Democrats are sure to have their knives out for any number of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, but Andrew Puzder, the fast-food CEO whom the president-elect has tapped for Labor Secretary, could be a promising target in their quest to claim at least one scalp.
Puzder is an outspoken opponent of private sector unions and popular labor regulations, including minimum wage increases and overtime rules. And infelicitous quotes about his view of workers have already started to emerge, like this one, about his preference for robots over human labor: “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case.” Unlike his prospective boss, Puzder has been a consistent champion of ruthlessly efficient capitalism and rarely wavered from Reaganite GOP orthodoxy on economic questions. (Although he has started to backtrack from some of these positions in the last several days).
In an earlier political environment, killing off a candidate like this to run the Frances Perkins building would be the Democrats’ bread-and-butter: Paint him as a plutocrat who prioritizes profits over people and prefers workers who are pliant and disposable. But things get awkward on the question of immigration, where the official Democratic position has moved uncomfortably close to that of the libertarian-leaning CEO.
Puzder’s record on immigration reflects the same priority as his remarks on automation—that is, the overriding importance of cutting costs for employers. As David Frum has highlighted, Puzder sang the praises of immigrant labor at a 2013 American Enterprise Institute panel, noting that foreign workers at his company are more likely to “appreciate the fact that they have a job” instead of complaining about the need to work. He strongly advocated for the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill, in particular the guest-worker provisions and the amnesty, which he reasoned would expand the labor supply for GKE foods, while suggesting that the bill’s extra border security outlays were unseemly.
Taken together with his views on automation and labor market regulation, Puzder’s donor-class sympathies on immigration might in theory be enough for a talented Democratic senator to construct a narrative (accurate or not) of the prospective Labor Secretary as a heartless CEO who will not prioritize the well-being of American workers, and if not block his nomination at least draw blood from the Trump administration in its infancy. But after years of painting less-skilled immigration as an unalloyed good, suggesting that restrictionist views are tantamount to racism, and siding with Silicon Valley behemoths to make business-friendly immigration reform a top priority, the party has undermined this valuable line of attack on Puzder’s worldview.
It wasn’t always thus: For much of the 20th century, the American labor movement was deeply concerned about the impact of less-skilled immigration on the ability of workers to unionize and the government to uphold workplace regulations. Democratic politicians like Barbara Jordan were vocal advocates of restriction at the national level. As late as 2000, the New York Times editorial page opposed an amnesty push on the grounds that it would “depress the wages of [America’s] lowest-paid native workers.” In other words, the Democratic Party, or at least parts of it, tied its economic agenda to a certain kind of egalitarian nationalistic vision—one that is now increasingly only found on the right, among reform-conservative writers like Reihan Salam.
For a variety of reasons, including the decline of the traditional union-based political structure and the increasing influence of post-1960s academic thought on the American Left, immigration has become more of an identity issue than an economic one. The Obama years have given way instead to an increasingly affluent, cosmopolitan party that only knows how to talk about immigration and immigration restriction in the language of inclusion versus bigotry. This shift was most clearly on display during the Democratic primary when Bernie Sanders was forced to backtrack and prove his pro-immigration bone fides after derisively describing open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal” in an interview with Vox‘s Ezra Klein.
While Senate Democrats are sure to attack Puzder for his comments on automation, these attacks could be more potent if they were linked to his stated immigration policy, which amounts to another side of the same pro-corporate coin. But it will be difficult to prosecute Puzder for his stated immigration positions when Democratic Party leaders have been so adamant that opposition to amnesty and less-skilled immigration is a betrayal of American values.
Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss has prompted an intense debate about the relationship between identity and class politics within the Democratic Party. One popular argument is that there is no conflict—that the Democrats can and should retain an aggressive cosmopolitan liberalism while also championing the economic interests of less-skilled workers. The Puzder nomination is a case study in the way these goals can collide.
By buying in so fully to the language of cosmopolitanism and jettisoning the language of national solidarity, the Democrats may have undermined their best defense against a fast food CEO who as Labor Secretary might seek to undo many priorities of the labor movement and the economic Left. Instead of a muscular defense of American workers that might sway the public, it looks like the Democrats might try to sink Puzder with an attack focused on identity—controversial Carl’s Jr.’s commercials showing scantily-clad women eating cheeseburgers.
The worst-case scenario for the Trump administration is that it will fuse the most reactionary parts of Donald Trump’s exclusionary populism with the most Randian parts of the GOP business wing’s corporate agenda. The Democrats’ abandonment of the center on immigration made it more likely that both will come to pass—first, by increasing Donald Trump’s appeal, and second, by diluting their own credibility to stand in the way of certain pro-business excesses when the administration tries to push them through.
