Current political rhetoric seems overwhelmingly dominated by issues of race: “Is America terminally racist?” and gender: “Which woman will Biden pick?” Yet there is mounting evidence that the driving force in this watershed presidential election will be neither of these overhyped aspects of identity politics, but rather the much more traditional fault line of class.
Compelling support for this assertion can be found in David Paul Kuhn’s new book, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. Since its July publication it has garnered extraordinary praise strongly suggesting that it may be the most important book of this election year.
James Carville called it the “best ever book on how the Democrats lost the white working class.” Michael Barone said Kuhn “skillfully shows how the split between traditionally Democratic constituencies—blue collar workers and militant students—eerily foreshadowed the bitter political splits of our time.”
Kuhn has had a varied career as a reporter,and political analyst for Politico, Real Clear Politics, and CBS News. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Review, and New Republic, among others.
The “hardhat riot” of his book’s title occurred in lower Manhattan on May 8, 1970, just four days after National Guardsmen at Kent State University killed four students protesting Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. These events triggered a renewed explosion of anti-war protests and violence which spanned the nation but proved most combustible in cities and college campuses.
The book examines the tumultuous political, military, and cultural upheavals in the period immediately prior to 1970—an unpopular war abroad, racial strife at home, riots, assassinations— which shook the very foundations of American society, events disturbingly similar to the conflicts of the present day.
The book’s core is a superbly researched and written reconstruction of the May 8 New York riot and the stark class conflict it represented.
The student protesters—disproportionately children of the affluent elites—chose Wall Street, the “heart of world capitalism,” as the focal point of their demonstration against an “immoral” and “imperialistic” war.
Looking down on them from the high steel of the rising World Trade Center were hundreds of construction workers or “hardhats”—overwhelmingly white ethnic working class—who were alternately baffled and outraged to see American flags being burned by marchers who waved flags of the Viet Cong enemy and bitterly denounced American soldiers as “cowards” and “baby-killers.”
Given that a large proportion of the hardhats had served in Vietnam, Korea, or World War II and had sons and brothers fighting and dying in Asia at the time, it was entirely predictable that a violent confrontation would occur.
The badly outnumbered police, who mostly came from the same social background as the hardhats ,proved unable or unwilling to keep the two sides apart. Mayhem ensued with protestors utterly routed.
The riot struck a raw nerve with the American people, with polls showing them strongly supporting the hardhats. Twelve days later in a score of cities from Pittsburgh to San Diego patriotic rallies took place—none larger than the 150,000 hardhats, teamsters, and longshoremen from all across New York who marched to City Hall amidst a sea of American flags while singing patriotic songs.
In Washington a beleaguered President Nixon saw these marchers as the embodiment of the Silent Majority he believed supported his policy of ending the war honorably. Nixon also shrewdly perceived the potential for a fundamental realignment of political party allegiances.
The president’s bid to leverage this new reality into a Senate majority fell short that fall, but it figured substantially in his own landslide reelection victory two years later. In Kuhn’s persuasive account, Nixon not only moved Republicans toward being the party of blue collars instead of blue bloods.
He also set the template for Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, who would each further advance the breakup of the historic Democratic coalition that had dominated American politics since FDR, bringing us to the political earthquake of 2016 and now to the epochal contest of 2020.
Kuhn’s closing chapters detail how the alienation of the white working class was greatly exacerbated by a “long march to less,” reflected in decades of blue-collar wage stagnation and the growing cultural and economic gap separating them from the educated and affluent elites.
Thus, equally disdained by the corporate right and the cultural left the white working class steadily gravitated toward leaders who would offer them perhaps not solutions, but at least respect.
Make no mistake. David Paul Kuhn’s hardhat thesis in one degree or another will find echoes in this November’s election.
Bill Moloney studied at Harvard, Oxford and the University of London. He is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Centennial Institute and a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.
