Conventional Wisdom V

Just as I did with the bizarre train wreck that was the Republican National Convention, I’ll be posting each day of this week’s Democratic National Convention.

Joe Biden is technically the headliner for the first night of the convention, which is an unusual spot for an incumbent president, especially one whom everyone assumed would be making the acceptance speech on Thursday night until about a month ago. I’ll circle back to that tomorrow after we’ve heard the speech and have a bit to think about it.

For now, though, what’s really remarkable about the first night of the convention has been the full-throated embrace of labor unions at the convention, with the heads of several important unions making appearances on stage and Shawn Fain of the UAW knocking it out of the park with this t-shirt (for sale here):

The union theme fits really well with “Biden night” given that he’s been perhaps the most pro-union president we’ve ever had. (And, yeah, I’d actually say he’s been more devoted to unions than even FDR. As the great labor historian David Montgomery once put it, it’s true that FDR thought of himself as “the worker’s patron” but it’s equally true that his attitude to them was pretty patronizing.)

In the decades since FDR, Democrats have had a frustrating relationship with their erstwhile allies in labor. It buckled a bit during the postwar era, and then seemed to collapse entirely in the 1970s when the Democratic Party reformed its structures to make space for women, racial and religious minorities, and other marginalized groups and wound up taking away some of the long-held power of union leaders. (If you’ve ever read anything about the 1972 DNC, you’ve seen George Meany’s grumbling about how all the “union men” were sidelined.)

But everyone knows that the working class, of course, is incredibly diverse (as long as you’re not a reporter for the New York Times, I guess) and thinking that protecting unions and respecting the demographic diversity of the party represent some kind of an either-or choice is deeply wrong. I mean, just look at this montage of the union leaders who came before Fain.

Personally, I find a lot to cheer in the Democrats’ apparent sincere rediscovery of their union bonafides. It’s a rejection of the neoliberal half-measures that so marked the late 20th century and a return to policies, programs and political alliances that once made the Democratic Party the legitimate “party of the working man” before that got hijacked by Republican appeals to racial resentment and culture wars fights that peeled away the white working class into MAGAland.

Biden has shown that Democratic alignment with the labor unions works well as a political agenda but also, of course, as an economic one. I’m hopeful Harris and Walz will build on that agenda in the campaign. Tonight makes for a hell of a start.