Not a day goes by that you don’t hear some talking head bemoaning the state of political polarization. Standard proclamations include “America is a country divided!” and “We haven’t been this polarized since the Civil War!” But take it from a trucker: America isn’t politically polarized. It’s economically stratified.
If you’re working class, you know this; if you ain’t, then you don’t. The only folk dumb enough to buy this polarization nonsense are those who were born on top of the economic heap. The rest of us getting crushed at the bottom understand it for what it is: a for-profit business model with two financial benefactors—corporate aristocrats and Bourbon white liberals.
The essential worker is the essential American. Statistically and spiritually, we live one common narrative. In a post-NAFTA, post-Great Recession, post-COVID-corporate-bailouts America, the asset-less “essential” worker of the 2020s is the landless sharecropper of the 1880s. And nothing divides us in the lower classes so much as our financial dispossession unites us.
I’m a trucker, and I’ve never been asked by another trucker if I was a Democrat or a Republican. Truckers only talk about Trump if asked about him by a journalist. And if they voted for Trump, it’s because Obama tanked the economy. I’ve worked with Latinos that voted for Trump and with Black dudes that liked him for freeing 3,100 inmates from prison with the First Step Act. I’ve also worked with white guys that felt the same.
Like all voters, truckers want things to get better. And we’re not alone in the working class in knowing that political polarization is a tool to fix a problem we don’t have—and to keep a problem we do have alive and well. In 1965, Dr. King spoke to what the multi-racial working class implicitly understands today: the race-baiting slop constructed and consumed by Bourbon whites serves only to enrich the land owning boss.
The problem we do have is that the boss class does none of the work and takes all of the profit, leaving the people they call “essential” with no assets, no choices, and no power.
It’s the economy, stupid. The poor don’t choose where we live; we live where it’s cheap. We don’t choose where we work; we work where they’re hiring. We don’t choose our coworkers or neighbors; poverty chooses for us.
Poverty is the most potent desegregation tool Congress has ever legislated. You don’t have the luxury of being politically hard headed when you’re poor. Because polarization relies on you believing your only options are polar opposites. And what you have to understand about us in the working class is that our brains don’t work that way. We use a variety of tools to build what you buy and fix what you break. The best tool is the one that works for the task at hand. If the tool doesn’t work, it’s the wrong tool for the job. So when they tell us we only have two tools in the political toolbox, we call bullsh*t.
David Butow/Corbis via Getty Images
I’m a white guy without a college degree. In white liberal media, I am the reason why America can’t have nice things. “Why are they voting against their economic interests” as the saying goes. But the truth is that voting Democrat has meant voting against my economic interest. I voted for Clinton, who orchestrated the largest mass deportation of Black, Latino, and white working class jobs in American history. I voted for Obama, who orchestrated the largest mass eviction of Black, Latino, and white working class homeowners in American history, myself included.
In 2016, I voted for Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general. I hoped Hillary would follow through on her campaign pitch to make public colleges free. When she lost, I was pissed. At 41, I knew any chance of me going to college was gone.
I never associated a college degree with smarts or tactical intelligence. There are plenty of stupid college grads that prove the point. College for me has always represented a ticket out of poverty, and I wanted out. I graduated high school in 1993 and immediately took three minimum wage jobs to help my single mom cover the rent and bills with four kids under one roof. I took taxi cabs between mall jobs and a job at a plating factory, working seven days a week.
When I could, I took what college I could afford: a single English class at Dutchess Community College. Work prevented me from attending several lectures. The professor said this wasn’t tenable. I dropped out in the spring of 1994. I didn’t want to quit.
Recently, I met a young person in the same situation I was once in, an 18-year-old DACA kid working in a South Phoenix coffee shop. After graduating high school, she managed to fit in a few community college courses while working full time to cover the rent. But now rent was rising, her mom’s back was shot from years of cleaning rich peoples’ houses, and there was no choice but to drop out of school and take a second job. She didn’t want to quit, either.
This white trash trucker and that young Latina brought to the U.S. when she was three are on the same side of the college divide. There is no meaningful distinction between us. We joked back and forth about our mistrust of liberals and their biennial “vote blue no matter who” sweep through South Phoenix. And we both knew a truth that seems unfathomable to the elites driving the polarization narrative: I ain’t gonna get what I need if she doesn’t get what she needs.
That’s unifying, not polarizing.
Cyrus Tharpe is a hazmat tanker truck driver.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
