Tonight, JD Vance will almost certainly try to out-Trump Trump, setting himself up to be Trump’s heir and likely Republican presidential candidate four years from now.
Listen carefully to Vance and you’ll probably also hear shades of Richard M. Nixon, because it was Nixon who first began peeling blue-collar workers away from the Democratic Party. Trump and Vance are the lineal descendants of Nixon — as well as Nixon aides Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan.
Nixon wanted to undo FDR’s New Deal coalition and claim the mantle of the white working class for himself and the Republican Party. Using racism and cultural populism, he made some headway, which Ronald Reagan built upon. Trump and Vance are the latest manifestations.
The decision of the Teamsters Union not to endorse any presidential candidate this year has roots in that Nixonian strategy. The Teamsters endorsed Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and George H.W. Bush in 1986.
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Some years after Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa went to prison for jury tampering, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud, Nixon henchman Colson helped negotiate Hoffa’s release. When in prison, Hoffa had named as his successor Frank Fitzsimmons, who became one of Nixon’s strongest supporters.
Nixon and Colson wanted the Teamsters and other unions to break with the Democrats. The Vietnam War provided the first big opportunity.
Colson can be heard on a White House tape recording made on May 5, 1970, urging several New York union leaders to organize an attack on student anti-Vietnam War protesters in New York.
Two days later, on May 8, more than 400 construction workers attacked around 1,000 student demonstrators (including two of my friends) protesting the war. The workers were armed with lengths of steel rebar, their tools, and steel-toe boots. They carried U.S. flags and chanted “U.S.A., all the way” and “America, love it or leave it” as they chased and assaulted students in the streets.
More than 100 people were injured; most required hospital treatment. My friends who had been demonstrating against the war phoned me later that day. They had escaped injury, but they were traumatized. I remember them describing the rioting construction workers as a “pack of animals.”
Nixon exploited the riot for political advantage. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary: “The college demonstrators have overplayed their hands, evidence is the blue-collar group rising up against them, and [the] president can mobilize them.”
Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan wrote in a memo to his boss that “blue-collar Americans” are “our people now.”
Peter Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, claimed “the unions had nothing to do with” the riot, but his claim was bogus. Just before the riot began, Brennan rallied construction workers to show support for the war. Brennan explained that workers were “fed up” with violence and flag desecration by anti-war demonstrators.
In the days after the riot, Nixon invited Brennan and a delegation of 22 other union leaders to the White House. They presented Nixon with several hard hats and a flag pin, after which Nixon praised the “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.”
After the 1972 election, Nixon appointed Brennan labor secretary. In that position, Brennan strongly opposed affirmative action. He also prevented Labor Department officials from investigating allegations of corruption in the Teamsters Union and of Fitzsimmons, who had helped secure labor support for Nixon’s reelection.
Colson’s dirty work didn’t end with the hardhat riot. He assembled Nixon’s “enemies list” — people who would be subject to intensified IRS audits.
Colson also hired E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, to spy on Nixon’s political opponents. Hunt then led a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in June 1972. (Colson later became the first member of the Nixon administration to be imprisoned for Watergate-related felonies.)
Nixon thought he could succeed by emphasizing cultural issues involving nationalism and class as well as race and gender. Buchanan said the Republican Party should embrace these growing working-class resentments. “The Republican moment [depends on the GOP taking] up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion, and race.”
The construction workers who attacked the demonstrators on May 8, 1970 and the police who egged them on were more likely to have family and friends in Vietnam than the college students who demonstrated. Many were veterans of World War II and Korea. They also lived in the same working-class neighborhoods. They despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, long-haired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snots.
These blue-collar workers felt abandoned by the middle class and the college-educated who deserted their communities; they felt stiffed by the clever kids with draft deferments; they resented being forced to bus their kids to Black neighborhoods and accept Black kids into their schools; and they were burdened by an economy no longer delivering upward mobility. As the journalist Pete Hamill observed at the time, the workingman “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored.”
Buchanan ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and in 1996. Although he lost both times, he won about a third of the Republican primary vote, chiefly from the party’s blue-collar members. He ran again in 2000. Although he lost once more, his ideas began taking root in the party. He argued that Republicans should oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement, take a stronger stand against immigration, and support Russian president Vladimir Putin because he was anti-gay.
Buchanan’s rallies prefigured Trump rallies two decades later. The crowds he drew included many men wearing military fatigues. The press corps traveling with Buchanan were reviled and subjected to the same verbal threats that have become commonplace today.
The cultural populism peddled today by Trump and JD Vance is almost the same as that of Nixon, Colson, and Buchanan — and with the same purpose: to capture an angry and disaffected working class.
But I believe Republican cultural populism would never have got this far had Democrats been more willing to follow FDR and embrace economic populism. (More on this to come.)
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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/