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As the GOP primary starts to heat up, it's starting to look like culture wars are going to dominate. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is former President Trump's nearest challenger, and he has make fighting wokeness a centerpiece of his campaign. You're also hearing a lot about President Biden's son Hunter's connections to China and Ukraine from the GOP these days, and people banning hormones and surgeries to children who believe they are trans.
I don't disagree with any of these issues. In fact, I and many of my fellow working-class Americans are pretty much in the Republicans' corner when it comes to the culture wars. But these are so far from our top issues that even though we agree, many of us are turned off and disengaged by a party who thinks these issues should be the priority.
In other words, if you think boycotting Bud Light is more important than the fact that many hardworking Americans can't feed their families, you don't deserve to win. And I say that as someone who thinks Bud Light made a huge mistake partnering with a trans influencer. Yet as a working-class American, my first thought is not, "I hate that they did that." It's, "Who's gonna feed the Bud Light truck driver's kids? Who's gonna pay his mortgage?"
If you personally aren't faced with these kinds of struggles and don't know anyone living on a knife-edge, working their heart out and just barely getting, I can see why culture wars are going to be your bread and butter. But the GOP's base is now the working class, though Republicans don't seem to realize it. We're the people you've got to convince. And this is a big turnoff.
What I'm trying to explain is that even people who agree with you on wokeness are going to be really turned off and disillusioned if that's all you've got. It starts to seem like a way for corporations and politicians and conservative media to distract us from the shoddy underbelly of politics, business practices, and policy that seems designed to keep us at each other's throats.
A few days ago I was at a truck stop in Olathe, Kansas. A guy drove in dirty from working in a warehouse all day. He came to get $10.81 in gas because that's all he had. He had a couple of bucks and the rest was in change.
How high on his list do you think the war on wokness is?
Anheuser-Busch which owns Bud Light employs a lot of people, keeping them from his fate. They employ diesel mechanics, welders, truck drivers, brewers, and more. Many of these people potentially are your fellow voters and here you are high fiving putting their livelihoods at risk.
The problem with Anheuser-Busch is not that it's woke; it's that it's a monopoly, and monopolies are bad for workers, bad for consumers, and bad for capitalism. This could have been an opportunity to talk about that—the real issue here. But I'm not the only one who finds it impossible for Republicans to do that. It would mean siding with workers over corporations, and they never do that.
Instead, they try to distract us with culture wars. You get Dylan Mulvaney outrage instead of fair compensation and safe work conditions.
Or consider DeSantis's campaign. He's put forward nothing of real substance that would help the lives of the working class. His campaign is built around the idea that wokeness is bad and the Left must be destroyed. I haven't heard him talk much about bringing back manufacturing, or strengthening trade unions, or bringing down the price of gas. Imagine how something like cheaper gas prices would affect the life of a man who could only afford $10.81 in gas. Private equity firms are buying up entire neighborhoods in Florida. Where is DeSantis on that?
I'm not saying don't bring up Hunter Biden's laptop, or wokeness, or the Democrats' hypocrisy. But you have to couple it with kitchen table issues: the price of food, gas, and housing. These are things that keep people from getting at each other's throats like in some kind of zombie apocalypse.
Like I said before, it's not about whether we agree or disagree with these issues; it's about making the absolute necessities for day to day survival more easily attainable so that a person has the bandwidth to attack and engage these social issues in a more substantial way.
If all you have to offer is the war on wokeness, don't be surprised when you have an unmotivated voting base. You don't deserve the votes of people who agree with you. How are you going to get those who don't?
Charles Stallworth is a union railroad worker.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
