The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly newsletter on current topics in labor, curated by the some of the most insightful scholars and activists in the labor world today. Check out some highlights from the latest edition below.
Many of our readers and much of the country continue to scratch their heads about the rise of Trump and the sustenance his campaign counts on from white working-class voters. In this newsletter, we lead with a fascinating article by Jedediah Purdy, recently published in The New Republic, discussing two recent books that each take an intimate look at contemporary working-class conservative communities. We then offer an article by Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman that we published back in 2010, during the heyday of the Tea Party, that very usefully examines the history of populism in the U.S. – wavering as it has between a desire to create a new order and a yearning to return to an idealized old order — with a pronounced tendency during the last half-century toward old order conservatism. We end with a New Labor Forum film review by Jeremy Varon of three documentaries, including You’ve Been Trumped (directed by Anthony Baxter), a verité style account of Donald Trump’s effort, only recently realized, to build a luxury golf course and grand hotel on Scotland’s Aberdeenshire coast. As Trump enlists the Scottish national government and police to do battle against local residents, the review reminds us what a bizarre champion of the working-class Trump indeed is.
Contents:
- Red State Blues by Jedediah Purdy, The New Republic
- History’s Mad Hatters: The Strange Career of Tea Party Populism by Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, New Labor Forum
- It’s Good to Be King: The Crisis Documentary and the American Dreamscapeby Jeremy Varon, New Labor Forum
