Historian and 2019-20 CASBS fellow Jefferson Cowie talks with host John Markoff about the inescapable legacy of slavery, the political fracturing of labor, anti-statism, and whether the current structure of federalism can adequately address issues like climate change and pandemics.
Jefferson’s recent New York Times Piece “The ‘Hard Hat Riot’ Was a Preview of Today’s Political Divisions”
The illuminating CASBS symposium “_Contesting the Nation_”, with Jefferson Cowie, Kathleen Belew, and Catherine Ramírez
Richard Rorty, CASBS fellow 1982-83 “Achieving Our Country”
Donald F. Kettl’s “The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work”
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stranger in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”
Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”
Special thanks to CASBS staff member Paola Dios for the opening the episode!
Announcer: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Narrator: Today, host John Markoff has a virtual sit-down with historian and CASBS fellow Jefferson Cowie. Cowie holds the James G. Stallman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University, where his work focuses on how class inequality and labor shape American politics and culture. We'll hear their thoughts on the inescapable legacy of slavery, the political fracturing of labor, anti-statism, and whether the current structure of federalism can adequately address large-scale issues like climate change and pandemics.
John Markoff: Thanks for doing this with us. This is our first COVID-era podcast, so this is an experiment. Let's get right into it. I saw this, what I thought was interesting piece in the business section of the New York Times today, basically describing the meltdown of the gig economy. And it made me think about, so just sort of wondering if you thought about what the labor movement might look like after this.
Jefferson Cowie: Right, well, there's been so much chatter about what's gonna happen with the labor movement in this moment and a lot of optimism, I think, among labor people that this might be a turnaround moment. And while I think some of the objective conditions for workers might be there to make people begin to think about organizing, The structural questions about federal policy and politics, I think, and the other issues that are going to overshadow it, I think make it a very, very difficult time for any, any old school sort of labor union collective bargaining system really to get off the ground again in the near future.
John Markoff: Do you see anything to be optimistic about in terms of grassroots mobilization, or are there any Mystic straws in the wind?
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, I think there's a lot of actions that have been fairly small, isolated on the ground, but they're getting some traction in small ways. But in terms of like large macro changes, I continue to be a little, let's just say I'm pessimistic about it. But I do think that like there will be immediate changes at this plant or in this condition or the way these guys drive or, you know, whatever the case might be. Especially with health and safety. But geez, that's all survival-level stuff, you know.
John Markoff: And then what about specifically this notion that the gig economy has been just thrashed by this so far? I don't know what's going to happen over the next half year, but—
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, I mean, my rule of thumb on this is anybody who says they know what's going to happen— Yeah, I mean We don't know anything. We don't even know if the college is going to be open, let alone what happens to the gig economy. I mean, this is uncharted terrain, right? And I don't see why the gig economy would not bounce back though. In fact, you could make the argument it would be among the first to bounce back because it's low— it's not capital intensive. People can get off the ground pretty quickly. Yeah. I mean, something like Airbnb may not pop right back because people are going to be afraid to travel, but service level stuff I think could actually be among the first.
John Markoff: And in California in particular, have you had ability to watch what's been going on at the state level and in the courts? A bunch of things have been happening to turn gig economy—
Jefferson Cowie: Oh yeah, oh yeah, that stuff. Yeah, sure, of course. Yeah.
John Markoff: I wonder if that's representative of something that's going to happen on a more national scale.
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah. I mean, there's like It's interesting. You have to kind of step back and say, what's driving what, right? And this, my friend and former fellow Lewis Hyman talks about this a lot, is kind of what is the gig economy driven by technology or is it being driven by the structural issues in the labor market? And I tend to think it's being driven by the structural problems in the labor market and the technology's coming in to fill that in. You may disagree, John.
John Markoff: No, not necessarily.
Jefferson Cowie: And so, for those court decisions to just sort of try and rationalize, create a sort of regulatory structure or regime to have those occupations, I think, more steady and reliable might be interesting, but it's also gonna take the wind out of actually what has made the gig economy the gig economy in a lot of ways.
John Markoff: So, I wanna come back to the pandemic in American politics, but I also wanted to ask you what it's like to be a working historian in the midst of a pandemic. I mean, how has this affected your research at CASBS?
Jefferson Cowie: So, I'm pretty much driving, just sucking the juice out of every last document I have to write, and before I get into the archives again. But fortunately, I'm able to do that. I've got a lot of notes, and I came here ready to write. So for me, I'm actually, you know, nobody disturbs me and I get to write my stuff. So it's working out okay. I think I'm one of the few people for which this is gonna be okay.
John Markoff: I'm asking you to completely speculate, but let's just say COVID went away and we were back to normal like we were. How much of this stuff would stick around or how quickly do you think we'll return to traditional methods of interaction and stuff?
Jefferson Cowie: That's a great question. I mean, again, we're We're in fairly unknown territory, but if we look at the end of a lot of crises, wars, the Spanish flu, there tends to be actually a fairly jubilant time afterwards. People kind of become grateful and open up to the world and realize their interconnectedness and things like that. So, I mean, I could equally paint you an apocalyptic picture of, you know, burning tires in the streets, but I actually think that maybe there's a little bit of hope because we're also at the end of a large political cycle here, right? I mean, there's been kind of a historical fix since the early '80s to 2016. And now things are wide open. We don't know where we're going and pandemic's part of that. But I'm a little bit optimistic about what happens in the next 5 years. And I am not known, Am I optimistic?
John Markoff: Your point on jubilation or the, you know, just the joy of being back in human touch is a really interesting one to me because my sort of dark analysis of the internet is there's been much less, you know, forget COVID, there was already much less face-to-face contact because of the emergence of social networks. There was this, I'm blanking on his name, but there was a Stanford political scientist who did really interesting early research on the early internet comparing it to television. Basically, if you look at it like television, you know, that's, you know, you look at the screen and you don't interact with other people. And so more people were looking at screens and not interacting with people. We've already gone a long way down this sort of isolation path if you're just talking about what you're doing physically.
Jefferson Cowie: Right, so I mean, this is probably not who you were thinking about, but Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, he looks at a variety of variables and says the tele— you know, suburbanization television went a long way to essentially creating isolated, autonomous people who don't join things anymore. And yeah, I think that's gonna be an enormous problem. And I'm hope— I mean, the worst-case scenario is we substitute this kind of Zoom conversation for reality. In my book, like, I'm, I'm a reality-based guy, John. I am old-school, flesh, blood, Dirt. Yeah.
Narrator: You mentioned the Spanish flu, and I'm wondering, do any of our current labor circumstances track with what happened then? And how did labor emerge from that? And is there anything it can learn from that today?
Jefferson Cowie: That's interesting because, you know, we think we have it bad, but the Spanish flu happened alongside the Great War, you know, the war to end all wars. It's, you know, this absolutely armageddon-level conflict, and so the flu was chump change in comparison. But coming out of that, you had one of the biggest strike waves in American and world history in 1919, and it was very dramatic, and this was a push not just for the old organized, the old skilled trades that had been organized, but basic industry, especially steel. And this is when you had the Seattle Soviet, when The Seattle workers took over Seattle and ran it as a kind of a socialist city, and the Boston police strike and all this stuff. And that was all crushed. That was all, it was viciously crushed. But by and large, the culture survives. I think there was still a lot of excitement in the '20s, the Roaring '20s, afterward that was, that was really gave a lot of energy to the culture, you know, it's the Jazz Age, that whole thing. However, and here's the lesson for our time, there was nothing redistributing all the wealth that was being created in the 1920s. And you had this incredible escalation of inequality, which ends in 1929 with the stock market crash, and then of course, 12 years of depression.
John Markoff: Can I ask about your current project, I guess a book titled The Dark Note of Freedom?
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, it's recently been updated to The Dark Note of White Freedom.
John Markoff: Oh, is that because your focus has changed or you just, it's—
Jefferson Cowie: No.
John Markoff: It better describes what you're doing.
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, more clarity, right, yeah. Yeah, so the idea is this book is working on two levels. One level is it's a study of freedom and the problem with freedom, you know, this American creed that we believe in and we have no idea what we're talking about when we invoke it. And I'm using the ideas of a historical sociologist named Orlando Patterson at Harvard, and he goes back and looks at the entire history of freedom all the way back to the ancients. Basically says freedom emerges from slave societies, that we only actually understand freedom through slavery, that, you know, in a binary kind of way. And that one of the key elements of freedom— he breaks it down into several things— but one of the key elements, what I call the dark notes, is the freedom to oppress, the freedom to own others, the freedom to drive others to do what you want. And of course, one of the great sort of mysteries of American history is how all this talk about freedom emerges in the United States in a slave republic. And so I'm getting at that, and the way I'm getting at this question, this sort of relationship between the freedom to oppress and the rhetoric of liberty as we normally think of it, is I'm looking at this little town in Alabama and 4 episodes of federal power coming into this town, federal intervention. Indian removal, Reconstruction, the New Deal, and civil rights. And how this kind of racialized anti-statism among white people emerges where they establish their freedom as against the federal government. Because the federal government's coming in and telling them how not to treat minorities. So race, freedom, and federal authority all get mixed up in this mess.
John Markoff: So, you know, let me see if I can tie together this essay that you're gonna have in the New York Times, which is about, drawn from this iconic photograph of the Hard Hat Riot in New York in 1970. And, you know, when I saw that picture and I was beginning to read your essay, I immediately thought of this other iconic photo that just emerged of these all-white occupiers in the Capitol building in Michigan. And I was thinking about this in the context of your discussion of freedom and freedom as it's framed in this new pandemic context. I know you're doing history, but all of a sudden it sort of tracks, doesn't it?
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, no, in fact, Ibram Kendi, the African-American scholar, just had a piece, I think it was in The Atlantic, basically saying that you can understand the response to federal authority telling you what to do in the pandemic all the way back to this sort of anti-statism of slavery. That you can't tell me what to do kind of thing. And so yeah, I think that kind of twisted idea of freedom that trumps other ideas of solidarity, equality, what's good for the nation as a whole is alive and well in a lot of the responses to the—
John Markoff: And would you call that ideologically libertarian, or is it something else?
Jefferson Cowie: Great question. What I'm seeing unfolding in the South is essentially textbook libertarianism that I see today in a lot of ways. It's low taxes, low infrastructure, get the federal government and state government off my back so I can do whatever I want. Unless I can use it to my advantage, then I will take— then I'll leverage government intervention whenever I can. But also, where it gets traction— and this is the kind of interesting thing about American conservatism— where it gets traction is through race. So Goldwater can run on libertarian principles and stuff and win a few states. But what you really need is this sort of double helix of free markets and race in order to get people to vote for these kind of libertarian ideas, I think. They're not that popular on their own.
John Markoff: So, you know, you mentioned federalism, and I wondered if you've noticed, you know, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly recently been describing California as a nation-state. And I haven't thought it's been accidental, but I don't know what his agenda is, and I wondered if you had a take on what's going on.
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, I just listened to another press conference he did, and he said, "I'm just using this, you know, rhetorically." You know, he kind of backed off that. But this is, yeah, this is in some ways the opposite of my argument. There's a California exceptionalism, because my argument's basically saying federal government comes in with a higher standard of whatever it is, and says, you know, you are beholden to the standard and people fight back. Now we have California having a higher standard against, you know, a crumbling, you know, what's bordering to me on a banana republic, and having to fight back. I think it's very, very intriguing. I don't know what his actual agenda is, but now we've already begun to scratch our heads and wonder if, you know, hmm, Which side of the line are we gonna be on when California breaks off?
John Markoff: Could you conceive of, I mean, succession seems so unreachable, and yet, it's, you know, why not?
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, no, it's a great question, because, you know, secession, I think, was, the Confederate version of secession was literally based on an entire discourse of freedom. It was all about freedom. We have the right to do this, and this is a constitutional right, and it kinda was, I mean, Honestly, you know, I think the North was morally right, but the South was constitutionally right. And that's a horrible thing to say, but I think it's true. And so, but California, I think, would be a fascinating thing. And, you know, I began to think back on, there's this sort of theme in apocalyptic and futuristic stuff where the nation breaks into various regions, like Ecotopia or something like that, where there's these sustainable, more sustainable level nation states, because I do think there's actually a problem, a deep problem that's coming out about federalism right now, obviously, right? It's not working. You can't— with the two threats, COVID and global warming, you need centralized capacity to act. I don't think you can do this from the bottom up, and if the federal government's failing, I think I think that there is an argument to be made to try and do it, as well as the South's taking all the resources. You know, I mean, they're net takers in the tax game. It's kind of funny and ironic thing.
John Markoff: Yeah. So one of the things that you pointed to in your essay about that photo in the Times, the hardhat riots, was the fragmentation of the working class as being this thing. And I wonder if you could sort of dial that forward.
Jefferson Cowie: You always want to go forward. What about backward?
Narrator: Maybe give a listener a kind of synopsis of the Hard Hat Riot so that we can then project forward from that.
Jefferson Cowie: Okay, so the Hard Hat Riot happened right after Nixon made public his incursion into Cambodia on April 30th, 1970. Then the Kent State protests happened on the 4th of May, and the 4 kids were killed at Kent State. And then after that, there was anti-war protests across the country, one of which was in downtown Manhattan. There were about 1,000 people in the financial district demonstrating against the war. And then suddenly, in a surprise, hundreds of construction workers who were working on the World Trade Center marched up chanting all the way, "USA," and carrying tools and pipes and all sorts of stuff, just burst through this demonstration, pummeled the protesters, and made their way to the top of the stairs of Federal Hall, which is where the protest was, and sort of raised the flag and sang God Bless America. And, you know, it's sort of— I compare it with what raising the flag looked like at Iwo Jima, you know, it's this sort of scrum of humanity raising a flag. So this began to raised questions of a kind of fascist working class and whether this new right-wing, white male working class was this Karl Marx turned upside down, that workers were no longer on the forefront of social change, but were in fact retrograde in the face of the new social movements of the 1960s around gender, race, sexuality, culture, the war. They don't make explicit claims about race, but this does come on the heels of a series of anti-affirmative action demands by the unions because they wanted to maintain their hiring privileges, aka whiteness. And so that, that was certainly there. The EEOC was founded— the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was formed in '64. So it's beginning to— the workplace is beginning to integrate, but the big push happens in the 1970s. So that's part of it as well. But it really seems to be about kind of this masculine patriarchal worldview that believes in flag, God, nation. And, you know, Pete Brennan, who's the head of the building trades at the time, he says, you know, we're the people who build the buildings, we don't burn the buildings. And that really kind of, I think, illuminated the cultural divide at the moment.
Narrator: So this was more of a cultural difference rather— they didn't have any labor disputes that they were bringing to this protest at all?
Jefferson Cowie: No, none whatsoever. There were no labor disputes involved. It was, it was, and it wasn't really organized. I mean, it had to be organized on a micro level. In fact, the labor situation was great. I mean, these guys were making time and a half building the World Trade Center. It was a good time to be a construction worker. But they really felt their world was slipping away with these coddled college kids who were just, you know, yelling and screaming about what's wrong with America. And for them, there's nothing wrong with America. It looked like them, and they wanted to keep it that way.
John Markoff: But is the dynamic that led to Trump's election and the dynamic that led to Nixon's landslide, are those different things or the same things?
Jefferson Cowie: Very similar, I think. I think this is, like, there's several things, the Wallace campaign in '68 and '72, the hardhat riots, Nixon's, what he called his new majority, which was really an attempt to crack off enough of the white working class from the Roosevelt coalition and bring it over to the Republican Party. All those things were kind of— that '68 to '72 period is this kind of swirl of things that begin to coagulate into the New Right, and it makes several things happen. A chunk of the white working class moves to the Republican Party, and the Republican Party becomes much more populist, right? It becomes Ronald Reagan. Reagan at some point says, we need to get out of the country club and get into the taverns, get into the factories, make this a party for regular people. And I think he said that in the '76 primary. And so he does, you know, and he builds this around America. It's very much the themes that the hard hats were protesting around. And then, you know, Pat Buchanan, who was a Nixon advisor, he basically reads the whole thing and says, yeah, what we see is this part of the working class moving away from FDR. The guys who gave FDR those landslides in '32 and '36 are now going to be for us. And then he goes on, of course, and has his own Soul of America speech in '92 and the culture war stuff. And then I think that wing— Gingrich, of course, helps drive polarization. And I think this is all kind of one continuous thread that brings us to Trump.
John Markoff: You know, since then, I mean, we've had globalization, we've had women entering the workforce, we've had probably a much more racially diverse workforce emerge, we've had the emergence of a much larger white-collar workforce in America probably than we did, manufacturing has largely declined to, what, 10% or whatever. Structurally there are things that are different then. How do they play out?
Jefferson Cowie: Right. Well, it's gotten worse for a lot of these guys, you know, especially— probably not construction workers in New York, they're probably doing okay. But if you go into the old Rust Belt, of course, you know, you're getting what Angus Deacon and— why can't I remember their names? This is bad. Anyway, the two economists who coined the term deaths of despair, where people are basically, you know, their world is no longer one of optimism and expansiveness. And it's sort of odd that if you think about it, African Americans and Latinos are more optimistic about the future than are white working-class men, which is, yeah, which is kind of crazy. But their narrative is sort of, to them it feels like it's coming to a close. There's few opportunities for them. It's narrowing. So I, you know, I— what the hard hats felt in 1970 was essentially a slipping cultural place in the patriarchy. What you see now is essentially absolute, complete despair amongst a lot of those folks who feel like they don't have a place at all anymore in the political discourse. And I'm not saying that's accurate. I'm saying that's how they feel.
John Markoff: The other meme that I run across all the time is that the increasing participation of ethnic groups in the electoral process is gonna move the— it's gonna move the—
Jefferson Cowie: You're sort of euphemistically talking about immigration?
John Markoff: Yeah, sort of. Well, yeah, and differential birth rates too, you know.
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, right, right. And youth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of potential energy there that is yet to be realized. And that's why, again, I think this is part of, I think, the kind of churn we're in the midst of right now that I think a whole lot of variables are spinning, and that's one of them. And I think, you know, if you go back before Trump, the Republican Party was suddenly, oh, we can't just be a party of white guys, we gotta, we gotta diversify, we need to, you know, we're gonna lose this, so let's get on the road to diversification and reach out to Latinos and stuff. Well, they're still getting enough traction on whiteness and regionalism to survive, but I just, if you travel through the South or live there as we do, we live in Nashville, you see the amount of immigration, especially in the cities, and I think there's a lot of another element of hope there for getting out of this kind of dark—
John Markoff: You know, there's been a lot of discussion about the potential connection between the Green New Deal and COVID, and more recently, I've seen people even suggesting an Old New Deal. And COVID. I mean, that's come up in a number of different ways. And do those political, you know, crusades, platforms of the last 30 decades have anything to offer America in trying to recover from the pandemic?
Jefferson Cowie: Wow. Boy, you asked— that question is a lot bigger for me than I think that it is for most people. I mean, most people would say, look at these policy initiatives. That's what we need. That would work, whether it's an economy based on full employment, or redistributive policies, or unionization, or improved Social Security, or whatever, these would all work. As an historian, go back with me now, those thrilling days of yesteryear, the circumstances that gave rise to the New Deal were extraordinary, I mean truly, not just in terms of the economic crisis of the 1930s and then World War II, right? I mean, you essentially have 15 years of cataclysmic, world-consequence-level issues, but you also have things like there was no immigration really. The Democratic Party was playing this game with Black people where they're kind of in, kind of out. We're gonna allow segregation, but we're gonna kind of court the Black vote. Individualism was not as powerful as it had been prior or after. Herbert Hoover gave the rugged individualism speech just before the whole world economy collapsed. There's a whole host of things that were going on that were very, very different that allowed that to take off. So policy-wise, yes, I think the Green New Deal, or even the old New Deal, would be great. The social circumstances that give rise to that, that keep— you know, the old adage in political science is the more diverse a society is, the harder it is to— the less likely it is to be social democratic. The more homogeneous it is, the more likely it is to be social democratic. We're a very diverse society, so creating any kind of social democratic agenda is very, very difficult in a society where it's much easier to blame minorities or immigrants or whatever the case may be. For the period of the New Deal, that was very different. So as a metaphor for going forward, I think it's kind of useful as a policy prescription, but it's less useful in terms of the sort of social soil that gave rise to those robust programs.
Narrator: Okay, so it seems like there's a fracturing of labor at that moment.
Jefferson Cowie: Oh, right. Yeah. John started to ask about that.
Narrator: Right. Yeah, and that crack kept widening and widening until the point where we had enough people sort of on one side of labor that they end up voting for someone like Donald Trump. And in this pandemic, it seems like people are expressing a desire to really inspect the world we've built for ourselves. And so if we imagine trying to repair that fracture within labor, to sort of bring workers back together. Does this pandemic afford us an opportunity to do that? You know, I'm thinking we, we seem to be creating a new category within labor of essential worker, and I'm wondering if you see that as a thing that can further that fracture or unite us, you know, new groups of workers together, or you know, how these kinds of labels affect labor politics?
Jefferson Cowie: Well, the interesting thing about the term essential worker is it already creates a divide, right?
Narrator: Right.
Jefferson Cowie: Essential and non-essential, right? So, uh, the one thing that a revival of labor depends upon is some sort of vision of solidarity. And that, you know, the more we're talking about essential versus non-essential, immigrant versus native, Black versus white, California versus Tennessee, but, you know, the less capable we'll be of, I think, of creating any sort of unified vision like that. But there are a lot of things going on. I mean, I think it's pretty clear at this moment that there's two issues, both of which push forward for questions of climate change, that need to be dealt with. And one is, I think, federalism. I mean, going back to what we were talking about, that we need more centralized authority. That's what the New Deal was about. It was about sort of taking that old anti-monopoly wing of the party and saying, nope, we're going to embrace bigness and we're going to regulate it. And I think— and then the other is healthcare. And without healthcare, obviously everybody's vulnerable. Everybody. It's not just people without healthcare. It goes back to the old kind of public health thing that people, people more even rich people in more equal societies will live longer. So, you know, and in the midst of a pandemic, all the more so. So anyway, I think there are some circumstances that are brewing in a positive direction. I don't think it's like, you know, Joe Amazon worker walking out because he's not getting the proper personal protection. That might be a small piece of it, but I think we need to look at some larger trend lines than just these sort of isolated incidents that we began talking about at the beginning of that.
Narrator: And is this why you invoke, or you mentioned Richard Rorty?
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, that kind of came out of left field. Yeah, big Richard Rorty fan.
Narrator: But that's essentially like, wasn't that the sort of achieving the country is—
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No. So Rory, if you go back in that book, he predicted Trump with absolute clarity. He basically says, if we keep going with inequality like this, and a bunch of snobby professors who are debating, you know, the nature of postmodernism, and a Washington Beltway culture that doesn't give a crap about anybody in the heartland, some strongman's gonna rise up and reverse all the gains that have happened for women and minorities and he's going to rally white guys and it's going to get ugly. And it was just like, that was in like '98 or whenever, um, Rorty wrote that book. So, um, yeah.
Narrator: Speaking of politics and academics, sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time talking politics, but we may not all be great at doing it, if that makes sense.
Jefferson Cowie: Yeah. All right. And traditionally, we talk about politics like other people talk about football.
Narrator: Yeah. And traditionally, labor has been seen as this big doer of politics. It's this huge kind of participant in the political process. But it kind of seems like that's been on the decline.
Jefferson Cowie: And yeah, labor's in a tough position. So private sector union density is probably 6.5% right now. You know, it used to be 35. Um, if you add the public sector, you're, you know, jump up to 11 or something, maybe. I haven't looked at the statistics really. So numerically, it's weak. Still has some resources, still has some money, still is a major player in the Democratic Party, but much weaker. Unlike the hardhat era though, it is one of the most diverse institutions in American history. It's no longer just a white guy club. So you've had this sort of dual change of sort of declining power but rising diversity. That's been a major problem, of course, because there's very little voice for the collective economic interests of working people being represented in Washington, right? Until things have changed. Things have changed since, you know, maybe since Bernie's run in 2012, and certainly since 2016, I think, as costs of economic inequality become obvious. But I don't think organized labor has a lot of leverage at the moment. And a lot of their members are fairly conservative. So there's a backlash against paying dues to an organization that's advocating left-wing causes and things like this. But the energy that is happening, I think, at the grassroots— look at Las Vegas, the culinary workers are essentially playing an incredibly dynamic, powerful role in Nevada politics. And so, you know, it's one of the last great union bastions in America. Whether that's the future or the past in terms of, you know, what Vegas— what the Las Vegas situation means for the rest of the country, I can't tell. But I think, you know, organized labor is not in a strong position to advocate much, and it's historically played this role within the Democratic Party where it bankrolls everything and gets nothing. I mean, they've really been a source of a lot of money and they have gotten very, very little out of the Democratic Party historically.
Narrator: Why is that?
Jefferson Cowie: That's a great question. Um, I think there are other parties that, uh, have anti-labor interests, right?
John Markoff: They're within the party.
Jefferson Cowie: I mean, certainly since the Clinton era, you know, when the Democrats went sort of more on a firmly neoliberal direction, redistributive policies have not been at the top of the agenda. The era of big government's over, the North American Free Trade Agreement, all that kind of stuff that came out of the '90s made labor this appendage to the Democratic Party. And there's been all sorts of attempts to break away, stop giving money to the Democrats, start putting money into organizing through new coalitions. Nothing is really— they've been just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and nothing is quite stuck. And meanwhile, the Democratic Party's emphasis since really the '70s has really been towards providing more equitable opportunity within the existing framework for women and minorities and other people. And that's really super important, but it's not going to redistribute wealth on a macro scale. Increase, you know, you can change the complexion of the pyramid, but you're not going to change the pyramid.
Narrator: If we were sitting in Nashville, where you're from, if we were sitting there right now having this sort of conversation and we were surrounded by Rust Belt workers and people who've been hit particularly hard, not just by the sort of slow decline, but maybe the pandemic as well, what would we hear? What will we notice?
Jefferson Cowie: Well, I have two responses to that. One is, we'd also be surrounded by Black people, which, you know, so it wouldn't just be, if we're back in Nashville, it wouldn't just be, you know, Bubba Redneck, it would be African Americans as well. And the interesting thing I think about the politics of white people in areas like this, and this, I'm thinking a little bit here about my colleague Jonathan Metzl's new book, Dying of Whiteness, where he looked at people in, I think it was Tennessee and Missouri and another state, and he basically makes the argument that if you put all the pieces together, people who would profit immensely from having healthcare refuse to have any kind of public option, essentially because it would mean that Black people would have it too. And I just, I actually just wrote a chapter in my book about this, where the 1901 Alabama Constitution that set up desegregation, it also disfranchised not just Black people, but poor whites as well. And poor whites voted for it to disfranchise Black people. Right? So I think there's this kind of logic that goes all the way back to being a slave society that we have yet to actually deal with.
Narrator: Do we have historical examples where people have tried to upend that logic?
Jefferson Cowie: Sure, there's constant bursts of that type of— I mean, you know, Reconstruction after the Civil War, where federal troops went down and said, okay, everybody gets the right to vote. And we have the guns and the bayonets to make sure everybody has the right to vote. And it worked great for about 10 years, and then it didn't, and I can explain why, but it didn't. Or the Populist Party, which tried to organize interracially in the 1880s and 1890s. The CIO and the New Deal— CIO is one of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the major industrial union push during the 1930s was the biggest gain in African-American history prior to the civil rights era. You actually had Black steelworkers making decent money. And then some of the interracial organizing that came out of the '60s, the Freedom Summer and things like that. So it happens. It's not just like total idiocy.
Narrator: When you mention Reconstruction, it makes me think of, um, you know, for the past couple months we've been seeing all of these COVID maps, and some people have been pointing out, hey, these lines look pretty much like the Civil War era maps. And I'm kind of wondering, is that just a coincidence? And if not, what does that say about our country?
Jefferson Cowie: Oh, the electoral— I mean, if you look at the electoral map, it's the Civil War. I mean, prior to Trump winning some of the Rust Belt states, it's essentially the South. It's the old Confederacy. It's under a different party, you know. They spent the last 50 years switching parties because they were solidly Democratic after the Civil War, and then after the Civil Rights Act in '64, they began to move to the White people began to move to the Republican Party. So, you know, this is all this deep, deep historical burden that we carry as Americans that we can't escape. It's not some weird genetic problem. It's a product of history. And this is our burden to keep struggling with. And these huge problems that we're talking about, about federalism and our capacity to respond to COVID and global warming and unions, which never cracked the South, all this stuff is still connected to the fact that this was a slave society.
Narrator: Earlier you talked about Richard Rorty briefly, who I think was a CASBS fellow in sometime in the '80s, uh, but I'm wondering, other than all of the archival research that you've done and that I'm sure you're buried in, have there been any books that you've read recently that you'd recommend people check out to help them think about these topics?
Jefferson Cowie: No, you know, one of the problems with history is it's this kind of cumulative thing. It's, you know, you're building something out of all these bricks. And so it's not like, wow, here's the one that really tells it all. But so I have a problem digging out a single book. But I've been thinking lately about a lot of the questions that we've been thinking about. So this intersection between kind of inequality, fragmentation, and polarization, and the environment, and kind of federalism. And then like this, this four-way thing. So I, you know, somebody like Thomas Piketty's Capital, I think is important to at least understand. You don't have to read the whole doorstop, but I think it's really for inequality or And I've really liked, for fragmentation, Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land. That really gets to some of the psychology we're talking about, by, you know, she goes down to Louisiana and actually kind of lives there and tries to make sense of this kind of worldview that a lot of smug liberals don't really understand. So I find that pretty rich. And I've lately been sort of diving into some of the stuff on on federalism, like Donald Kettle, he's got a new book, Divided America, about sort of an argument against federalism, that we need more, you know, in order to survive, we need more centralized power, you know, in terms of regulation or environmental policy. So those are some of the things, and a lot of those things are coming together. I'm reading Walter Johnson's book called The Broken Heart of America, it's on St. Louis, I'm enjoying that one. A lot too. It has a great cover. It's the unfinished arch at St. Louis with a big hole in the center where the two pieces don't quite come together. So it's very seductive. So there's a smattering of answers to sort of bring us home.
John Markoff: Yeah, yeah. Thanks very much for spending time with us. You know, having a historical lens is really quite helpful. Whether you think I live entirely in the future or not, I do I do think that as a framing way of looking at the present, it's actually really helpful. So I appreciate it, dude.
Jefferson Cowie: Sorry we can't go out and, uh—
John Markoff: I know, beer would be great.
Jefferson Cowie: Thanks, guys.
John Markoff: All right, see everybody soon.
Jefferson Cowie: See you, John. All right, see ya.
John Markoff: Take care, Mike.
Jefferson Cowie: Bye-bye.
John Markoff: Take care, Jeff.
Jefferson Cowie: Later, guys.
Narrator: That was Jefferson Cowie in lockdown conversation with John Markoff. To learn more about the topics in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. Make a special trip to Jefferson's website to check out some of his previous books and essays We look forward to getting our eyes on his forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Dark Note of White Freedom. Human-Centered is a show from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. To learn more about the people and projects at the center, visit our website by going to casbs.stanford.edu or follow us on Twitter @CASBSStanford. Special thanks to CASBS admin Paulo Dios for opening the episode today. From everyone at CASBS, thanks for listening.