For The American Right, There's Only One Kind Of Real Work

To even begin to comprehend the American right’s idea of working class political power, you have to first understand what they consider work, and what they don’t. 

Working at home on your laptop, or what they derisively call “email jobs”? Not work. 

Bouncing between spreadsheets and entering data and talking about that data with colleagues? Not work. 

Caring for the young or the elderly or the sick or the impoverished? I'm sorry, not work. 

Working a cash register at a fast food joint or a gas station or a grocery store? Nope, not work. 

Cleaning other people’s homes or hotel rooms or office buildings? Absolutely not work in the right-wing imagination. 

Class Dealignment Is Real, And It’s Spectacularly Bad

It’s the most romantic political notion: A working class coalition putting aside their cultural and racial and religious differences to elect legislators who will ram through explicitly pro-worker policies and save us from the yawning darkness of creeping fascism in the United States. I get the appeal, truly.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

All of these wage-paying occupations – most of them, anyway – are considered women’s work. Women, in the fevered right-wing imagination filled with images implanted into their brains of hard, physically torturous work as a glorious display of a man’s might, cannot do Real Work. And if there’s a lady working a construction site, sweaty and dirty alongside the men with whom she works, there must be something wrong with her. At the very least, she has violated the natural order of things by engaging in Real Work. 

This childish idea of what Real Work really looks like naturally bleeds into the post-left media environment, where bad-faith operators and not-so-secret conservatives and outright grifters spend enormous time and resources tearing apart the one remaining major U.S. political party that can be considered pro-democracy.

The post-left folks say they’re tired of supporting a Democratic Party that – like everything else in the third decade of the 21st century – has been captured by capital. Accordingly, they say they have no choice but to support third-party wreckers funded by authoritarian strongmen and some Republicans who talk a big, bad faith-fueled game about America’s working class and economic precarity in this age of oligarchical domination. It’s why Tucker Carlson, who pretends to want a good-faith conservative party to challenge the GOP, draws most of his support from folks who used to back Democrats but found more algorithmic support – and therefore money – in launching sustained attacks against liberals and some parts of the left. 

For the American post-left, comprised mostly of men like Matt Stoller who have been X-poisoned and who see liberalism and democracy as effeminate and elitist, anyone who supports "woke" candidates is necessarily abandoning working people (for the purposes of this analysis, I think we can safely group the post-left into the right wing since they mysteriously align on so many issues).

How, you might ask, does this work? Are so-called woke politicians and candidates not supportive of policies that could make for a slightly more dignified life for Americans who trade their labor for a little bit of cash? You thought "woke" elected leaders back universal pre-K and a public healthcare option and parental leave and a (much) higher federally-mandated minimum wage. You seem to recall these "woke" folks on your TV and your social media timelines delivering impassioned calls for the U.S. government to do something – anything – to lighten the burden of working class families living one paycheck to the next, praying to any god who will listen that they don't ever get sick or, god forbid, crash the car. You swear you remember these woke folks talking about how the federal government should have kept in place the European-style welfare state policies that took hold during COVID – policies that put food in empty bellies and allowed the poor to do the impossible and see a doctor.

Here's the thing: You did hear all that. You're not wrong. You're not crazy. But when a guy like Stoller says Americans must choose between "woke" libs and "working people," he has a certain picture in his head of what qualifies as a working person. That picture looks roughly like disgraced former U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, a big, burly fella who takes oysters out of Maine waters and gets dirty and sweaty while doing it. An American worker, a Real Worker, is a strong, able-bodied white man like Platner.

To view of American working class as one massive population of hard-living, poorly-educated, beer-swilling roughnecks who just want a little respect from the ruling class, you'd have to ignore every data point about what the country's working class actually looks like, and what members of that class do to earn a living. Ignoring data, of course, is no issue for the right or their post-left buddies. It is their specialty.

For many Americans who like to talk about what the working class needs and deserves, work is a purely masculine endeavor. It's two broad-shouldered guys with unkempt beards working an oil rig, their faces covered with black gold like Daniel Plainview. It's men lifting heavy shit in a warehouse and screaming with effort. It's a haggard older man with the arms of a much young man fixing a big-ass vehicle. The sweat from the working man's brow runs through the grease on his face and his hands and his barrel chest as he forces a machine to bend to his will. The man's knowledge of the machine – his professionalism, his experience – means nothing in this scenario. It is only his brawn that gets the job done.

None of this is by accident. It has been politically and culturally important since the peak of America's racial justice reconciliation – what might be called Woke 1 – to make working class politics diametrically opposed to so-called wokeness. Wokeness, according to the narrative, slithered out of the Ivory Tower to tell regular folks not to use slurs. Working class political power, the story goes, can only be achieved if we oppose the woke among us and use our slurs and hold our hatreds and prejudices close. It's what our fathers did, after all. Dad loved his slurs.

Bernie’s Gleaming Good Faith Exposes the Right’s Wretched Bad Faith

In a political landscape ruled by good faith, Bernie Sanders’ almost adorably earnest political messaging would draw MAGA freaks to him like a tractor beam. Sanders, after running the two most important presidential campaigns in American history, is still the only major political figure (politely) raging against our brutal, soulless

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

If the country's fascist movement is to survive whatever comes in the post-Trump era, it has to maintain possession of the bad-faith populist messaging Trump mastered long ago.

This movement, rife with dishonesty and in control of our social media algorithms (unless you are on Bluesky, the only pro-democracy social media platform), must reach into the brains of every American voter and draw a hard line between well-leaning liberals and working class supporters. These libs, they'll say, are overly educated and feminine and soft. Some of them are even women. They don't know about real work. They can't possibly understand the working man's life, and his desire for dignity.

It's a nice story to tell. I'm sure it hits hard if you have lived your life without the vaguest understanding that working class political power can't be achieved without racial, gender, and sexual solidarity. You know, the woke shit.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.