Who Speaks for the Working Class?

I’ll tell you one thing: It’s not Vance!

Photo by Brad Weaver on Unsplash

I see a lot of Trump worship in my red little town, which makes me either sad or angry, depending on my mood. And now that he’s brought J.D. “Uncle” Vance onto the ticket, I’m even sadder and angrier. 

I just read a thread on social media in which people were fawning over Vance, thinking it was going to be so good to have “one of our own” in power. I wanted to throw up.

Vance is no friend to the working class

Or to the blue collar worker. Or to the underclass. He’s a friend to the uber-wealthy and stands ready to throw everyone else under the bus.

Somewhere I saw a cartoon in which a wooden-handled ax was being lauded by the trees, who saw the wooden handle and thought the ax would surely be on their side. 

Vance is that ax. Can’t people see that?

As someone who grew up in a working class family and still identifies that way (despite my college degree and liberal politics) I see all this clearly.

Traditionally, the blue collar corner of the working class supported Democrats, who seemingly took these people for granted. That’s not actually fair, because the Democrats have always supported all kinds of policies that would have done all the non-wealthy people in the country a lot of good, but the blue collar folks tended not to get the message.

Worse, wealthy Dems were sometimes guilty of conflating the working class and the underclass. Those two groups do not have as much in common as a wealthy person might assume. In fact, your average hard-working blue collar person holds far more disdain for people who don’t work than does any rich person. (I explain this in Here’s Why Poor People Keep Voting Against Their Own Self Interest.)

Trump claims to be a champion for the working class, even though he hasn’t done a damn thing for them except pretend to care about them. He told them what they wanted to hear and then kept cutting taxes for the wealthy – which is a good part of why income inequality became much worse under Trump.

Apparently, everybody just noticed the working class is suffering

Now, candidates are courting them, but few are doing it the right way. 

I was excited to read a New York Times story about Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a blue-collar Democrat in Washington State. But my excitement fell as I read that she voted against President Biden’s $400 billion loan-forgiveness plan, because, according to the story, it wouldn’t benefit her constituents because it didn’t include technical education.

Of course, it costs far, far more to get a college education than to become a plumber. People going to trade schools aren’t the ones burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. I don’t know how many of her constituents missed out on relief thanks to her vote, but I do know when something is done for show. 

I hope Sen. Joe Manchin’s rumored plan to run for president is just an ugly rumor. He was a Democrat until he wasn’t but he’s reportedly thinking of becoming one again so he can compete for the nomination.

Don’t bother, Joe. You were never a Democrat. Your cowardly vote against Build Back Better – and your claim that poor families would just blow child care money on drugs will not be forgotten. One of my family members was paying more for childcare than for her house payment when you voted “no.” Up – and I mean this sincerely – yours.

There are many different flavors of progressive/rural/blue collar/working class voters who are ignored. 

I’m a fan of a Missouri woman whose Substack I follow – the Dirt Road Democrat Jess Piper, who writes The View from Rural Missouri. Even though I live in a different state, everything she says resonates with me and I hope she runs for public office again. She speaks for people nobody else speaks for, and unlike people like Manchin, Vance and Gluesenkamp Perez, Piper understands how to meet people where they are and draw a clear line from their lives to Democrat policies.

That’s what we need to do. 

Vance won’t do that. He can’t. He’s one of those people who hates everything about the place he came from, including himself. 

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.