For decades, unions were more than just labor organizations—they were community anchors that shaped working-class identity and political loyalty. But what happens when an entire generation loses its economic and social foundation? The Rust Belt’s working-class voters were once a Democratic stronghold, but that’s no longer the case. Lainey Newman, co-author of Rust Belt Union Blues, joins Paul and Goldy this week to explain how the erosion of union power helped shift working-class voters away from Democrats, and why economic fixes alone won’t be enough to win them back.
Lainey Newman is an author and J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. She is a graduate of Harvard College and a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party
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Goldie:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Paul Konstant:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked. But what’s the alternative?
Goldie:
Middle-out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence. That’s right.
Paul Konstant:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle-out. Welcome to the show.
Goldie:
Paul Konstant.
Paul Konstant:
Hello. Hi, how are you?
Goldie:
You’re not Nick Hanauer.
Paul Konstant:
To my eternal regret, I am not Nick Hanauer. That’s right.
Goldie:
So I have a question for you which I wouldn’t ask of Nick because I already know the answer. Were you ever a member of a union?
Paul Konstant:
One of the big regrets in my life is that I’ve never been a member of a union. I, of course, tried to unionize an alternative weekly once. That didn’t get very far. But no, I’ve always wanted to, really the idea of a union is so appealing to me. The idea of fellowship and working with other people and taking pride in your work and all that, it’s always been a dream of mine. But no, I have not.
Goldie:
Were either of your parents union members?
Paul Konstant:
Nope, neither of them were. My mother was a homemaker and my dad worked at a paper mill in the accounting department that should have been unionized but was not, and that’s why he got laid off. And the whole paper mill got pretty much downsized into nothing.
Goldie:
So that makes me the person with the most union cred because my mother was a public school teacher, a member of AFT, and so all of my health care and dental work came courtesy of organized labor and the contracts.
Paul Konstant:
Were you aware of that at the time? Did your mom talk about the union at all?
Goldie:
Because the Philadelphia school district went on strike every three years. So it was this constant thing that she’d be laid off at the end of the school year and then they’d go on strike and she’d be rehired at the beginning of the next school year because she was an art teacher. So not essential when it came to budget cuts. I was always aware and like you, I was never a member of a union. I got fired from that alt weekly before you even tried to organize.
Goldie:
And the closest I ever came was talk radio, but the station decertified you a year before I started there, which is actually partially how I got my show because they were able to fire the only liberal host they had.
Paul Konstant:
So you were a scab.
Goldie:
There was room for me. Well, it was a year later.
Paul Konstant:
Right, right.
Goldie:
It’s one of the things about this pod, a bunch of… Well, I guess you’re the closest to working class we get, but professional class, educated at least, autodidact white men, talking about problems that don’t affect us. A big part of that and what we’ve seen in terms of how it has impacted politics nationwide and thus the economy directly and indirectly is the changing politics of the Rust Belt and the industrial Midwest, the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which clearly have not been Blue Walls for quite some time.
Paul Konstant:
So today we are talking to Lainey Newman. She is a researcher and with Theda Skocpol, she’s the co-author of the book, Rust Belt Union Blue: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from The Democratic Party. And it’s a super interesting book that really gets into the shifting political identities of union workers in the Rust Belt, specifically your home turf of Pennsylvania. And so I’m hoping we can learn a little bit about the decline of unionism and how that reshaped the political landscape.
Goldie:
Well, let’s talk to Lainey.
Lainey Newman:
My name is Lainey Newman. I am one of the authors of Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. I’m currently a law student at Harvard Law School and I’m really happy to be here.
Goldie:
So I guess let’s start off by just laying out the central thesis of your book.
Lainey Newman:
Sure. So Rust Belt Union Blues is about the role that unions had in communities in the industrial Midwest in the mid-twentieth century. So there’s been a lot of really great research on the role that unions play in improving workers’ quality of work, quality of life, improving obviously wages and even racial relations in the workplace and that type of thing. But what we dug into in our book is the role that they played in communities and how they served as really key institutions in local community infrastructures, how they were integrated into workers’ lives, into family life, recreational life, religious life, really from children working with schools and sponsoring soapbox derbies, all the way to helping people figure out how to apply for Medicare and social security benefits and that type of thing.
Lainey Newman:
And so what we wanted to understand was this sort of extra workplace role that unions had during the height of big labor.
Paul Konstant:
I want to sort of drill down on the political part for a minute. You talk about how union members tune out political messaging from their union leadership now. Have those endorsements become less persuasive compared to earlier decades? Can you sort of walk us through that a little bit?
Lainey Newman:
Sure. So we found interesting research data from the mid-20th century, some United Steelworkers surveys that we dug up from the Penn State archives. And the responses actually showed that union members even at that time were resistant or not super positive about getting top-down sort of directives about voting or sort of endorsements in that type of thing. What they were really positive about was local level involvement and information from their local union about political candidates and that type of thing, and community involvement as well. But so what we see now is this sort of widening gap that is between executive union leadership on sort of the international or DC level and rank-and-file membership voting preferences.
Lainey Newman:
And so what we sort of attribute that to is rather than people who used to listen to the top leaders, now not listening to the top leaders anymore, really what was going on at the height of union power was listening to one another. Internal community dialogues that were reinforcing voting preferences that were in line with the international endorsements, but really were being reinforced at the local level and by one’s peers as opposed to via top-down directives. Now we have seen in our research documents how those local level attachments and networks have really dissipated in terms of their strength amongst union members.
Lainey Newman:
And now the sort of top-down endorsements don’t carry much water either because there isn’t that sort of local reinforcement. So we see a lot of distance between the rank and file and leadership now, but we don’t think that people were always taking directives straight from the top.
Paul Konstant:
When I started reading this, I attributed some of that fracture or what I perceived as a fracture between top-down to culture war issues and guns and all that. But you think that it’s more complex than that and I think that has sort of ramifications for outside of unions too. So I was wondering if you could talk us through that a little bit.
Lainey Newman:
I mean, I think that one thing that we try to reckon with is that these… Cultural issues have always been present in the political dialogue. And so what we try to understand is why did union messages carry so much weight? In the mid-20th century and mid to late-20th century when union members were really adhering to priorities that were associated with collective worker power. Why were people, workers and their families, prioritizing those messages over cultural issues of the time? Something that we try to like parse apart is there’s always been contentious and fringe ideologies, extremism, racism, all these different isms and all the sort of cultural anathema that we think about today. There’s always been those types of voices.
Lainey Newman:
And so what we wanted to understand was really, when union messages were so powerful, why were workers listening to them? And so what we get into with that is, again, with this idea of people voting based on rather than individual issue stances or a calculation of which party or policy is going to benefit me. More a sense of who am I and how do I see myself in relation to my community, my workplace, the world? How do those sorts of concepts of self and identity factor into how we vote? And at the time where unions were really powerful, unions were involved in a lot of different aspects of workers and families lives. The union’s presence and relevance was high and unions were perceived as not only political entities, they weren’t only sending political messages.
Lainey Newman:
And so there was a lot more integration of identity into how workers saw themselves as union members. And so being a “union man” which most of these folks were men at the time and that’s changed. But sort of the same principle holds where being a union man was a key part of who people were. And so when they went to the ballot box, it wasn’t measuring gun rights versus whatever. It was really a reflection of one’s self and one’s identity. And so that’s sort of the change that we document. And today, we see the cultural issues much more relevant but I think that that’s in part because there’s a decreased prioritization of union stances and union issues.
Goldie:
Obviously, it’s right there in the title of the book. This is a… Your focus is on working class voters in the Rust Belt, the former manufacturing centers that have seen a lot of decline, a huge amount of decline over the past 50 years. Pittsburgh, where you’re from total transformation of that city and region. But I’m wondering if what you’re observing can be applied more broadly across unionized workers or whether there’s a big distinction between manufacturing workers and service workers, you mentioned just now that these were union men, whether the findings are heavily gendered or if it’s something that’s specific to the former manufacturing centers.
Lainey Newman:
So it’s a good question and I think that there are parts of our theory that are sort of more cabin to the industrial Midwest and areas that were really union dense and particularly union dense with manufacturing facilities or steel mills or coal mines or something like that. And then there’s parts of our theory that can be applied more broadly. And so I’ll start with the former. Some of the things that we talk about are about these sorts of unique historical communities where workers lived within a two-mile radius of where they worked, of their union hall. Generally these were steel mills or maybe a glass plant, a glass factory or coal mines or automobile, that type of thing.
Lainey Newman:
And formed incredibly rich, local community networks in those very sorts of tight-knit communities where everyone went to the same workplace. And some of the interviewees I spoke to in doing the research for the book were children of this era and grew up and everyone on their street, the dads went to the same steel mill every day. So there’s that sort of discussion of the historical context of that type of union community. But then we have our more general theories about what we call the union man and the ideology behind that and what made that a sort of key identity factor for people of that era. And so we talk about a couple of different things that go into this identity of the union man or union person today. And that was a mutual commitment.
Lainey Newman:
So commitment to one’s fellow workers and to the collective, even sometimes prioritizing the collective over oneself. Occupational pride, so the idea of being really proud of one’s work, proud of the trade that you’re in, and that can go for steelworkers as well as trades as well as any type of… All labor is worthy labor. And then the final one being historical awareness. And so the idea that these union folks were keenly aware of the achievements of the labor movement and how much improved their lives were as a result of advancements in quality of work due to the labor movement and unions. And so those three factors really encompassing this idea of commitment, awareness of history, and commitment to one another and commitment to the collective.
Lainey Newman:
And so I think that that idea is translatable across gender, across race, across communities. And I see it actually… We see it in some of the conversations that have been had recently in the successful unionization efforts like at VW and the idea of being really proud of one’s work and proud of the labor movement and wanting to propel that forward. So I think that there is parts of our theory that are historical, but then there’s also parts like that of sort of this union person and what creates a strong sense of shared identity that can be extrapolated beyond just the Midwest in that time period.
Paul Konstant:
So Nick Hanauer, who is one of the hosts of this podcast but couldn’t be here today. I think that he would say… Goldie, you can correct me if I’m mischaracterizing. He has long attributed this to economic factors, right? The breakdown of unions and things like that. And that’s something that this book sort of… You make a case that it’s a more social issue and I’m wondering if there’s sort of a chicken and egg situation here where the economic breakdown can lead to a social breakdown or vice versa.
Paul Konstant:
And so I guess it felt like in reading this book that you might’ve been approaching it from an idea that it was an economic issue and then you sort of gradually developed a social thesis. Is that correct? And also, do you have any thoughts on the chicken and egg of it all?
Lainey Newman:
I mean I think that they’re pretty inextricable, the economic causes of what happened here and the sort of social realities that resulted. I think one thing we talk about in the book is the breakdown of big labor. And so much of that was to do with economic factors and also policy decisions, by policy decisions to, in some cases, not take action to protect domestic industry and to protect workers and that type of thing. But I think that what we saw in the seventies and eighties was the collapse of a sector of the economy and the decision from the Carter administration that was being… People were advocating to the Carter administration to rescue the steel industry, for instance, and they declined to do that.
Lainey Newman:
There was this idea of the inevitability of the demise of manufacturing and the inevitability of us moving from an economy based on making things to an economy based on knowledge and service, which we have done. But I think that those economic sorts of large macroeconomic trends are highly linked and highly related to what happened then in local communities in the industrial Midwest thereafter. I mean, one thing that we talk about in the book is how something you can’t ignore is the population loss and just the fact that people’s families told their kids, “You’re not going to make a living here, you got to go somewhere else.” And so that going along with those macroeconomic trends as well.
Lainey Newman:
So I think that what we do is we take this overarching understanding of these economic trends that I think have been really well documented and we sort of look in on how they have affected communities and what the social ramifications have been. Not only in terms of how they’ve changed the makeup of those communities, which we recognize, but also in how they change the internal dynamics of those communities. So one thing that we do that I think some of the research has… Not much of the research has taken this approach, but it’s just to look within the existing union communities rather than looking sort of at the comparison groups of non-union or of the lost, the people who moved elsewhere, whatever.
Lainey Newman:
So we look at these communities, as they have evolved over time, how they have changed internally. And something that we see and that we document is just these social changes and the dissipation of the social fabrics of these communities. And if you go to any of these old steel towns, in Western Pennsylvania or Ohio or whatever, and my interviewees would describe… I mean this is not an insult to anyone, but they’re shells of what they used to be, they just simply are not… People describe them as this town used to have seven movie theaters, four movie theaters, seven shoe stores, that type of thing. I mean, they’re mostly shut down and mostly boarded up and that type of thing.
Lainey Newman:
And so those effects have had a huge or those changes have had a huge effect on communities. And so what we look at is trying to isolate how we can understand those community changes.
Goldie:
I don’t know that I want to get to the solution part of this interview because I am not hopeful that there is one, because you talked about how these communities evolved, you used that word. And I think where I disagree with Nick, because Nick does think that if you fix the economy, you basically fix everything. And I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that it’s too late because the crisis we’re seeing right now, this shift is an emergent feature of all these processes.
Goldie:
And we’ve reached this tipping point where there’s really no bringing these people back. Because you look at the Republican Party, which they are supporting, and there is nothing, literally nothing that they are offering these people other than a trade war that’s going to raise their prices. I mean, maybe 40 years ago raising tariffs would have helped, but not now. I don’t know, should I be this hopeless or do you think that there’s some hope for Democrats in regaining ground in these regions?
Lainey Newman:
I would say I’m slightly more hopeful than you maybe, but I understand your pessimism. So I think that there’s no denying the reality of the shifts that have happened and the fact that we’re not going back to an era in which we’re the world’s leading producer of steel and there’s tens of thousands of people employed in these industries in western Pennsylvania and that type of thing. I mean, it’s just, that’s not realistic, especially with the advent of AI and all these continuing growing advancement of automation and that type of thing. So I don’t think that-
Goldie:
We’re certainly not recovering the coal industry.
Lainey Newman:
Right. Absolutely. I mean, so natural gas killed coal, right? I mean there’s no denying that. I think that in terms of the political changes, I am slightly more hopeful. I think about a lot of these changes seem very sort of… A lot of the realities that we see today in the political world, in the Rust Belt and in the former blue wall, which I don’t think we can refer to it as a blue wall anymore because it’s not. But a lot of those realities are relatively recent. I mean, I think about how 2008 we had Indiana, a state that we now consider core to the Trump base that went for Obama. It’s like these things weren’t that long ago that there were significant differences. And I think even if we go back 10 years to 2015, the political realities that we’re working in are just totally foreign.
Lainey Newman:
And so I do have a little bit more hope for 10 years from now. What could things look like? I think that people will… I am hopeful that people will realize that the policy decisions that are currently being made are not in the best interest of them or their communities or what have you. I think that one thing that people I heard from talked about with regard to tariffs is this idea of… Even Democrats in… I mean, Chris D’alusio for instance, represents a congressional district outside the city of Pittsburgh, came out in favor of tariffs. He’s a Democrat. And Bob Casey, former senator from Pennsylvania in favor of tariffs.
Lainey Newman:
So I do think that there’s appetite for some level of protectionism of domestic industry in these communities that’s reflected by some Democrats. And I think that there may be a place for a limited role of that, but right. I mean, you’re completely right that waging a trade war isn’t going to help people afford groceries.
Goldie:
These people in the here and now. Even if you have this dream of rebuilding the domestic steel industry, if we had the industrial policy to do that, it would take a decade or more to even make a dent in it because it takes a long time to rebuild a steel plant.
Lainey Newman:
Absolutely. I mean, today I think that what we can look at is chip plants and thinking about how we can get more sort of good paying jobs in the US, in the industrial vein, but maybe not trying to recreate the past. So some optimism maybe, but I don’t know. We’ll see.
Paul Konstant:
So we like to ask a benevolent dictator question, and I want to tailor it for you. You are put in charge of a union and your edict is to increase membership and you have unlimited resources. What do you do?
Lainey Newman:
Wow. I mean, I think one thing that I was struck by in my research is just how many people got involved in their union and got involved in the political action of their union, even going to DC with fellow members and lobbying and that type of thing. Devoted significant parts of their lives to the union because they originally got involved with it through friends and through things that… A couple of people told me about they’re someone who essentially was just like, “Hey, what are you doing after work? Come to this meeting with me and we hang out after,” and that type of thing. Or someone else who got tricked into going to a meeting.
Lainey Newman:
I think that this goes along with the general sort of trend in the social science literature that’s been documented that a lot of people get involved in causes, not necessarily initially because of a commitment to that particular cause, but through their community or through their social connections and that type of thing. I guess it sounds like, not in the vein of the big project of labor to be focusing on that type of small thing, but I think that… One thing that unions have to start, or unions have to prioritize is rebuilding the unity from within. And I think that what we see now is just a lot of distrust for the leadership, the executive leadership that is often seen as just sort of bureaucrats off in DC doing their own thing and not in touch with the membership and the real members.
Lainey Newman:
We also see a lot of fracturing of unions based on essentially that the union doesn’t represent one’s core industry anymore. So for example, as a graduate student here at Harvard, I teach the undergraduates and I’m a member of the UAW because that’s our bargaining unit. And I’m proud, I think it’s great, we have a great contract, but an autoworker in Detroit might not see fellowship with me as a graduate student at Harvard. So I think that there’s a lot of distance and a lot of space between people within unions. And so I think that prioritizing building relationships on the local level. If I had unlimited money, I would say build back these brick and mortar union halls that used to exist in these communities that were on Main Street or whatever, where people would get together after work.
Lainey Newman:
Some of them had basketball courts, most of them had banquet halls, they would have dinners, whatever, every week or so and bring together families for holiday parties and that type of thing. That’s what I would do. I would say get the brick and mortar physical structures back in these communities so that people have places to go and hang out and build rapport with their community members. And I think that that lends itself to more belief in what it means to be a union member.
Goldie:
In Seattle we have the labor temple.
Lainey Newman:
Yes, absolutely. That’s great.
Goldie:
It’s from an entirely different era that you would build this huge union hall, which was the center of the community.
Lainey Newman:
Right? Exactly. And actually before unions had their own individual halls, there were a lot of these temples and lyceums and that type of thing, and there were some in Pittsburgh, New York. I mean, they were really all over. And I think that… I mean, unions today might not have the money or resources to build standalone individual halls for one local union, but maybe if they consolidate resources, you could try to do something like that again, where it’s dedicated to labor, but it’s open to the community and you can bring people together there.
Lainey Newman:
And I think that one thing that Democrats don’t have that Republicans do is an infrastructure in communities the way that as we document a lot of conservative churches and gun clubs serve as social spaces. I’m totally in favor of that type of model where we can get people together in physical spaces again.
Goldie:
I guess, are we up to the final question, Paul?
Paul Konstant:
I think we are. We’ve taken up a lot of her time.
Goldie:
I get to ask it, normally Nick does. I’m going to take the privilege. We ask all of our guests this, why do you do this work?
Lainey Newman:
Yes. The ultimate question. So I was inspired to start researching unions because of my family, so I had a family who were real autoworkers, unlike myself. So up in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area. And I just always knew of them just sort of in the family lore and that type of thing as union men and that they were proud Democrat, they were from an immigrant family. And I think that it just… I guess I began to wonder, where has that type of identity gone and why don’t we see it anymore. So I think that I’m drawn to this work because I think it’s important to understand where people are deriving community and how their networks and how the things that they’re part of inform their political decisions.
Lainey Newman:
I think that… I might differ with Nick and you guys, that the economy explains everything, because I don’t think that people are fully rational, and I don’t think that people vote entirely based on rational choices. But I do think that identity and the things that we’re part of and the things that we devote our lives to and the people we spend time with have a huge impact on how we make decisions at the ballot box and everywhere else in our lives. And so in pursuit of trying to understand that, I wanted to understand this diminished role that unions seem to have in communities as opposed to sort of what I grew up thinking of them as with regard to my family members.
Lainey Newman:
I just think it’s important work to try to make the country a little bit fairer overall. And I think we can do that through politics if we prioritize understanding how people vote and getting people back on board with some of these more worker coalition driven priorities.
Paul Konstant:
Great. Well thank you for joining us and thanks for writing the book.
Lainey Newman:
Absolutely.
Goldie:
So, Paul takeaways?
Paul Konstant:
Sure. I mean, I think that a lot of my work here, I spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between the individual and the systemic, right? I think that’s sort of one of the essential questions about economics and politics that we don’t fully have a grasp on, right? And I think that I tend to lean more in the Nick direction where I think that the whole economic system caused the sort of deterioration of unions and the social aspect. And Lainey obviously is coming from the opposite direction. And I don’t know if that question matters because I think that they’re kind of intertwined. I don’t think you get the one without the other, you don’t get the decline of social status in unions without the economic decline.
Paul Konstant:
But the book and this conversation really helped me to think a lot about the importance of the social aspect, right? I think that what she was saying about third places, union halls, one of the things that struck me in reading the book was I had never thought about churches that way. Evangelical churches is sort of taking the place of the Eagles halls and the Masonic halls and things like that, that used to hold a place in civic life that other things just aren’t there anymore. And so churches have sort of subsumed the vacuum in civic space.
Goldie:
I think it’s interesting, one of the critiques, we talk about economics obviously on this podcast. And one of the critiques of neoclassical economics, Orthodox economics is that it assumes that you can extrapolate the macro from the micro. So they’ll have these pretty obvious things about microeconomics and the way individuals behave, and then they just assume the entire economy operates that way. It behaves that way. And it’s just not true because you mentioned this difference between the individual and the systemic. The system is the macro is an emergent property of the micro. And when you have complex systems like human societies, the micro is not predictive of the macro.
Goldie:
You get these things that are totally unexpected. And also once you get them… And a great analogy is what we’re seeing with climate change. It’s not like, “Oh no, it’s gotten bad, let’s just cut carbon and we can fix it all.” Once you have this phase shift, you have the phase shift. And I think part of the problem with trying to address working class voters in these former manufacturing centers in the Rust Belt is that, I don’t know, I think the allegiance of the Democratic Party was always difficult, that you had it coming out of the New Deal, you had the Democrats became the party of the working class from FDR forward.
Goldie:
But culturally, I think these people are more aligned with the values of the Republican Party as antithetical as the Republican Party’s economic policies are to these people in their communities. And so it kind of make this realignment kind of make sense.
Paul Konstant:
I disagree with that. I think anybody who’s spent any time in an old Irish granny’s kitchen with a picture of JFK right up next to the picture of Jesus, well, see, there’s definitely some. There was a working class identification, a lot of it was born out of the New Deal because that was so transformational. I think it’s a little revisionist to say that there’s not a cultural attachment to the Democrat.
Goldie:
I think you’re being too uniform in how you’re describing those grannies. Because there’s the social justice Catholics, which is the type of Catholic family I married into, and there’s the abortion and birth control is murder Catholics. And they’re not the same people. They both may be Irish Catholic, but they’re culturally very different. And again, I think there’s a gender quality to this. You can create new good paying jobs in these regions, and they’re not the jobs they want. There’s jobs in healthcare, you could pay people well to be orderlies, nursing assistants, nurses, whatever. And that’s not considered manly work, even though there’s a lot of demand for those jobs.
Goldie:
I think there is a cultured and gendered idea of what a good job is, and it involves doing physical labor with your hands, not sitting behind a desk, not doing a service job, not working in a hospital or a retirement home regardless of what the pay is. And you’re not getting those coal jobs back, that’s for sure. And well, we can bring some manufacturing back. It’s not going to be the same manufacturing that left. And that’s what they want. They want the jobs that their fathers and grandfathers had, and they’re not getting them. And there’s going to be no solace in anything that replaces it. That’s my concern. I just don’t think… I don’t think you can.
Goldie:
No, I’m not defending the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has been awful on this, right? We, they took unions for granted for decades, where else are you going to go? Well, we found out, didn’t we? But I just don’t know. Again, I’m a little hopeless here. I don’t know what you can do for these communities, because when a town grows up around a steel mill and the steel mill is no longer there, I don’t… What is the raison d’etre for that company town?
Paul Konstant:
Well, I could make a lot of arguments here about making investments in new generations and things like that, but Goldie, you have a headache today. You have championed through this episode, and so I will let you have a rare win and just say everything is terrible.
Goldie:
Oh my God. Do you read the headlines, Paul? We’re recording this on March 11th. You tell me everything isn’t terrible.
Paul Konstant:
I think that these situations, and I think that Lainey talked about this a little bit, is that these situations are very malleable. And it’s possible that a tariff war might be just the thing to convince people that maybe there’s a different way forward.
Goldie:
I think if Trump’s tariffs end up crashing the economy and spiking inflation and making their lives more miserable, the majority of them will be persuaded by Fox News to blame it on the Democrats. “Oh my God, Joe Biden and his tariffs.” Just like Obama was blamed for 9/11.
Paul Konstant:
Well, I disagree, but like I said, it’s be nice to Goldie Day, so I will let you end on a downer. All right.
Goldie:
In any case, if you want to read more, we recommend the book, Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working Class Voters Are Turning Away From The Democratic Party. You can find it at your favorite online monopolist or Paul, where else would people go?
Paul Konstant:
At your local neighborhood independent bookstore. There is also a link online to buy it from online, not monopolist as well. So check out there if you’re not in the neighborhood of a great independent bookstore.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Threads at pitchforkeconomics, Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well at Nick Hanhauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomicscom. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.