George Packer: Working Class Voters Are “Up for Grabs” This Election

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, while Trump’s racist comments have angered many, his anti-immigrant rhetoric also appears to have taken hold in the Pennsylvanian Rust Belt town of Charleroi. I hope I’m saying that right. Once a thriving community of mostly Democratic union workers, the population has now dwindled. And though an influx of Haitian immigrants is revitalizing the town, they’re being blamed for its troubles and they’re being targeted by Trump’s lies. As The Atlantic staff writer George Packer, puts it in his recent piece, “The Three Factors That Will Decide the Election.” Trump found a small, tender wound in a crucial swing state and stuck a finger inside. Some might also call it micro targeting. And Packer joins Walter Isaacson to discuss that reporting.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And, George Packer, welcome to the show.

GEORGE PACKER, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Thanks for having me, Walter.

ISAACSON: You went to Charleroi, Pennsylvania. And I read this piece you did in The Atlantic, very interesting, because it’s so emblematic of all of the themes we’re facing. Tell me how you found Charleroi and why was it so emblematic for you?

PACKER: Yes, it’s a small industrial town south of Pittsburgh, and I saw two stories that happened to coincide almost exactly in time in September in Little Charleroi. One was that its famous Pyrex factory, which has been making glassware since the 1890s, was going to shut down and move some of its operations to Ohio. 300 plus good union jobs were going to disappear from a town that had been losing industrial jobs for 50 years. So, it was just one more blow to a declining industrial town on the Monongahela River. The other Charleroi story was that Donald Trump found out about Charleroi and learned that 2,000 Haitian immigrants had arrived over the past few years to a town that had really declined all the way down to about just 4,200 people. So, it was a pretty significant increase. And he began saying in speeches that Charleroi is being destroyed by the Haitians, that crime was rampant, the town was bankrupt. How do you like your beautiful Charleroi now? So, I thought, well, these two things are both crucial elements of the election. One is about immigration and about demagoguery and the other is about decline and inequality and the Rust Belt. So, I thought I should go there and see what it’s really like.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s start with the economic thing. There was a private equity firm, Center Lane Partners, that is responsible for shutting down that Pyrex plant. Was some of the anger directed at Wall Street corporate billionaires?

PACKER: Absolutely. I sat down with a group of workers from the factory who are union members in the local steelworkers union, and they were furious with it. Center Lane Partners and for a company called Anchor Hocking, which had recently bought the factory under somewhat hazy conditions, because it seemed they’d been prevented from buying it earlier this year because of antitrust law, and then the sale went ahead. It was a bankruptcy sale. It was all very shadowy. And then, suddenly they’re announcing that it’s going to be moved to Ohio, that people will get severance or they can move to Ohio if they can do that. And it was a huge disruption. And yes, I talked to workers who said, you know, this is what we’ve been dealing with, is they don’t care about us. They strip us for parts, and then they move when it’s profitable, when it’s convenient, and we get, what, one woman said, $8,000 in severance for 35 years of her life working at that factory. So, it’s — there is absolutely blame, a portion, to Wall Street and to corporate greed, which is a phrase I —

ISAACSON: Isn’t that something that the Democrats used to be able to express more?

PACKER: Yes. Charleroi was a Democratic town until roughly 2016, it may have begun to turn red earlier, but 2016, I was told, was a big turning point when Trump began to articulate the anger at trade deals, at immigration, at other forces, globalization that were — that people there felt were responsible for the decline of the town. So, Democrats and unions were the voice of workers in a place like that until, I would say, the 1990s when NAFTA and the forces of globalization and the new Democrats under Bill Clinton really lost the voice to speak for those workers, stopped seeing them, you could say. And the workers felt that maybe there’s no difference between the two parties. That’s what happened over the last 30 years. And Democrats lost their standing as the champions of the working-class. And so, people in a place like Charleroi who no longer hear it from the Democrats, who hear instead that the party is becoming the party of the college educated, they look to the Republicans who may not be doing anything economically to help them, but who are at least giving them scapegoats and culture war issues that they can blame for their troubles.

ISAACSON: You talk about the Republicans offering scapegoating, was that what the immigrant discussion was about and Trump’s attack on the immigrants that have come to Charleroi?

PACKER: I think so, basically. Look, we have to be honest when a town of 4,200, overwhelmingly white, working-class, and aging people finds that there are now 2,000 new immigrants, that’s 50 percent of the population in a distressed town, and they are overwhelmingly black, you’re going to have tensions, and you’re going to have, for example, the complaints I heard that the schools are overcrowded, the teachers can’t pay attention to the American born students because they’ve got too much translating to do, too many different kinds of kids from different backgrounds to teach, that the traffic laws are not being followed because the immigrants don’t know which are the one way streets and they are rather badly marked, I’ve got to say. I was warned by a union member to be careful about one-way streets when I got to Charleroi. So, yes, there are —

ISAACSON: Yes, but hasn’t the immigration actually revitalized the economy of the town?

PACKER: I was going to say, these are inevitable growing pains of a resurgence of life. Yes, it’s coming from abroad, but that’s because it wasn’t coming from here. The town was dying, and suddenly, empty houses are filling up. There’s a whole new population of taxpayers working in rather low wage jobs that American workers basically didn’t want, like in food preparation factories. There’s bakeries and markets opening, there’s entrepreneurship, there’s life. And I was told by the borough manager and the borough council president that this was just a great gift to Charleroi, to find that a younger population was coming, was working, was working hard and the workers at the Pyrex factory said they had about half a dozen Haitians working there and they were the hardest workers at the factory, even as those same people were complaining about schools and traffic and things like that.

ISAACSON: One of the interesting characters in your piece is the coordinator of Haitian community relation who had come to the United States, I think it was in the Haitian Coast Guard. Tell me about him and how he’s dealing with it.

PACKER: This guy, whose name is Getro Bernabe, was a really interesting man, really thoughtful, and optimistic, as immigrants often are. He sees us in a better light than we see ourselves. He told me that he always loved the phrase e pluribus unum on the American coin. To him that expressed what America is about. I said, well, what does it mean to you? And he said, it means people from all different backgrounds come together in a united country, which made me a little sad because we’re not a united country. And it may take someone like that from Haiti to see us in a different light because he’s come from a country being torn apart by violence, a failed state, and he sees us as having all these advantages and good things. He actually really loves Charleroi, but the effect of Trump’s pointing it out as a failed place because of immigrants, he said, was having a terrible effect on the immigrants themselves, who were sort of keeping their heads down, staying inside, even thinking about leaving Charleroi because they were afraid.

ISAACSON: You talk about how some Democrats are able to speak to these frustrations. And it’s something that the National Democratic Party hasn’t done all that well, apparently. But one of the people running for Congress, the Democratic Congress Chris DeLuzio, I think his name is, is able to talk about everything from corporate greed to being pro-union and to mitigate some of the effects of the immigration talk. Tell me how that message works.

PACKER: Yes. Chris DeLuzio is a one-term congressman from the district just north of Charleroi, the Pennsylvania 17th District. And he is an old- fashioned Democrat, you could say. He’s only 40. He’s a Navy veteran. He’s a lawyer. He’s very well educated. Very thoughtful. But he has staked his political fate in a district that’s quite even, and where he might not win re-election. It’s one of those 50/50 districts that have become so rare. He stakes his future on a return to a Democratic message that we are with the workers, we don’t want corporations to be raiding our towns and our factories, stripping them for assets, and then moving on and leaving behind broken lives. And that’s — it’s a strong message that he tries to hit home, going door to door in speeches, et cetera. One thing that happened in his district was that train derailment in Ohio, it was just across the border from his district and some of the chemical gases spread into his area. And he has made regulation of rail freight one of his signature issues, and has sort of use that as a way of saying, so, Republican Party, are you prepared to regulate rail freight or are you going to go with what your donors in the Koch Brothers Network want you to do, which is to keep it deregulated? So, that’s a sort of economic message that doesn’t really address immigration head on, but that essentially tries to say there are larger reasons for your troubles than these 2,000 hardworking immigrants in your town. There are much bigger forces at work, let’s pay attention to them and not scapegoat people who are really simply trying to live the American dream here.

ISAACSON: That populist message of taking on, say the freight and rail companies, in some ways dovetails with some in the Republican Party doing that. Didn’t he work with J. D. Vance on that railway thing?

PACKER: Absolutely. There is a populist strain the Republican Party. J. D. Vance is maybe its leading spokesman now in Congress, and he was a co- sponsor of that rail freight regulation bill. I think it’s called the Rail Safety Act or something. Josh Hawley of Missouri is another. And it’s sort of a submerged part of Trump-ism. Trump talks that way when it suits him, but when he’s in power, what does he do? He cuts taxes for corporations and rich people. And the question is whether the Republican Party is serious about actually defending the economic interests of the working-class, or if they’re using it as a way to turn their party into a working-class party, which many Republicans want without ever really shedding the legacy of the small government, low tax, low regulation, Reagan, Republican Party. And the other half of that question is whether the Democratic Party is capable of reclaiming that mantle after years and years of becoming the party of the professional class, which doesn’t really see places like Charleroi at all and has forgotten about them.

ISAACSON: There’s been a major shift, which is somewhat documented in this town of Charleroi of the Democratic Party moving more and more to become the party of urban, more affluent, more educated meritocratic elite, and the Republican Party playing a populist card, being for the average working guy. To what extent is that a major shift in our politics that’ll be ongoing?

PACKER: I think it’s been happening for several decades on the Democratic side with Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama was another meritocrat who believed in the meritocracy and in the value of higher education. And on the Republican side, it was a revolution with Trump. It happened in 2016. Until then, the Reagan dogma had held the party in its grip and nothing else really could get through. So, we now have a Republican Party that claims to speak for workers, and it is winning working-class voters from all races. That’s a big change that’s happened in the last cycle or two. And it has kind of defied the norms of American politics. Black voters voting for a Republican is not something that was supposed to happen. It’s happening. It’s a big problem for Democrats, and Latino voters in even greater numbers. But as I said, I am skeptical that the Republican Party is prepared to use government, because that’s what we’re talking about. This — the anti- government gene is so strong in the Republican Party that to use government and to govern well rather than simply tearing down the administrative state in order to bring jobs, to bring chip making and manufacturing and green energy jobs to places like Charleroi, or to keep the jobs that are there, the few industrial jobs that are still there, and to support unions, because those are the voices of workers. I’m very skeptical. I just think it goes against too many of the interests of the Republican Party, too many of its reflexes, too many of its donors. So, I think, in a way, the working-class is up for grabs and I don’t see either party claiming it. I don’t see either party being able to make it a true realignment, which would last for a generation or two. That to me is where American politics is going to be played out, which party can claim to speak for people who work for a living and make an hourly wage. And right now, I think it’s up in the air. And I don’t see either party making its claim in a way that’s going to last as a realignment.

ISAACSON: You wrote a very influential book called “The Unwinding,” about how America kind of, frayed its social fabric. How has that played out even more as you saw it in Charleroi?

PACKER: We just keep on unwinding. That book came out in 2013. Trump was a New York celebrity and a TV star and had begun to make a name for himself as a denier of Barack Obama’s citizenship, a birther. He’s not in the book. But Trump-ism is in the book. The landscape that Trump walked out onto and claimed is in the book, because it’s about communities that are in decline, institutions that are failing to support the people they’re supposed to support. It’s about loneliness, how Americans seem to be trying to make it in — against the odds without any help from either government or union or church or corporation. So, I wrote it in places similar to Charleroi, like Youngstown, Ohio, which is a more — a bigger and more dramatic example of industrial decline. It wasn’t hard to find people who said the middle class is gone, the game is rigged for the elites and the powerful, and my children are not going to have as good a life as I had. Those became the mantra that I heard over and over. And did I hear that in Charleroi? That’s all I heard in Charleroi. So, of course, Charleroi is not Seattle or Washington or Austin, Texas, the country is regionally dividing dramatically into the Charlerois of America and the Austins of America. And that in itself, to me, is part of our unwinding. We don’t feel that we belong to the same country. We don’t — people of different parties don’t feel they belong to the same country. And our elites in media and politics seem to have figured out that the best way to get ahead and make a name and make money is by feeding that, not by trying to overcome it, but by feeding it. And that’s what they do.

ISAACSON: George Packer, thanks so much for joining us.

PACKER: I really enjoyed it. Thank you.