Helping Our Own
June 9, 2025 | 934 words | Economics, Politics
The ICE raids on restaurants and other small businesses around the country to arrest illegal immigrants and those whose visas have expired, with an eye toward deporting them, are of a piece with telling Harvard it can no longer admit large numbers of foreign students.
The stated aim is to preserve employment and educational opportunities for those born and raised here.
The harsh manner in which these policies are being implemented lead many Americans to see the Trump administration as an authoritarian regime, with its actions signaling the end of democracy as we know it. But what of those other Americans, the ones who still think of Donald Trump as their guy, even now, after all this. What could possibly be their rationale? Apart from outright xenophobia, of course.
There are a variety of explanations for this phenomenon, which our leading political and cultural commentators continue to explore. Here is my own modest contribution to the discussion, a broad-stroke take on one aspect of how we got to where we are.
There are many in our country who feel they are losing ground and falling behind financially, despite their best efforts. To them the script has flipped. They don’t know what they did wrong and are at a loss as to how to right their ship. Their quiet desperation is such that their discernment has been addled. In dire need of a helping hand, they have accepted the Trump presidency warts and all, because they have come to believe somebody in charge is finally looking out for them.
The rich will always support a Republican president who cuts taxes or at least keeps a lid on them. But Mr. Trump’s singular achievement is how he has captured the hearts and minds of Democrats who are decidedly not-so-rich, whether we describe this coalition as middle class, working class, or blue collar.
This new-found support is the key to Mr. Trump’s hold on Republican members of Congress. He has reconnected with that voting bloc previously referred to as Reagan Democrats, the ones who first jumped ship and reoriented themselves politically over the issue of abortion.
Those folks have been hanging on for dear life these last forty years, as Republicans have enacted one ‘pro-growth’ fiscal policy after another, opening the flood gates to mergers and acquisitions that slashed jobs and lowered wages of the jobs that remained. The take-over and consolidation formula has been pursued relentlessly, juicing up the bottom line of financial wizards who operate far above the fray.
This predatory economic behavior was officially sanctioned back in 1987 when our hard-won anti-trust legislation of a half century before was rolled back on the promise such mergers would yield lower prices for consumers.
Lower consumer prices were delivered as promised, but came at a cost: loss of job security and the birth of the no-benefits gig economy. This late 20th century twist was just the latest iteration of an age-old problem: exploitation of those with no economic leverage.
Throughout our history the use of an immigrant workforce to undermine the established wage structure has been a tried-and-true technique employed by the entrepreneurial class to keep expenses down. It is natural, therefore, for some of our citizens to be wary of what they believe might be an influx of immigrants.
Until our movers and shakers in the business world make a concerted effort to stabilize wages among the workforce, native-born and immigrant alike it, there will always be populist cries for economic reform via government mandates of one kind or another. This populist fervor has cycled up in our country’s history on a regular basis.
Donald Trump may be the unlikeliest populist imaginable, given his background as a real estate developer/exploiter of various contractors and suppliers. But as someone who wanted to be president at any cost, he stumbled upon a winning message that resonates with everyday folks, and is now playing that card for all it’s worth.
Mr. Trump’s bombastic carnival act may strike some of us as transparently transactional in the extreme, but his particular genius has proven to be selling himself to Democrats as a man of the people while holding onto to the upper crust “no new taxes” Republican base.
J.D. Vance, on the other hand, strikes me as more sincere in his populist musings, having emerged from the middle class-working class-blue collar world. As Trump’s young lieutenant Mr. Vance is being called on from time-to-time to broadcast a “common good /helping our own” ideological underpinning for the current administration’s most egregious excesses when it comes to immigration policy enforcement.
By leaning into such a restrictive policy Vance is missing the point. It is Republican fiscal policy that has eroded the middle class over these last forty years – not an overabundance of legal immigrants taking employment and educational opportunities away from those born and raised here.
But blaming immigrants is an easy sell to a weary working-class population, and provides cover for the shortfalls being registered throughout society by the inconsiderate way the entrepreneurial class has chosen to conduct its business.
In the broadest sense these shortfalls result from an almost complete abandonment of what used to be called the “social contract,” and a fevered embrace of Milton Friedman’s 1962 proclamation that a corporation has only one social responsibility: making a profit.
How ironic that Mr. Trump, currently starring in the role of The Great Populist, is still very much a member in good standing of the entrepreneurial class, practicing his real estate developer art of the deal shtick, now as a side hustle from his perch in the Oval Office.
Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr.
bobcavjr@gmail.com