we’ll detail how generation analysis is ineffectual and, more often than not, misses the mark. We’ll discuss how fears of a “gerontocracy” can — if not in intent, in effect — malign old age itself and stigmatize the eldery and, above all, distract from what could be a substantive critical analysis of real, more profound vectors of oppression such as class, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ currents.

    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Winslow Erik Wright, author and activist whose writing covers disability rights, the struggle for authenticity under capitalism, and participatory democracy.

    [Begin Clip]

    Winslow Erik Wright: I think there is something to be said for, you know, the generations being pitted against each other. I think that’s a lot of what’s happening and it obscures the fact that I, as a millennial, share a lot of interests with another Boomer who’s situated similarly economically, but when you frame it as gerontocracy or, you know, ‘our leadership is too old,’ and there is a kernel of truth to that, but when you really get into the stigma and the hatred that’s attached with those ideas, that separates me from the other people I might unite with to undertake the collective action that’s necessary to actually challenge the problems we’re facing.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: This is a spiritual successor to Episode 38: The Media’s Bogus Generation Obsession, where we discussed the general use of generation discourse to create a fake conflict by our media. Today, we’re specifically going to be talking about the trope that our current government institutions are failing because they’re just too old. We’re going to make the argument that this is true to a very minor extent, but not really that important, and gets a disproportionate amount of focus, because it’s a form of anti-politics — anti-politics, I think we talk about a lot in the show, which is to say, the appearance of doing politics without really doing politics. Now, that being said, of course, many of our leaders, as we noted, are extremely old. Joe Biden, for example, was born closer to the civil war than his inauguration, which I was pretty smug about until I realized that, as of next year, I will have been born closer to World War Two than the present year.

    Nima: Yeah, exactly. Welcome to old age, Adam.

    Adam: Yeah. When I turn 39, I’ll be, yeah, anyway. So, the basic premise is intuitively true on a very basic level, but increasingly, as it’s become used by people like Elon Musk, it sort of shows how empty this kind of rhetoric is.

    Nima: The notion of gerontocracy — that is, a society ruled by the elderly — is in many ways baked into human ideas of leadership, right, of wisdom and experience and, of course, in our politics, has been for millennia. Across human society, “elders” have long held prominent leadership roles in families, communities, kingly courts, and across countries.

    The very first book of Plato’s Republic features the philosopher Socrates noting how crucial the wisdom of the aged is, saying, quote, “They have gone before us along a road which we must all travel in our turn,” end quote. The Romans named their most prestigious seat of, small ‘r,’ republican government Senatus. The word Senatus — and, in turn, our own word Senate — is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning an old man, and thereby conferring the ideas of gravitas, wisdom, experience. The Senate, by definition, is an assembly of old men.

    Now, the U.S. Senate — and the rest of our federal political class — largely bears this out. The median age of members of Congress has increased over the past four decades. Between 1980 and 1982, the average age of a U.S. Senator was 47 years old. It’s now over 64; with more than a quarter of sitting Senators 70 or older; half of all Senators are over 65. The current Congress — the 117th — is the ​​is the oldest, on average, of any Congress in the past two decades. The average age of members of the House of Representatives is slightly lower at 58 years old. But Joe Biden is the second consecutive oldest president ever elected. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn are both 82, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 83. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 81, a decade older than the Senate Majority Leader, y’know, that young whippersnapper Chuck Schumer. Senator Dianne Feinstein turned 89 in June; Chuck Grassley turns 89 this September.

    US Senate

    Plus, we all know older people vote more consistently than younger people. In 2023, more Americans will turn 65 than ever before. Worldwide, the number of people 80 years or older is expected to triple by 2050 to reach 426 million. But to bring it back to the United States, according to Pew, while people over 50 make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 52 percent of the electorate. In mayoral elections, the median voter age is 57, despite the median age of the American population being only 38.

    Adam: So it’s clear that both the average voter, and of course the average representative in our democracy, is much, much older than the mean of our society. That is objectively true. But of course, although it has gotten more acute of late, it is not a new critique. It goes back many, many decades. Some of the earlier stirrings of warnings about an aging government began in the 1940s. Already here you can see age was used as a proxy for politics. The Morning Herald in Pennsylvania wrote, this is from November of 1944, quote:

    Georges Gurvitch, formerly of the University of Strasbourg, points out in detail the role of gerontocracy in the collapse of France. France had never known the trust in ‘young and new men characteristic of the United States.’

    Dr. Gurvitch further points out the dangers of gerontocracy — government by old men — the abyss which resulted in the proliferation of so-called youth groups: ‘Young Radicals,’ ‘Young Socialists,’ ‘Young Rightists,’ etc. — alike only in their revolt against the faith of the gerontocrats, all susceptible to the propaganda of Fascists or Communists.

    Are the champions of the fourth term fully aware of the sinister menace of gerontocracy in this country?

    Nima: Now, Joe Biden — who is the subject of much gerontocracy discourse that we’ll be talking about later in the episode — used age critiques as a bludgeon when he was younger against political opponent Senator Cale Boggs back in 1972. As Nathan V. Lorenzen noted for The Nation in a July 2022 article, quote:

    Biden argued that Boggs had ‘lost that twinkle in his eyes’ and was ‘just not a fighter.’ You can swap the names Boggs and Biden, and these attacks from 1972 would be indistinguishable from those used in 2022. Of course, such comments about age are far from a one-way street. Biden, who was 29 when first elected senator, faced criticism for his youthfulness and was derisively referred to as a ‘young kid’ by Delaware Governor Russell Peterson.

    End quote.

    Adam: Use of the term “gerontocracy” also accelerated in the middle of the 20th century, partially as code for “governments we don’t like.” At the height of the Cold War, and in its waning years, the word often appeared in coverage of China and the Soviet Union to portray their governments as bloated, excessively powerful, and ineffective.

    This is an excerpt from a 1976 syndicated piece written after the death of Zhou En Lai, former Premier of the People’s Republic of China, who died at 78 while holding public office. For some context, Chairman Mao Zedong was alive at the time, holding office until his death that same year at 82. The piece would use the politicians’ ages, paying no attention to their policies or popularity, writing, quote:

    This tendency toward gerontocracy is nothing new in China, where rulers usually have hung on till their deaths. It has been fostered perhaps by the Chinese tradition of respect for the aged and certain institutional factors such as the need to accumulate vast networks of personal ties, which are the cement of political power in China.

    The Los Angeles Times in 1983 wrote an article, quote, “Kremlin’s Gerontocracy May Be Good for West.” The San Francisco Examiner in 1992, “China talks economic reform: The Chinese gerontocracy is paying lip service again to free markets but still not to political freedom.”

    That same year, 1992, media conversely began to characterize the newly elected, “fresh-faced” Bill Clinton as a kind of counter to graying and out-of-touch governance. The Washington Post wrote in November 1992 after the election, quote, “Clinton has Europe thinking change.” This piece presents Clinton’s Third Way centrism — something that for decades has undergirded US Democratic party politics, regardless of the age of leaders — as a refreshing deviation from politics as usual writing, quote:

    The generational change that Clinton represents goes beyond the biological dimension,” said Serge July, editor of the French daily Liberation. He believes CLinton’s biggest impact on European politics will be to accelerate the shedding of ideologies, to blue distinctions between left and right, as befits a man ‘who can so easily blend his support for feminism with support for the death penalty.’

    Adam: Wow, okay.

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: Noted feminist Bill Clinton. So here we see this idea that in the absence of meaningful ideological distinction, in the absence of someone who’s fighting the rich, or fighting for the disenfranchised, we have this very 1990s PR, Pepsi marketing idea that Clinton is young, and they did this very, very, very, more successfully, even, soon after with Tony Blair, that Tony Blair was young and he was fresh.

    Nima: Yeah, but Tony Blair doesn’t play the saxophone on Arsenio.

    Adam: Yeah, and they were going to get rid of all the stodgy, old, labor vanguard, and they were going to embrace the free market, as Clinton did. And so here you have the first real kind of effort to use age discourse and anti-gerontocracy discourse to flatten the ideology at work and to sell or make sexy and cool something which was basically a very similar platform to the one that Dukakis ran on in 1988. Except for, of course, the death penalty being one of the major differences, for obvious racist reasons. But again, Dukakis ran as a neoliberal. He was in the new democratic coalition. He was a centrist. But he was seen as being older or stodgy. And this is, again, where you sort of get this, how do we take something that has no discernible ideological positioning within the framework of the left, and it’s selling you a lot of, again, Social Security, privatization, deficit reduction, a lot of right-wing ideas, 100,000 new police officers, whatever, what have you, how do we make it cool to the kids and for media? Well, he’s young, and it’s like, ‘Oh, well, young is good, and old is lame, and old sucks and young is good, right?’

    Nima: Yeah, Clinton was with it, man. So this use of young politicians versus the gerontocracy, we would see a lot more often starting in the 2010s. In April of the year 2010, syndicated Washington Post columnist George Will cautioned that the, quote, “welfare state” would encourage — what else Adam? — a quote-unquote “gerontocracy” — apparently because it, unacceptably, makes life relatively comfortable for senior citizens — while singing the praises of a young Republican senatorial candidate named Marco Rubio. Here’s what Will wrote in April of 2010 in The Post, quote:

    Asked how the nation might address the projected $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities, Rubio said we should consider two changes for people 10 or more years from retirement. One would raise the retirement age. The other would alter the calculation of benefits: Indexing them to inflation rather than wage increases would substantially reduce the system’s unfunded liabilities.

    End quote.

    Will would go on in this article to state this, quote:

    The 38-year-old Rubio’s responsible answer to a serious question gives the nation a glimpse of a rarity — a brave approach to the welfare state’s inevitable politics of gerontocracy.

    End quote.

    Adam: So the old people who retire on Social Security are going to live high on the hog and create a gerontocracy unless we raise —

    Nima: If we’re legislating to allow people to live better lives in retirement what are we doing? What kind of freedom is that?

    Adam: The worst.

    Nima: Now again, according to the Congressional Research Service, the average age of US senators at the beginning of 2021 was 64.3 years, the oldest in US history. As mentioned earlier, Biden became the oldest president in US history at the time of his inauguration; Nancy Pelosi shares the title of oldest person ever elected speaker of the House. The House and Senate leadership is chock full of septua- and octogenarians.

    Adam: But the age of policymakers, rather than their politics, has been awarded, as we will argue in this episode, far too much import, becoming a convenient scapegoat for their ineffectiveness, venality, and unpopularity of neoliberal policies of both parties. Gerontocracy really kind of took off in 2016 as a favorite media theme, Politico in February of 2016 wrote, “Is Donald Trump Too Old to Be President?” The piece is a somewhat shallow discussion of cognitive science which offers no blanket mental diagnosis for anyone based on age alone, and the optics of age and experience versus youthful energy, optimism, and vision for a political candidate. God forbid policy be one of the many factors. This, like many others, was also a proxy to discussing Bernie Sanders’ age. The idea being is that oh, they’re all just so old. Let’s get someone new in.

    Nima: It’s still just the status quo. We need new energy, but they’re not actually talking about policies.

    Adam: Right. Because again, it’s a form of anti-politics. It’s when you have a lot of, when you need to write about politics, but you don’t really want to write about politics you write about things like populism, or polarization, things that sort of avoid the key points of tension within politics. September of 2019, we got, “America, the Gerontocracy,” also in Politico, an excerpt from the peace read, quote:

    Hate crime is rising, the Arctic is burning, and the Dow is bobbing like a cork on an angry sea. If the nation seems intolerant, reckless and more than a little cranky, perhaps that’s because the American republic is showing its age. Somewhere along the way, a once-new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (not men and women; that came later) became a wheezy gerontocracy. Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old.

    The article compares the US to the USSR. Again, nothing about the policies of either one. Author Timothy Noah goes on to undermine his own thesis by saying:

    Whether Trump’s cognition is declining is a question muddied by a wealth of evidence that his speech and behavior were always at least somewhat erratic. (This is a man, recall, who more than 30 years ago confessed to giving his second-grade music teacher a black eye, which may not even be true.) A similar ambiguity surrounds Joe Biden, 76, whose well-documented history of verbal gaffes helped sink two previous presidential candidacies, one of them (similarly) more than 30 years ago.

    And so here we get this general idea that age is a proxy for observable cognitive decline. So I think it’s probably a good time to discuss visible cognitive decline on the show, I think it’s kind of beating around the bush to not discuss that, because oftentimes people say, ‘Well, clearly, Joe Biden isn’t quite as sharp as he used to be,’ objectively neutral statement, Donald Trump, definitely not as sharp as he used to be, if you watch old interviews with him on CNN, you can tell he’s not as sharp as he used to be. That seems true to me. But of course, you can be plenty sharp and be 76 years old, 79 years old, 80 years old, you can be in cognitive decline at the age of 57. Right?

    Nima: You can be super sharp at 36 and have terrible politics.

    Adam: Exactly. So there’s nothing, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with discussing people’s, again, we want to be very careful not to try to, we talked about this in Episode 10, about using the word crazy to describe Trump, like he sort of, you don’t want to get into the business of pathologizing or saying someone’s crazy because they have mental, Trump’s mental, and it’s like, no, he’s a fascist.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: Nor do you want to try to prescribe or diagnose from afar. That’s obviously a very dicey area. I think discussions of whether or not people are, politicians are as articulate or able to remember, you know, as much as they used to, or they’re able to give a speech, which is like 80 percent of what being President is is giving speeches. I think that’s all fair game. I just think that’s a conversation that has very little to do with age as such, because then it becomes a kind of dislike an eighth grade social studies teacher, but that is a definition of a stereotype that is stereotyping someone based on something as a proxy for some other criticism, as a way of prejudice, and the stuff around Trump’s cognitive issues and age, we’re always a fourth- or fifth-rate concern for the fact that he was a fascist, and he had fascist tendencies and a fascist racist, violent following. And so in many ways, well, what do you want? You know, you want them to be sharper, younger, more enthusiastic and charming fascist?

    Nima: Yeah, like that’s Ron DeSantis. You don’t want him either.

    Adam: Yeah, it’s the whole like, you know, ‘The food at this restaurant is so horrible, and it’s such small portions,’ like what exactly is the criticism here?

    Nima: Well, right. And so with this, you see consistent anti-politics articles, like from the New Statesman on October 28, 2020 by Nick Burns this article, “Can you be too old to be president? How gerontocracy rules in the age of decline.” You have this from New York Magazine’s Intelligencer March 15, 2021 by Eve Peyser, the article, “Gerontocracy Is Hurting Democracy,” in which she writes, quote, “Contemporary gerontocracy, it appears, is a distinctly American problem,” writes Peyser. She goes on to quote, Kevin Munger, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University who, she writes, quote, “is currently writing a book about generational conflict.” Munger says, quote:

    If you look at other countries, they’re not similarly controlled by older politicians. I think that the explanation here is the two-party system. [A multiparty system gets] young people involved in politics, voting, organizing, running things, organizational politics, [which] means that they are able to start accumulating institutional power.

    End quote.

    Peyser then helpfully notes, quote, “The two parties of the United States, on the other hand, are staunchly controlled by older generations,” adding, “Before things get better, they will get worse” and quotes Munger again: “We have not yet reached the peak of boomer culture. We’re going to see the highest number of people turning 65 in U.S. history in 2023. The long-run perspective is good. The long run is actually 20, 30 years. Generational replacement will happen.” End quote.

    Adam: Well, no shit.

    Nima: Peyser sums up this view this way, quote, “In other words, things will change, but only after the baby-boomer generation literally dies.” End quote.

    Adam: Yeah, there’s an arrow of time, right? There’s entropy. This is not a meaningful state, old people will get old and die. Young people will get older. I’m not sure how that’s a very meaningful analysis.

    Nima: But it’s also saying that salvation for our society, Adam, is not only around the corner, but relies on old people dying, which, okay, if we’re talking about shitty old politicians can kind of be like a tongue in cheek solid line at a party, but if you’re actually talking about wishing mass death, and I know, I’m not trying to be too fucking serious about like a tongue in cheek quote, but if you’re talking about the effects of ageism, of constantly talking about how the older generations are fucking this all up, and we need more youth, we need more people to die, right? Especially right at the time of a pandemic that obviously affects older people far more than younger people, there’s a stereotype that then gets embedded, there’s a notion of expendability that becomes entrenched in our society that I think winds up leading to really shitty outcomes.

    Adam: It’s also a bit of a siren song. Even if you accept the logic that the world would be better if all the old people died off like saying, okay, wait till the Boomers die in 10, 15, 20 years, it’s not a very empowering political action.

    Nima: Because then your young buck who’s running for office now is going to be 65 then.

    Adam: Yeah, there’s a line in the movie XXX with Vin Diesel, where he’s like, talking to some, I can’t believe I remember this, it was like 20 years ago, he says, ‘What are you doing to take down this bad guy?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we’ve been staking out his place for a few months.’ He’s like, ‘What do you wait until he dies of old age?’ You’re supposed to just wait around until the bad old people die? I mean, it’s not again, it’s not a very empowering policy prescription. And so we have The Guardian, May 2022, Cas Mudde, who we’ve criticized on the show before for his anti-politics, “The Democratic party needs new, younger leadership before it’s too late.” US News & World Report, August 2022, David Gergen, the sort of high priest of centrist politics, former Clinton official, writes hagiographies to John McCain every five minutes, “America’s Greatest Hope: Young Leaders.” And so here you have middlebrow populist experts, Republican extreme centrist like David Gergen. And then to really top it off, you have Elon Musk, this is a Business Insider headline, quote, “Elon Musk says the US has ‘very, very ancient leadership,’ believes there’s ‘a serious issue with gerontocracy’ in many countries.” In an interview with Axel Springer, Musk said, quote:

    The founders of the USA put minimum ages for a local office. But they did not put maximum ages because they did not expect that people will be living so long. They should have. Because for a democracy to function, the leaders must be reasonably in touch with the bulk of the population. And if you’re too young or too old, you can’t say that you will be attached.

    Musk added that he’d like to see political leaders “be ideally within 10 or at least, 20 years of the average age of the population.” And so here you have the richest human in the world, sometimes it fluctuates between him and Bezos, but I think as of now he’s the richest human in the world, worth over $260 billion, is telling us that the problem — and by the way, funds and supports plenty of Trumper politicians, right-wing politicians, is telling us the problem is that the leaders are too old and I got to think that if a particular line of argument is being echoed by the richest person in the world, and is being echoed by centrist Republicans, Democrats —

    Nima: It might be something different than simply age.

    Adam: I’m not sure how useful this analysis really is because the follow up question to, you know, if I say oh, we need to replace all these old leaders with young leaders, and you know, that sort of sounds superficially appealing, that would be an applause line at any given dinner. But then the logical question is like, okay, well, what youth?

    Nima: Children are the future.

    Adam: and the what youth thing is the $64,000 question, and then you say, oh, well, then you get into the issue of ideology of racial representation of class representation. All the other stuff that we argue in this episode is far more important, but doesn’t get nearly as much discourse and as much coverage because generations discourse, again, like a lot of anti-politics, can kind of mean whatever you want it to mean. And so if we’re going to talk about representation, I think this is what I would say to anyone who says we need to have quotas in Congress or in leadership of youth, I’d say okay, great, but we have to partner those with a complete one to one representation of class status.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: People in Congress have to make the median average family salary of $80,000 a year in this country, for a family. They can’t be more than 10 to 20 percent, to use Musk as proxy, over that.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: X percent, 99 percent of members of Congress have to make under $150,000 a year, which is what 99 percent of people in this country make. 51 percent of members of Congress are millionaires. That’s compared to 7.2 percent of the adult population in the United States. If you include children, that’s 5.3 million. So millionaires are way overrepresented. Obviously, men are very overrepresented in Congress. 73 percent of Congress is men compared to 50 percent of the general population are men, of course. So those would be far more interesting quotas.

    Nima: Quotas to institute. Yeah.

    Adam: Then age, which wouldn’t really get you anywhere because as we’ve learned from a recent cohort of self-made millionaires running for Congress under the age of 50, you would just get a bunch of 45-year-old multimillionaires or billionaires, right? Wou would get a bunch of Pritzker’s running, who was relatively young. So I’m not really sure where that gets you or how that’s really a meaningful mode of criticism, because the assumption is that youth is a proxy for more progressive or liberal values. But that’s not really true. It is true that those in Congress who are young have a tendency to vote more liberally, not by a very significant margin, and it’s not really a metric for how you just decide who you sort of choose to be the next cohort of leadership. Because again, it sort of sounds like, you know, my vegetables are dying and either replace them with new vegetables, right? Like my, my chair is old in either place, but people love new shit, they hate old shit, shirt, socks, it’s old.

    Nima: It’s coupling congressional leadership with consumerism, we need upgrades, and that it is really just about having something new and shiny as opposed to something that maybe, you know, works for your interest, not just seems to operate better on its gears.

    Adam: And, fine, I’ll concede you want new things, that’s fine, but without saying what the new thing is, it’s extremely suspect.

    Nima: Or what it’s supposed to do.

    Adam: Which is something we see over and over again. And increasingly, we’ve seen it be a bit of a distraction or a favorite media trope. I wrote about this for the Substack explaining Biden’s lack of popularity as poll numbers have since ticked up a little bit since I wrote this. But Biden in July of this year, there was a torrent of articles about Biden’s age being the reason why he’s bleeding the youth vote and support in general. Michelle Goldberg wrote this article, “Joe Biden Is Too Old to Be President Again.” And when she hand wrings about Biden’s age showing 64 percent of Democrats think Biden shouldn’t run again due to his age, Goldberg insists that he should step down and be a one term president because he’s old, but buried in all these articles about how voters don’t like him because he’s old is the fact that the number one reason why young voters give to why they don’t want Biden, by a wide margin, is job performance and ideology.

    Nima: Right.

    Adam: Which is far more than age by about 20 percentage points. 41 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds cited job performance as the, quote, “most important reason,” they prefer a different 2024 nominee. 20 percent chose “not progressive enough” and only 14 percent cited age. So here we have a difference of 27 percentage points citing ideology as the reason but age became the center of so many different articles when this poll came out saying Biden is too old, The New York Times saying Biden is too old, we need replacement. Michelle Goldberg phrased it as Biden is too old, we need to replace him. And it’s like, the age factor becomes a way of obscuring the substance of why so many people feel like his presidency has let them down, and it’s not because he’s some doddering old fool out of touch with the youth. Now, you could make an argument that if you did have a Pete Buttigieg type guy, he could better sell the bullshit austerity politics and sell the tough on crime, more police stuff that have turned off young voters, which is probably true, but the fundamental substance wouldn’t really change much, and I think that’s, in case we haven’t beat it on your head by this point, that’s kind of the crux of our argument, which is that it’s not clear who this kind of gerontocracy discourse really serves without specifying the ideological parameters of who the so-called youthful replacements are going to be, and without accounting for other vectors of oppression like racism, class, white supremacy, anti-trans laws, which are now there’s, you know, hundreds in every state. I mean, those vectors of oppression seem far more interesting to me than this kind of vague generational discourse, which, again, can maybe give someone a little bit of a victim status by virtue of being 25. But I’m not really sure how meaningful that is.

    Nima: To talk about this more, we’re going to be joined by Winslow Erik Wright, an author and activist, whose writing covers disability rights, the struggle for authenticity under capitalism, and participatory democracy. Winslow will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.

    [Music]

    Nima: We are joined now by Winslow Erik Wright. Winslow, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Thank you, Nima, and thank you, Adam, for having me.

    Adam: Thank you. So I want to begin by kind of talking about, specifically you wrote an article that touched on many of the themes we’ve discussed, specifically in the context of Elon Musk doing this gerontocracy discourse, which I thought was a sort of great way of teasing out some of the problems and limitations of this discourse. Because clearly, if the richest person in the world is trafficking in this criticism, it can’t be that useful of a power analysis from our perspective. So I want to kind of start off the discussion by asking you what kind of, for want of a better term, sort of triggered or sparked this article out of you? Again, I know it’s a topic that a lot of people will take very personally, they have kind of a visceral response to it, so I want to know what compelled you to write about it, and especially how it’s kind of become more and more popular of late, as we also note at the top of the show, for very obvious reasons, we have a lot of old people in charge. So that it is sort of understandable to an extent, but talk about what made you want to write about it, and what are the big picture problems you see with this discourse?

    Winslow Erik Wright: I think the thing that started me getting interested in it is that, you know, I see a lot of young people very angry today, and that’s because we’re mired in a series of endless political, economic and ecological crises, and the people in power are not being responsive to our concerns or our interests, and that legitimate anger I’ve seen it simmer into resentment and often boil into outright vitriol toward older people. I’ve seen it online, certainly, and I’ve also seen it in my personal life, and it’s not just ‘Okay, Boomer’ kind of stuff kind of cheeky, it can get really, really nasty. One prominent example that I’ve seen both online and offline, is the idea that older people dying from COVID-19 is actually a good thing. That large numbers of older people dying is necessary for society to move forward and COVID-19 is doing that work for us.

    Adam: Yeah.

    Winslow Erik Wright: So when I started to really notice that sentiment more and more often, and even, you know, not just on the right or in the center, I’ve seen it on the left as well, and as I you know, sort of connected the dots with that, I realized that that’s something that I wanted to write about, that I wanted to speak out about, because it’s really important.

    Adam: Because if you associate age with frailty or injury or disability, it’s not a huge leap to sort of see that ageism can very well be a mode of ableism and it’s a proxy for these people are just kind of gross and we want them out of the way.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah.

    Adam: And then when that takes on a kind of faux-leftist energy, it kind of has the veneer of something subversive, when in reality, again, as we’ve tried to argue at the beginning, it’s actually a quite conservative argument, insofar that it really does obscure issues.

    Nima: Well, yeah. I mean, I think it comes down to this question of ableism, ageism as a proxy for maybe avoiding questions of ideology. So, you know, one of the things we’ve been talking about is that ageism winds up being, I think, in political discourse, less of this kind of pat, generational conflict story, right, that we’ve heard endlessly — we’ve had a show about generations and other kinds of marketing ploys more than anything else — there has long been young versus old, old versus young discourse dating back to ancient Greece, ancient China, everything right? But all of this winds up being kind of useless, right? It doesn’t account for class, it doesn’t account for racism, for oppression for anti-LGBTQ currents, other modes of suppressing people’s voices, and once one counts for that, perhaps it can be useful to talk about ageism as part of that, but this winds up being sort of pat, it’s just like vague claims about, as you said, ‘Okay, Boomer,’ right, Boomer oppression without really qualifying, which Boomers maybe we’re talking about or the real power analysis here. So Winslow, I’d love if you could just discuss a bit, how ageism, and this idea of gerontocracy, winds up being a really good way to flatten questions of power by sort of shoving it into this generational discourse, but avoiding the real issues that are at stake.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah. So what started me on this issue was just seeing some of the vitriol directed at older people that, you know, generations aren’t a monolith and there are lots of lovely Boomers, and lovely older people, and it just was really indiscriminate and I think that’s what started me on it but I really got a lot deeper into it when I was researching the article and I came across Elon Musk’s take on it, and Elon Musk, not only the richest person in the world, but someone who invades against the woke mind virus being a threat to human civilization. And his take in his interview in Business Insider, which, you know, he talked about a lot of things, but he was basically saying that people don’t change their minds, they just die, and that older people are suffocating our society, they’re holding back progress, and that the answer to that is to prohibit them from holding office. I think the limit that he gave was seventy years old, and that totally crystallized what was going on for me, because as you pointed out, Musk is the richest person in the world, he is the very definition of the establishment, and I think the framing of our problems as stemming from gerontocracy, and not something like plutocracy or patriarchy or white supremacy serves three main functions, and I think they’re connected. And the first is that, as you say it misdirects from those things, it takes attention away from them. The real sources of our problem are the structures of capitalism, their neoliberal ideology, there’s racism, sexism, and the role of the ultra-rich in all of this. So it misdirects away from that, but then once that anger is taken away, it’s undirected anger, and then I feel like people like Musk and people like Peter Thiel, who has similarly criticized the gerontocracy, I feel like that they can then harness that undirected anger to make themselves seem like outsiders.

    Adam: To support Blake Masters, the guy who’s running for Congress, who actually looks just like a school shooter, but yeah, who is like, what, 40 something?

    Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters speaks in Chandler, Ariz. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images file)

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah, I think they take that, and they harness it for their own purposes and they’re the consummate insiders, and they’re using it to draw a distinction between themselves and the people, other people in power, and there’s really not much difference there.

    Adam: Right.

    Nima: Right.

    Winslow Erik Wright: The final thing that I think is connected is that it divides people and I think there is something to be said for, you know, the generations being pitted against each other. I think that’s a lot of what’s happening and it obscures the fact that I as a millennial share a lot of interests with another Boomer who’s situated similarly economically, but when you frame it as gerontocracy, or you know, our leadership is too old, and there is a kernel of truth that, but when you really get into the stigma and the hatred that’s attached with those ideas, that separates me from the other people I might unite with to undertake the collective action that’s necessary to actually challenge the problems we’re facing.

    Adam: Yeah, because one of the things that bothers me so much about it, because I’ve had this arguing with people a lot on social media, is they’ll say, ‘Well, older people have a tendency to be richer.’ Now, of course, there’s a really good New York Times article about why that is, because poor people die younger. So by definition, right? But of course, a lot of people who live in poverty are old, as well.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah.

    Adam: So like, you’re kind of railing against this kind of vague cohort, where if you eliminate the standard deviation, I’m sure it’s not much different, and part of me is like, come on, are you really going to act like we don’t live in a society that absolutely obsesses over, fetishizes, gives credence to and loves young people over old people? I mean, especially when it’s gendered, right? I mean, you can’t go five seconds without some Hollywood star becoming irrelevant or some professional person being told to go out to pasture because they’re too old, like our society, in many, many ways, hates old people, and it strikes me as a little daft, to be quite honest, but I think a lot of it is is fairly moderately wealthy, middle class white people who want like a vector of oppression, and they latch on to not being old is like their form of oppression, which strikes me as kind of tedious because they need an oppressive identity, and it’s like, come on, I mean, really? That’s maybe a little unfair, but I do think that’s a part of it, and it strikes me as something, you know, you sort of it’s such a weird concept to live in, eat and breathe oxygen in this world, especially in the United States, and not see the sort of systemic contempt our society has for old people. Even if, again, people who are old disproportionately are empowered, disproportionately may have more money, because everyone was poor died off, that strikes me as someone who doesn’t really live in the world that I live in, because it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere you see it, you know what I mean? There’s the lame olds, they suck, they’re irrelevant, they told war stories and people just hate old people in general. It’s similar to how our society hates fat people or hates anyone who wasn’t deemed attractive.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah, I think that’s a good point first of all, that poor people die younger. I think the other factor with both power and wealth, like financial capital and social capital, they both accumulate over time. That’s just how they work. It takes money to make money and compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. So I think that’s true with not just wealth, but power as well. And it’s not that age doesn’t generate those things themselves. There are no intrinsic benefits to growing older. What you’re going to get is more health conditions to deal with and then as you point out, socially, it’s not perceived positively. What age can do for you is if you have been born into wealth or have been lucky enough to acquire it, it can grow that wealth over time. So I think, you know, wealth obviously has intrinsic benefits, you can buy stuff with it, you can control people with it, race doesn’t have any intrinsic benefits, but you’re more likely as a white person, for example, to be born into a positive economic circumstance, and you’re more likely, if you’re not born into a positive one, you’re more likely to be able to get into one. Age is, I think, has none of that, but it can magnify those differences.

    Nima: Yeah, you know, one of the things that I keep thinking about as we’re talking is the common arguments we hear, and I think, you know, as you pointed out, there are some on the right, some on the left, some in the, what make nominally be called the center, I don’t know if there’s a center but, you know, center as an ideology, not a not a middle of the road notion of kind of playing both sides, but like, there are these common things, right? So we hear that our political class is too old, they’re out of touch, they don’t have to live with the consequences of their policies or their votes, right? So therefore, climate chaos is not so much a concern. So these are common things we hear. But at the same time, this seems to totally ignore that there are plenty of shitty young people, right? There are so many young people who vote for terrible people, who have bad views of the world based on the, you know, communities they grew up in, the narratives that are flowing through our media and our pop culture. This is rampant. So where do you think this divide happens? Are politicians too old at this point, kind of across the board and are not taking urgent issues seriously? Or is this again, just sort of, as you said, misdirection away from what we’re really talking about, which winds up being about class, about racism, about wealth, inequalities, and about ideology as a whole?

    Winslow Erik Wright: Well, I think it’s a fact that our leadership is disproportionately old, and I think that’s the kernel of truth in the propaganda of the idea that we live in a gerontocracy. I agree that it skewers more than it elucidates, for sure. And I think the answers that people are coming up with are the wrong answers. I see a lot of talk about age limits. It’s not just Elon Musk, there was a YouGov poll that found that 58 percent of people supported an age limit and the majority was between 60 and 70. So a lot of people are keen on basically disenfranchising older people, and that’s not going to solve any of our problems. I think the only way that we can solve these problems is by finding like-minded people who are in all generations, and trying to convince them of the best way to go about things, and I think, again, this logic of gerontocracy, it really does, I think it makes it very hard for older people to be open to new ideas, it kind of buttresses the basis of the criticism in the first place.

    Adam: Right.

    Winslow Erik Wright: The idea is that older people are unable to adapt to new ideas. But when you attack people, and especially aspects of their identity that they can’t change, they will shut down and they won’t be willing to listen to you. So I think it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

    Adam: So I want to address a common retort. Obviously, people will point to Senator Feinstein of California who’s showing obvious cognitive decline. I think that’s well documented, not really in debate, we’re not necessarily obviously going to prescribe a medical condition from afar, because I know that can get dicey. We’ve talked about that before. But it is true that there are certain politicians who clearly show mental decline. Now, of course, that can happen at 50 or 60 or 100, right? It isn’t necessarily just about age, which is I think, because people say, ‘Oh, we have to put age limits on because look at Senator so and so who’s sunsetting,’ and it’s like, well, then the issue is judging people on an individual basis based on their manifest ability to do their job, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do whatever it happens to be, especially when you’re dealing in a situation where you’ve essentially elected someone to make a decision, but their staffers are making a decision that gets, you know, from a democratic perspective, that gets a little dicey. I want to address that. Also, there’s a common, the most common retort I hear is, ‘Well, one reason we haven’t moved on climate change is because all these old people aren’t going to be around anymore,’ which of course, has little to do, if you actually look at who supports climate legislation, and you account for things like ideology, there is no real age correlation at all. There’s a thousand 32 year old Trump clones in Congress now who do think it’s a communist plot, climate change. You obviously have, as we discussed, for every Ocasio-Cortez, there’s 10 different psychotic Pete Buttigieg climbers who want to be the next President Obama, who have all kinds of horrible neoliberal capitalist blah, blah, blah, ideology.

    Nima: The US Capitol wasn’t stormed for the early bird special.

    Adam: Right, and both on the right and the center, right? And so, again, I think this idea that if we just get rid of the olds our problems will get easier to solve, I think aside from being vaguely genocidal, it strikes me as really kind of missing the point of what kind of people gravitate towards what kind of policy positions and why. And anyone who spent 10 minutes in Washington DC has met so many of these Georgetown grad psychos, who go work for Heritage and shit, like, they’re there. That’s got nothing to do with age, it has to do with power and ideology, and how many different leadership academies sponsored by Boeing and Meta are pumping out these kinds of dead-eyed strivers. I actually see that as being more dangerous, because they’re more slick, they’re more sophisticated, they’re more able to kind of gesture towards empathy and fake a kind of hip understanding of the current conditions. But address that issue, address the climate change issue, because this comes up a lot, I want to make sure that we’re trying to really talk about the strongest argument of those who think this is really a discrete thing.

    Winslow Erik Wright: First, I will talk about some of the research that I came across when I was writing my article. And that’s, first of all, Pew Research did a survey on this and they found that I believe 56 or 57 percent of boomers and people older than them, thought climate change should be a top priority in order to secure the future of humanity, basically. So that’s the majority and there is a gap between, you know, younger people are more concerned about it. That’s true. But older people have been coming around at about the same pace that younger people have. They’ve been adjusting their views in light of the changing circumstances which runs contrary to the whole, ‘older people can adapt,’ line of argument.

    Adam: Right.

    Nima: Old dogs.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah. So that was actually the study that looked at changing climate opinions or, you know, opinions about climate change over time. That was in the Journal of Nature, and it found no significant differences between the generations on if they’re coming around to seeing climate change as a problem. So, again, it goes back to there are people in every generation that we can bring over to our side and the best way to do that is in a considerate way and not in a way that alienates them. Aside from the fact that even a majority of Baby Boomers and older people already support addressing climate change vigorously, there’s more ground to be won there and the idea that they’re just fossils who aren’t capable of changing with the times, it just seeds that ground.

    Nima: Yeah. One thing that I want to touch on is how a lot of the people who have this kind of gerontocracy argument, right, that view of our politics, are a lot of the same people who, when there’s like progressive young blood injected into our leadership, The Squad, right, like as this kind of Billboard version of that, those same people that, you know, rail against the gerontocracy also aren’t thrilled with young progressives, right? Or, yeah, I mean, let alone actually left activists or organizers, right? And so what does the argument really do? What is underneath all of the oh, this is my position on why politics is ineffective, fraught, shitty? What do you think is actually under that? Because clearly, the people making that argument, or at least a large proportion, I would argue, are also not really that interested in what a younger generation might have to offer unless that younger generation is just a younger version of what the already old power structure is doing.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s basically that older people are, in this case, a scapegoat, and I think it’s been weaponized most often by the people who don’t have substantial differences from the people who are already in power, like they’re already close to power, and this is the way that they distinguish themselves from the other people in power. Elon Musk and the Democratic operative, the Neo liberal democratic operative that you talked about in your article, Adam, you know, they basically share everything with people in power, they’re just slightly outside of it, and this is their way, I think, to get closer to the center.

    Adam: Yeah, because the whole thing has, you know, it’s a Pepsi marketing feel to it. It’s like older, lame, younger, good. It’s like, yeah, I don’t know, maybe a little bit, but how useful is that? And one thing, one thing we know too is, of course, that the reason why so many, you know, the Pelosi said the Biden’s have been around forever is because they have the right ideology, and those with the wrong ideology are filtered out. So in that sense, gerontocracy is a symptom of a disease not a disease itself.

    Nima: Right. Mike Gravel it was not reelected and reelected and reelected and reelected.

    Adam: Right, exactly. You’re more likely to get attacked by APEC, you’re more likely to be attacked by oil interests, you’re more likely to sort of say the wrong thing and the media pile on top of you. You know, I mean, how many different progressive firebrands have kind of come and gone or been prime aired every 10 minutes, so naturally, if you just let us go right down the middle and say the right things and kiss up to the right people, you’re just going to be around forever.

    Nima: Right. You’ll have the job longer, you’ll grow old in that job.

    Adam: I’ve watched enough reality TV to know, that’s how you stick around competition shows, you sort of just lay low.

    Nima: Well, to that point, Winslow, what do you think, is the utility of, you know, thinking about why the old guard lingers on, and why young blood is said to be needed to change things, when the reason there are people in these jobs for such a long time is because they don’t upset the power structure, and it is actually harder to challenge that and stick around, which may also account for this kind of young, old dynamic in politics.

    Winslow Erik Wright: I mean, I think that’s exactly right. I think you’ve pretty much said it that, you know, if you’re amenable to how the system works now, you’re more likely to keep functioning in it, and the people who don’t, they are weeded out. And I think it’s also really hard, I mean, Congress, their reelection rate is really high. It’s just hard to unseat someone these days and there aren’t a lot of competitive districts. So I think the parties have a huge say in, you know, the party hierarchies get to decide who’s going to be running in those districts, even the ones that, you know, a younger person, a progressive might be able to take. I think the examples of, you know, younger progressive people basically seizing power, they’ve been going against the party hierarchy, like AOC. I don’t think they wanted her to run them. And she, I mean, she unseated a really senior figure in the party. I don’t think that’s, that’s probably not a generalizable strategy. I mean, it should definitely be attempted more. But that kind of approach, it’s not going to change the overall makeup of our leadership, and I think that the people who are arguing about gerontocracy, labeling our problems stemming from gerontocracy, and not something else that, you know, someone like AOC might draw attention to, they know that they’re holding all the keys and all the doors.

    Nima: Right. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to and you, this is what you write about in your excellent piece in Salon, which is that saying that this is about gerontocracy is actually skirting the real issues, right? It’s almost like well, yes, older people don’t serve, say broader interests or don’t reflect the desires or political leanings maybe sometimes of the majority of the population but it’s not simply because they are old, period, stop. The issue is that it is blamed on age as opposed to age as being just one of the factors that allows people with shitty ideologies to linger on for longer in positions of power. So really, what we’re talking about is we’re talking about power, we’re talking, as you put it, about wealth, and that age is this like code word, to just avoid talking about the real issues, which again, come down to power, which as you pointed out, power can be shifted, change conceded, due to more vigorous organizing.

    Winslow Erik Wright: In my research, I found advocates of the gerontocracy theory, they’re very concerned about, you know, they’re purportedly very concerned about representativeness of government, responsiveness and things like that. But they’re not talking about how wealthy congress people are, for example, the 116th Congress, I believe, a majority of them are millionaires, and the median wealth of a congressperson is over a million dollars, and with race, there are three Black Senators right now serving and the Black population in the country is about 13 and a half percent. So if people are actually concerned about representativeness of government and responsiveness —

    Adam: Oh, they don’t, they don’t mean that. No, they mean, this other superficial thing.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Not at all.

    Adam: Yeah. No. If you tried to have an income, representative income distribution, that would not work.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Yeah. I mean, I was going to say, why are they not talking about racial quotas, gender quotas, wealth and income cap? If they’re talking about age limits, why not cap wealth?

    Adam: Yeah, prior to 2018, the Saudi Parliament had a higher female representation than the US Congress did because they’re required by law to have 20 percent representation. Of course, this is parliament, so it has no actual power. But nevertheless, quite embarrassing.

    Women in Saudi Parliament. (Via Arab News)

    Nima: Yeah, that’s what quotas get you. But before we let you go Winslow, please do let us and our listeners know what you’re up to next, you know, you do really, really excellent political commentary. Where can people find your writing and what maybe is on tap coming down the pike that we can look out for?

    Winslow Erik Wright: Well, just pretty much just starting out, you know, I’ve been doing some activism before this, but I’m just now getting into writing and I’ve written a couple of articles for Salon. I wrote the article about gerontocracy and I just wrote an article again about Elon Musk because, you know, he’s at the center of everything these days, and he’s just a fantastic foil for all these crucial issues, and I was writing about disposability and automation. He has a new robot coming out. I think he’ll unveil it September 30, Optimus, and it’s a humanoid robot, and he basically, I mean, it may well be overhyped, you know, given his track record, it probably is, but his intention is to render workers obsolete, so he doesn’t have to deal with their needs, and this is a Bezos as well, this isn’t just, and it’s, I mean, it’s capitalism as well, but Bezos and Musk are spearheading this effort, and, you know, they don’t want to have to deal with workers having to go to the bathroom or unionize, and so I think this is part of their push to just get rid of that, just transcend workers altogether. So that’s my most recent article and I’m looking to branch out more. I’ve got some ideas rolling around and I’ll be pitching them.

    Nima: Well, awesome. We will definitely look out for that. Urge everyone to check out the excellent piece that we’ve been talking about is called, “No, Elon Musk, America isn’t a ‘gerontocracy’: The real issue is massive wealth inequality,” which came out this past June in Salon. We have been speaking with Winslow Erik Wright, an author and activist, whose writing covers disability rights, the struggle for authenticity under capitalism, and participatory democracy. Winslow, thank you so much, again, for joining us today on Citations Needed.

    Winslow Erik Wright: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

    [Music]

    Adam: Yeah, I think the idea that, one thing we didn’t harp on too much in the intro, but now we’ve talked about the interview, which I do want to kind of come back to is this idea that you start from a position of an organizer, whatever it happens to be, let’s say I’m trying to unionize an Amazon packing center or a tenant’s union or some kind of mutual aid program to help give harm reduction supplies to substance users in Nashville, Tennessee, whatever it is, whatever you organize, no one who does those things, who has to be, who’s in the business of converting souls, of convincing people to join a project, none of those people would ever really engage in that context in generations discourse. You wouldn’t say, ‘Everyone joined my Starbucks union, except for that old fart down there. He’s kind of a fucking loser.’ It’s not a very useful way of creating politics, right?

    Nima: And in fact, older activists make up a base of progressive support for a lot of unions and progressive movements, sure.

    Adam: Of course, are they disproportionately conservative? Yeah, disproportionately white people are conservative, it doesn’t mean you tell them all the fuck off, right? People aren’t vague, statistical cohorts. They’re people, they’re individuals. That’s the whole point of why you shouldn’t go around just making assumptions about people and I think there is a downside to constantly talking in this Pepsi marketing way about politics, where I do think it’s sort of, the implication is always that, wouldn’t it be better if these old people went away? When I really think what we’re talking about most of the time is, wouldn’t it be better if these people with really shitty politics who’ve been in charge since before I was born, wouldn’t they go away? But not be replaced by someone with equally shitty politics who’s just very charismatic and charming.

    Nima: Well, sure. And so often, the pundits who pontificate about, ‘Is America gerontocracy?’ ‘Why are we still governed by Baby Boomers and the remarkably old?’ Are the same writers and commentators who then hate younger Democratic politicians. Largely, I’d say Democratic because ideologically that’s what they’re usually opposed to, folks like AOC, right, who like aren’t even like all the way left, but they symbolize this thing of youthful exuberance and energy and breaking the status quo. Yet, the writers that are now hand wringing about gerontocracy, are the same ones who are like, ‘They’re inexperienced. The youngs don’t have the right kind of gravitas to govern in the right way. Their ideas are all pie in the sky. They’re millennials who have no sense of work ethic.’ Yada, yada, yada, right? It’s the same kind of thing. So really, all they want is younger old people. They want the same politics to happen just with a younger face.

    Adam: Yeah. Because there’s a similar form of, you know, it’s not the same but there’s a kind of ageism when people do the whole head patting look at these idealistic Bernie voters who don’t know how the real world, it’s a similar form of stereotyping. It’s obviously different because of the nature of how our society operates.

    Nima: But apparently, the real world works for people who are like 47 and center right, right? That’s the thing.

    Adam: All those people should just be in charge.

    Nima: The old people don’t know how the world works anymore because they’re over the hill and the young people don’t know how the world works because they haven’t lived long enough. So now it’s like 47 and white and conservative. They know how the world works.

    Adam: The old people are lame-olds, and the young people are a bunch of fucking pie-in-the-sky dipshits and people who are exactly my age should be in charge.

    Nima: Yeah. So I think that that kind of sums it up the idea that this is really age as a proxy for ideology is this current throughout everything we’ve been talking about, and I think that once you start to see it like that, you’re like, oh, oh, they’re not actually talking about old people, they’re using that as a way to like shit on anyone who has a different viewpoint, but they are kind of hinting that they want something different, but you know what, these writers don’t want anything different.

    But that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all so much for listening. We are thrilled, as we said last week, to be back for our sixth season of Citations Needed. Plenty more to come. Until then of course, you can always follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, buy some merch at Bonfire.com, search for Citations Needed, and of course, you can always become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated. And as always, a very special shout out goes to our critic level supporters on Patreon. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Thank you for listening to Citations Needed. Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Morgan McAslan. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.

    [Music]


    This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, September 14, 2022.

    Transcription by Morgan McAslan.

  • Episode 166: The Convenient Conventional Wisdom of “Education as Great Equalizer” Appeals

    Citations Needed | September 14, 2022 | Transcript

    Edward James Olmos as teacher Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver (1988).

    [Music]

    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Welcome to season six of Citations Needed. Adam, we’ve been doing this since 2017. We are now back for our sixth season of Citations Needed. We cannot thank you all enough for listening to the show, for supporting the show. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and if you have not already, please do consider supporting the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100 percent listener funded, we don’t run any commercials, we don’t have any corporate funding, we keep this completely independent and the way we do that is because of the support we get from listeners like you.

    Adam: Yeah, so if you listen and you like it, please consider subscribing to our Patreon. It really does help keep the show sustainable and the episodes themselves free.

    Nima: Education “is a great equalizer of conditions of men,” stated school reformer Horace Mann in 1848. “Math is the great equalizer,” preached Edward James Olmos’ character in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. “The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” announced President Barack Obama during his 2010 State of the Union.

    Adam: This message is everywhere, pervading political speeches, Oscar-bait films, think-tank screeds, and everything in between. The key to economic upward mobility, we’re endlessly told, is education — a societal building block that is, or at least should be, accessible to every child, no matter their race, gender, or income level. It’s a seductive, seemingly unassailable conceit, suggesting that we live in a meritocracy where second chances and generational wealth-building are possible, even probable, with these simple tools.

    Nima: But is there any truth to this idea? There’s a growing body of evidence showing that education level does not, in fact, necessarily translate to higher wages. Which raises the questions: Why has the idea that education is the ultimate anti-poverty tool persisted this long? Whose interests are served in its continuation? And who, in turn, pays the price for this myth?

    Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll detail and debunk the widespread conventional wisdom that education is the rising tide that lifts all boats, looking at the ways it reinforces themes of individualism and personal responsibility; obscures systemic issues like racism and worker exploitation in the labor market; and ultimately keeps people entrenched in, rather than liberating them from, poverty and low-wage work.

    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Cristina Viviana Groeger, a historian of education and work in the modern United States. An Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lake Forest College, she is the author of the book The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, published by Harvard University Press in 2021.

    [Begin Clip]

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: So if employers, you know, if there’s a skill shortage, it’s not that they’re not paying their workers enough to make those jobs attractive, it’s that there’s not enough workers who have those skills, and the idea that individuals are to blame for their own poverty, this is an idea that dates back a very long time.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: This is a spiritual sequel to Episode One. To paraphrase George Lucas, it rhymes. We did our very first episode, of course, on the meritocratic mythology surrounding charter schools, this is a spiritual sequel to it, as we are prone to say. One qualifier, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that we’re anti-education right up front. Peter, my son, if you’re listening to this 10 years from now, you will be about 12 years old, don’t take this to mean you shouldn’t go to college, you need to go to college. This is a classic example of something we talk about a lot on the show, which is kind of macro-tizing the micro, which is something that it’s kind of like the sort of Theory of Everything tries to have the sort of laws of Newtonian physics break down when you get to large bodies, or I guess, small bodies as well, on an individual basis. Education can and oftentimes is a mechanism of social mobility. But as a societal approach, and this is why it’s so intuitively attractive, right, Nima? There’s not really much evidence that it is, and in fact, as we will explain, in many ways it reinforces and reproduces many of the inequities that it supposedly is meant to curtail or stop.

    Nima: Yeah, it also puts the onus on, oftentimes, teachers to be heroes, to be martyrs in the service of education because they are seen as this great hope to lift their students say out of poverty, out of dangerous family situations, the kind of hero trope of the teacher, which we’re going to get into, and what that does is also create dangerous narratives about who is responsible for bettering society, right? Are we responsible for each other? What systems do we have in place? And do we actually need heroes to rely on as we’re told consistently through our media and our pop culture to be our savior rather than taking care of each other.

    Now, the notion that education is an anti-poverty tool originated among circles of well-meaning, but ultimately toothless, reformist intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries. The “great equalizer” motto is commonly credited to Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and early public school advocate. In 1848, Mann stated this, quote, “Education, then, beyond all other divides of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery.” End quote.

    Horace Mann

    Now, this ethos would continue as a reaction to the severe inequities of the Gilded Age during the waning years of the 19th century, a product of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1880s, approximately 40 percent of industrial workers earned wages below the poverty line of $500 a year — women, Black workers, immigrants, and children, of course, were paid the least. Meanwhile, by 1890, the wealthiest 1 percent of US families owned 51 percent of real and personal property in the country, while the poorest 44 percent owned a measly 1.2 percent. This dire economic climate would spark a series of historic labor actions — for instance, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Riots of 1886, the Homestead and Pullman strikes of the 1890s, and the 1902 anthracite coal strike.

    Adam: Now enter the Progressive reformists — with a capital P — at the turn of the 20th century. A predominantly middle-class group that had benefited financially from the second Industrial Revolution, Progressives were anti-monopolists who sought to preserve, but soften, capitalism through manifold initiatives: business and antitrust regulations, child-labor laws, Prohibition, school expansion, and so on. This, they hoped, would stem further worker unrest and, relatedly, the growth of socialist doctrine.

    Out of this rationale came one of the Progressives’ chief convictions: that education could be used as a tool to fight poverty and encourage social mobility. Low-wage workers were given little pay, Progressives contended, because they were low-skilled. Progressives championed the rise of vocational education in areas like carpentry and agriculture for boys and domestic economy for girls; these schools garnered the support of industries as well, as the programs would undermine the influence of craft unions.

    Nima: Our guest on today’s episode, Cristina Groeger, explained this more in an interview with Jacobin magazine just last year. She said this, quote:

    There were almost no unions in white-collar work at this time and basically no opposition to expanding training. Craftwork and the industrial sector were a different story. Craft workers had organized power in the form of craft unions, and that power came from their ability to control access to specific skills through the union apprenticeship process. Employers of craft workers were very eager to get around the craft unions and the apprenticeship process, both because it regulated the wages they had to pay apprentices and because employers don’t like unions and wanted to undercut the basis of their power.

    End quote.

    Adam: Around the same time, public high schools were spreading throughout the US. Between Reconstruction and WWI, the number of public high schools increased, by some estimates, from fewer than 100 to more than 6,000. Through public high schools, students, mostly white women and second-generation immigrants, suddenly became eligible for burgeoning post-Industrial Revolution white-collar positions like clerk, secretary, typist, and accountant.

    Groeger argues that although this was only the case for a fraction of students and laborers, it became a material basis for the notion of education as an engine of social mobility. In addition, from the start, this notion overlooked the material constraints many low-wage workers faced at the time. Many domestic and other low-wage workers didn’t have time to go to these schools, for example, and many Black workers weren’t in low-wage positions because of a lack of skills or education, but because of racism in the labor market.

    Nima: In the years following WWII, economists began to seize on this ideology, popularizing the term “human capital” to refer to individuals’ skills and knowledge as economic assets.

    In his 1946 book Education and Economic Change, economist Allan G.B. Fisher claimed historically, “human capital,” quote-unquote, had been neglected, as evidenced in, quote, “the limitations of imperfect systems of education,” end quote. Fisher suggested that a scarcity of skilled labor was detrimental to the economy, and proposed solutions like universal primary education and worker training.

    In the ensuing years, members of the economics department from the University of Chicago — one of the US’s most right-wing academic institutions — further built on this idea. In 1961, Theodore Schultz, then head of the University of Chicago economics department, authored an article entitled “Investment in Human Capital,” and it stated this, quote:

    Many paradoxes and puzzles about our dynamic, growing economy can be resolved once human investment is taken into account. Let me begin by sketching some that are minor though not trivial.

    When farm people take nonfarm jobs they earn substantially less than industrial workers of the same race, age, and sex. Similarly non-white urban males earn much less than white males even after allowance is made for the effects of differences in unemployment, age, city size and region. Because these differentials in earnings correspond closely to corresponding differentials in education, they strongly suggest that the one is a consequence of the other. Negroes who operate farms, whether as tenants or as owners, earn much less than whites on comparable farms. Fortunately, crops and livestock are not vulnerable to the blight of discrimination. The large differences in earnings seem rather to reflect mainly the differences in health and education.

    End quote.

    Adam: Somewhat incredibly, racism and the history of slave labor in the US are not factors in Schultz’s mind.

    Nima: No, of course not.

    Adam: By the early 1960s, Schultz, along with University of Chicago economists Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker had refined what would become known as “human capital theory”: the idea that a worker’s compensation was a reflection of their skill level, usually measured in terms of individualized markers like education and training, without accounting seriously for any systemic factors such as racism, misogyny, de-unionization, corporate profit structures, and so on, keeping workers mired in poverty.

    Now cutting to the 1980s, this idea has also been the message, whether explicitly or implicitly, of countless films as well — namely those that are quote-unquote “Based on a True Story” about a dedicated teacher whose unconventional methods, emphasizing personal discipline and responsibility, break through to unlock their once-recalcitrant students’ true potential.

    Nima: Yeah. One of the best examples of this is the 1988 film Stand and Deliver which tells the story of teacher Jaime Escalante, played by, of course, the great Edward James Olmos, an effective, stern high school teacher in East LA who taught calculus to largely working-class Latino students. It is one of the most famous examples of the All They Need Is A Good Teacher trope in film and TV. Now, while the theme had been established already in films like 1955’s Blackboard Jungle and 1967’s To Sir, with Love, incidentally both starring Sidney Poitier, and in a different way in films like Born Yesterday, My Fair Lady and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Stand and Deliver leaned more heavily into the idea of education as anti-poverty tool, telling us in the script that, quote, “Math is the great equalizer.”

    [Begin Clip]

    Jaime Escalante: There will be no free rides, no excuses. You already have two strikes against you. There are some people in this world who will assume that you know less than you do because of your name and your complexion. But math is the great equalizer. When you go for a job, the person giving you that job, will not want to hear your problems and neither do I. You’re gonna work harder than you ever worked before, and the only thing I asked from you is ganas, desire.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: So here we have this very info, Reagan era, patronizing idea that minority, poverty or quote-unquote “ghettos” were the result of a lack of education, that if only they could get better education, they would lift themselves out of poverty, and we would close the racial wealth gap and inch the institutional poverty of our country’s ethnic minorities. We would see the return of the Teacher As Savior theme in the following years. It’s of course perfectly laudable to portray teachers as heroes in books and television and film and obviously we are pro that, we are pro-Teacher As Hero narrative.

    Nima: Definitely. Especially if it’s, you know, my wife, that educator.

    Adam: It’s true. You’re legally required to say that. But these films perpetuate a very right-wing idea that if we just scold and patronize and discipline minority youth enough that they can somehow lift themselves up out of poverty. These include 1989’s Lean On Me, which was based on the story of Joe Louis Clark, a high school principal in a predominantly Black and Latino working-class part of Paterson, New Jersey. Clark is played by Morgan Freeman. Clark’s school was in danger of being placed into receivership of the New Jersey state government unless students improved their test scores on the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills Test. To achieve this, Clark employs draconian methods, including expelling 300 students and punishing students if they don’t learn the school song. This is peak Reagan, early George H.W. Bush days. White people love these fucking movies, right? Let’s just be honest, I hate to be the white guy who criticizes white people, but come on, white people love these kinds of fucking movies, where there’s all these kinds of, again, sort of racial disciplining where One of the Good Ones lays down the law.

    In this scene, a parent objects to Clark’s draconian approach. In this clip, this is his response to her, in which he characterizes the use of government assistance as a lack of “pride” and of educational priorities.

    [Begin Clip]

    Joe Clark: Now, you’re right Mrs. Barrett. This is a war. It’s a war to save 700 other students, most of whom don’t have the basic skills to pass a state exam. If you want to help us fine, sit down with your kids and make them study at night. (Crowd sounds.) Give our children some pride. Help them get their priorities straight.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: In another scene, Clark imparts a lesson of individual responsibility to the students whose performance he’s attempting to improve.

    [Begin Clip]

    Joe Clark: My motto is simple: If you do not succeed in life, I don’t want you to blame your parents, I don’t want you to blame the white man, I want you to blame yourselves, the responsibility is yours. In two weeks, we have a practice exam, and the minimum basic skills test on April 13. That’s 110 school days from now. But it’s not just about those test scores. If you do not have these basic skills, you will find yourselves locked out. Locked out of that American dream that you see advertised on TV, that they tell you was so easy to get. You are here for one reason, one reason only, to learn to work for what you want. The alternative is to waste your time and to fall into the trap of crime, drugs, and death.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: And Clark is clearly presented as the film’s hero, methods and ideology are key to the kids’ success, which they invariably have.

    Nima: Yeah, so in this Oscar worthy speech by Morgan Freeman, this idea that look, basic skills, literacy, education, extremely important, I cannot stress this enough, we are not anti that, but the idea as presented here, and in so many of these films, that you need this stern discipline, and that it really comes down to proselytizing about personal responsibility, work ethic, ‘this is all on you,’ ‘earn your dream,’ that kind of rhetoric doesn’t take at all a systemic approach to what we know are so many failures in the educational and societal safety net system that we have here.

    Adam: Yeah, here you have Morgan Freeman talking about the alternatives are death and prison and drugs, and the idea is that unless you’re educated, right, only those who sort of achieve a certain level of passing tests, that anyone who falls short of that is not worthy of life and dignity and economic security, right? It’s taken as law of nature that that’s just the way society is versus having a floor that everyone’s entitled to of human dignity and enough money to survive and have Bread and Roses, and be able to go on vacation just by virtue of being alive, by being a human being, that you have to somehow prove yourself to pull yourself up out of this trap. It’s the definition of a rat race. There’s this totally artificial society contrived competition TV show, that if you win, congratulations, you’re one of the big winners, but the other 80–70 percent who fail, tough shit, that’s on you, maybe it’s on some bad teachers, I guess that’s how you can sort of justify it.

    Nima: Well, which is literally the entire kind of conceit of the charter school lottery system.

    Adam: Right, and that’s, it’s all part of the same ideological stew. And so these movies, just one after the other, would fulfill this role of having 52-year-old white men and women look at the screen and nod their head going, ‘Uh-huh, that’s right.’

    Nima: Yeah, no, exactly right. And so, you know, you would see this theme in the ensuing years, not coincidentally, as Teach For America became more and more successful. There’s Dangerous Minds from 1996 of course with Michelle Pfeiffer, there’s Finding Forrester from 2000 with Sean Connery, Freedom Writers from 2007, Hillary Swank, The Blind Side is another example with Sandra Bullock from 2009. The list goes on and on. But I can’t move past Dangerous Minds that quickly, Adam. I remember seeing this when I was in high school, Gangsta’s Paradise was on the soundtrack. So I just want to stick around with Dangerous Minds for just a minute. Now, based on, of course, “A true story,” says the title card, it chronicles the experience of ex-Marine Louanne Johnson, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who teaches at a California high school attended primarily by — who? — low-income Black and Latino students. Here is a clip of Johnson in the film speaking to her students in the classroom about making the choice to get educated and abandoning their victim mentality.

    [Begin Clip]

    Louanne Johnson: Hey, listen, nobody’s forcing you to be here. You have a choice. You can stay or you can leave.

    Teenager #1: Lady, why are you playing this game? We don’t have a choice.

    Louanne Johnson: You don’t have a choice. You don’t have a choice on whether or not you’re here?

    Teenager #1: Nah. If we leave, we don’t get to graduate and if we stay we got to put up with you.

    Louanne Johnson: Well, that’s a choice, isn’t it? You have a choice. You either don’t graduate or you have to put up with me. It may not be a choice you like, but it is a choice.

    Teenager #2: Man, you don’t understand nothing. I mean, you don’t come from where we live. You’re not bussed here.

    Louanne Johnson: Do you have a choice to get on that bus?

    Teenager #2: Man, you come to live in my neighborhood for one week and then you tell me if you got a choice.

    Louanne Johnson: There are a lot of people who live in your neighborhood who choose not to get on that bus. What do they choose to do? They choose to go out and sell drugs, they choose to go out and kill people, they choose to do a lot of other things, but they choose not to get on that bus. The people who choose to get on that bus, which are you, are the people who are saying, I will not carry myself down to die, when I go to migrate my head will be high. That is a choice. There are no victims in this classroom.

    [End Clip]

    Adam: But there are lots of them. By definition, those who are born into abject poverty are victims.

    Nima: Didn’t you know that poverty is a choice, Adam?

    Adam: Victimhood is not about the moral properties of the individual being victimized. It’s a material power relation. But anyway, so yeah, this ethos became widely influential, it was kind of the basis of education policy, virtually bipartisan, I think there were a few Democratic holdouts up until the ’90s and then they just kind of went away and this kind of bootstrap, education as anti-poverty measure would become consensus. Former US President George H.W. Bush said, quote, “Education is the key to opportunity. It’s a ticket out of poverty.” Former US President Barack Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union as part of his pro-charter school Race to the Top education initiative, which we detailed in Episode 162 on the dangers of “data-driven” framing, he said quote:

    [Begin Clip]

    Barack Obama: In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.

    [End Clip]

    Nima: Yes, and the audience watching The Blind Side stands and applauds. Now this message has been used to exalt charter schools as well, as we’ve been discussing, particularly those that have cropped up in resource-starved neighborhoods over the last two decades. Charter schools in poor neighborhoods, the logic goes, can help close the “achievement gap” between quote-unquote “advantaged” and quote-unquote “disadvantaged” students, which, historically, in neoliberal education rhetoric, means white students versus Black and Latino students.

    Now, a quick aside about this term “achievement gap”: According to scholar Laura Jones, the term originated in a 1956 article in the Washington Evening Star to describe an alleged disparity in standardized test performance between Black and white high school students in Washington, DC. The article was headlined “School Probers Told of Lag in Negro Learning.” The subhead is “D.C. Survey Shows Achievement Gap In Senior Highs.”

    Now, Jones notes that the term was effectively cooked up by segregationists using spurious data to make an ostensibly scientific case for re-segregating schools. The timing here is important to note: 1956 was just two years after the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which found that school segregation was unconstitutional. Since then, the term “achievement gap” has exploded in news media and elsewhere. This happened most acutely in the 2000s, when “achievement gap” rhetoric would be used to bolster initiatives like George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race To The Top, both of which penalized quote-unquote “failing” public schools in order to pave the way for charters.

    Adam: Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education and former CEO of Chicago Public Schools — yes, they call it CEO, I guess it sounds very corporate-y — and charter-school shill, has been a major promulgator of this. In 2016, Duncan argued the following in the pages of The Atlantic, quote:

    What is it that schools can do at scale for children to close achievement gaps, even in the face of the real burdens of poverty?

    As the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and later as the U.S. Secretary of Education, I had the good fortune to visit dozens of gap-closing charter schools…I always came away from those visits — as I do when I visit any great public school — with both a sense of hope and a profound feeling of respect and gratitude for the school’s educators and school leaders.

    Yet I absolutely reject the idea that poverty is destiny in the classroom and the self-defeating belief that schools don’t matter much in the face of poverty. Despite challenges at home, despite neighborhood violence, and despite poverty, I know that every child can learn and thrive. It’s the responsibility of schools to teach all children — and to have high expectations for every student, rich and poor.

    End quote.

    In 2004, while at the helm of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan closed 80 public schools and opened 100 charter schools as part of a disruptive program euphemistically referred to as “turnaround.” Not long after, as Diane Ravitch notes, some of the turnaround schools failed and were closed. By 2021, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to put an end to the turnaround strategy. Studies have shown repeatedly that charters do nothing to improve the so-called “achievement gap.”

    Barack Obama and Arne Duncan in 2008. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune / MCT via Getty Images)

    As early as 2010, most studies measuring charter schools’ effects had found that charter schools, which have been in existence since 1992 at that point, produced achievement gains that were about the same or lower than those found in traditional public schools. A 2014 study from the University of Minnesota comparing charter and traditional public schools found that charters usually performed below their district counterparts, and in the cases they do outperform them, it’s only by single-digit margins. Charter schools’ four-year graduation rate was 66 percent compared to non-charters’ 68 percent, and five-year graduation rates were 76 percent for charters and 86 percent for public schools.

    Nima: Now, what Arne Duncan was writing about, Adam, it’s hard to argue against the idea that everyone deserves a good education, right?

    Adam: Right.

    Nima: That’s actually not the argument. It’s about relying on education as the salve and the solver of poverty rather than addressing what creates poverty. So it’s kind of like a bait and switch in that op-ed because, of course, education level alone does not in fact necessarily translate to higher wages as numerous studies have shown over the years. For example, service workers on average have higher levels of education than they did two decades ago. A 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office expressly stated that, quote, “Increases in Educational Attainment Have Not Led to Higher Wages,” end quote, and found the following: That about 22 percent of Americans who earned between $12.01 and $16 per hour held college degrees, compared with 16 percent back in 1995. The percentage of workers who had at least a high-school diploma yet earned the federal minimum wage or below increased from an estimated 70 percent in 1995 to 80 percent by 2016.

    Studies have also shown that significant portions of workers make more money than their more educated counterparts. For instance a 2021 Georgetown University report found that roughly 16 percent of high school graduates earn more than half of workers with a bachelor’s degree. Also, 28 percent of workers with an associate’s degree earn more than half of workers with a bachelor’s degree, and 36 percent of workers with a bachelor’s degree earn more than half of workers with a master’s degree. So, still, how much one makes comes down more importantly to one’s field of study, right? What your major is, what you really concentrate on, your eventual occupation which sometimes doesn’t have to do with what you studied in school, oftentimes does not, including tons of other factors, of course, race and gender being critical there as well.

    Adam: It’s also worth asking, as many are increasingly doing, what would happen to low wage jobs if all people working them advanced one or more education levels? As MIT Professor Paul Osterman has written, quote:

    What if all the employees in low wage jobs suddenly acquired a community college degree or better. Would the jobs they hold disappear? Would the wages of all of them rise? The exact answer to this question differs depending on the time horizon; however over any reasonable period the answer would seem to be no.

    End quote.

    The education-as-anti-poverty-tool trope doesn’t take into account the necessity under a capitalist system for a pool of low-wage workers, regardless of education status. The United States has long had one of the highest rates of educational access and enrollment in the world, consistently ranking within the top 12 to 10 most formally educated countries worldwide, but it also has one of the highest rates of inequality and disprportionately high rates of absolute poverty.

    According to the Census Bureau, the high school completion rate in the United States for people aged 25 and older increased from 87.6 percent in 2011 to 91.1 percent in 2021. Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of people aged 25 and older who had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by 7.5 percentage points from 30.4 percent to 37.9 percent.

    In 2017 however, the US ranked 23 out of 30 quote-unquote “developed” countries in a measure known as the “inclusive development index,” which factors in data on income, health, poverty, and “sustainability” created and designed by the World Economic Forum.

    Nima: Yes, so clearly, high education levels don’t necessarily correspond across the board to, you know, quality of life improvements. I mean, over the past two years, we’ve seen life expectancy drop in the United States, regardless of any kind of metrics that have to do with education, largely, of course, due to the COVID pandemic. This from NPR, quote:

    In 2019, someone born in the U.S. had a life expectancy of 79 years. In 202o, because of the pandemic, that dropped to 77 years. In 2021 life-span dropped again — to 76.1 years. And for some Americans, life expectancy is even lower, according to a provisional analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    In 2019, someone born in the U.S. had a life expectancy of 79 years. In 202o, because of the pandemic, that dropped to 77 years. In 2021 life-span dropped again — to 76.1 years. And for some Americans, life expectancy is even lower, according to a provisional analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Adam: And of course, the key metric is poverty. As of 2020 37 million Americans are 11.4 percent of our population that lives in poverty. And so the question is, is all this investment and bootstrapism and the charter school movement in the ’90s, did this actually reduce the “achievement gap” or reduce poverty? And the answer is unequivocally no, it didn’t. Because education in and of itself can’t do that, and frankly really shouldn’t have to do that. That’s not a burden that education as this kind of abstract moral good should have. The thing that should lower poverty is taking all of the stuff that all the people who are filthy rich, and giving it to those that are poor. That way you stop poverty in a matter of days if you want to, versus relying on these kinds of abstract long, decades long horizons of trickle down bootstrap-ism, which are full of cozy rhetoric, but don’t actually do the thing they’re set out to do, which is reduce poverty because we still have a lot of poor people in this country relative to other quote-unquote “developed” countries.

    Nima: To discuss this more, we’re going to be joined by Cristina Viviana Groeger, a historian of education and work in the modern United States. She’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lake Forest College, and the author of the book The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, which was published last year by Harvard University Press. Tina will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.

    [Music]

    Nima: We are joined now by Cristina Viviana Groeger. Tina, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Thanks so much for having me.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger

    Adam: So the truism that education is a mechanism for reducing inequality and poverty is simply taking for granted in liberal and conservative circles alike, while this is certainly true on a micro level — like for example, I want to tell my child or insist that my niece go to college because theoretically, the outcomes are better — on a macro level, this premise begins to break down, and I think many people kind of intuit a micro level with macro policy on its face, it makes sense as you write about and talk about a lot. So I want to sort of begin from the 30,000 foot, to use a horrible corporate cliche, talking about this premise, what theories it’s based on, and what just as a sort of real quick, cursory explanation, what are the fundamental problems with that assumption?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: So I think the kind of broad theory behind the idea that more skills equals higher wages, that’s, you know, that’s sort of the economic theory of human capital, and the premise is that if you can increase the skills of everyone, especially those at the bottom, then that will compress wages, and overall reduce inequality. I think there is a grain of truth to this story and I think that’s important to recognize that historically, and in the present, right, like gaining skills for many workers, but not all workers, gaining skills did lead to real social mobility, and at times, usually, like the middle of the 20th century, we point to was a time when education hugely expanded and that was also a time when inequality went down with a huge expansion of public college, and it also fits a huge expansion of education in the early 20th century that I write about in my book, especially around white collar work, where, you know, there really was for lots of working class students and women for the first time, accessing the skills provided in schools did lead to social mobility and higher wages. The problem is that that equation really breaks down in a lot of cases in practice, and does not apply to everyone, and I think the most obvious example of this is discrimination, right? You know, if you are an African American man or woman and you have all the skills possible, but the decision of an employer not to hire you means that you will make no wages, and so certain groups of people, especially African Americans, or recent immigrants, get put into occupational categories, usually low wage work, not because they don’t have the right skills, but because of systemic discrimination. On the broader level too there have also been periods of history when education has expanded but inequality has actually gone up, and this is the early 20th century is the case study that I look at a lot, and in that case, what we actually see is, throughout the whole educational system, although many people did, this is the time when like public high schools become huge institutions and really expand and those helped a lot of students and a lot of future workers, but it was also the time then that colleges were able to kind of consolidate their central role for the first time really in leading to the top corporate and professional positions when they had not played that role before. As everyone is getting more education, the top, both colleges and kind of economic elite, can just consolidate their advantages more, and so this idea that just by expanding education on a systemic level we’re going to somehow reduce inequality, that doesn’t really account for what’s actually happened. But this is a very useful truism, as you said, because it’s also one that really doesn’t challenge the power of employers or challenge the status quo or challenge the power of those with the most power, and so the example that I talked about in my book is that, you know, for women and immigrants going into white collar jobs for the first time, like that was real social mobility for them, and that’s important to recognize, but at the same time, for employers, it was actually a way for them to cut costs because women were paid half as much as men, entirely non-unionized sector, whereas craft work that white collar work, new sort of engineers and managers try to cut down on and replace, that had been one of the few sectors of work where workers had real power. So we can see the growth of education is both a form of social mobility for those that got it or for certain groups that got it, but also essentially kind of a union busting or an attempt to control the workforce in new ways through shifting the workforce towards workers that had less power than different ones.

    Nima: Well, right, because it then establishes just a new way for some people, some segments of the society, some communities to have to, as always, work twice as hard and get half as much, and I think that, you know, part of this truism, as we’ve been calling it, that I want to dig deeper into is the idea that the burden, as you were saying, continues to rely on individuals. These are not then systemic issues, you get to kind of have this platitude of more education equals less inequality, but again, then the burden of fixing inequality is on not for an entire society to make sure everyone is educated in a certain way, but for individuals, or their families, to have to figure out how to educate themselves, right? They need to work harder, they need to get better grades, collectively pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to use that hackneyed metaphor, rather than saying, have a robust redistributive policies that just take money from the rich, provide more for the poor, which would in itself does go a very long way to fixing inequality. But how does this narrative of education as an anti-poverty program deliberately avoid these messy questions of, say, higher taxation for rich people or creating a strong social welfare state?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah, well, I think, you know, we have to think about who this narrative benefits, right, and why we would want to avoid those messy questions. So I think, from an employer’s perspective, this narrative of putting the burden on the workers rather than themselves, rather than the state, it kind of absolves those in power from responsibility, right? And so if employers, you know, if there’s a skill shortage, it’s not that they’re not paying their workers enough to make those jobs attractive, it’s that there’s not enough workers who have those skills, and the idea that individuals are to blame for their own poverty, this is an idea that dates back a very long time, you know, and in the Progressive era, it was often proposed, you know, education was a popular solution because it didn’t require real sacrifices, and it didn’t challenge sort of power dynamics really in society broadly, it provided a kind of easy and very popular program for either charity that would be based on, you know, providing say domestic workers with more skills in domestic service so they could become better servants, right?

    Nima: Those are just called fellowships and scholarships now.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah, right, or internships. But yeah, we see this sort of analysis persist and kind of culture of poverty theories of the 1960s that there’s sort of an inherent problem, and so schools, because they’re transformative, or imagined to be kind of socially and individually transformative, and they’re the right solution. But I think at the end of the day, it’s so popular, because, again, it really doesn’t require any of those in power to really make any sacrifices, and because it has this grain of truth, I think it’s kind of dangerously accepted, right? And not, you know, that’s why across the political spectrum, you see this kind of narrative persist, and it can kind of take hold in a way in popular imagination because it is intuitive. But I think we can see throughout history and in the present the ways that this is kind of letting a lot of those who are ultimately responsible for inequality, for labor abuses, kind of off the hook, and especially employers, they’re very happy to have training done for them, right? It also offloads their cost of training and it basically provides free training through the public school system rather than employers doing it themselves, for instance, which they used to do, you know, in the 19th century.

    Adam: Yeah, because you want them to learn how to make a widget but you don’t want them to learn about radical politics or literature. That’s the Koch brothers education model.

    Nima: And if they do that then they better have lifelong student debt.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Right.

    Adam: Their children can, to be clear, but not the workers. But that’s a separate episode. But I do want to talk a little bit about the charter school movement, something we’ve criticized quite a bit on the show for being astroturfed, billionaire-backed, teachers union busting but much of the narrative of the charter school movement is propped up by this truism that education is an anti-poverty program. That’s sort of the opening premise of Davis Guggenheim’s grotesque propaganda film Waiting for Superman, where he’s like, ‘Here are these poor Black kids who are poor because they don’t have the opportunity,’ and this opportunity narrative, they love this word opportunity. It’s all so fucking patronizing. It’s this head patting, ‘They just need opportunities because I’m over here, I’m some Walton, I have 10,000 fish, you’re starving, but I’m going to teach you how to fish rather than just giving you my fish,’ with an understanding that fish have a very narrow shelf life so maybe this metaphor is not very good, but you see my point. ‘So I’m going to teach you how to fish, I’m going to donate two of my fish to open a fishing Academy.’ There’s sort of this constant kind of hamster on a wheel bullshit, right, to mix animal metaphors, and the charter school movement is pretty much propped up by this assumption, and of course, you combine this with the fact that Black schools were underfunded, objectively, for decades, right? So you had this genuine frustration with the school system that was co-opted by these forces, very sophisticated PR, and then you have this idea that, you touched on it earlier, but this kind of Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal racism, right, of kind of culture, and you know, we need to have them line up every day on a piece of fucking tape.

    Richard Nixon with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (Nixon Foundation)

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: And have the right uniforms, and if they just have better culture, then we’ll have better inequality outcomes. That’s borne out not to be true at all. That’s all bullshit.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Right.

    Adam: Not necessarily worse, but basically a wash with some teachers’ unions busted up and school boards undermined, et cetera, et cetera. So talk about the ways in which this kind of, it’s bipartisan, I mean, again, Obama spoke in this language, Republicans, of course, love this language, it’s kind of gone out of favor in the last few years, but this basic premise that this head padding opportunity narrative is premised on this fundamentally false idea, again, that it has a such a bipartisan hold on how we view the purpose of education, how that dovetails with the charter school movement.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah, so here, I think, this language of blaming the individual essentially, right, it’s the failure of the individual for having enough skills to get the jobs that would give them social mobility, et cetera, I think that sort of becomes a blaming the school system in sort of charter school reform rhetoric, right, and then blaming entire school systems or blaming public schools, in particular, for failing to provide students with all of the skills but in reality overcome poverty, and provide sort of a magical transformation to allow them to access good jobs in the future. So I think, here’s where the popular imagination of the role of education then can be used to kind of attack one of the most well-developed parts of the welfare state that the US has, which is the public school system, and can become part of a kind of conservative project to undermine it or to dismantle it. But I think because there is a, you know, I’m thinking now why have liberal reformers or the Democratic Party, why have they embraced it as well? I think, because also, again, this narrative tends to favor employers or doesn’t really challenge employers so it’s easier and kind of more politically feasible to focus on education reform, than it is say on tax reform or other kind of more substantive policies that would actually redistribute power, you know, and then I feel like education kind of just becomes a punching bag for everyone, and schools and teachers are blamed, you know, for every problem that that young people and older people may have. But it can always be spun into, you know, ‘the schools are failing or the schools are not doing enough,’ even if, of course, schools are overburdened, and a lot of schools are underfunded and don’t have the resources even to do basic education. But I think it kind of spirals and it fits also with a kind of anti-labor mission, right, in the sense that charter schools are also places where they don’t need to follow labor policies and the public schools can hire whoever they want, although we’re now seeing charter schools’ teachers unionizing themselves. But yeah, a way of kind of getting around some of those labor policies also.

    Adam: Yeah, because I think it feeds into this meritocracy, because the only way that a quote-unquote “meritocracy” system, and you look at this country, you see the massive inequality, the racial globalization, the wild racial gap, all this stuff, the only way you could sort of make that make sense, right, the only way I can reconcile that worldview is that we have a meritocracy but there’s all these bad outcomes, right?

    Nima: People aren’t trying as hard as they need to.

    Adam: Well, right. The only way a liberal can kind of rectify that in their head is to say, ‘Oh, well, they haven’t had enough opportunity.’ Because the right winger would use a kind of quasi eugenicist argument that they’re always going to be poor and so the liberal has to rectify these two things, and that’s where you merge into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan eugenics by proxy when you talk about culture, and then you say, ‘Oh, they haven’t had enough opportunities and so if we could just fix the schools.’

    Nima: But not all schools, Adam, only certain schools, only certain pipelines exist for success.

    Adam: Right, and it’s the only way this sort of worldview makes sense, because like you said, it doesn’t upset anyone. I think we’ve talked a lot about the 2000 law that Bill Clinton passed his last week in office that created the tax break for real estate, I think, well, if it was hedge funds and real estate to invest in education for charter schools, and just how perfect that is, because it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s this little device we have, it’s going to save you millions of dollars on taxes,’ which is a form of revenue generation, right? And also, it’s going to help solve racism. It’s like, what a perfect solution!

    Nima: For hedge funds and real estate.

    Adam: Yeah. What are the odds? Out of all the gin joints.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah.

    Nima: To that point, Tina, I want to ask you specifically about your book, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, and there’s a word in the subheadline that I actually really want to focus on, which is “remaking,” “the remaking of inequality.” Can you talk to us a bit about the approach that you took in your book, what you found and where that remaking, right, not just establishment of inequality in Boston, but that something existed and then it was remade in a certain way and how that relates to schools and education?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah, well, no, thank you for the question. So the remake is kind of referring to how, you know, I argue that the educational system ultimately didn’t really challenge some of the oldest hierarchies be they gender or racial or kind of economic or class-based hierarchies that had long existed, right, in a very overt form in Boston in the 19th century, and those overt forms, an extremely segregated labor market, but more through informal and kind of family relationships, because education played a very small role, and most people found work through their ethnic or kinship ties or family networks, social networks, but you know, in an extremely segmented and hierarchical labor market, and the promise of education in the early 20th century was that it would challenge these sorts of overt forms of hierarchy and inequality, but we end up seeing is actually how, through the creation of a very tiered educational system, and so I talk about, you know, K through 12, but also then what’s happening to colleges in the early 20th century too and universities and professional schools, you kind of see the basis of what the economic elite or the financial elite, it switches from a sort of small family-based concentration of wealth to something that’s then actually reproduced through schools. So through Harvard University, most obviously, but the way that in the sort of reforms that happen in universities in this time period, it’s, you know, universities, very actively try to establish connections to economic and professional elites, to become the new training ground for those groups. So I end my book in 1940, or kind of the end of the Great Depression, and by this point, everyone across the board has much more schooling than they did at the end of the 19th century, but inequality has actually gone up in this period, which is an irony if you think that education can reduce inequality, and that’s because now education is actually forming, you know, although there are these individual paths of social mobility, on a broader level, it’s actually forming kind of a new form, a new structure of inequality or a new way that that individuals can be channeled into the right jobs, because specific schools and institutions are very closely connected to employers in the area, and really do function sometimes as direct channels to elite employment opportunities.

    Adam: Right. In that case, education ends up reproducing and codifying inequality, as you also talked about.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Right.

    Adam: Which, you know, it’s why frats exist, right? Sort of reproduction zones of inequality and exclusion and racial exclusion. So having said all that, education and schooling, as you and we all agree, is intrinsically important. While it may not be an elegant mechanism to solve inequality or to improve the plight of the poor to reduce poverty, obviously society still needs education. So I’m going to ask you, for those listening who’s like, ‘Well, wait a second, well, I have an education, you know if it’s not some great equalizer, then what the fuck is it for?’ Without being too squishy about it, you know, obviously all societies need education, population for civic engagement, et cetera, you know, our plumber-should-read-John-Milton-poems and, you know, that kind of romantic vision of education.

    Nima: We are pro-education on this show.

    Adam: I happen to be very squishy about education, especially liberal arts education.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah.

    Adam: So what is the value? If you were the dictator tomorrow, and you, you know, got to control the Department of Education by, you know, authoritarian rule, what would that look like? What is the point of education?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: As you can probably imagine, this book, talking to largely educators, it sometimes gets me into trouble, because then they ask like, ‘Okay, but are you saying if there’s no point or are you saying we shouldn’t have education? Or what?’

    Nima: What are you saying, Professor?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Right, exactly. So in part, because, as we started the conversation, education still is very important for accessing job market outcomes, even though those good jobs are shrinking. But you know, to the extent that they exist, it’s still really important to have education, I think that because that is still true we can’t blame students for having an often very vocational attitude towards their education or say, you know, going to college so that they can have a good career. I think there’s sometimes a sort of liberal arts or sort of handwringing about, ‘Oh, like the careerism of students,’ and it’s like, well, okay, but this is what this is the system that they are part of and I don’t blame them for that. So I want to sort of acknowledge it makes sense given that this is the society that we live in. At the same time, I think that because education is so caught up with that purpose for, you know, its meaning in our society is sort of caught up with that purpose, the only way to imagine alternatives for what education could be is it has to happen after we’ve addressed the job question. So, you know, I think we have to ensure that everyone can access a well-paying job after the end of their schooling, whatever that may be, in order to free up education to actually be about something else. In some ways it’s almost like we can’t really decide now because in the future, we would be able to really reimagine what education could be, and I think there it would have a lot more to do with fostering creativity and curiosity and learning from other people. I mean, I started out as very enamored with John Dewey, that got me interested in education in the first place, and I think in some ways all of those ideals are still true, we should learn by doing, and sort of his idea of education fostering democratic practice. But we can’t do that, right, if the educational system is sort of held hostage by the economy. So that’s one thing. I mean, another way that I’ve been thinking about it lately too is how can we reimagine education to actually be teaching students the skills to remake society. So thinking about political action as a form of education or students leading walkouts, and protests, which —

    Adam: Whoa, whoa, whoa. CRT, guys, Ben Shapiro, you’re polluting young minds with this nonsense?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah, exactly. Or yeah, even worse, instead of teaching students how to become better employees from an employer’s perspective, why don’t we teach them how to organize a union? Right?

    Adam: Whoa.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: That seems like relevant job preparation to me, right, in 2022.

    Adam: Absolutely.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: And in ways that, you know, political education, working on a campaign, being part of organizing a union, all of that is also important education and training, you can say, for the kind of political change that, you know, I think we need to actually address inequality. So, you know, I don’t know if schools as they are currently formed are going to be the forum for that form of education, but I think that would sort of be my, you know, in an ideal world, education would actually be about how do you actually change the world and not just go and start a nonprofit, but you know, to really engage in politics in a meaningful way.

    Adam: Yeah. Because theoretically, everyone should be able to pursue education for its own sake. But yeah, maybe 20 percent of the time you learn how to be an engineer or change a tire, someone has to do that shit, right? Not everyone can be podcasters. Some people need real jobs.

    Nima: Not everyone has a classics degree and then becomes a podcast. Tina, before we let you go, we’d love to hear what you’re working on currently, where folks can read more of your work, maybe beyond the book that they should all buy, but you know, what are you working on these days? What should people look out for?

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Sure. So well, I published an article called The Fight for a Public University in Boston that kind of came out of this book project. So, there’s a long and interestingly organized labor that was one of the chief advocates from the very beginning, from the 19th century saying workers should have access to higher education, which I don’t think everybody necessarily knows. But there’s an interesting kind of long history because Boston was one of the longest or it didn’t have a public university until the late 20th century. So there’s sort of a long and interesting history of just fighting for public education in Boston. But the question of skills and sort of how we determine what is low-skilled or high-skilled work and just sort of the social determinants of, yeah, the sort of historical context and all the sort of racial and gender assumptions that go into determining what skill is, is a, you know, is definitely a central question in the previous book, is also one that I’m thinking about, and I’m trying to think of ways that we can break down some of the assumptions we have about skill, but in a sort of historical way, and thinking about gender and immigration in particular, and how that relates to the question of skill is something that we’ll see where that goes, but that’s sort of where my brain is right now.

    Nima: Awesome. Well, we will definitely look out for that. We’ve been speaking with Cristina Viviana Groeger, historian of education and work in the modern United States. An Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lake Forest College, she is the author of the book The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, published by Harvard University Press in 2021. Tina, thank you so much, again, for joining us today for this back-to-school episode of Citations Needed.

    Cristina Viviana Groeger: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

    [Music]

    Adam: Yeah, the sort of history of the existential question of pedagogy is a fascinating one, and maybe it’s a little pat or high minded to say, well, education is good in and of itself. Obviously, it needs to provide people with relevant skills, we need people who can fix toilets and software engineers, that stuff is important, I’m not saying everyone needs to get the sort of proverbial major and beat poetry or whatever kind of Fox News punching bag you want to use. But I want to live in a world where we have those majors and those majors are valued and cherished and not mocked and used as a punch line. I know we’re pandering a little bit because our audience is made up of over-educated downwardly mobile types, but at the same time, it’s like —

    Nima: We validate you.

    Adam: Yeah, exactly. At the same time, we talk about the great equalizer. It’s like, you know, what’s a great equalizer, taking shit from rich people and giving it to poor quality.

    Nima: Equality.

    Adam: There’s one weird trick doctors hate them for, yeah, it’s like, there’s this really easy thing you can do, which is to take the thing that people have, and give it to those that don’t have it. This is one really great way of creating a more equal society, maybe not completely equal, God forbid, but reducing poverty, we could reduce poverty overnight if we wanted to reduce poverty. So we have to come up with these, we’re like a carnival barker trying to trick you into playing a game at a carnival, right, sort of throw the baseball at the glass to get the big stuffed animal, there’s a showmanship involved, and doing all this elaborate exotic shit that doesn’t involve actually just creating a more equal society through the mechanism of government redistribution, right? And so we’re constantly being sold different schemes and shell games and elaborate tricks to give you the illusion that you have some agency, when in reality, the solution, and again, I know it’s not that simple, but it kind of is. Meanwhile, the solution is very simple, which is we should just make sure people aren’t poor by providing them a very robust floor of food, groceries, rent, a dignified living, union, you know, protections if they have employment, things of that nature.

    Nima: Yeah, and it may not come down to your success being dictated by having a hero in the classroom teaching you, right, someone that sacrificed their own career to go into education, with all their idealism and martyrdom, to lift others out of ignorance and poverty, which is just super patronizing, and also puts a lot of pressure on teachers who already have a lot of fucking pressure on themselves. They don’t need to constantly see hero stories in pop culture, because, you know what that is not doing? That’s not making people flocked to the profession of teaching, right?

    Adam: Right.

    Nima: It’s not actually doing that. What teachers need is not these flashy movie commercials, they need safer work environments and more money and then I’m sure there’ll be more teachers. But what these pop culture fantasies do, is it really motivates people who are susceptible to that message to join organizations like Teach for America, not to become teachers because they are educators and that is their job, but it’s a, you know, kind of do-goodie thing on the way to your Wall Street job, you stop over at Teach For America for a few years, and then you move on. So it bloats those ranks while taking away from the idea that teachers alone should not be expected to solve poverty, to solve systems of inequity and oppression that are maintained at the highest levels of our politics, in our society, and so creating these kind of individualistic hero narratives that have to do with personal responsibility and Protestant work ethic and kind of imposing that, not only on students, but their teachers, to all be heroic in the face of oppression is really a fucked-up message to send.

    Adam: Yeah, and it’s all part of the carnival game, right? Sort of need the illusion that you’re going to knock that piece of class over and win the teddy bear.

    Nima: Yeah.

    Adam: It’s all tricks to get you to not think about the thing we should be thinking about which is holy shit, we have a lot of very, very wealthy people in this country, and we have a lot of very, very poor people in this country, and those two things ought not coexist.

    Nima: That will do it for this episode of Citations Needed, our season six premiere. Thank you, everyone, for coming back with us. We are thrilled to be back for this season. We have a lot of great stuff coming up, so we hope you stick with us. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, buy some merch at Bonfire.com, search for Citations Needed, and of course, you can always become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. And as always, a very special shoutout goes to our critic-level supporters through Patreon. I am Nima Shirazi.

    Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

    Nima: Thank you for listening to Citations Needed. Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Morgan McAslan. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. Welcome back to Citations Needed for season six. We’ll catch you next time.

    [Music]


    This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, September 14, 2022.

    Transcription by Morgan McAslan.

  • Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    [Music]
    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
    Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We have no commercials, no billionaire benefactors that we know of, because we are completely listener funded and cannot thank you all enough for that.
    Adam: Yes, if you haven’t, please support us on Patreon, it’s very much appreciated, it does help keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable. Also, if you could rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, that’s very much appreciated, and as always, check out Bonfire for our merchandise, shirts, tote bags, mugs, what have you, it helps also support the show and also makes you look cool because you’re with the coolest podcast in the world. I believe that one marker of a cool podcast is they tell you they’re cool.
    Nima: (Laughs.) I like how your voice made that a question at the end.
    Adam: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s cool anymore. I’m old. I have a kid.
    Nima: It’s definitely a Citations Needed tote bag.
    Adam: Yeah, clearly.
    Nima: This is also our season five finale of Citations Needed. We’ll be taking a little summer break after this episode, spending some time with our families and gearing up for next season, season six, which will begin in September.
    A white-collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that’s taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer’s union-busting tactics.
    Adam: Stories like these represent something we don’t often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs, zealots, radical left-wingers, mafiosos or thugs or grifters, but as heroes willing to risk their health, homes, and livelihoods for the greater good.
    Nima: This is in stark contrast to the anti-union depictions in pop culture we explored on Citations Needed in Episode 164, part one of this two-part series on depictions of labor and unionization in film and television. On the previous episode, we discussed Hollywood’s emphasis on corruption in labor organizing, focusing noticeably on depictions of bloated bureaucracy, organized crime, and autocratic union bosses in films like On the Waterfront from 1954, Blue Collar from 1978, and The Irishman from 2019.
    Adam: This week, in part two, we’re going to address the inverse of that, looking at the rare but nontrivial examples of pop film that celebrates the accomplishments of labor movements, centers beleaguered workers with everything to lose, and positions abusive employers as the villains, while embracing themes of worker courage and heroism. While very often not perfect, these examples show that compelling, award-winning narratives can be crafted out of tales of collective action and collective bargaining.
    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Angela Allan, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, who writes about pop culture for The Atlantic magazine.
    [Begin Clip]
    Angela Allan: And I think the way that we see places like the New York Times or The Washington Post, how they’ve been covering unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses and at Starbucks, that they already are casting them as having this kind of narrative flair, you know, so if Martin Ritt is like, ‘I was really inspired by Crystal Lee Sutton,’ people like Chris Smalls or Jaz Brisack feel like Norma Rae-esque figures. I think that does suggest that there’s an appetite for these victory stories in real life.
    [End Clip]
    Nima: So last episode, we discussed a number of films that kind of do this common trope, Adam, of unions are generally corrupt, certainly their leadership is, sometimes, you know, solidarity between workers is a good thing, the working man, the working woman, more occasionally than the man depicted in Hollywood, especially in the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood, that there can be power in workers banding together and finding solidarity together. But generally, unions, as they are depicted, are that of overbearing, autocratic, and certainly corrupt institutions, just as corrupt as the companies that they’re supposed to be organizing against.
    Adam: Right. But let’s be honest, Hollywood, especially maybe in the ’40s and ’50s, and on to the ’60s and ’70s, less so I think today, but certainly decades ago, has left-wingers in it, has socialists, communists, fellow travelers et cetera, or bleeding-heart liberals, who empathize with unions, what have you. So obviously, there’s going to be some representations, pro-labor representation in Hollywood, that kind of slipped through the cracks, either because a director or writer is so established they can do whatever they want based on previous work or they’re indie films that are maybe outside the Hollywood studio production, which is definitely something we’re going to cover in this episode, but they still kind of get widespread releases based on critical acclaim or other independent vectors for success, if you will, or they’re just crypto, let’s be honest here, right? Much of people’s politics have to be crypto in certain ways, just by the nature of how popular culture works, by definition it must be popular, it must be broad, and the absolute biggest sin one can engage in is to have an agenda or a politics, that’s sort of seen as being declasse, that you can have message pictures where it’s say no to drugs or whatever, but you can’t have a message pictures that’s like down with capitalism. That’s too far. As you noted, legendary Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn is credited with saying, “All they want is a story. If you have a message, send it by Western Union.” Of course, we argue in this episode that all movies have messages whether we want to or not, there’s no such thing as a non-message movie. And some of those films will have a message that is pro-labor in inclination, if not intent. So we’re excited to get into those today and talk about those and then talk to our guest about how they worked, what makes them work, and what we can learn from them.
    Nima: Now, obviously, normal qualifier to start, Adam, this is a huge topic, we can’t cover every single labor film, even the good ones. There are incredible documentaries like Harlan County, USA, directed by Barbara Kopple. There are films like Warren Beatty’s Reds from 1981 about journalist John Reed and the chronicling of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and John Sayles’ Matewan from 1987 about the 1920s coal miner strike in Matewan, West Virginia. There is stealth communist propaganda by Disney, Newsies from 1992. There’s the 2000 film directed by Ken Loach, Bread and Roses, about the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in LA and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It’s based on the very real Justice for Janitors campaign of the SEIU.

    Adam: There is a very famous episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that is very pro-union propaganda. To give some context, one of the characters, who’s an alien, works at the bar of Deep Space Nine station, and is consistently abused and exploited by his brother, played by Quark, the scrupulous bar owner who we come to love. And he begins to talk about starting a union to demand more rights, which for the Ferengis is unheard of, since they’re, like, a race of hypercapitalists. In this clip, he’s discussing with two of his crewmates, Dr. Bashir and Miles O’Brien, about his frustrations with his boss and his desire to have collective bargaining.
    [Begin Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Rom: Dr. Bashir, I’m glad you’re in. I need your help.
    Dr. Bashir: Your ear acting up again?
    Rom: My ear’s fine. I need some advice about…unions.
    Dr. Bashir: Unions?
    Rom: You said the other day I should form a union, so I did.
    Dr. Bashir: Rom, I was speaking theoretically.
    Rom: And I put your theory into practice! All of Quark’s employees have joined. We’re going to force Quark to treat us better. I hope.
    Miles O’Brien: A union, huh? Good for you.
    Rom: You know about unions?
    Miles O’Brien: Who do you think led the Pennsylvania coal miners during the anthracite strike of 1902?
    Rom: I have no idea.
    Miles O’Brien: Sean Aloysius O’Brien.
    Dr. Bashir: I didn’t know that.
    Miles O’Brien: There’s a lot of things about my family you don’t know. Eleven months, those mines were closed. They didn’t open again until all the miners’ demands were met.
    Rom: You mean we should force Quark to close the bar?
    Dr. Bashir: Only as a last resort. If he’s reasonable about your requests, there’s no need to strike.
    Miles O’Brien: Quark? Reasonable? Ha! Unlikely. You’ll have to strike. Mark my words. And when you do, you’ll have to be strong.
    Rom: Just like Sean O’Brien.
    Miles O’Brien: Exactly. You know, he had the biggest funeral in all of Western Pennsylvania.
    Rom: Funeral?
    Miles O’Brien: Mm. They fished his body out of the Allegheny River the week before the strike ended. 32 bullets he had in him. Or was it 34?
    Dr. Bashir: Well, he died a hero.
    Miles O’Brien: He was more than a hero! He was a union man!
    [End Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Adam: I think it’s funny that Miles O’Brien does this thing where he traces his lineage back, like, 400 years at this point.
    Nima: (Laughs.) Yeah, when Pennsylvania existed.
    Adam: Yeah, when people take their genealogy tests, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m a descendant of King James II.’ I’m like, well, everyone’s a descendant of King James II at that point.
    Nima: Hey, it works, even later in the episode, Rom even quotes from the Communist Manifesto, saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”
    Adam: Right.
    Nima: It is very exciting. Now, I must admit I am not the Star Trek scholar that you are, Adam, but I’m thrilled that we were able to get this one in. The episode is called “Bar Association,” directed by LeVar Burton, and aired originally on February 19, 1996. Just two days later on February 21, 1996, an episode of Sister, Sister aired called “Paper or Plastic” when one of the characters’ co-workers on the show working in a grocery store are going on strike to demand higher wages, and this episode of Sister, Sister is remarkable for its pro-union advocacy, as documented on Twitter a couple years ago by Diana Hussein, who is the comms director for the pro-worker group UNITE HERE! Everyone should absolutely check that out. They call the replacement workers scabs. They tell folks not to cross picket lines. It is really fantastic and kind of amazing that within the span of just three days, Deep Space Nine and Sister, Sister ran pro-union episodes.
    Adam: An anomaly indeed. Our usual disclaimer here by the way, before we get into the films, there are spoilers to the films we will be discussing.
    Nima: While on part one of this episode last week, we began in 1954 with On the Waterfront, we are going to return to that year to start off this episode but this time we’re going to talk about the film Salt of the Earth, again from 1954, directed by Herbert J. Biberman.
    The story goes basically like this: Esperanza Quintero, played by Rosaura Revueltas, and her husband, Ramón, played by Juan Chacón, live with their two, and soon to be three, children in precarity in her home village — now the company town of Zinc Town, New Mexico. Ramón, a union miner for Delaware Zinc, is forced to work in the mines alone, a policy that only applies to Mexican-American, not white, miners, which creates extremely dangerous conditions of course. Ramón and other miners decide to strike for worker safety, and their wives encourage them to expand their demands, marking the beginning of an instrumental role that women will play in organizing for the rights of the miners’ union and the health and safety of their families.
    Adam: During the strike, the company hires out-of-town strikebreakers, but they leave after seeing the size of the picket line. In one scene, the superintendent and an executive drive up to the picket line and speak manipulatively to Ramón, but Ramón doesn’t take the bait. Now keep in mind, this is 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out. This is extremely based shit. So we’re gonna listen to that here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Alexander: Well, they’re like children in many ways. Sometimes you have to humor them, sometimes you have to spank them — and sometimes you have to take their food away. Here comes the one we were talking about. (Chuckles) He’s quite a character. Claims his grandfather once owned the land where the mine is now.
    Ramon: Want to go up to your office, Mr. Alexander?
    Alexander: Naturally. You think I parked here for a cup of coffee?
    Ramon: You’re welcome to one.
    Alexander: No thanks.
    Ramon: The men would like to know who this gentleman is.
    Alexander: That’s none of their affair.
    Hartwell: That’s all right — it’s no secret. My name’s Hartwell. I’m from the company’s Eastern office.
    Ramon: You mean Delaware?
    Hartwell: No. New York.
    Ramon: New York? You’re not the Company President by any chance?
    Hartwell: No.
    Ramon: Too bad. The men have always wanted to get a look at the President. But you’ve come out here to settle the strike?
    Hartwell: Well, if that’s possible.
    Ramon: It’s possible. Just negotiate.
    Hartwell: Are we talking to a union spokesman?
    Alexander: Not exactly. But I wish he were one. He knows more about mining than those pie-cards we’ve had to deal with. I mean it. I know your work record. You were in line for foreman when this trouble started. Did you know that? You had a real future with this company, but you let those Reds stir you up. And now they’ll sell you down the river. Why don’t you wake up, Ray? That’s your name, isn’t it, Ray?
    Ramon: No. My name is Quintero. Mister Quintero.
    Alexander: Are you going to let us pass or do I have to call the Sheriff?
    Ramon: There’s nothing stopping you…
    I was wrong! They don’t want Jenkins for general manager — they want me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Adam: Some context, the guy who says he isn’t the president is, in fact, the president.
    Nima: President of the company, that’s right. Undercover Boss.
    Adam: Ramón is soon arrested by the violent, racist police after confronting a scab he knows. At the same time, Esperanza goes into labor. The strike continues for months, and strikers and union locals from around the country provide food and other aid for the families. Later, the sheriff issues a Taft-Hartley injunction ordering the striking workers to stop picketing. At a meeting, one of the strikers’ wives offers a solution, to much derision and resistance, which we’re going to listen to in that clip here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Teresa: If you read the court injunction carefully you will see that it only prohibits striking miners from picketing. We women are not striking miners. We will take over your picket line. (Men laughing.) Don’t laugh. We have a solution. You have none. Brother Quintero was right when he said we’ll lose fifty years of gains if we lose this strike. Your wives and children too. But this we promise, if the women take your places on the picket line, the strike will not be broken, and no scabs will take your jobs. (Applause.)
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]

    Nima: Now, before the union members vote on whether to introduce the women into the picket line, as suggested, Esperanza insists that the women be allowed to vote, and the motion narrowly passes. People begin marching immediately, though some women’s husbands, including Esperanza’s, prohibit them from joining the picket line. But eventually Esperanza joins the picketers and is arrested herself, along with her children, other picketers, and their children. In jail, the women make demands for baby formula, bathroom access, and other necessities, mirroring those of the miners.
    The children are released, and Ramón handles the housework while Esperanza is forced to stay in jail. Ramón, resentful of Esperanza’s growing independence, insists that the women have no chance of winning, but Esperanza maintains that they can outlast the company and criticizes her husband Ramon for treating her just as the bosses treat him.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Esperanza: Have you learned nothing from this strike? Why are you afraid to have me at your side? Do you still think you can have dignity only if I have none?
    Ramon: You talk of dignity? After what you’ve been doing?
    Esperanza: Yes. I talk of dignity. The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican.” That’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place.” Do you feel better having someone lower than you?
    Ramon: Shut up, you’re talking crazy.
    Esperanza: Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower than I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.
    Ramon: Will you be still?
    Esperanza: And if you can’t understand this you’re a fool because you can’t win this strike without me! You can’t win anything without me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Nima: Later, the company obtains an eviction order against the strikers, and the police start the process at the Quintero house. The strikers’ families defy the eviction order however, returning the Quinteros’ belongings to their home. Vastly outnumbered, the police leave, meaning the families have won the strike and that they can stay in their houses. Ramón thanks Esperanza for her work and for preaching a message of unity.
    Adam: The film was produced by Independent Productions Corporation, founded by Simon Lazarus, Herbert J. Biberman and producer Paul Jarrico, both of whom were blacklisted at the time and used the company to hire other blacklisted filmmakers. Writer Michael Wilson had been blacklisted as well. Salt of the Earth was also produced in partnership with the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.
    The story was based on the actual strike of 1951–1952 by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers against Empire Zinc, a subsidiary of New Jersey Zinc. Two of the film’s cast members — Juan Chacón, who played Ramón, and Clinton Jencks, who played another character named Frank Barnes — were actually members of the union and strike participants. Chacón, in fact, was president of one of the union locals.
    Nima: So yeah, this was basically a lefty labor-made film starring actual union organizers, past strikers as, you know, actors in the film. Now Unsurprisingly, the film Salt of the Earth had many powerful detractors. According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    In February 1953, during filming, California Republican Representative Donald Jackson, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) from California, declared that [Salt of the Earth] was ‘deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds,’ and was ‘a new weapon for Russia.’
    End quote.
    Simon Lazarus, founder of the film’s production company, was called to testify before Jackson’s committee that same year, 1953, the year before Salt of the Earth was even released.
    US entertainment unions opposed the film as well. IATSE and the Screen Actors Guild reportedly tried to halt production of the film for over a year, and director Biberman and producer Jarrico stated that they had hired people who had been effectively blacklisted by IATSE, including four Black workers — the assistant to the director, an assistant cameraman and two technicians — all of them excluded under IATSE’s Jim Crow policies.
    On May 24, 1959, the New York Times reported that the United States Information Agency included Salt of the Earth on its list of movies that it refused to show overseas. The film however was subsequently re-released in the US in 1965.
    Adam: Yeah, so if your film was too overtly pro union, centers race and racist cops, centers women’s liberation in the context of unionization, all a lot of bad stuff going on there. Hiring Black crew members. All that was very icky and so this movie was effectively thrown into a memory hole.
    Nima: It was so un-American that it wouldn’t be shown overseas.
    Adam: So un-American it is the only film ever to be blacklisted. Not a filmmaker, but the actual film, the only film ever to be blacklisted. Next up is Norma Rae from 1979. This is a more mainstream film, but one that has not so subtle politics, maybe slightly more subtle than the previous entry.
    In the Southern rural town of Henleyville, single mother Norma Rae Webster, played by Sally Field, works with her parents in a textile mill under conditions threatening the health of her, her family, and her co-workers. To shut her quote-unquote “big mouth,” management gives Norma a promotion, which she initially accepts but eventually rejects after realizing that the modest raise isn’t worth betraying the rank and file, her friends or family. When New York-based labor organizer Reuben Warshovsky, played by Ron Leibman, comes into town to encourage the mill workers to unionize, the galvanized Norma Rae takes an increasingly active role in the pursuit of victory for the mill workers.

    Sally Field and Ron Leibman in Norma Rae, 1979.
    Nima: So Norma Rae, of course, is widely known as kind of a high watermark of labor depiction in films. It’s from 1979. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure you can find it at your local library, you can stream it on Vimeo, you can probably pick up a DVD somewhere, I encourage you to do that, it is a fine film. But it really does mark this labor as shown in Hollywood as being a real hero’s journey. Also, similarly to Salt of the Earth, shone through this idea of powerful women being the kind of center of a story and moving, not only labor solidarity, but also women’s liberation and almost a feminist ideology that combines to really push the labor movement forward.
    Adam: Yeah, though, as our guest notes, and we’ll talk about, its depiction of race is a bit simplistic and tokenizing. But that aside, let’s get into the breakdown of the film itself. The first scene we’re going to watch here is when the union organizer from New York, Reuben, knocks on Norma’s door, explaining that he’s a traveling labor organizer seeking a room to rent. Norma’s father Vernon denies Reuben’s request, stating that Reuben and the union are not welcome. So to start off, we’re going to play a clip where Norma has been making too many demands of management so management decides, which is a typical tactic, decides to give her a promotion, and basically turn her against her own co-workers. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Norma Rae: Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.
    Gardner: Norma, you got the biggest mouth in this mill. “Give us a longer break.” “Give us more smokin’ time.” “Give us a Kotex pad machine.”
    Norma Rae: Do it and I’ll shut up!
    Gardner: Well, we’ll do better than that. We figure the only way to close that mouth is to hand you a promotion. You’re goin’ up in the world, honey.
    Norma Rae: Yeah? How far and for how much?
    Gardner: Well, we’re gonna put you on spot-checkin’.
    Norma Rae: Well hell, it sure ain’t gonna make me any friends.
    Gardner: It’ll make you another dollar and a half an hour.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Nima: Now, Norma demands to be fired after realizing that this promotion is effectively a betrayal to her co-workers, and that you know, she should be fired instead of getting the raise. Later, Norma and one of her co-workers attend a Textile Workers’ Union of America meeting held by traveling organizer Reuben Warshovsky, in which Warshovsky evangelizes about the unifying potential of organizing.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshovsky: Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them… by coming over to the room at the Golden Cherry Motel to pick up a union card and sign it. Yes, it comes from the Bible. “According to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.” But it comes from Reuben Warshovsky: “Not unless you make it happen.” Thank you.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: So Reuben tours the factory with management. After Norma sees how he defends the workers, she seeks to partner with him and improve the union’s outreach, cutting through years of anti-union propaganda fed to the textile workers. It has a kind of city-boy-meets-country-girl flair, but it’s very well done.
    As the labor organization attempts become more visible, the company retaliates. Management forces workers into longer shifts and posts a letter telling white workers that Black workers would use the union as a tool of control. Both of these tactics have dire consequences for the workers.
    Management later attempts to fire Norma after she tries to copy the letter to send to the union, hoping to expose the company’s illegal union-busting tactics. In response, in what has become an iconic scene, Norma stands up on a worktable at the mill holding a sign that reads “UNION” as the workers turn off their mechanical looms in solidarity, one by one.
    The company has Norma arrested for “disorderly conduct,” and Reuben bails her out. Norma is distraught, but Reuben is unfazed and used to hostility from police. He explains that this kind of institutional antagonism is a routine part of labor organizing, offering a glimpse into the ways that police and the state enact violence against unions. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshowsky: It comes with the job.
    Norma Rae: (Crying.)
    Reuben Warshowsky: I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club. I saw a boy get shot in the back. I saw a guy get blown to hell and back when he tried to start up his car in the morning. And you just got your feet wet on this one.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: Yeah, so spoiler alert — which in case you haven’t noticed this whole episode is — the risks pay off and the mill holds an election over whether to unionize, and the result is a victory for the union.
    Nima: Norma Rae was quite faithfully based on the story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a cotton mill worker at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Sutton became active in union organizing after meeting Eli Zivkovich, on whom Reuben Warshovsky was modeled. Sutton was fired after copying a racist, anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board and responded just as we see in Norma Rae: climbing onto a worktable, holding a sign reading “UNION” above her head. Unionization at J.P. Stevens took much more time than it did in its fictional counterpart, but it did happen nevertheless eventually in 1980.

    The film’s director, Martin Ritt, was known for his catalog of tales of the oppressed, such as the 1972 film Sounder, about Black sharecroppers during the Depression. Like the makers of Salt of the Earth, Ritt had been blacklisted himself in the 1950s, an experience he captured in the 1976 Woody Allen/Zero Mostel film The Front. He said this in 1986, quote, “I make the kind of films that not too many people get to make in this town, though sometimes I’ve had to take the risk myself,” end quote.
    Adam: According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. and United Artists turned down the project. As explained in a 25 Feb 1979 NYT article, Alan Ladd Jr., President at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., acquired it after Ritt convinced him that the film would be perceived as uplifting and not depressing…During negotiations with the studio, Ritt agreed to cut his salary in half to $250,000.
    $250,000 is still a lot of money in 1979, so our hearts don’t bleed too much. But the point is to further demonstrate the friction filmmakers encounter when they do try to have pro union narratives, it requires them to, in this case, eat shit on half their salary.
    Nima: Both Salt of the Earth, from 1954 and 1979’s Norma Rae depict unionization as going hand in hand with cross racial solidarity and the third film we’re going to discuss is no different. This is Sorry to Bother You from 2018.
    Adam: The film was written and directed by Boots Riley, who has a history of activism in the Bay Area and has a history of pretty overtly left-wing politics, which of course, explains the politics of the film.
    Sorry to Bother You tells the story of Cassius “Cash” Green, played by Lakeith Stanfield, who works, out of desperation, as a telemarketer for Oakland-based company called RegalView, where management repeatedly floats the abstract promise of a promotion. As Cassius’s co-worker Squeeze, played by Steven Yeun, hopes to start a union, Cassius ascends the ranks to become a handsomely paid and steadily promoted “power caller,” on the condition that he enthusiastically performs work far more grim than he could have possibly imagined.
    Nima: So Sorry to Bother You certainly is one of the more ideological films that we are discussing in this two-parter, Adam. It is an allegory more than it is based on a true story or the, you know, story of a certain hero as emblematic of a movement. It is really a fantastical look at labor, at capitalism, and the horrors within those. So we’re going to break down some of the scenes from Sorry to Bother You.
    At one point in the film Cassius somewhat reluctantly participates in a work stoppage organized by his coworker Squeeze and is called into the manager’s office, where his three supervisors offer the allure of a promotion to dissuade him from going any further, you can see parallels here to what happened to Norma Rae, right? We’ll give you a promotion if you just shut your mouth. Here is a clip from that scene from Sorry to Bother You.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Cassius: All right, hey, I know you’re gonna threaten to fire me and go ahead, whatever, I don’t care anymore because we’re gonna take this fucking place down.
    Johnny: (Laughs.) Pack your shit and get out.
    Cassius: Well, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you! Fuck you!
    Anderson: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, Mr. Green. You’re starting to sound a little paranoid here. We’re the bearers of good news. Great news.
    Johnny: Great motherfucking news.
    Anderson: Great motherfucking news. Power caller.
    Cassius: What the fuck?
    Anderson: Yeah we just got the call. They think you’re A1 material, you’re going upstairs my compadre. Yes, you are getting a promotion. at 9am tomorrow morning. Do you have a suit?
    Diana: Of course he does. Powerful, young, strong, intelligent, power caller.
    Cassius: But they —
    Anderson: Oh, God, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. You’re not going against their actions. All their issues are down here. Not up there. Two very different kinds of telemarketing.
    Cassius: Okay. Um…
    Anderson: This is your moment. Don’t waste it.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Cassius soon discovers that as a power caller, he’ll be selling repugnant yet lucrative products from a company called WorryFree. The work stoppage has become a full-blown strike at this point, and Cassius tries to play to both labor and management, telling the workers trying to organize that he supports them quote-unquote “from the sidelines” while simultaneously reaping the financial rewards and class signifiers of his new position as a power caller.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Salvador: Cassius? What’s up, man? Where you been? What’s up with the suit?
    Cassius: I got promoted.
    Squeeze: What does that mean? Are you a manager now?
    Cassius: That means I’m a power caller now. About to be paid.
    Squeeze: We’re all trying to get fucking paid. But we’re going to do it as a team. Are you on the team?
    Cassius: Yeah, I guess I’m still on your little team but I’m playing from the bench. The bench where you sit and get your bills paid. You know, my uncle is about to lose his house.
    Salvador: Cash, I’m Sorry about your uncle man, but they don’t mean sell out.
    Cassius: I’m not selling you all out. My success has nothing to do with you. All right? You just keep doing whatever it is that you’re fucking doing and I’ll root for you from the sidelines and try not to laugh at that stupid smirk on your face.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Later, Cassius is invited to an especially decadent party at the mansion of WorryFree executive Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer —
    Adam: Who we now know was playing himself basically.

  • Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    [Music]
    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
    Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We have no commercials, no billionaire benefactors that we know of, because we are completely listener funded and cannot thank you all enough for that.
    Adam: Yes, if you haven’t, please support us on Patreon, it’s very much appreciated, it does help keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable. Also, if you could rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, that’s very much appreciated, and as always, check out Bonfire for our merchandise, shirts, tote bags, mugs, what have you, it helps also support the show and also makes you look cool because you’re with the coolest podcast in the world. I believe that one marker of a cool podcast is they tell you they’re cool.
    Nima: (Laughs.) I like how your voice made that a question at the end.
    Adam: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s cool anymore. I’m old. I have a kid.
    Nima: It’s definitely a Citations Needed tote bag.
    Adam: Yeah, clearly.
    Nima: This is also our season five finale of Citations Needed. We’ll be taking a little summer break after this episode, spending some time with our families and gearing up for next season, season six, which will begin in September.
    A white-collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that’s taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer’s union-busting tactics.
    Adam: Stories like these represent something we don’t often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs, zealots, radical left-wingers, mafiosos or thugs or grifters, but as heroes willing to risk their health, homes, and livelihoods for the greater good.
    Nima: This is in stark contrast to the anti-union depictions in pop culture we explored on Citations Needed in Episode 164, part one of this two-part series on depictions of labor and unionization in film and television. On the previous episode, we discussed Hollywood’s emphasis on corruption in labor organizing, focusing noticeably on depictions of bloated bureaucracy, organized crime, and autocratic union bosses in films like On the Waterfront from 1954, Blue Collar from 1978, and The Irishman from 2019.
    Adam: This week, in part two, we’re going to address the inverse of that, looking at the rare but nontrivial examples of pop film that celebrates the accomplishments of labor movements, centers beleaguered workers with everything to lose, and positions abusive employers as the villains, while embracing themes of worker courage and heroism. While very often not perfect, these examples show that compelling, award-winning narratives can be crafted out of tales of collective action and collective bargaining.
    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Angela Allan, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, who writes about pop culture for The Atlantic magazine.
    [Begin Clip]
    Angela Allan: And I think the way that we see places like the New York Times or The Washington Post, how they’ve been covering unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses and at Starbucks, that they already are casting them as having this kind of narrative flair, you know, so if Martin Ritt is like, ‘I was really inspired by Crystal Lee Sutton,’ people like Chris Smalls or Jaz Brisack feel like Norma Rae-esque figures. I think that does suggest that there’s an appetite for these victory stories in real life.
    [End Clip]
    Nima: So last episode, we discussed a number of films that kind of do this common trope, Adam, of unions are generally corrupt, certainly their leadership is, sometimes, you know, solidarity between workers is a good thing, the working man, the working woman, more occasionally than the man depicted in Hollywood, especially in the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood, that there can be power in workers banding together and finding solidarity together. But generally, unions, as they are depicted, are that of overbearing, autocratic, and certainly corrupt institutions, just as corrupt as the companies that they’re supposed to be organizing against.
    Adam: Right. But let’s be honest, Hollywood, especially maybe in the ’40s and ’50s, and on to the ’60s and ’70s, less so I think today, but certainly decades ago, has left-wingers in it, has socialists, communists, fellow travelers et cetera, or bleeding-heart liberals, who empathize with unions, what have you. So obviously, there’s going to be some representations, pro-labor representation in Hollywood, that kind of slipped through the cracks, either because a director or writer is so established they can do whatever they want based on previous work or they’re indie films that are maybe outside the Hollywood studio production, which is definitely something we’re going to cover in this episode, but they still kind of get widespread releases based on critical acclaim or other independent vectors for success, if you will, or they’re just crypto, let’s be honest here, right? Much of people’s politics have to be crypto in certain ways, just by the nature of how popular culture works, by definition it must be popular, it must be broad, and the absolute biggest sin one can engage in is to have an agenda or a politics, that’s sort of seen as being declasse, that you can have message pictures where it’s say no to drugs or whatever, but you can’t have a message pictures that’s like down with capitalism. That’s too far. As you noted, legendary Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn is credited with saying, “All they want is a story. If you have a message, send it by Western Union.” Of course, we argue in this episode that all movies have messages whether we want to or not, there’s no such thing as a non-message movie. And some of those films will have a message that is pro-labor in inclination, if not intent. So we’re excited to get into those today and talk about those and then talk to our guest about how they worked, what makes them work, and what we can learn from them.
    Nima: Now, obviously, normal qualifier to start, Adam, this is a huge topic, we can’t cover every single labor film, even the good ones. There are incredible documentaries like Harlan County, USA, directed by Barbara Kopple. There are films like Warren Beatty’s Reds from 1981 about journalist John Reed and the chronicling of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and John Sayles’ Matewan from 1987 about the 1920s coal miner strike in Matewan, West Virginia. There is stealth communist propaganda by Disney, Newsies from 1992. There’s the 2000 film directed by Ken Loach, Bread and Roses, about the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in LA and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It’s based on the very real Justice for Janitors campaign of the SEIU.

    Adam: There is a very famous episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that is very pro-union propaganda. To give some context, one of the characters, who’s an alien, works at the bar of Deep Space Nine station, and is consistently abused and exploited by his brother, played by Quark, the scrupulous bar owner who we come to love. And he begins to talk about starting a union to demand more rights, which for the Ferengis is unheard of, since they’re, like, a race of hypercapitalists. In this clip, he’s discussing with two of his crewmates, Dr. Bashir and Miles O’Brien, about his frustrations with his boss and his desire to have collective bargaining.
    [Begin Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Rom: Dr. Bashir, I’m glad you’re in. I need your help.
    Dr. Bashir: Your ear acting up again?
    Rom: My ear’s fine. I need some advice about…unions.
    Dr. Bashir: Unions?
    Rom: You said the other day I should form a union, so I did.
    Dr. Bashir: Rom, I was speaking theoretically.
    Rom: And I put your theory into practice! All of Quark’s employees have joined. We’re going to force Quark to treat us better. I hope.
    Miles O’Brien: A union, huh? Good for you.
    Rom: You know about unions?
    Miles O’Brien: Who do you think led the Pennsylvania coal miners during the anthracite strike of 1902?
    Rom: I have no idea.
    Miles O’Brien: Sean Aloysius O’Brien.
    Dr. Bashir: I didn’t know that.
    Miles O’Brien: There’s a lot of things about my family you don’t know. Eleven months, those mines were closed. They didn’t open again until all the miners’ demands were met.
    Rom: You mean we should force Quark to close the bar?
    Dr. Bashir: Only as a last resort. If he’s reasonable about your requests, there’s no need to strike.
    Miles O’Brien: Quark? Reasonable? Ha! Unlikely. You’ll have to strike. Mark my words. And when you do, you’ll have to be strong.
    Rom: Just like Sean O’Brien.
    Miles O’Brien: Exactly. You know, he had the biggest funeral in all of Western Pennsylvania.
    Rom: Funeral?
    Miles O’Brien: Mm. They fished his body out of the Allegheny River the week before the strike ended. 32 bullets he had in him. Or was it 34?
    Dr. Bashir: Well, he died a hero.
    Miles O’Brien: He was more than a hero! He was a union man!
    [End Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Adam: I think it’s funny that Miles O’Brien does this thing where he traces his lineage back, like, 400 years at this point.
    Nima: (Laughs.) Yeah, when Pennsylvania existed.
    Adam: Yeah, when people take their genealogy tests, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m a descendant of King James II.’ I’m like, well, everyone’s a descendant of King James II at that point.
    Nima: Hey, it works, even later in the episode, Rom even quotes from the Communist Manifesto, saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”
    Adam: Right.
    Nima: It is very exciting. Now, I must admit I am not the Star Trek scholar that you are, Adam, but I’m thrilled that we were able to get this one in. The episode is called “Bar Association,” directed by LeVar Burton, and aired originally on February 19, 1996. Just two days later on February 21, 1996, an episode of Sister, Sister aired called “Paper or Plastic” when one of the characters’ co-workers on the show working in a grocery store are going on strike to demand higher wages, and this episode of Sister, Sister is remarkable for its pro-union advocacy, as documented on Twitter a couple years ago by Diana Hussein, who is the comms director for the pro-worker group UNITE HERE! Everyone should absolutely check that out. They call the replacement workers scabs. They tell folks not to cross picket lines. It is really fantastic and kind of amazing that within the span of just three days, Deep Space Nine and Sister, Sister ran pro-union episodes.
    Adam: An anomaly indeed. Our usual disclaimer here by the way, before we get into the films, there are spoilers to the films we will be discussing.
    Nima: While on part one of this episode last week, we began in 1954 with On the Waterfront, we are going to return to that year to start off this episode but this time we’re going to talk about the film Salt of the Earth, again from 1954, directed by Herbert J. Biberman.
    The story goes basically like this: Esperanza Quintero, played by Rosaura Revueltas, and her husband, Ramón, played by Juan Chacón, live with their two, and soon to be three, children in precarity in her home village — now the company town of Zinc Town, New Mexico. Ramón, a union miner for Delaware Zinc, is forced to work in the mines alone, a policy that only applies to Mexican-American, not white, miners, which creates extremely dangerous conditions of course. Ramón and other miners decide to strike for worker safety, and their wives encourage them to expand their demands, marking the beginning of an instrumental role that women will play in organizing for the rights of the miners’ union and the health and safety of their families.
    Adam: During the strike, the company hires out-of-town strikebreakers, but they leave after seeing the size of the picket line. In one scene, the superintendent and an executive drive up to the picket line and speak manipulatively to Ramón, but Ramón doesn’t take the bait. Now keep in mind, this is 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out. This is extremely based shit. So we’re gonna listen to that here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Alexander: Well, they’re like children in many ways. Sometimes you have to humor them, sometimes you have to spank them — and sometimes you have to take their food away. Here comes the one we were talking about. (Chuckles) He’s quite a character. Claims his grandfather once owned the land where the mine is now.
    Ramon: Want to go up to your office, Mr. Alexander?
    Alexander: Naturally. You think I parked here for a cup of coffee?
    Ramon: You’re welcome to one.
    Alexander: No thanks.
    Ramon: The men would like to know who this gentleman is.
    Alexander: That’s none of their affair.
    Hartwell: That’s all right — it’s no secret. My name’s Hartwell. I’m from the company’s Eastern office.
    Ramon: You mean Delaware?
    Hartwell: No. New York.
    Ramon: New York? You’re not the Company President by any chance?
    Hartwell: No.
    Ramon: Too bad. The men have always wanted to get a look at the President. But you’ve come out here to settle the strike?
    Hartwell: Well, if that’s possible.
    Ramon: It’s possible. Just negotiate.
    Hartwell: Are we talking to a union spokesman?
    Alexander: Not exactly. But I wish he were one. He knows more about mining than those pie-cards we’ve had to deal with. I mean it. I know your work record. You were in line for foreman when this trouble started. Did you know that? You had a real future with this company, but you let those Reds stir you up. And now they’ll sell you down the river. Why don’t you wake up, Ray? That’s your name, isn’t it, Ray?
    Ramon: No. My name is Quintero. Mister Quintero.
    Alexander: Are you going to let us pass or do I have to call the Sheriff?
    Ramon: There’s nothing stopping you…
    I was wrong! They don’t want Jenkins for general manager — they want me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Adam: Some context, the guy who says he isn’t the president is, in fact, the president.
    Nima: President of the company, that’s right. Undercover Boss.
    Adam: Ramón is soon arrested by the violent, racist police after confronting a scab he knows. At the same time, Esperanza goes into labor. The strike continues for months, and strikers and union locals from around the country provide food and other aid for the families. Later, the sheriff issues a Taft-Hartley injunction ordering the striking workers to stop picketing. At a meeting, one of the strikers’ wives offers a solution, to much derision and resistance, which we’re going to listen to in that clip here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Teresa: If you read the court injunction carefully you will see that it only prohibits striking miners from picketing. We women are not striking miners. We will take over your picket line. (Men laughing.) Don’t laugh. We have a solution. You have none. Brother Quintero was right when he said we’ll lose fifty years of gains if we lose this strike. Your wives and children too. But this we promise, if the women take your places on the picket line, the strike will not be broken, and no scabs will take your jobs. (Applause.)
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]

    Nima: Now, before the union members vote on whether to introduce the women into the picket line, as suggested, Esperanza insists that the women be allowed to vote, and the motion narrowly passes. People begin marching immediately, though some women’s husbands, including Esperanza’s, prohibit them from joining the picket line. But eventually Esperanza joins the picketers and is arrested herself, along with her children, other picketers, and their children. In jail, the women make demands for baby formula, bathroom access, and other necessities, mirroring those of the miners.
    The children are released, and Ramón handles the housework while Esperanza is forced to stay in jail. Ramón, resentful of Esperanza’s growing independence, insists that the women have no chance of winning, but Esperanza maintains that they can outlast the company and criticizes her husband Ramon for treating her just as the bosses treat him.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Esperanza: Have you learned nothing from this strike? Why are you afraid to have me at your side? Do you still think you can have dignity only if I have none?
    Ramon: You talk of dignity? After what you’ve been doing?
    Esperanza: Yes. I talk of dignity. The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican.” That’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place.” Do you feel better having someone lower than you?
    Ramon: Shut up, you’re talking crazy.
    Esperanza: Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower than I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.
    Ramon: Will you be still?
    Esperanza: And if you can’t understand this you’re a fool because you can’t win this strike without me! You can’t win anything without me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Nima: Later, the company obtains an eviction order against the strikers, and the police start the process at the Quintero house. The strikers’ families defy the eviction order however, returning the Quinteros’ belongings to their home. Vastly outnumbered, the police leave, meaning the families have won the strike and that they can stay in their houses. Ramón thanks Esperanza for her work and for preaching a message of unity.
    Adam: The film was produced by Independent Productions Corporation, founded by Simon Lazarus, Herbert J. Biberman and producer Paul Jarrico, both of whom were blacklisted at the time and used the company to hire other blacklisted filmmakers. Writer Michael Wilson had been blacklisted as well. Salt of the Earth was also produced in partnership with the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.
    The story was based on the actual strike of 1951–1952 by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers against Empire Zinc, a subsidiary of New Jersey Zinc. Two of the film’s cast members — Juan Chacón, who played Ramón, and Clinton Jencks, who played another character named Frank Barnes — were actually members of the union and strike participants. Chacón, in fact, was president of one of the union locals.
    Nima: So yeah, this was basically a lefty labor-made film starring actual union organizers, past strikers as, you know, actors in the film. Now Unsurprisingly, the film Salt of the Earth had many powerful detractors. According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    In February 1953, during filming, California Republican Representative Donald Jackson, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) from California, declared that [Salt of the Earth] was ‘deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds,’ and was ‘a new weapon for Russia.’
    End quote.
    Simon Lazarus, founder of the film’s production company, was called to testify before Jackson’s committee that same year, 1953, the year before Salt of the Earth was even released.
    US entertainment unions opposed the film as well. IATSE and the Screen Actors Guild reportedly tried to halt production of the film for over a year, and director Biberman and producer Jarrico stated that they had hired people who had been effectively blacklisted by IATSE, including four Black workers — the assistant to the director, an assistant cameraman and two technicians — all of them excluded under IATSE’s Jim Crow policies.
    On May 24, 1959, the New York Times reported that the United States Information Agency included Salt of the Earth on its list of movies that it refused to show overseas. The film however was subsequently re-released in the US in 1965.
    Adam: Yeah, so if your film was too overtly pro union, centers race and racist cops, centers women’s liberation in the context of unionization, all a lot of bad stuff going on there. Hiring Black crew members. All that was very icky and so this movie was effectively thrown into a memory hole.
    Nima: It was so un-American that it wouldn’t be shown overseas.
    Adam: So un-American it is the only film ever to be blacklisted. Not a filmmaker, but the actual film, the only film ever to be blacklisted. Next up is Norma Rae from 1979. This is a more mainstream film, but one that has not so subtle politics, maybe slightly more subtle than the previous entry.
    In the Southern rural town of Henleyville, single mother Norma Rae Webster, played by Sally Field, works with her parents in a textile mill under conditions threatening the health of her, her family, and her co-workers. To shut her quote-unquote “big mouth,” management gives Norma a promotion, which she initially accepts but eventually rejects after realizing that the modest raise isn’t worth betraying the rank and file, her friends or family. When New York-based labor organizer Reuben Warshovsky, played by Ron Leibman, comes into town to encourage the mill workers to unionize, the galvanized Norma Rae takes an increasingly active role in the pursuit of victory for the mill workers.

    Sally Field and Ron Leibman in Norma Rae, 1979.
    Nima: So Norma Rae, of course, is widely known as kind of a high watermark of labor depiction in films. It’s from 1979. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure you can find it at your local library, you can stream it on Vimeo, you can probably pick up a DVD somewhere, I encourage you to do that, it is a fine film. But it really does mark this labor as shown in Hollywood as being a real hero’s journey. Also, similarly to Salt of the Earth, shone through this idea of powerful women being the kind of center of a story and moving, not only labor solidarity, but also women’s liberation and almost a feminist ideology that combines to really push the labor movement forward.
    Adam: Yeah, though, as our guest notes, and we’ll talk about, its depiction of race is a bit simplistic and tokenizing. But that aside, let’s get into the breakdown of the film itself. The first scene we’re going to watch here is when the union organizer from New York, Reuben, knocks on Norma’s door, explaining that he’s a traveling labor organizer seeking a room to rent. Norma’s father Vernon denies Reuben’s request, stating that Reuben and the union are not welcome. So to start off, we’re going to play a clip where Norma has been making too many demands of management so management decides, which is a typical tactic, decides to give her a promotion, and basically turn her against her own co-workers. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Norma Rae: Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.
    Gardner: Norma, you got the biggest mouth in this mill. “Give us a longer break.” “Give us more smokin’ time.” “Give us a Kotex pad machine.”
    Norma Rae: Do it and I’ll shut up!
    Gardner: Well, we’ll do better than that. We figure the only way to close that mouth is to hand you a promotion. You’re goin’ up in the world, honey.
    Norma Rae: Yeah? How far and for how much?
    Gardner: Well, we’re gonna put you on spot-checkin’.
    Norma Rae: Well hell, it sure ain’t gonna make me any friends.
    Gardner: It’ll make you another dollar and a half an hour.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Nima: Now, Norma demands to be fired after realizing that this promotion is effectively a betrayal to her co-workers, and that you know, she should be fired instead of getting the raise. Later, Norma and one of her co-workers attend a Textile Workers’ Union of America meeting held by traveling organizer Reuben Warshovsky, in which Warshovsky evangelizes about the unifying potential of organizing.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshovsky: Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them… by coming over to the room at the Golden Cherry Motel to pick up a union card and sign it. Yes, it comes from the Bible. “According to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.” But it comes from Reuben Warshovsky: “Not unless you make it happen.” Thank you.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: So Reuben tours the factory with management. After Norma sees how he defends the workers, she seeks to partner with him and improve the union’s outreach, cutting through years of anti-union propaganda fed to the textile workers. It has a kind of city-boy-meets-country-girl flair, but it’s very well done.
    As the labor organization attempts become more visible, the company retaliates. Management forces workers into longer shifts and posts a letter telling white workers that Black workers would use the union as a tool of control. Both of these tactics have dire consequences for the workers.
    Management later attempts to fire Norma after she tries to copy the letter to send to the union, hoping to expose the company’s illegal union-busting tactics. In response, in what has become an iconic scene, Norma stands up on a worktable at the mill holding a sign that reads “UNION” as the workers turn off their mechanical looms in solidarity, one by one.
    The company has Norma arrested for “disorderly conduct,” and Reuben bails her out. Norma is distraught, but Reuben is unfazed and used to hostility from police. He explains that this kind of institutional antagonism is a routine part of labor organizing, offering a glimpse into the ways that police and the state enact violence against unions. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshowsky: It comes with the job.
    Norma Rae: (Crying.)
    Reuben Warshowsky: I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club. I saw a boy get shot in the back. I saw a guy get blown to hell and back when he tried to start up his car in the morning. And you just got your feet wet on this one.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: Yeah, so spoiler alert — which in case you haven’t noticed this whole episode is — the risks pay off and the mill holds an election over whether to unionize, and the result is a victory for the union.
    Nima: Norma Rae was quite faithfully based on the story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a cotton mill worker at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Sutton became active in union organizing after meeting Eli Zivkovich, on whom Reuben Warshovsky was modeled. Sutton was fired after copying a racist, anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board and responded just as we see in Norma Rae: climbing onto a worktable, holding a sign reading “UNION” above her head. Unionization at J.P. Stevens took much more time than it did in its fictional counterpart, but it did happen nevertheless eventually in 1980.

    The film’s director, Martin Ritt, was known for his catalog of tales of the oppressed, such as the 1972 film Sounder, about Black sharecroppers during the Depression. Like the makers of Salt of the Earth, Ritt had been blacklisted himself in the 1950s, an experience he captured in the 1976 Woody Allen/Zero Mostel film The Front. He said this in 1986, quote, “I make the kind of films that not too many people get to make in this town, though sometimes I’ve had to take the risk myself,” end quote.
    Adam: According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. and United Artists turned down the project. As explained in a 25 Feb 1979 NYT article, Alan Ladd Jr., President at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., acquired it after Ritt convinced him that the film would be perceived as uplifting and not depressing…During negotiations with the studio, Ritt agreed to cut his salary in half to $250,000.
    $250,000 is still a lot of money in 1979, so our hearts don’t bleed too much. But the point is to further demonstrate the friction filmmakers encounter when they do try to have pro union narratives, it requires them to, in this case, eat shit on half their salary.
    Nima: Both Salt of the Earth, from 1954 and 1979’s Norma Rae depict unionization as going hand in hand with cross racial solidarity and the third film we’re going to discuss is no different. This is Sorry to Bother You from 2018.
    Adam: The film was written and directed by Boots Riley, who has a history of activism in the Bay Area and has a history of pretty overtly left-wing politics, which of course, explains the politics of the film.
    Sorry to Bother You tells the story of Cassius “Cash” Green, played by Lakeith Stanfield, who works, out of desperation, as a telemarketer for Oakland-based company called RegalView, where management repeatedly floats the abstract promise of a promotion. As Cassius’s co-worker Squeeze, played by Steven Yeun, hopes to start a union, Cassius ascends the ranks to become a handsomely paid and steadily promoted “power caller,” on the condition that he enthusiastically performs work far more grim than he could have possibly imagined.
    Nima: So Sorry to Bother You certainly is one of the more ideological films that we are discussing in this two-parter, Adam. It is an allegory more than it is based on a true story or the, you know, story of a certain hero as emblematic of a movement. It is really a fantastical look at labor, at capitalism, and the horrors within those. So we’re going to break down some of the scenes from Sorry to Bother You.
    At one point in the film Cassius somewhat reluctantly participates in a work stoppage organized by his coworker Squeeze and is called into the manager’s office, where his three supervisors offer the allure of a promotion to dissuade him from going any further, you can see parallels here to what happened to Norma Rae, right? We’ll give you a promotion if you just shut your mouth. Here is a clip from that scene from Sorry to Bother You.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Cassius: All right, hey, I know you’re gonna threaten to fire me and go ahead, whatever, I don’t care anymore because we’re gonna take this fucking place down.
    Johnny: (Laughs.) Pack your shit and get out.
    Cassius: Well, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you! Fuck you!
    Anderson: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, Mr. Green. You’re starting to sound a little paranoid here. We’re the bearers of good news. Great news.
    Johnny: Great motherfucking news.
    Anderson: Great motherfucking news. Power caller.
    Cassius: What the fuck?
    Anderson: Yeah we just got the call. They think you’re A1 material, you’re going upstairs my compadre. Yes, you are getting a promotion. at 9am tomorrow morning. Do you have a suit?
    Diana: Of course he does. Powerful, young, strong, intelligent, power caller.
    Cassius: But they —
    Anderson: Oh, God, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. You’re not going against their actions. All their issues are down here. Not up there. Two very different kinds of telemarketing.
    Cassius: Okay. Um…
    Anderson: This is your moment. Don’t waste it.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Cassius soon discovers that as a power caller, he’ll be selling repugnant yet lucrative products from a company called WorryFree. The work stoppage has become a full-blown strike at this point, and Cassius tries to play to both labor and management, telling the workers trying to organize that he supports them quote-unquote “from the sidelines” while simultaneously reaping the financial rewards and class signifiers of his new position as a power caller.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Salvador: Cassius? What’s up, man? Where you been? What’s up with the suit?
    Cassius: I got promoted.
    Squeeze: What does that mean? Are you a manager now?
    Cassius: That means I’m a power caller now. About to be paid.
    Squeeze: We’re all trying to get fucking paid. But we’re going to do it as a team. Are you on the team?
    Cassius: Yeah, I guess I’m still on your little team but I’m playing from the bench. The bench where you sit and get your bills paid. You know, my uncle is about to lose his house.
    Salvador: Cash, I’m Sorry about your uncle man, but they don’t mean sell out.
    Cassius: I’m not selling you all out. My success has nothing to do with you. All right? You just keep doing whatever it is that you’re fucking doing and I’ll root for you from the sidelines and try not to laugh at that stupid smirk on your face.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Later, Cassius is invited to an especially decadent party at the mansion of WorryFree executive Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer —
    Adam: Who we now know was playing himself basically.

  • Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    [Music]
    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
    Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We have no commercials, no billionaire benefactors that we know of, because we are completely listener funded and cannot thank you all enough for that.
    Adam: Yes, if you haven’t, please support us on Patreon, it’s very much appreciated, it does help keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable. Also, if you could rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, that’s very much appreciated, and as always, check out Bonfire for our merchandise, shirts, tote bags, mugs, what have you, it helps also support the show and also makes you look cool because you’re with the coolest podcast in the world. I believe that one marker of a cool podcast is they tell you they’re cool.
    Nima: (Laughs.) I like how your voice made that a question at the end.
    Adam: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s cool anymore. I’m old. I have a kid.
    Nima: It’s definitely a Citations Needed tote bag.
    Adam: Yeah, clearly.
    Nima: This is also our season five finale of Citations Needed. We’ll be taking a little summer break after this episode, spending some time with our families and gearing up for next season, season six, which will begin in September.
    A white-collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that’s taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer’s union-busting tactics.
    Adam: Stories like these represent something we don’t often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs, zealots, radical left-wingers, mafiosos or thugs or grifters, but as heroes willing to risk their health, homes, and livelihoods for the greater good.
    Nima: This is in stark contrast to the anti-union depictions in pop culture we explored on Citations Needed in Episode 164, part one of this two-part series on depictions of labor and unionization in film and television. On the previous episode, we discussed Hollywood’s emphasis on corruption in labor organizing, focusing noticeably on depictions of bloated bureaucracy, organized crime, and autocratic union bosses in films like On the Waterfront from 1954, Blue Collar from 1978, and The Irishman from 2019.
    Adam: This week, in part two, we’re going to address the inverse of that, looking at the rare but nontrivial examples of pop film that celebrates the accomplishments of labor movements, centers beleaguered workers with everything to lose, and positions abusive employers as the villains, while embracing themes of worker courage and heroism. While very often not perfect, these examples show that compelling, award-winning narratives can be crafted out of tales of collective action and collective bargaining.
    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Angela Allan, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, who writes about pop culture for The Atlantic magazine.
    [Begin Clip]
    Angela Allan: And I think the way that we see places like the New York Times or The Washington Post, how they’ve been covering unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses and at Starbucks, that they already are casting them as having this kind of narrative flair, you know, so if Martin Ritt is like, ‘I was really inspired by Crystal Lee Sutton,’ people like Chris Smalls or Jaz Brisack feel like Norma Rae-esque figures. I think that does suggest that there’s an appetite for these victory stories in real life.
    [End Clip]
    Nima: So last episode, we discussed a number of films that kind of do this common trope, Adam, of unions are generally corrupt, certainly their leadership is, sometimes, you know, solidarity between workers is a good thing, the working man, the working woman, more occasionally than the man depicted in Hollywood, especially in the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood, that there can be power in workers banding together and finding solidarity together. But generally, unions, as they are depicted, are that of overbearing, autocratic, and certainly corrupt institutions, just as corrupt as the companies that they’re supposed to be organizing against.
    Adam: Right. But let’s be honest, Hollywood, especially maybe in the ’40s and ’50s, and on to the ’60s and ’70s, less so I think today, but certainly decades ago, has left-wingers in it, has socialists, communists, fellow travelers et cetera, or bleeding-heart liberals, who empathize with unions, what have you. So obviously, there’s going to be some representations, pro-labor representation in Hollywood, that kind of slipped through the cracks, either because a director or writer is so established they can do whatever they want based on previous work or they’re indie films that are maybe outside the Hollywood studio production, which is definitely something we’re going to cover in this episode, but they still kind of get widespread releases based on critical acclaim or other independent vectors for success, if you will, or they’re just crypto, let’s be honest here, right? Much of people’s politics have to be crypto in certain ways, just by the nature of how popular culture works, by definition it must be popular, it must be broad, and the absolute biggest sin one can engage in is to have an agenda or a politics, that’s sort of seen as being declasse, that you can have message pictures where it’s say no to drugs or whatever, but you can’t have a message pictures that’s like down with capitalism. That’s too far. As you noted, legendary Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn is credited with saying, “All they want is a story. If you have a message, send it by Western Union.” Of course, we argue in this episode that all movies have messages whether we want to or not, there’s no such thing as a non-message movie. And some of those films will have a message that is pro-labor in inclination, if not intent. So we’re excited to get into those today and talk about those and then talk to our guest about how they worked, what makes them work, and what we can learn from them.
    Nima: Now, obviously, normal qualifier to start, Adam, this is a huge topic, we can’t cover every single labor film, even the good ones. There are incredible documentaries like Harlan County, USA, directed by Barbara Kopple. There are films like Warren Beatty’s Reds from 1981 about journalist John Reed and the chronicling of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and John Sayles’ Matewan from 1987 about the 1920s coal miner strike in Matewan, West Virginia. There is stealth communist propaganda by Disney, Newsies from 1992. There’s the 2000 film directed by Ken Loach, Bread and Roses, about the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in LA and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It’s based on the very real Justice for Janitors campaign of the SEIU.

    Adam: There is a very famous episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that is very pro-union propaganda. To give some context, one of the characters, who’s an alien, works at the bar of Deep Space Nine station, and is consistently abused and exploited by his brother, played by Quark, the scrupulous bar owner who we come to love. And he begins to talk about starting a union to demand more rights, which for the Ferengis is unheard of, since they’re, like, a race of hypercapitalists. In this clip, he’s discussing with two of his crewmates, Dr. Bashir and Miles O’Brien, about his frustrations with his boss and his desire to have collective bargaining.
    [Begin Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Rom: Dr. Bashir, I’m glad you’re in. I need your help.
    Dr. Bashir: Your ear acting up again?
    Rom: My ear’s fine. I need some advice about…unions.
    Dr. Bashir: Unions?
    Rom: You said the other day I should form a union, so I did.
    Dr. Bashir: Rom, I was speaking theoretically.
    Rom: And I put your theory into practice! All of Quark’s employees have joined. We’re going to force Quark to treat us better. I hope.
    Miles O’Brien: A union, huh? Good for you.
    Rom: You know about unions?
    Miles O’Brien: Who do you think led the Pennsylvania coal miners during the anthracite strike of 1902?
    Rom: I have no idea.
    Miles O’Brien: Sean Aloysius O’Brien.
    Dr. Bashir: I didn’t know that.
    Miles O’Brien: There’s a lot of things about my family you don’t know. Eleven months, those mines were closed. They didn’t open again until all the miners’ demands were met.
    Rom: You mean we should force Quark to close the bar?
    Dr. Bashir: Only as a last resort. If he’s reasonable about your requests, there’s no need to strike.
    Miles O’Brien: Quark? Reasonable? Ha! Unlikely. You’ll have to strike. Mark my words. And when you do, you’ll have to be strong.
    Rom: Just like Sean O’Brien.
    Miles O’Brien: Exactly. You know, he had the biggest funeral in all of Western Pennsylvania.
    Rom: Funeral?
    Miles O’Brien: Mm. They fished his body out of the Allegheny River the week before the strike ended. 32 bullets he had in him. Or was it 34?
    Dr. Bashir: Well, he died a hero.
    Miles O’Brien: He was more than a hero! He was a union man!
    [End Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Adam: I think it’s funny that Miles O’Brien does this thing where he traces his lineage back, like, 400 years at this point.
    Nima: (Laughs.) Yeah, when Pennsylvania existed.
    Adam: Yeah, when people take their genealogy tests, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m a descendant of King James II.’ I’m like, well, everyone’s a descendant of King James II at that point.
    Nima: Hey, it works, even later in the episode, Rom even quotes from the Communist Manifesto, saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”
    Adam: Right.
    Nima: It is very exciting. Now, I must admit I am not the Star Trek scholar that you are, Adam, but I’m thrilled that we were able to get this one in. The episode is called “Bar Association,” directed by LeVar Burton, and aired originally on February 19, 1996. Just two days later on February 21, 1996, an episode of Sister, Sister aired called “Paper or Plastic” when one of the characters’ co-workers on the show working in a grocery store are going on strike to demand higher wages, and this episode of Sister, Sister is remarkable for its pro-union advocacy, as documented on Twitter a couple years ago by Diana Hussein, who is the comms director for the pro-worker group UNITE HERE! Everyone should absolutely check that out. They call the replacement workers scabs. They tell folks not to cross picket lines. It is really fantastic and kind of amazing that within the span of just three days, Deep Space Nine and Sister, Sister ran pro-union episodes.
    Adam: An anomaly indeed. Our usual disclaimer here by the way, before we get into the films, there are spoilers to the films we will be discussing.
    Nima: While on part one of this episode last week, we began in 1954 with On the Waterfront, we are going to return to that year to start off this episode but this time we’re going to talk about the film Salt of the Earth, again from 1954, directed by Herbert J. Biberman.
    The story goes basically like this: Esperanza Quintero, played by Rosaura Revueltas, and her husband, Ramón, played by Juan Chacón, live with their two, and soon to be three, children in precarity in her home village — now the company town of Zinc Town, New Mexico. Ramón, a union miner for Delaware Zinc, is forced to work in the mines alone, a policy that only applies to Mexican-American, not white, miners, which creates extremely dangerous conditions of course. Ramón and other miners decide to strike for worker safety, and their wives encourage them to expand their demands, marking the beginning of an instrumental role that women will play in organizing for the rights of the miners’ union and the health and safety of their families.
    Adam: During the strike, the company hires out-of-town strikebreakers, but they leave after seeing the size of the picket line. In one scene, the superintendent and an executive drive up to the picket line and speak manipulatively to Ramón, but Ramón doesn’t take the bait. Now keep in mind, this is 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out. This is extremely based shit. So we’re gonna listen to that here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Alexander: Well, they’re like children in many ways. Sometimes you have to humor them, sometimes you have to spank them — and sometimes you have to take their food away. Here comes the one we were talking about. (Chuckles) He’s quite a character. Claims his grandfather once owned the land where the mine is now.
    Ramon: Want to go up to your office, Mr. Alexander?
    Alexander: Naturally. You think I parked here for a cup of coffee?
    Ramon: You’re welcome to one.
    Alexander: No thanks.
    Ramon: The men would like to know who this gentleman is.
    Alexander: That’s none of their affair.
    Hartwell: That’s all right — it’s no secret. My name’s Hartwell. I’m from the company’s Eastern office.
    Ramon: You mean Delaware?
    Hartwell: No. New York.
    Ramon: New York? You’re not the Company President by any chance?
    Hartwell: No.
    Ramon: Too bad. The men have always wanted to get a look at the President. But you’ve come out here to settle the strike?
    Hartwell: Well, if that’s possible.
    Ramon: It’s possible. Just negotiate.
    Hartwell: Are we talking to a union spokesman?
    Alexander: Not exactly. But I wish he were one. He knows more about mining than those pie-cards we’ve had to deal with. I mean it. I know your work record. You were in line for foreman when this trouble started. Did you know that? You had a real future with this company, but you let those Reds stir you up. And now they’ll sell you down the river. Why don’t you wake up, Ray? That’s your name, isn’t it, Ray?
    Ramon: No. My name is Quintero. Mister Quintero.
    Alexander: Are you going to let us pass or do I have to call the Sheriff?
    Ramon: There’s nothing stopping you…
    I was wrong! They don’t want Jenkins for general manager — they want me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Adam: Some context, the guy who says he isn’t the president is, in fact, the president.
    Nima: President of the company, that’s right. Undercover Boss.
    Adam: Ramón is soon arrested by the violent, racist police after confronting a scab he knows. At the same time, Esperanza goes into labor. The strike continues for months, and strikers and union locals from around the country provide food and other aid for the families. Later, the sheriff issues a Taft-Hartley injunction ordering the striking workers to stop picketing. At a meeting, one of the strikers’ wives offers a solution, to much derision and resistance, which we’re going to listen to in that clip here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Teresa: If you read the court injunction carefully you will see that it only prohibits striking miners from picketing. We women are not striking miners. We will take over your picket line. (Men laughing.) Don’t laugh. We have a solution. You have none. Brother Quintero was right when he said we’ll lose fifty years of gains if we lose this strike. Your wives and children too. But this we promise, if the women take your places on the picket line, the strike will not be broken, and no scabs will take your jobs. (Applause.)
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]

    Nima: Now, before the union members vote on whether to introduce the women into the picket line, as suggested, Esperanza insists that the women be allowed to vote, and the motion narrowly passes. People begin marching immediately, though some women’s husbands, including Esperanza’s, prohibit them from joining the picket line. But eventually Esperanza joins the picketers and is arrested herself, along with her children, other picketers, and their children. In jail, the women make demands for baby formula, bathroom access, and other necessities, mirroring those of the miners.
    The children are released, and Ramón handles the housework while Esperanza is forced to stay in jail. Ramón, resentful of Esperanza’s growing independence, insists that the women have no chance of winning, but Esperanza maintains that they can outlast the company and criticizes her husband Ramon for treating her just as the bosses treat him.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Esperanza: Have you learned nothing from this strike? Why are you afraid to have me at your side? Do you still think you can have dignity only if I have none?
    Ramon: You talk of dignity? After what you’ve been doing?
    Esperanza: Yes. I talk of dignity. The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican.” That’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place.” Do you feel better having someone lower than you?
    Ramon: Shut up, you’re talking crazy.
    Esperanza: Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower than I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.
    Ramon: Will you be still?
    Esperanza: And if you can’t understand this you’re a fool because you can’t win this strike without me! You can’t win anything without me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Nima: Later, the company obtains an eviction order against the strikers, and the police start the process at the Quintero house. The strikers’ families defy the eviction order however, returning the Quinteros’ belongings to their home. Vastly outnumbered, the police leave, meaning the families have won the strike and that they can stay in their houses. Ramón thanks Esperanza for her work and for preaching a message of unity.
    Adam: The film was produced by Independent Productions Corporation, founded by Simon Lazarus, Herbert J. Biberman and producer Paul Jarrico, both of whom were blacklisted at the time and used the company to hire other blacklisted filmmakers. Writer Michael Wilson had been blacklisted as well. Salt of the Earth was also produced in partnership with the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.
    The story was based on the actual strike of 1951–1952 by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers against Empire Zinc, a subsidiary of New Jersey Zinc. Two of the film’s cast members — Juan Chacón, who played Ramón, and Clinton Jencks, who played another character named Frank Barnes — were actually members of the union and strike participants. Chacón, in fact, was president of one of the union locals.
    Nima: So yeah, this was basically a lefty labor-made film starring actual union organizers, past strikers as, you know, actors in the film. Now Unsurprisingly, the film Salt of the Earth had many powerful detractors. According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    In February 1953, during filming, California Republican Representative Donald Jackson, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) from California, declared that [Salt of the Earth] was ‘deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds,’ and was ‘a new weapon for Russia.’
    End quote.
    Simon Lazarus, founder of the film’s production company, was called to testify before Jackson’s committee that same year, 1953, the year before Salt of the Earth was even released.
    US entertainment unions opposed the film as well. IATSE and the Screen Actors Guild reportedly tried to halt production of the film for over a year, and director Biberman and producer Jarrico stated that they had hired people who had been effectively blacklisted by IATSE, including four Black workers — the assistant to the director, an assistant cameraman and two technicians — all of them excluded under IATSE’s Jim Crow policies.
    On May 24, 1959, the New York Times reported that the United States Information Agency included Salt of the Earth on its list of movies that it refused to show overseas. The film however was subsequently re-released in the US in 1965.
    Adam: Yeah, so if your film was too overtly pro union, centers race and racist cops, centers women’s liberation in the context of unionization, all a lot of bad stuff going on there. Hiring Black crew members. All that was very icky and so this movie was effectively thrown into a memory hole.
    Nima: It was so un-American that it wouldn’t be shown overseas.
    Adam: So un-American it is the only film ever to be blacklisted. Not a filmmaker, but the actual film, the only film ever to be blacklisted. Next up is Norma Rae from 1979. This is a more mainstream film, but one that has not so subtle politics, maybe slightly more subtle than the previous entry.
    In the Southern rural town of Henleyville, single mother Norma Rae Webster, played by Sally Field, works with her parents in a textile mill under conditions threatening the health of her, her family, and her co-workers. To shut her quote-unquote “big mouth,” management gives Norma a promotion, which she initially accepts but eventually rejects after realizing that the modest raise isn’t worth betraying the rank and file, her friends or family. When New York-based labor organizer Reuben Warshovsky, played by Ron Leibman, comes into town to encourage the mill workers to unionize, the galvanized Norma Rae takes an increasingly active role in the pursuit of victory for the mill workers.

    Sally Field and Ron Leibman in Norma Rae, 1979.
    Nima: So Norma Rae, of course, is widely known as kind of a high watermark of labor depiction in films. It’s from 1979. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure you can find it at your local library, you can stream it on Vimeo, you can probably pick up a DVD somewhere, I encourage you to do that, it is a fine film. But it really does mark this labor as shown in Hollywood as being a real hero’s journey. Also, similarly to Salt of the Earth, shone through this idea of powerful women being the kind of center of a story and moving, not only labor solidarity, but also women’s liberation and almost a feminist ideology that combines to really push the labor movement forward.
    Adam: Yeah, though, as our guest notes, and we’ll talk about, its depiction of race is a bit simplistic and tokenizing. But that aside, let’s get into the breakdown of the film itself. The first scene we’re going to watch here is when the union organizer from New York, Reuben, knocks on Norma’s door, explaining that he’s a traveling labor organizer seeking a room to rent. Norma’s father Vernon denies Reuben’s request, stating that Reuben and the union are not welcome. So to start off, we’re going to play a clip where Norma has been making too many demands of management so management decides, which is a typical tactic, decides to give her a promotion, and basically turn her against her own co-workers. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Norma Rae: Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.
    Gardner: Norma, you got the biggest mouth in this mill. “Give us a longer break.” “Give us more smokin’ time.” “Give us a Kotex pad machine.”
    Norma Rae: Do it and I’ll shut up!
    Gardner: Well, we’ll do better than that. We figure the only way to close that mouth is to hand you a promotion. You’re goin’ up in the world, honey.
    Norma Rae: Yeah? How far and for how much?
    Gardner: Well, we’re gonna put you on spot-checkin’.
    Norma Rae: Well hell, it sure ain’t gonna make me any friends.
    Gardner: It’ll make you another dollar and a half an hour.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Nima: Now, Norma demands to be fired after realizing that this promotion is effectively a betrayal to her co-workers, and that you know, she should be fired instead of getting the raise. Later, Norma and one of her co-workers attend a Textile Workers’ Union of America meeting held by traveling organizer Reuben Warshovsky, in which Warshovsky evangelizes about the unifying potential of organizing.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshovsky: Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them… by coming over to the room at the Golden Cherry Motel to pick up a union card and sign it. Yes, it comes from the Bible. “According to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.” But it comes from Reuben Warshovsky: “Not unless you make it happen.” Thank you.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: So Reuben tours the factory with management. After Norma sees how he defends the workers, she seeks to partner with him and improve the union’s outreach, cutting through years of anti-union propaganda fed to the textile workers. It has a kind of city-boy-meets-country-girl flair, but it’s very well done.
    As the labor organization attempts become more visible, the company retaliates. Management forces workers into longer shifts and posts a letter telling white workers that Black workers would use the union as a tool of control. Both of these tactics have dire consequences for the workers.
    Management later attempts to fire Norma after she tries to copy the letter to send to the union, hoping to expose the company’s illegal union-busting tactics. In response, in what has become an iconic scene, Norma stands up on a worktable at the mill holding a sign that reads “UNION” as the workers turn off their mechanical looms in solidarity, one by one.
    The company has Norma arrested for “disorderly conduct,” and Reuben bails her out. Norma is distraught, but Reuben is unfazed and used to hostility from police. He explains that this kind of institutional antagonism is a routine part of labor organizing, offering a glimpse into the ways that police and the state enact violence against unions. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshowsky: It comes with the job.
    Norma Rae: (Crying.)
    Reuben Warshowsky: I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club. I saw a boy get shot in the back. I saw a guy get blown to hell and back when he tried to start up his car in the morning. And you just got your feet wet on this one.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: Yeah, so spoiler alert — which in case you haven’t noticed this whole episode is — the risks pay off and the mill holds an election over whether to unionize, and the result is a victory for the union.
    Nima: Norma Rae was quite faithfully based on the story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a cotton mill worker at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Sutton became active in union organizing after meeting Eli Zivkovich, on whom Reuben Warshovsky was modeled. Sutton was fired after copying a racist, anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board and responded just as we see in Norma Rae: climbing onto a worktable, holding a sign reading “UNION” above her head. Unionization at J.P. Stevens took much more time than it did in its fictional counterpart, but it did happen nevertheless eventually in 1980.

    The film’s director, Martin Ritt, was known for his catalog of tales of the oppressed, such as the 1972 film Sounder, about Black sharecroppers during the Depression. Like the makers of Salt of the Earth, Ritt had been blacklisted himself in the 1950s, an experience he captured in the 1976 Woody Allen/Zero Mostel film The Front. He said this in 1986, quote, “I make the kind of films that not too many people get to make in this town, though sometimes I’ve had to take the risk myself,” end quote.
    Adam: According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. and United Artists turned down the project. As explained in a 25 Feb 1979 NYT article, Alan Ladd Jr., President at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., acquired it after Ritt convinced him that the film would be perceived as uplifting and not depressing…During negotiations with the studio, Ritt agreed to cut his salary in half to $250,000.
    $250,000 is still a lot of money in 1979, so our hearts don’t bleed too much. But the point is to further demonstrate the friction filmmakers encounter when they do try to have pro union narratives, it requires them to, in this case, eat shit on half their salary.
    Nima: Both Salt of the Earth, from 1954 and 1979’s Norma Rae depict unionization as going hand in hand with cross racial solidarity and the third film we’re going to discuss is no different. This is Sorry to Bother You from 2018.
    Adam: The film was written and directed by Boots Riley, who has a history of activism in the Bay Area and has a history of pretty overtly left-wing politics, which of course, explains the politics of the film.
    Sorry to Bother You tells the story of Cassius “Cash” Green, played by Lakeith Stanfield, who works, out of desperation, as a telemarketer for Oakland-based company called RegalView, where management repeatedly floats the abstract promise of a promotion. As Cassius’s co-worker Squeeze, played by Steven Yeun, hopes to start a union, Cassius ascends the ranks to become a handsomely paid and steadily promoted “power caller,” on the condition that he enthusiastically performs work far more grim than he could have possibly imagined.
    Nima: So Sorry to Bother You certainly is one of the more ideological films that we are discussing in this two-parter, Adam. It is an allegory more than it is based on a true story or the, you know, story of a certain hero as emblematic of a movement. It is really a fantastical look at labor, at capitalism, and the horrors within those. So we’re going to break down some of the scenes from Sorry to Bother You.
    At one point in the film Cassius somewhat reluctantly participates in a work stoppage organized by his coworker Squeeze and is called into the manager’s office, where his three supervisors offer the allure of a promotion to dissuade him from going any further, you can see parallels here to what happened to Norma Rae, right? We’ll give you a promotion if you just shut your mouth. Here is a clip from that scene from Sorry to Bother You.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Cassius: All right, hey, I know you’re gonna threaten to fire me and go ahead, whatever, I don’t care anymore because we’re gonna take this fucking place down.
    Johnny: (Laughs.) Pack your shit and get out.
    Cassius: Well, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you! Fuck you!
    Anderson: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, Mr. Green. You’re starting to sound a little paranoid here. We’re the bearers of good news. Great news.
    Johnny: Great motherfucking news.
    Anderson: Great motherfucking news. Power caller.
    Cassius: What the fuck?
    Anderson: Yeah we just got the call. They think you’re A1 material, you’re going upstairs my compadre. Yes, you are getting a promotion. at 9am tomorrow morning. Do you have a suit?
    Diana: Of course he does. Powerful, young, strong, intelligent, power caller.
    Cassius: But they —
    Anderson: Oh, God, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. You’re not going against their actions. All their issues are down here. Not up there. Two very different kinds of telemarketing.
    Cassius: Okay. Um…
    Anderson: This is your moment. Don’t waste it.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Cassius soon discovers that as a power caller, he’ll be selling repugnant yet lucrative products from a company called WorryFree. The work stoppage has become a full-blown strike at this point, and Cassius tries to play to both labor and management, telling the workers trying to organize that he supports them quote-unquote “from the sidelines” while simultaneously reaping the financial rewards and class signifiers of his new position as a power caller.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Salvador: Cassius? What’s up, man? Where you been? What’s up with the suit?
    Cassius: I got promoted.
    Squeeze: What does that mean? Are you a manager now?
    Cassius: That means I’m a power caller now. About to be paid.
    Squeeze: We’re all trying to get fucking paid. But we’re going to do it as a team. Are you on the team?
    Cassius: Yeah, I guess I’m still on your little team but I’m playing from the bench. The bench where you sit and get your bills paid. You know, my uncle is about to lose his house.
    Salvador: Cash, I’m Sorry about your uncle man, but they don’t mean sell out.
    Cassius: I’m not selling you all out. My success has nothing to do with you. All right? You just keep doing whatever it is that you’re fucking doing and I’ll root for you from the sidelines and try not to laugh at that stupid smirk on your face.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Later, Cassius is invited to an especially decadent party at the mansion of WorryFree executive Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer —
    Adam: Who we now know was playing himself basically.

  • Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    [Music]
    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
    Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We have no commercials, no billionaire benefactors that we know of, because we are completely listener funded and cannot thank you all enough for that.
    Adam: Yes, if you haven’t, please support us on Patreon, it’s very much appreciated, it does help keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable. Also, if you could rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, that’s very much appreciated, and as always, check out Bonfire for our merchandise, shirts, tote bags, mugs, what have you, it helps also support the show and also makes you look cool because you’re with the coolest podcast in the world. I believe that one marker of a cool podcast is they tell you they’re cool.
    Nima: (Laughs.) I like how your voice made that a question at the end.
    Adam: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s cool anymore. I’m old. I have a kid.
    Nima: It’s definitely a Citations Needed tote bag.
    Adam: Yeah, clearly.
    Nima: This is also our season five finale of Citations Needed. We’ll be taking a little summer break after this episode, spending some time with our families and gearing up for next season, season six, which will begin in September.
    A white-collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that’s taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer’s union-busting tactics.
    Adam: Stories like these represent something we don’t often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs, zealots, radical left-wingers, mafiosos or thugs or grifters, but as heroes willing to risk their health, homes, and livelihoods for the greater good.
    Nima: This is in stark contrast to the anti-union depictions in pop culture we explored on Citations Needed in Episode 164, part one of this two-part series on depictions of labor and unionization in film and television. On the previous episode, we discussed Hollywood’s emphasis on corruption in labor organizing, focusing noticeably on depictions of bloated bureaucracy, organized crime, and autocratic union bosses in films like On the Waterfront from 1954, Blue Collar from 1978, and The Irishman from 2019.
    Adam: This week, in part two, we’re going to address the inverse of that, looking at the rare but nontrivial examples of pop film that celebrates the accomplishments of labor movements, centers beleaguered workers with everything to lose, and positions abusive employers as the villains, while embracing themes of worker courage and heroism. While very often not perfect, these examples show that compelling, award-winning narratives can be crafted out of tales of collective action and collective bargaining.
    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Angela Allan, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, who writes about pop culture for The Atlantic magazine.
    [Begin Clip]
    Angela Allan: And I think the way that we see places like the New York Times or The Washington Post, how they’ve been covering unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses and at Starbucks, that they already are casting them as having this kind of narrative flair, you know, so if Martin Ritt is like, ‘I was really inspired by Crystal Lee Sutton,’ people like Chris Smalls or Jaz Brisack feel like Norma Rae-esque figures. I think that does suggest that there’s an appetite for these victory stories in real life.
    [End Clip]
    Nima: So last episode, we discussed a number of films that kind of do this common trope, Adam, of unions are generally corrupt, certainly their leadership is, sometimes, you know, solidarity between workers is a good thing, the working man, the working woman, more occasionally than the man depicted in Hollywood, especially in the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood, that there can be power in workers banding together and finding solidarity together. But generally, unions, as they are depicted, are that of overbearing, autocratic, and certainly corrupt institutions, just as corrupt as the companies that they’re supposed to be organizing against.
    Adam: Right. But let’s be honest, Hollywood, especially maybe in the ’40s and ’50s, and on to the ’60s and ’70s, less so I think today, but certainly decades ago, has left-wingers in it, has socialists, communists, fellow travelers et cetera, or bleeding-heart liberals, who empathize with unions, what have you. So obviously, there’s going to be some representations, pro-labor representation in Hollywood, that kind of slipped through the cracks, either because a director or writer is so established they can do whatever they want based on previous work or they’re indie films that are maybe outside the Hollywood studio production, which is definitely something we’re going to cover in this episode, but they still kind of get widespread releases based on critical acclaim or other independent vectors for success, if you will, or they’re just crypto, let’s be honest here, right? Much of people’s politics have to be crypto in certain ways, just by the nature of how popular culture works, by definition it must be popular, it must be broad, and the absolute biggest sin one can engage in is to have an agenda or a politics, that’s sort of seen as being declasse, that you can have message pictures where it’s say no to drugs or whatever, but you can’t have a message pictures that’s like down with capitalism. That’s too far. As you noted, legendary Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn is credited with saying, “All they want is a story. If you have a message, send it by Western Union.” Of course, we argue in this episode that all movies have messages whether we want to or not, there’s no such thing as a non-message movie. And some of those films will have a message that is pro-labor in inclination, if not intent. So we’re excited to get into those today and talk about those and then talk to our guest about how they worked, what makes them work, and what we can learn from them.
    Nima: Now, obviously, normal qualifier to start, Adam, this is a huge topic, we can’t cover every single labor film, even the good ones. There are incredible documentaries like Harlan County, USA, directed by Barbara Kopple. There are films like Warren Beatty’s Reds from 1981 about journalist John Reed and the chronicling of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and John Sayles’ Matewan from 1987 about the 1920s coal miner strike in Matewan, West Virginia. There is stealth communist propaganda by Disney, Newsies from 1992. There’s the 2000 film directed by Ken Loach, Bread and Roses, about the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in LA and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It’s based on the very real Justice for Janitors campaign of the SEIU.

    Adam: There is a very famous episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that is very pro-union propaganda. To give some context, one of the characters, who’s an alien, works at the bar of Deep Space Nine station, and is consistently abused and exploited by his brother, played by Quark, the scrupulous bar owner who we come to love. And he begins to talk about starting a union to demand more rights, which for the Ferengis is unheard of, since they’re, like, a race of hypercapitalists. In this clip, he’s discussing with two of his crewmates, Dr. Bashir and Miles O’Brien, about his frustrations with his boss and his desire to have collective bargaining.
    [Begin Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Rom: Dr. Bashir, I’m glad you’re in. I need your help.
    Dr. Bashir: Your ear acting up again?
    Rom: My ear’s fine. I need some advice about…unions.
    Dr. Bashir: Unions?
    Rom: You said the other day I should form a union, so I did.
    Dr. Bashir: Rom, I was speaking theoretically.
    Rom: And I put your theory into practice! All of Quark’s employees have joined. We’re going to force Quark to treat us better. I hope.
    Miles O’Brien: A union, huh? Good for you.
    Rom: You know about unions?
    Miles O’Brien: Who do you think led the Pennsylvania coal miners during the anthracite strike of 1902?
    Rom: I have no idea.
    Miles O’Brien: Sean Aloysius O’Brien.
    Dr. Bashir: I didn’t know that.
    Miles O’Brien: There’s a lot of things about my family you don’t know. Eleven months, those mines were closed. They didn’t open again until all the miners’ demands were met.
    Rom: You mean we should force Quark to close the bar?
    Dr. Bashir: Only as a last resort. If he’s reasonable about your requests, there’s no need to strike.
    Miles O’Brien: Quark? Reasonable? Ha! Unlikely. You’ll have to strike. Mark my words. And when you do, you’ll have to be strong.
    Rom: Just like Sean O’Brien.
    Miles O’Brien: Exactly. You know, he had the biggest funeral in all of Western Pennsylvania.
    Rom: Funeral?
    Miles O’Brien: Mm. They fished his body out of the Allegheny River the week before the strike ended. 32 bullets he had in him. Or was it 34?
    Dr. Bashir: Well, he died a hero.
    Miles O’Brien: He was more than a hero! He was a union man!
    [End Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Adam: I think it’s funny that Miles O’Brien does this thing where he traces his lineage back, like, 400 years at this point.
    Nima: (Laughs.) Yeah, when Pennsylvania existed.
    Adam: Yeah, when people take their genealogy tests, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m a descendant of King James II.’ I’m like, well, everyone’s a descendant of King James II at that point.
    Nima: Hey, it works, even later in the episode, Rom even quotes from the Communist Manifesto, saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”
    Adam: Right.
    Nima: It is very exciting. Now, I must admit I am not the Star Trek scholar that you are, Adam, but I’m thrilled that we were able to get this one in. The episode is called “Bar Association,” directed by LeVar Burton, and aired originally on February 19, 1996. Just two days later on February 21, 1996, an episode of Sister, Sister aired called “Paper or Plastic” when one of the characters’ co-workers on the show working in a grocery store are going on strike to demand higher wages, and this episode of Sister, Sister is remarkable for its pro-union advocacy, as documented on Twitter a couple years ago by Diana Hussein, who is the comms director for the pro-worker group UNITE HERE! Everyone should absolutely check that out. They call the replacement workers scabs. They tell folks not to cross picket lines. It is really fantastic and kind of amazing that within the span of just three days, Deep Space Nine and Sister, Sister ran pro-union episodes.
    Adam: An anomaly indeed. Our usual disclaimer here by the way, before we get into the films, there are spoilers to the films we will be discussing.
    Nima: While on part one of this episode last week, we began in 1954 with On the Waterfront, we are going to return to that year to start off this episode but this time we’re going to talk about the film Salt of the Earth, again from 1954, directed by Herbert J. Biberman.
    The story goes basically like this: Esperanza Quintero, played by Rosaura Revueltas, and her husband, Ramón, played by Juan Chacón, live with their two, and soon to be three, children in precarity in her home village — now the company town of Zinc Town, New Mexico. Ramón, a union miner for Delaware Zinc, is forced to work in the mines alone, a policy that only applies to Mexican-American, not white, miners, which creates extremely dangerous conditions of course. Ramón and other miners decide to strike for worker safety, and their wives encourage them to expand their demands, marking the beginning of an instrumental role that women will play in organizing for the rights of the miners’ union and the health and safety of their families.
    Adam: During the strike, the company hires out-of-town strikebreakers, but they leave after seeing the size of the picket line. In one scene, the superintendent and an executive drive up to the picket line and speak manipulatively to Ramón, but Ramón doesn’t take the bait. Now keep in mind, this is 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out. This is extremely based shit. So we’re gonna listen to that here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Alexander: Well, they’re like children in many ways. Sometimes you have to humor them, sometimes you have to spank them — and sometimes you have to take their food away. Here comes the one we were talking about. (Chuckles) He’s quite a character. Claims his grandfather once owned the land where the mine is now.
    Ramon: Want to go up to your office, Mr. Alexander?
    Alexander: Naturally. You think I parked here for a cup of coffee?
    Ramon: You’re welcome to one.
    Alexander: No thanks.
    Ramon: The men would like to know who this gentleman is.
    Alexander: That’s none of their affair.
    Hartwell: That’s all right — it’s no secret. My name’s Hartwell. I’m from the company’s Eastern office.
    Ramon: You mean Delaware?
    Hartwell: No. New York.
    Ramon: New York? You’re not the Company President by any chance?
    Hartwell: No.
    Ramon: Too bad. The men have always wanted to get a look at the President. But you’ve come out here to settle the strike?
    Hartwell: Well, if that’s possible.
    Ramon: It’s possible. Just negotiate.
    Hartwell: Are we talking to a union spokesman?
    Alexander: Not exactly. But I wish he were one. He knows more about mining than those pie-cards we’ve had to deal with. I mean it. I know your work record. You were in line for foreman when this trouble started. Did you know that? You had a real future with this company, but you let those Reds stir you up. And now they’ll sell you down the river. Why don’t you wake up, Ray? That’s your name, isn’t it, Ray?
    Ramon: No. My name is Quintero. Mister Quintero.
    Alexander: Are you going to let us pass or do I have to call the Sheriff?
    Ramon: There’s nothing stopping you…
    I was wrong! They don’t want Jenkins for general manager — they want me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Adam: Some context, the guy who says he isn’t the president is, in fact, the president.
    Nima: President of the company, that’s right. Undercover Boss.
    Adam: Ramón is soon arrested by the violent, racist police after confronting a scab he knows. At the same time, Esperanza goes into labor. The strike continues for months, and strikers and union locals from around the country provide food and other aid for the families. Later, the sheriff issues a Taft-Hartley injunction ordering the striking workers to stop picketing. At a meeting, one of the strikers’ wives offers a solution, to much derision and resistance, which we’re going to listen to in that clip here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Teresa: If you read the court injunction carefully you will see that it only prohibits striking miners from picketing. We women are not striking miners. We will take over your picket line. (Men laughing.) Don’t laugh. We have a solution. You have none. Brother Quintero was right when he said we’ll lose fifty years of gains if we lose this strike. Your wives and children too. But this we promise, if the women take your places on the picket line, the strike will not be broken, and no scabs will take your jobs. (Applause.)
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]

    Nima: Now, before the union members vote on whether to introduce the women into the picket line, as suggested, Esperanza insists that the women be allowed to vote, and the motion narrowly passes. People begin marching immediately, though some women’s husbands, including Esperanza’s, prohibit them from joining the picket line. But eventually Esperanza joins the picketers and is arrested herself, along with her children, other picketers, and their children. In jail, the women make demands for baby formula, bathroom access, and other necessities, mirroring those of the miners.
    The children are released, and Ramón handles the housework while Esperanza is forced to stay in jail. Ramón, resentful of Esperanza’s growing independence, insists that the women have no chance of winning, but Esperanza maintains that they can outlast the company and criticizes her husband Ramon for treating her just as the bosses treat him.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Esperanza: Have you learned nothing from this strike? Why are you afraid to have me at your side? Do you still think you can have dignity only if I have none?
    Ramon: You talk of dignity? After what you’ve been doing?
    Esperanza: Yes. I talk of dignity. The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican.” That’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place.” Do you feel better having someone lower than you?
    Ramon: Shut up, you’re talking crazy.
    Esperanza: Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower than I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.
    Ramon: Will you be still?
    Esperanza: And if you can’t understand this you’re a fool because you can’t win this strike without me! You can’t win anything without me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Nima: Later, the company obtains an eviction order against the strikers, and the police start the process at the Quintero house. The strikers’ families defy the eviction order however, returning the Quinteros’ belongings to their home. Vastly outnumbered, the police leave, meaning the families have won the strike and that they can stay in their houses. Ramón thanks Esperanza for her work and for preaching a message of unity.
    Adam: The film was produced by Independent Productions Corporation, founded by Simon Lazarus, Herbert J. Biberman and producer Paul Jarrico, both of whom were blacklisted at the time and used the company to hire other blacklisted filmmakers. Writer Michael Wilson had been blacklisted as well. Salt of the Earth was also produced in partnership with the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.
    The story was based on the actual strike of 1951–1952 by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers against Empire Zinc, a subsidiary of New Jersey Zinc. Two of the film’s cast members — Juan Chacón, who played Ramón, and Clinton Jencks, who played another character named Frank Barnes — were actually members of the union and strike participants. Chacón, in fact, was president of one of the union locals.
    Nima: So yeah, this was basically a lefty labor-made film starring actual union organizers, past strikers as, you know, actors in the film. Now Unsurprisingly, the film Salt of the Earth had many powerful detractors. According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    In February 1953, during filming, California Republican Representative Donald Jackson, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) from California, declared that [Salt of the Earth] was ‘deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds,’ and was ‘a new weapon for Russia.’
    End quote.
    Simon Lazarus, founder of the film’s production company, was called to testify before Jackson’s committee that same year, 1953, the year before Salt of the Earth was even released.
    US entertainment unions opposed the film as well. IATSE and the Screen Actors Guild reportedly tried to halt production of the film for over a year, and director Biberman and producer Jarrico stated that they had hired people who had been effectively blacklisted by IATSE, including four Black workers — the assistant to the director, an assistant cameraman and two technicians — all of them excluded under IATSE’s Jim Crow policies.
    On May 24, 1959, the New York Times reported that the United States Information Agency included Salt of the Earth on its list of movies that it refused to show overseas. The film however was subsequently re-released in the US in 1965.
    Adam: Yeah, so if your film was too overtly pro union, centers race and racist cops, centers women’s liberation in the context of unionization, all a lot of bad stuff going on there. Hiring Black crew members. All that was very icky and so this movie was effectively thrown into a memory hole.
    Nima: It was so un-American that it wouldn’t be shown overseas.
    Adam: So un-American it is the only film ever to be blacklisted. Not a filmmaker, but the actual film, the only film ever to be blacklisted. Next up is Norma Rae from 1979. This is a more mainstream film, but one that has not so subtle politics, maybe slightly more subtle than the previous entry.
    In the Southern rural town of Henleyville, single mother Norma Rae Webster, played by Sally Field, works with her parents in a textile mill under conditions threatening the health of her, her family, and her co-workers. To shut her quote-unquote “big mouth,” management gives Norma a promotion, which she initially accepts but eventually rejects after realizing that the modest raise isn’t worth betraying the rank and file, her friends or family. When New York-based labor organizer Reuben Warshovsky, played by Ron Leibman, comes into town to encourage the mill workers to unionize, the galvanized Norma Rae takes an increasingly active role in the pursuit of victory for the mill workers.

    Sally Field and Ron Leibman in Norma Rae, 1979.
    Nima: So Norma Rae, of course, is widely known as kind of a high watermark of labor depiction in films. It’s from 1979. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure you can find it at your local library, you can stream it on Vimeo, you can probably pick up a DVD somewhere, I encourage you to do that, it is a fine film. But it really does mark this labor as shown in Hollywood as being a real hero’s journey. Also, similarly to Salt of the Earth, shone through this idea of powerful women being the kind of center of a story and moving, not only labor solidarity, but also women’s liberation and almost a feminist ideology that combines to really push the labor movement forward.
    Adam: Yeah, though, as our guest notes, and we’ll talk about, its depiction of race is a bit simplistic and tokenizing. But that aside, let’s get into the breakdown of the film itself. The first scene we’re going to watch here is when the union organizer from New York, Reuben, knocks on Norma’s door, explaining that he’s a traveling labor organizer seeking a room to rent. Norma’s father Vernon denies Reuben’s request, stating that Reuben and the union are not welcome. So to start off, we’re going to play a clip where Norma has been making too many demands of management so management decides, which is a typical tactic, decides to give her a promotion, and basically turn her against her own co-workers. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Norma Rae: Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.
    Gardner: Norma, you got the biggest mouth in this mill. “Give us a longer break.” “Give us more smokin’ time.” “Give us a Kotex pad machine.”
    Norma Rae: Do it and I’ll shut up!
    Gardner: Well, we’ll do better than that. We figure the only way to close that mouth is to hand you a promotion. You’re goin’ up in the world, honey.
    Norma Rae: Yeah? How far and for how much?
    Gardner: Well, we’re gonna put you on spot-checkin’.
    Norma Rae: Well hell, it sure ain’t gonna make me any friends.
    Gardner: It’ll make you another dollar and a half an hour.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Nima: Now, Norma demands to be fired after realizing that this promotion is effectively a betrayal to her co-workers, and that you know, she should be fired instead of getting the raise. Later, Norma and one of her co-workers attend a Textile Workers’ Union of America meeting held by traveling organizer Reuben Warshovsky, in which Warshovsky evangelizes about the unifying potential of organizing.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshovsky: Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them… by coming over to the room at the Golden Cherry Motel to pick up a union card and sign it. Yes, it comes from the Bible. “According to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.” But it comes from Reuben Warshovsky: “Not unless you make it happen.” Thank you.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: So Reuben tours the factory with management. After Norma sees how he defends the workers, she seeks to partner with him and improve the union’s outreach, cutting through years of anti-union propaganda fed to the textile workers. It has a kind of city-boy-meets-country-girl flair, but it’s very well done.
    As the labor organization attempts become more visible, the company retaliates. Management forces workers into longer shifts and posts a letter telling white workers that Black workers would use the union as a tool of control. Both of these tactics have dire consequences for the workers.
    Management later attempts to fire Norma after she tries to copy the letter to send to the union, hoping to expose the company’s illegal union-busting tactics. In response, in what has become an iconic scene, Norma stands up on a worktable at the mill holding a sign that reads “UNION” as the workers turn off their mechanical looms in solidarity, one by one.
    The company has Norma arrested for “disorderly conduct,” and Reuben bails her out. Norma is distraught, but Reuben is unfazed and used to hostility from police. He explains that this kind of institutional antagonism is a routine part of labor organizing, offering a glimpse into the ways that police and the state enact violence against unions. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshowsky: It comes with the job.
    Norma Rae: (Crying.)
    Reuben Warshowsky: I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club. I saw a boy get shot in the back. I saw a guy get blown to hell and back when he tried to start up his car in the morning. And you just got your feet wet on this one.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: Yeah, so spoiler alert — which in case you haven’t noticed this whole episode is — the risks pay off and the mill holds an election over whether to unionize, and the result is a victory for the union.
    Nima: Norma Rae was quite faithfully based on the story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a cotton mill worker at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Sutton became active in union organizing after meeting Eli Zivkovich, on whom Reuben Warshovsky was modeled. Sutton was fired after copying a racist, anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board and responded just as we see in Norma Rae: climbing onto a worktable, holding a sign reading “UNION” above her head. Unionization at J.P. Stevens took much more time than it did in its fictional counterpart, but it did happen nevertheless eventually in 1980.

    The film’s director, Martin Ritt, was known for his catalog of tales of the oppressed, such as the 1972 film Sounder, about Black sharecroppers during the Depression. Like the makers of Salt of the Earth, Ritt had been blacklisted himself in the 1950s, an experience he captured in the 1976 Woody Allen/Zero Mostel film The Front. He said this in 1986, quote, “I make the kind of films that not too many people get to make in this town, though sometimes I’ve had to take the risk myself,” end quote.
    Adam: According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. and United Artists turned down the project. As explained in a 25 Feb 1979 NYT article, Alan Ladd Jr., President at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., acquired it after Ritt convinced him that the film would be perceived as uplifting and not depressing…During negotiations with the studio, Ritt agreed to cut his salary in half to $250,000.
    $250,000 is still a lot of money in 1979, so our hearts don’t bleed too much. But the point is to further demonstrate the friction filmmakers encounter when they do try to have pro union narratives, it requires them to, in this case, eat shit on half their salary.
    Nima: Both Salt of the Earth, from 1954 and 1979’s Norma Rae depict unionization as going hand in hand with cross racial solidarity and the third film we’re going to discuss is no different. This is Sorry to Bother You from 2018.
    Adam: The film was written and directed by Boots Riley, who has a history of activism in the Bay Area and has a history of pretty overtly left-wing politics, which of course, explains the politics of the film.
    Sorry to Bother You tells the story of Cassius “Cash” Green, played by Lakeith Stanfield, who works, out of desperation, as a telemarketer for Oakland-based company called RegalView, where management repeatedly floats the abstract promise of a promotion. As Cassius’s co-worker Squeeze, played by Steven Yeun, hopes to start a union, Cassius ascends the ranks to become a handsomely paid and steadily promoted “power caller,” on the condition that he enthusiastically performs work far more grim than he could have possibly imagined.
    Nima: So Sorry to Bother You certainly is one of the more ideological films that we are discussing in this two-parter, Adam. It is an allegory more than it is based on a true story or the, you know, story of a certain hero as emblematic of a movement. It is really a fantastical look at labor, at capitalism, and the horrors within those. So we’re going to break down some of the scenes from Sorry to Bother You.
    At one point in the film Cassius somewhat reluctantly participates in a work stoppage organized by his coworker Squeeze and is called into the manager’s office, where his three supervisors offer the allure of a promotion to dissuade him from going any further, you can see parallels here to what happened to Norma Rae, right? We’ll give you a promotion if you just shut your mouth. Here is a clip from that scene from Sorry to Bother You.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Cassius: All right, hey, I know you’re gonna threaten to fire me and go ahead, whatever, I don’t care anymore because we’re gonna take this fucking place down.
    Johnny: (Laughs.) Pack your shit and get out.
    Cassius: Well, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you! Fuck you!
    Anderson: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, Mr. Green. You’re starting to sound a little paranoid here. We’re the bearers of good news. Great news.
    Johnny: Great motherfucking news.
    Anderson: Great motherfucking news. Power caller.
    Cassius: What the fuck?
    Anderson: Yeah we just got the call. They think you’re A1 material, you’re going upstairs my compadre. Yes, you are getting a promotion. at 9am tomorrow morning. Do you have a suit?
    Diana: Of course he does. Powerful, young, strong, intelligent, power caller.
    Cassius: But they —
    Anderson: Oh, God, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. You’re not going against their actions. All their issues are down here. Not up there. Two very different kinds of telemarketing.
    Cassius: Okay. Um…
    Anderson: This is your moment. Don’t waste it.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Cassius soon discovers that as a power caller, he’ll be selling repugnant yet lucrative products from a company called WorryFree. The work stoppage has become a full-blown strike at this point, and Cassius tries to play to both labor and management, telling the workers trying to organize that he supports them quote-unquote “from the sidelines” while simultaneously reaping the financial rewards and class signifiers of his new position as a power caller.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Salvador: Cassius? What’s up, man? Where you been? What’s up with the suit?
    Cassius: I got promoted.
    Squeeze: What does that mean? Are you a manager now?
    Cassius: That means I’m a power caller now. About to be paid.
    Squeeze: We’re all trying to get fucking paid. But we’re going to do it as a team. Are you on the team?
    Cassius: Yeah, I guess I’m still on your little team but I’m playing from the bench. The bench where you sit and get your bills paid. You know, my uncle is about to lose his house.
    Salvador: Cash, I’m Sorry about your uncle man, but they don’t mean sell out.
    Cassius: I’m not selling you all out. My success has nothing to do with you. All right? You just keep doing whatever it is that you’re fucking doing and I’ll root for you from the sidelines and try not to laugh at that stupid smirk on your face.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Later, Cassius is invited to an especially decadent party at the mansion of WorryFree executive Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer —
    Adam: Who we now know was playing himself basically.

  • Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    Ep. 165: Labor Union Depictions in Hollywood (Part II): The Rare Pro-Worker Narrative

    [Music]
    Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
    Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
    Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
    Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We have no commercials, no billionaire benefactors that we know of, because we are completely listener funded and cannot thank you all enough for that.
    Adam: Yes, if you haven’t, please support us on Patreon, it’s very much appreciated, it does help keep the episodes themselves free and keeps the show sustainable. Also, if you could rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, that’s very much appreciated, and as always, check out Bonfire for our merchandise, shirts, tote bags, mugs, what have you, it helps also support the show and also makes you look cool because you’re with the coolest podcast in the world. I believe that one marker of a cool podcast is they tell you they’re cool.
    Nima: (Laughs.) I like how your voice made that a question at the end.
    Adam: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s cool anymore. I’m old. I have a kid.
    Nima: It’s definitely a Citations Needed tote bag.
    Adam: Yeah, clearly.
    Nima: This is also our season five finale of Citations Needed. We’ll be taking a little summer break after this episode, spending some time with our families and gearing up for next season, season six, which will begin in September.
    A white-collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that’s taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer’s union-busting tactics.
    Adam: Stories like these represent something we don’t often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs, zealots, radical left-wingers, mafiosos or thugs or grifters, but as heroes willing to risk their health, homes, and livelihoods for the greater good.
    Nima: This is in stark contrast to the anti-union depictions in pop culture we explored on Citations Needed in Episode 164, part one of this two-part series on depictions of labor and unionization in film and television. On the previous episode, we discussed Hollywood’s emphasis on corruption in labor organizing, focusing noticeably on depictions of bloated bureaucracy, organized crime, and autocratic union bosses in films like On the Waterfront from 1954, Blue Collar from 1978, and The Irishman from 2019.
    Adam: This week, in part two, we’re going to address the inverse of that, looking at the rare but nontrivial examples of pop film that celebrates the accomplishments of labor movements, centers beleaguered workers with everything to lose, and positions abusive employers as the villains, while embracing themes of worker courage and heroism. While very often not perfect, these examples show that compelling, award-winning narratives can be crafted out of tales of collective action and collective bargaining.
    Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Angela Allan, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, who writes about pop culture for The Atlantic magazine.
    [Begin Clip]
    Angela Allan: And I think the way that we see places like the New York Times or The Washington Post, how they’ve been covering unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses and at Starbucks, that they already are casting them as having this kind of narrative flair, you know, so if Martin Ritt is like, ‘I was really inspired by Crystal Lee Sutton,’ people like Chris Smalls or Jaz Brisack feel like Norma Rae-esque figures. I think that does suggest that there’s an appetite for these victory stories in real life.
    [End Clip]
    Nima: So last episode, we discussed a number of films that kind of do this common trope, Adam, of unions are generally corrupt, certainly their leadership is, sometimes, you know, solidarity between workers is a good thing, the working man, the working woman, more occasionally than the man depicted in Hollywood, especially in the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood, that there can be power in workers banding together and finding solidarity together. But generally, unions, as they are depicted, are that of overbearing, autocratic, and certainly corrupt institutions, just as corrupt as the companies that they’re supposed to be organizing against.
    Adam: Right. But let’s be honest, Hollywood, especially maybe in the ’40s and ’50s, and on to the ’60s and ’70s, less so I think today, but certainly decades ago, has left-wingers in it, has socialists, communists, fellow travelers et cetera, or bleeding-heart liberals, who empathize with unions, what have you. So obviously, there’s going to be some representations, pro-labor representation in Hollywood, that kind of slipped through the cracks, either because a director or writer is so established they can do whatever they want based on previous work or they’re indie films that are maybe outside the Hollywood studio production, which is definitely something we’re going to cover in this episode, but they still kind of get widespread releases based on critical acclaim or other independent vectors for success, if you will, or they’re just crypto, let’s be honest here, right? Much of people’s politics have to be crypto in certain ways, just by the nature of how popular culture works, by definition it must be popular, it must be broad, and the absolute biggest sin one can engage in is to have an agenda or a politics, that’s sort of seen as being declasse, that you can have message pictures where it’s say no to drugs or whatever, but you can’t have a message pictures that’s like down with capitalism. That’s too far. As you noted, legendary Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn is credited with saying, “All they want is a story. If you have a message, send it by Western Union.” Of course, we argue in this episode that all movies have messages whether we want to or not, there’s no such thing as a non-message movie. And some of those films will have a message that is pro-labor in inclination, if not intent. So we’re excited to get into those today and talk about those and then talk to our guest about how they worked, what makes them work, and what we can learn from them.
    Nima: Now, obviously, normal qualifier to start, Adam, this is a huge topic, we can’t cover every single labor film, even the good ones. There are incredible documentaries like Harlan County, USA, directed by Barbara Kopple. There are films like Warren Beatty’s Reds from 1981 about journalist John Reed and the chronicling of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and John Sayles’ Matewan from 1987 about the 1920s coal miner strike in Matewan, West Virginia. There is stealth communist propaganda by Disney, Newsies from 1992. There’s the 2000 film directed by Ken Loach, Bread and Roses, about the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in LA and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It’s based on the very real Justice for Janitors campaign of the SEIU.

    Adam: There is a very famous episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that is very pro-union propaganda. To give some context, one of the characters, who’s an alien, works at the bar of Deep Space Nine station, and is consistently abused and exploited by his brother, played by Quark, the scrupulous bar owner who we come to love. And he begins to talk about starting a union to demand more rights, which for the Ferengis is unheard of, since they’re, like, a race of hypercapitalists. In this clip, he’s discussing with two of his crewmates, Dr. Bashir and Miles O’Brien, about his frustrations with his boss and his desire to have collective bargaining.
    [Begin Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Rom: Dr. Bashir, I’m glad you’re in. I need your help.
    Dr. Bashir: Your ear acting up again?
    Rom: My ear’s fine. I need some advice about…unions.
    Dr. Bashir: Unions?
    Rom: You said the other day I should form a union, so I did.
    Dr. Bashir: Rom, I was speaking theoretically.
    Rom: And I put your theory into practice! All of Quark’s employees have joined. We’re going to force Quark to treat us better. I hope.
    Miles O’Brien: A union, huh? Good for you.
    Rom: You know about unions?
    Miles O’Brien: Who do you think led the Pennsylvania coal miners during the anthracite strike of 1902?
    Rom: I have no idea.
    Miles O’Brien: Sean Aloysius O’Brien.
    Dr. Bashir: I didn’t know that.
    Miles O’Brien: There’s a lot of things about my family you don’t know. Eleven months, those mines were closed. They didn’t open again until all the miners’ demands were met.
    Rom: You mean we should force Quark to close the bar?
    Dr. Bashir: Only as a last resort. If he’s reasonable about your requests, there’s no need to strike.
    Miles O’Brien: Quark? Reasonable? Ha! Unlikely. You’ll have to strike. Mark my words. And when you do, you’ll have to be strong.
    Rom: Just like Sean O’Brien.
    Miles O’Brien: Exactly. You know, he had the biggest funeral in all of Western Pennsylvania.
    Rom: Funeral?
    Miles O’Brien: Mm. They fished his body out of the Allegheny River the week before the strike ended. 32 bullets he had in him. Or was it 34?
    Dr. Bashir: Well, he died a hero.
    Miles O’Brien: He was more than a hero! He was a union man!
    [End Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Clip]
    Adam: I think it’s funny that Miles O’Brien does this thing where he traces his lineage back, like, 400 years at this point.
    Nima: (Laughs.) Yeah, when Pennsylvania existed.
    Adam: Yeah, when people take their genealogy tests, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m a descendant of King James II.’ I’m like, well, everyone’s a descendant of King James II at that point.
    Nima: Hey, it works, even later in the episode, Rom even quotes from the Communist Manifesto, saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”
    Adam: Right.
    Nima: It is very exciting. Now, I must admit I am not the Star Trek scholar that you are, Adam, but I’m thrilled that we were able to get this one in. The episode is called “Bar Association,” directed by LeVar Burton, and aired originally on February 19, 1996. Just two days later on February 21, 1996, an episode of Sister, Sister aired called “Paper or Plastic” when one of the characters’ co-workers on the show working in a grocery store are going on strike to demand higher wages, and this episode of Sister, Sister is remarkable for its pro-union advocacy, as documented on Twitter a couple years ago by Diana Hussein, who is the comms director for the pro-worker group UNITE HERE! Everyone should absolutely check that out. They call the replacement workers scabs. They tell folks not to cross picket lines. It is really fantastic and kind of amazing that within the span of just three days, Deep Space Nine and Sister, Sister ran pro-union episodes.
    Adam: An anomaly indeed. Our usual disclaimer here by the way, before we get into the films, there are spoilers to the films we will be discussing.
    Nima: While on part one of this episode last week, we began in 1954 with On the Waterfront, we are going to return to that year to start off this episode but this time we’re going to talk about the film Salt of the Earth, again from 1954, directed by Herbert J. Biberman.
    The story goes basically like this: Esperanza Quintero, played by Rosaura Revueltas, and her husband, Ramón, played by Juan Chacón, live with their two, and soon to be three, children in precarity in her home village — now the company town of Zinc Town, New Mexico. Ramón, a union miner for Delaware Zinc, is forced to work in the mines alone, a policy that only applies to Mexican-American, not white, miners, which creates extremely dangerous conditions of course. Ramón and other miners decide to strike for worker safety, and their wives encourage them to expand their demands, marking the beginning of an instrumental role that women will play in organizing for the rights of the miners’ union and the health and safety of their families.
    Adam: During the strike, the company hires out-of-town strikebreakers, but they leave after seeing the size of the picket line. In one scene, the superintendent and an executive drive up to the picket line and speak manipulatively to Ramón, but Ramón doesn’t take the bait. Now keep in mind, this is 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out. This is extremely based shit. So we’re gonna listen to that here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Alexander: Well, they’re like children in many ways. Sometimes you have to humor them, sometimes you have to spank them — and sometimes you have to take their food away. Here comes the one we were talking about. (Chuckles) He’s quite a character. Claims his grandfather once owned the land where the mine is now.
    Ramon: Want to go up to your office, Mr. Alexander?
    Alexander: Naturally. You think I parked here for a cup of coffee?
    Ramon: You’re welcome to one.
    Alexander: No thanks.
    Ramon: The men would like to know who this gentleman is.
    Alexander: That’s none of their affair.
    Hartwell: That’s all right — it’s no secret. My name’s Hartwell. I’m from the company’s Eastern office.
    Ramon: You mean Delaware?
    Hartwell: No. New York.
    Ramon: New York? You’re not the Company President by any chance?
    Hartwell: No.
    Ramon: Too bad. The men have always wanted to get a look at the President. But you’ve come out here to settle the strike?
    Hartwell: Well, if that’s possible.
    Ramon: It’s possible. Just negotiate.
    Hartwell: Are we talking to a union spokesman?
    Alexander: Not exactly. But I wish he were one. He knows more about mining than those pie-cards we’ve had to deal with. I mean it. I know your work record. You were in line for foreman when this trouble started. Did you know that? You had a real future with this company, but you let those Reds stir you up. And now they’ll sell you down the river. Why don’t you wake up, Ray? That’s your name, isn’t it, Ray?
    Ramon: No. My name is Quintero. Mister Quintero.
    Alexander: Are you going to let us pass or do I have to call the Sheriff?
    Ramon: There’s nothing stopping you…
    I was wrong! They don’t want Jenkins for general manager — they want me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Adam: Some context, the guy who says he isn’t the president is, in fact, the president.
    Nima: President of the company, that’s right. Undercover Boss.
    Adam: Ramón is soon arrested by the violent, racist police after confronting a scab he knows. At the same time, Esperanza goes into labor. The strike continues for months, and strikers and union locals from around the country provide food and other aid for the families. Later, the sheriff issues a Taft-Hartley injunction ordering the striking workers to stop picketing. At a meeting, one of the strikers’ wives offers a solution, to much derision and resistance, which we’re going to listen to in that clip here.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Teresa: If you read the court injunction carefully you will see that it only prohibits striking miners from picketing. We women are not striking miners. We will take over your picket line. (Men laughing.) Don’t laugh. We have a solution. You have none. Brother Quintero was right when he said we’ll lose fifty years of gains if we lose this strike. Your wives and children too. But this we promise, if the women take your places on the picket line, the strike will not be broken, and no scabs will take your jobs. (Applause.)
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]

    Nima: Now, before the union members vote on whether to introduce the women into the picket line, as suggested, Esperanza insists that the women be allowed to vote, and the motion narrowly passes. People begin marching immediately, though some women’s husbands, including Esperanza’s, prohibit them from joining the picket line. But eventually Esperanza joins the picketers and is arrested herself, along with her children, other picketers, and their children. In jail, the women make demands for baby formula, bathroom access, and other necessities, mirroring those of the miners.
    The children are released, and Ramón handles the housework while Esperanza is forced to stay in jail. Ramón, resentful of Esperanza’s growing independence, insists that the women have no chance of winning, but Esperanza maintains that they can outlast the company and criticizes her husband Ramon for treating her just as the bosses treat him.
    [Begin Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Esperanza: Have you learned nothing from this strike? Why are you afraid to have me at your side? Do you still think you can have dignity only if I have none?
    Ramon: You talk of dignity? After what you’ve been doing?
    Esperanza: Yes. I talk of dignity. The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican.” That’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place.” Do you feel better having someone lower than you?
    Ramon: Shut up, you’re talking crazy.
    Esperanza: Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower than I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.
    Ramon: Will you be still?
    Esperanza: And if you can’t understand this you’re a fool because you can’t win this strike without me! You can’t win anything without me!
    [End Salt of the Earth Clip]
    Nima: Later, the company obtains an eviction order against the strikers, and the police start the process at the Quintero house. The strikers’ families defy the eviction order however, returning the Quinteros’ belongings to their home. Vastly outnumbered, the police leave, meaning the families have won the strike and that they can stay in their houses. Ramón thanks Esperanza for her work and for preaching a message of unity.
    Adam: The film was produced by Independent Productions Corporation, founded by Simon Lazarus, Herbert J. Biberman and producer Paul Jarrico, both of whom were blacklisted at the time and used the company to hire other blacklisted filmmakers. Writer Michael Wilson had been blacklisted as well. Salt of the Earth was also produced in partnership with the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.
    The story was based on the actual strike of 1951–1952 by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers against Empire Zinc, a subsidiary of New Jersey Zinc. Two of the film’s cast members — Juan Chacón, who played Ramón, and Clinton Jencks, who played another character named Frank Barnes — were actually members of the union and strike participants. Chacón, in fact, was president of one of the union locals.
    Nima: So yeah, this was basically a lefty labor-made film starring actual union organizers, past strikers as, you know, actors in the film. Now Unsurprisingly, the film Salt of the Earth had many powerful detractors. According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    In February 1953, during filming, California Republican Representative Donald Jackson, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) from California, declared that [Salt of the Earth] was ‘deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds,’ and was ‘a new weapon for Russia.’
    End quote.
    Simon Lazarus, founder of the film’s production company, was called to testify before Jackson’s committee that same year, 1953, the year before Salt of the Earth was even released.
    US entertainment unions opposed the film as well. IATSE and the Screen Actors Guild reportedly tried to halt production of the film for over a year, and director Biberman and producer Jarrico stated that they had hired people who had been effectively blacklisted by IATSE, including four Black workers — the assistant to the director, an assistant cameraman and two technicians — all of them excluded under IATSE’s Jim Crow policies.
    On May 24, 1959, the New York Times reported that the United States Information Agency included Salt of the Earth on its list of movies that it refused to show overseas. The film however was subsequently re-released in the US in 1965.
    Adam: Yeah, so if your film was too overtly pro union, centers race and racist cops, centers women’s liberation in the context of unionization, all a lot of bad stuff going on there. Hiring Black crew members. All that was very icky and so this movie was effectively thrown into a memory hole.
    Nima: It was so un-American that it wouldn’t be shown overseas.
    Adam: So un-American it is the only film ever to be blacklisted. Not a filmmaker, but the actual film, the only film ever to be blacklisted. Next up is Norma Rae from 1979. This is a more mainstream film, but one that has not so subtle politics, maybe slightly more subtle than the previous entry.
    In the Southern rural town of Henleyville, single mother Norma Rae Webster, played by Sally Field, works with her parents in a textile mill under conditions threatening the health of her, her family, and her co-workers. To shut her quote-unquote “big mouth,” management gives Norma a promotion, which she initially accepts but eventually rejects after realizing that the modest raise isn’t worth betraying the rank and file, her friends or family. When New York-based labor organizer Reuben Warshovsky, played by Ron Leibman, comes into town to encourage the mill workers to unionize, the galvanized Norma Rae takes an increasingly active role in the pursuit of victory for the mill workers.

    Sally Field and Ron Leibman in Norma Rae, 1979.
    Nima: So Norma Rae, of course, is widely known as kind of a high watermark of labor depiction in films. It’s from 1979. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure you can find it at your local library, you can stream it on Vimeo, you can probably pick up a DVD somewhere, I encourage you to do that, it is a fine film. But it really does mark this labor as shown in Hollywood as being a real hero’s journey. Also, similarly to Salt of the Earth, shone through this idea of powerful women being the kind of center of a story and moving, not only labor solidarity, but also women’s liberation and almost a feminist ideology that combines to really push the labor movement forward.
    Adam: Yeah, though, as our guest notes, and we’ll talk about, its depiction of race is a bit simplistic and tokenizing. But that aside, let’s get into the breakdown of the film itself. The first scene we’re going to watch here is when the union organizer from New York, Reuben, knocks on Norma’s door, explaining that he’s a traveling labor organizer seeking a room to rent. Norma’s father Vernon denies Reuben’s request, stating that Reuben and the union are not welcome. So to start off, we’re going to play a clip where Norma has been making too many demands of management so management decides, which is a typical tactic, decides to give her a promotion, and basically turn her against her own co-workers. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Norma Rae: Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.
    Gardner: Norma, you got the biggest mouth in this mill. “Give us a longer break.” “Give us more smokin’ time.” “Give us a Kotex pad machine.”
    Norma Rae: Do it and I’ll shut up!
    Gardner: Well, we’ll do better than that. We figure the only way to close that mouth is to hand you a promotion. You’re goin’ up in the world, honey.
    Norma Rae: Yeah? How far and for how much?
    Gardner: Well, we’re gonna put you on spot-checkin’.
    Norma Rae: Well hell, it sure ain’t gonna make me any friends.
    Gardner: It’ll make you another dollar and a half an hour.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Nima: Now, Norma demands to be fired after realizing that this promotion is effectively a betrayal to her co-workers, and that you know, she should be fired instead of getting the raise. Later, Norma and one of her co-workers attend a Textile Workers’ Union of America meeting held by traveling organizer Reuben Warshovsky, in which Warshovsky evangelizes about the unifying potential of organizing.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshovsky: Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them… by coming over to the room at the Golden Cherry Motel to pick up a union card and sign it. Yes, it comes from the Bible. “According to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.” But it comes from Reuben Warshovsky: “Not unless you make it happen.” Thank you.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: So Reuben tours the factory with management. After Norma sees how he defends the workers, she seeks to partner with him and improve the union’s outreach, cutting through years of anti-union propaganda fed to the textile workers. It has a kind of city-boy-meets-country-girl flair, but it’s very well done.
    As the labor organization attempts become more visible, the company retaliates. Management forces workers into longer shifts and posts a letter telling white workers that Black workers would use the union as a tool of control. Both of these tactics have dire consequences for the workers.
    Management later attempts to fire Norma after she tries to copy the letter to send to the union, hoping to expose the company’s illegal union-busting tactics. In response, in what has become an iconic scene, Norma stands up on a worktable at the mill holding a sign that reads “UNION” as the workers turn off their mechanical looms in solidarity, one by one.
    The company has Norma arrested for “disorderly conduct,” and Reuben bails her out. Norma is distraught, but Reuben is unfazed and used to hostility from police. He explains that this kind of institutional antagonism is a routine part of labor organizing, offering a glimpse into the ways that police and the state enact violence against unions. So let’s listen to that clip here.
    [Begin Norma Rae Clip]
    Reuben Warshowsky: It comes with the job.
    Norma Rae: (Crying.)
    Reuben Warshowsky: I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club. I saw a boy get shot in the back. I saw a guy get blown to hell and back when he tried to start up his car in the morning. And you just got your feet wet on this one.
    [End Norma Rae Clip]
    Adam: Yeah, so spoiler alert — which in case you haven’t noticed this whole episode is — the risks pay off and the mill holds an election over whether to unionize, and the result is a victory for the union.
    Nima: Norma Rae was quite faithfully based on the story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a cotton mill worker at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Sutton became active in union organizing after meeting Eli Zivkovich, on whom Reuben Warshovsky was modeled. Sutton was fired after copying a racist, anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board and responded just as we see in Norma Rae: climbing onto a worktable, holding a sign reading “UNION” above her head. Unionization at J.P. Stevens took much more time than it did in its fictional counterpart, but it did happen nevertheless eventually in 1980.

    The film’s director, Martin Ritt, was known for his catalog of tales of the oppressed, such as the 1972 film Sounder, about Black sharecroppers during the Depression. Like the makers of Salt of the Earth, Ritt had been blacklisted himself in the 1950s, an experience he captured in the 1976 Woody Allen/Zero Mostel film The Front. He said this in 1986, quote, “I make the kind of films that not too many people get to make in this town, though sometimes I’ve had to take the risk myself,” end quote.
    Adam: According to the American Film Institute, quote:
    Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. and United Artists turned down the project. As explained in a 25 Feb 1979 NYT article, Alan Ladd Jr., President at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., acquired it after Ritt convinced him that the film would be perceived as uplifting and not depressing…During negotiations with the studio, Ritt agreed to cut his salary in half to $250,000.
    $250,000 is still a lot of money in 1979, so our hearts don’t bleed too much. But the point is to further demonstrate the friction filmmakers encounter when they do try to have pro union narratives, it requires them to, in this case, eat shit on half their salary.
    Nima: Both Salt of the Earth, from 1954 and 1979’s Norma Rae depict unionization as going hand in hand with cross racial solidarity and the third film we’re going to discuss is no different. This is Sorry to Bother You from 2018.
    Adam: The film was written and directed by Boots Riley, who has a history of activism in the Bay Area and has a history of pretty overtly left-wing politics, which of course, explains the politics of the film.
    Sorry to Bother You tells the story of Cassius “Cash” Green, played by Lakeith Stanfield, who works, out of desperation, as a telemarketer for Oakland-based company called RegalView, where management repeatedly floats the abstract promise of a promotion. As Cassius’s co-worker Squeeze, played by Steven Yeun, hopes to start a union, Cassius ascends the ranks to become a handsomely paid and steadily promoted “power caller,” on the condition that he enthusiastically performs work far more grim than he could have possibly imagined.
    Nima: So Sorry to Bother You certainly is one of the more ideological films that we are discussing in this two-parter, Adam. It is an allegory more than it is based on a true story or the, you know, story of a certain hero as emblematic of a movement. It is really a fantastical look at labor, at capitalism, and the horrors within those. So we’re going to break down some of the scenes from Sorry to Bother You.
    At one point in the film Cassius somewhat reluctantly participates in a work stoppage organized by his coworker Squeeze and is called into the manager’s office, where his three supervisors offer the allure of a promotion to dissuade him from going any further, you can see parallels here to what happened to Norma Rae, right? We’ll give you a promotion if you just shut your mouth. Here is a clip from that scene from Sorry to Bother You.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Cassius: All right, hey, I know you’re gonna threaten to fire me and go ahead, whatever, I don’t care anymore because we’re gonna take this fucking place down.
    Johnny: (Laughs.) Pack your shit and get out.
    Cassius: Well, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you! Fuck you!
    Anderson: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, Mr. Green. You’re starting to sound a little paranoid here. We’re the bearers of good news. Great news.
    Johnny: Great motherfucking news.
    Anderson: Great motherfucking news. Power caller.
    Cassius: What the fuck?
    Anderson: Yeah we just got the call. They think you’re A1 material, you’re going upstairs my compadre. Yes, you are getting a promotion. at 9am tomorrow morning. Do you have a suit?
    Diana: Of course he does. Powerful, young, strong, intelligent, power caller.
    Cassius: But they —
    Anderson: Oh, God, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. You’re not going against their actions. All their issues are down here. Not up there. Two very different kinds of telemarketing.
    Cassius: Okay. Um…
    Anderson: This is your moment. Don’t waste it.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Cassius soon discovers that as a power caller, he’ll be selling repugnant yet lucrative products from a company called WorryFree. The work stoppage has become a full-blown strike at this point, and Cassius tries to play to both labor and management, telling the workers trying to organize that he supports them quote-unquote “from the sidelines” while simultaneously reaping the financial rewards and class signifiers of his new position as a power caller.
    [Begin Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Salvador: Cassius? What’s up, man? Where you been? What’s up with the suit?
    Cassius: I got promoted.
    Squeeze: What does that mean? Are you a manager now?
    Cassius: That means I’m a power caller now. About to be paid.
    Squeeze: We’re all trying to get fucking paid. But we’re going to do it as a team. Are you on the team?
    Cassius: Yeah, I guess I’m still on your little team but I’m playing from the bench. The bench where you sit and get your bills paid. You know, my uncle is about to lose his house.
    Salvador: Cash, I’m Sorry about your uncle man, but they don’t mean sell out.
    Cassius: I’m not selling you all out. My success has nothing to do with you. All right? You just keep doing whatever it is that you’re fucking doing and I’ll root for you from the sidelines and try not to laugh at that stupid smirk on your face.
    [End Sorry to Bother You Clip]
    Nima: Later, Cassius is invited to an especially decadent party at the mansion of WorryFree executive Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer —
    Adam: Who we now know was playing himself basically.