Last November, a few days after the election, I fell into conversation with an official of a labor union of blue collar workers in the construction sector. I’ll call him Smith.
Smith’s union is notably progressive. Rather than resist job reductions currently foretold by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robots doing work its members perform, Smith’s union negotiated protections for existing workers and also the right to have their members trained to operate the new machines and robots. Smith showed me some fascinating videos of how this is working out for the union members, their employers, and the construction projects involved.
Smith and I agreed his union had followed the enlightened approach of the West Coast longshoremen’s union decades ago with the advent of containerization, which the union president noted would “eliminate the longshoreman’s basic living wage.” This referred to the unwritten rules that allowed longshoremen to eat what they could of a ship’s leftover stores, take home one unit of any cargo they could carry under one arm and one piece of clothing if they could wear it off the ship. (The summer I worked on the waterfront, in 1967, this resulted in ice cream all day long plus one small television and one Irish cableknit sweater for each longshoreman on my shifts.)
Also, the West Coast union negotiated ways to protect their members, acquire skills as operators of the cargo cranes, and even to invest pension funds in containerization. Smith and I contrasted this with today’s East Coast union, which has vowed to prevent robots on the waterfront. “Hopeless!” Smith said. “They should cut deals to become trained robot operators and make sure their existing members aren’t harmed financially.”
I asked if Smith’s union had endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Yes, he replied. But did your members vote for her? I asked. No they didn’t, he said. They voted for Trump. “Now this confuses me,” I told him. “I’ve never met anyone who could tell me, off the top of their head, any laws Republicans have ever enacted that help working-class people. But I can rattle off a ton of them enacted by Democrats.”
“Yes,” Smith replied. “Our members know Democrats are the ones who look after our economic interests. But they vote for Trump anyway.” As I pondered that, he added a bit sheepishly, “Hell, I voted for Trump myself. [X] is one of my personal friends.” X is a nationally prominent extreme MAGA Republican.
From this encounter I concluded several things. First, people who claim Democrats have lost working class voters because Democrats haven’t done enough to benefit the pocketbook interests of those voters don’t know what they’re talking about. To borrow a line from T.S. Eliot, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” (And as Seattle journalist Bill Prochnau once pointed out, the horoscope may be the most popular thing in the newspaper, but adding a second horoscope won’t make subscribers of those who don’t already buy the paper.)
Second, I was struck by what a great opportunity, with its Congressional majority and the presidency, the GOP now has to do something to help working-class voters — or at least to avoid harming them — and perhaps win working-class voters’ allegiance that could endure decades after Trump is no longer around.
That opportunity is to not mess with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, but rather to celebrate and embrace it. Even though not a single Republican member of Congress voted for the IRA, a growing number of Republicans are now prepared to fight for it. They may need to, given the specter of dismemberment by Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the Heritage Foundation of this and other Biden-era government initiatives.
Biden and others usually tout the IRA as the greatest piece of climate legislation ever enacted anywhere in the world. Indisputably, it is that. It is designed to attract trillions of dollars of private investment in renewable energy projects (wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, etc.) and related equipment manufacturing; production of decarbonized fuels for aviation and marine shipping; electric-vehicle manufacturing and EV fast-charging stations; battery production; carbon capture and sequestration; hydrogen production (necessary, ultimately, to decarbonize all natural-gas loads that can’t be converted to electricity or served with renewable natural gas); and more.
In other words, the IRA is “all of the above” for every form of decarbonization we can bring to the energy sector. That, together with its massive scale, is what makes it the most important climate legislation in history.
Although I work in the climate sector myself, I’ve always thought treating the IRA primarily as climate legislation misses the key point. It is also the most powerful piece of economic stimulus and American re-industrial legislation ever enacted. The reason Republicans in Congress are becoming fully alert to this is that some 80% of those trillions of dollars of new private investment the IRA has called forth is being invested in brand new facilities (and creating thousands of new jobs) in red states and Congressional districts that voted for Donald Trump.
We might pause to ask why this happened, and the reasons are numerous. Many red states are sunnier and windier than most blue states (California excepted), so they have better renewable energy potential. Land is cheaper in red states, and so are construction costs, including labor. Importantly, project and building permits are typically available much faster in red states. (If California had equally rapid permitting, the current 80% red state, 20% blue state split of IRA-driven investment might be nearly equalized.)
Finally, the Biden Administration has actively favored IRA projects in red localities, both to decrease the chances of the projects getting blocked and to boost employment and demand for labor in low-wage, economically depressed, or faded industrial areas and the chronically under-employed Southeastern U.S.
The result is a steady stream of announcements of new manufacturing facilities, renewable power projects, decarbonized fuel plants, and other IRA-favored investments. Steel in the ground and hardhats on platoons of blue collar workers have definitely caught GOP attention.
Members of Congress who voted against the IRA invariably show up at home for photo opportunities at groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings, and other celebrations of these announcements. Some Democrats and climate advocates view as hypocritical this Republican support for IRA-prompted investments in their own states and Congressional districts. Again, we are having the experience, so let’s not miss the meaning.
Republican embrace of IRA projects is the single best way to save the IRA and its climate benefits, not to mention its economic ones. That political saving will be needed. For the past two years, GOP leaders denounced the IRA and trumpeted plans to repeal it if they regained the White House and Congress. Now, however, substantial numbers of them are publicly urging that no provision of the IRA that benefits projects in their own states or Congressional districts should be touched.
Coincidentally, both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) have newly announced multi-billion-dollar IRA-financed industrial facilities in their own districts.
It’s too early to know how Congressional Republicans, eager to support the dozens of announced IRA projects that will benefit their own constituents, will prevail if it comes to a showdown (as it may) with Musk, Ramaswamy, the Heritage Foundation, and Trump himself. The history of Trump’s first Administration is cautionary; in that term, the White House and Trump’s advisors often treated Congressional Republicans as pesky irritants and obstructionists to be steamrolled, not accommodated.
But for a significant number of Congressional Republicans themselves, there are now solid electoral reasons to defend the IRA stoutly, or at least those provisions that make possible the construction of projects and the creation of thousands of jobs on their own turf.
For the religious among them, and there are many, it might also be worth considering Christ’s observation in Luke 15:7: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”
Okay, maybe neither God’s Heaven nor the Biblical concept of sin quite belong here, but the analogy is still pretty good. One Republican Member of Congress who opposed the IRA now switching to defend it could do more for the GOP’s working-class voters at this critical historical moment than 99 Democrats who, uncelebrated among those voters, supported it from the beginning. Let’s hope the Republicans understand and grasp this opportunity.
Eric Redman is currently working to develop a large plant to produce decarbonized marine fuel in Southeastern US — a project avidly supported by the Republican Congressman who represents the district where the project will be built, if key provisions of the IRA remain intact.
“Our members know Democrats are the ones who look after our
economic interests. But they vote for Trump anyway.” As I pondered that, he added a bit sheepishly, “Hell, I voted for Trump myself. ”
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Doesn’t seem rational, does it? But did the thought cross your mind that voters aren’t necessarily rational, nor that there is any requirement that they be so? Is it possible that there are other reasons? Could latent, or overt, racism be one of those reasons? Did you make any effort to find out?
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Just asking questions here, not drawing any conclusions. If I knew the answers to those questions, I’d be some fat-cat consultant, lighting my cigar with $100 bills.
The “Inflation Reduction Act” is all about climate. And the jobs that come with projects like the author is working on are generally short term construction jobs.
Unrecognized is the fact that most voters are not as persuaded. Spending for EV charging stations, solar development covering our State’s agriculture land, and wind turbines are not a priority. And environmentally they spoil the scenic views of the Columbia River Gorge and other eastern Washington landscapes.
Mr. Redman is a good advocate for renewables. But that’s his job.
And in the Northwest, we are looking at a 30% deficit in firm power by 2030 caused in part by the tax subsidies of the IRA.
For too many well intentioned Democrat sponsored programs, “aspiration” is not followed by “execution”. As a result, too much money is consumed by partisan driven “process” without delivering the desired product.
Two recent examples are the total inability to deliver on rural internet or EV charging stations. Proven commercial solutions existed to economically provide both but political animosity prevented their use.
I wonder about this: do Democrats actually go to places where people live, to talk with them about their lives and their concerns, not AT them about facts — however true — about what ‘we’ve done for you’ and how ‘inflation is down’ and that ‘we have no American soldiers fighting on foreign soil.’ If that’s happened, it’s not happened enough and if it has happened, it hasn’t made a real difference. Perceptions make a difference in politics and people in this state and so-called ‘red states’ or ‘purple states’ apparently think Democrats don’ t really know about them or care about them. Just ask any of us who live west of the Cascades and have relatives east of those same mountains who persist in saying ‘we’re Republicans’ even if they don’t like some of those Republican policies or politicians.
@Carolyn Wallace , A handful of democrats have held on in “red districts” by doing just this — meeting and listening very, very carefully to their constituents and then voting accordingly (which is not always the party line). Marie Glusenkamp Perez in Washington state has received national attention for doing just that and boy did she have some words for how party democrats managed the last election.