Democrats Keep Handing Working-Class Voters to Republicans
By letting false friends in the GOP appeal to striking railworkers, Democrats are playing with fire.

Illustration by Carmen Casado
“The rail workers had good reason to threaten a strike,” a US senator wrote in December. “Railway workers wanted sufficient paid leave to cover illnesses, and the big companies didn’t want to provide them, despite the fact the rail companies are more profitable than ever. How have they gotten so profitable in just the last few years? By cutting the number of rail jobs and working laborers harder. The record profits of the rail industry have been a tremendous victory for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.”
If you think the senator who wrote that was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or some other Democrat, think again. It was January 6 fist-pumper Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri.
That’s right, while President Joe Biden was behaving like a villain from Les Misérables — busting the workers’ strike and then eating caviar and lobster at a black-tie dinner with the French president — Hawley was penning that essay, which culminated in him declaring: “Wall Street and Washington say this anti-worker agenda is the natural order of things. They’re wrong, as usual. We don’t have to follow this path — and we shouldn’t a moment longer.”