Will Bunch's "The Left Behind"
Who Cares for the Working Class?
One of the somewhat predictable responses to the Biden Administration college debt retirement plan has been for conservatives to say, “Why should Working Adults have to pay for the decisions of 18 year olds?” Their critique may be in some ways sincere, but is based upon a useful stereotype of the factory worker slaving away in the heat to produce the materials we rely upon. It is matched by a similar critique of people with student loans; that they are all 20 year old party animals racking up bills to support their licentious lifestyle while pursuing their degree in “lesbian dance theory”1.
In reality, the people with college loans aren’t recent college grads and, as Tressie McMillan Cottom explained on Friday, likely not grads at all. They run the gamut age-wise and many are actually blue collar workers. And nearly all of them, too, are “working adults”.
But the divide between the so-called Working Adults and the imaginary college students, even as caricature, underscores what Will Bunch was arguing in After the Ivory Tower Falls2. He suggested that there was a four-part division in the country separating those who went to college before 1990, those who didn’t go to college, those who did and are burdened with debt, and younger populations without college who have little hope. He calls that second group the Left Behind.
In one chapter of the book, Bunch sketches these four groups by telling the stories of specific individuals. His example of the Left Behind is Dave Mitchko from near Scranton, PA.
And yet in many ways Mitchko was the picture in the dictionary version of the voter that Trump had called "the forgotten American”, the epitome of the nation's Left Behind. It so often started roughly the same way -- the great bait and switch of the late twentieth century in Heartland America, as the industrial age ground to a halt. Mitchko's dad (now eighty-four, suffering from throat cancer) had worked for decades in Scranton's large Trane air conditioner plant, and with the promise of a good life and lots of overtime, the classroom-adverse junior Mitchko had no reason to prepare for college.
"We were, like, the street smart," Mitchko recalls of his days at Mid-Valley High. "Our [shop] teacher would tell us, 'I could drop you guys off in New York City and pick you up there tomorrow morning. That class across the hallway' — the advanced math and science nerds — I could drop them off at six — and by seven they'd all be dead.” 179.
To be fair, the division between the “shop kids” and the “math and science nerds” has always been part of the American high school. What changed is not the attitudes and behaviors of the nerds but the economic limitations of what Bunch identifies as “the great bait and switch.”
Entire generations of high school students were told that it was okay that they didn’t care much about grades because the factory/mining/farming job would always be there. Until it wasn’t. And then we had the audacity to tell them that they should have gone into the burgeoning field of computer science.3
The bait and switch isn’t new. I remember team-teaching an urban history/sociology course with a historian friend. It was the first time I learned about the Pullman Strike. Following the financial panic of 1873, the company faced reduced demand for rail cars and began laying off workers. Those workers lived in the company town outside Chicago. But George Pullman the owner said that rents were still due to George Pullman the landlord. The American Railway Union went on strike in 1984, which soon spread nationwide. President Cleveland sent the army to break the strike (over 40 died, 30 in Chicago) and eventually dissolved the ARU.
This pattern of worker-owner conflict has repeated itself ever since. At times, unions were stronger and reached mutually agreeable concessions. Robert Reich argues that the period from 1947 to 1975 could be called The Great Prosperity. As the late 1970s “stagflation” turned into the Reagan Revolution, the balance shifted in favor of owners. Reagan dissolved the Air Traffic Controllers Union and we were off to the non-union races.
From the 1980s on, negotiations between worker representatives and management became increasingly one-sided, with unions giving ground to keep as many jobs as possible. A natural byproduct was lower wages, loss of pension protections, and increased employee payments for health insurance. And many jobs were still lost.
Dependent upon the company for economic security, people accepted company actions. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild explains why people remained loyal to the petroleum industry in Louisiana even as it was destroying their groundwater — where else would they go?
In the end, that loyalty would prove one-sided. The company would do what management thought best for themselves and for their shareholders. Especially once companies fell into the leveraged buyout debt financing schemes that created today’s hedge funds.
Again, read Brian Alexander’s Glass House to see how this plays out. More from him in my next newsletter dealing with the Left Out.
I remember seeing a newscast in the early 1980s about how the Briggs and Stratton plant in Milwaukee suddenly shut production. People who had worked there for generations suddenly learned of the bait and switch. Bill Moyers followed up with factory workers in Milwaukee in the early 1990s and found many struggling with minimum wage jobs (or several of them). A 2020 article in Urban Milwaukee did a retrospective on what happened at Briggs and Stratton.
Just days before filing for bankruptcy in July, Milwaukee’s Briggs & Stratton Corp., at one time the largest producer of small engines in the world and employer to 11,000 union production workers making a solid, middle-class living, handed its top executives $5 million in bonuses, calling them “retention awards.”
In mid-September a federal bankruptcy court judge approved the sale of Briggs & Stratton’s assets to KPS Capital Partners, a private equity firm.
Like vultures picking a carcass clean, these bonuses in the run-up to bankruptcy have become an all-too-frequent way for corporate executives to gift themselves with one last, egregious payday before stiffing their workers and creditors.
So back to where I started this piece. Why should the working class have to pay for the college debt explosion when they didn’t do anything to create it? Because when government structures and policies create massive inequalities in the society, it requires attention to resolve it.
In truth, we should have done something similar for those factory workers who were dislocated by a shift in the economy from manufacturing things to financial performance in the markets. If we had, maybe the animosity would be lessened.4 But we didn't do anything because policy-makers wanted the financial side to win.
The reality is that it’s a good thing to tackle the college debt problem. It would have been a good thing not to throw the displaced factory worker to the caprice of the market. Of course, if we’d supported them in some counterfactual universe, the very same voices complaining about lesbian dance theory would be complaining about support for overpaid factory workers5 and their unnecessary bathroom breaks.6
The Left Behind aren’t left behind because math and science nerds went to college. They are left behind as a direct result of policy decisions (actions taken and actions foregone) by leaders of both parties over the last forty years.
Congresswoman Lauren Bobert’s contribution to an important policy discussion
My newsletter from August 17 has my analysis of the book:
Reagan actually said this.
Our political dynamics would certainly be better.
A moment in your article that I think is an excellent representation of the larger issue: "In truth, we should have done something similar for those factory workers who were dislocated by a shift in the economy from manufacturing things to financial performance in the markets. If we had, maybe the animosity would be lessened.⁴ But we didn't do anything because policy-makers wanted the financial side to win."
Now your above statement can be spoken with a straight face as justifiable policy by any pillow salesman on talk radio in order to gain followers on social media. With a little extra brinksmanship, the pillow salesman just makes sure to blame the (a, some) liberal government for failing the factory workers, even while he supports with propaganda the very conservative fiscal agenda that failed them.
Would these same naysayers have been so vocal about the GI Bill? I would bet that many of the middle class among them grew up well in no small part because of it.
Reagan wrecked the sense of national allegiance that kept these arguments from becoming so polarized since the Civil War. He was the beginning of our current plutocratic oligarchy. Even the 1960s, while punctuated with horrible domestic conflict, didn't drive the country to the brink of collapse. There was, at least, still a Cold War focus that united people. At worst there was a lot of misdirected animosity caused by the Vietnam war. The relationship between the government and private sector was still too chummy, and white men were the only effective decision makers, but the idea of the nation as a nation was still very much in play. And school was free to cheap.
Trump simply finished off what Reagan started--enabling an anti-government strain of knee-jerk vitriol against any idea--especially a good one--that isn't his. As Jon Voinovich, prompted by Mitch McConnell, said, "If he [Obama] was for it, then we had to be against it." When you think that way, why would you want more people educated, let alone use taxes to help them? That does nothing for an anti-government agenda used to make a handful of rich people richer.
Great post, as always, John.