The politics of the Brookwood coal strike

Peter Beinart with an interesting thought piece on the politics of this coal strike, within the larger context of the real meaning of political populism, who speaks for the common workers.

I must sheepishly admit that I have not been following the story of this strike

All of which brings me to Brookwood, Alabama, where coal miners have been on strike for more than five hundred days. On Monday, the New York Times podcast, The Daily, told the story in impressive detail. Politically, what makes the Brookwood strike fascinating is that it pits the left’s economic populism against the right’s cultural populism. The Brookwood strikers are union members taking on their corporate bosses. But they’re also coal miners, a profession that conservatives lionize because it evokes the tough-guy America of yesteryear and progressives disdain because it contributes to environmental apocalypse. When a reporter from the socialist publication, Left Voice, travelled to central Alabama last fall to cover the strike he found Trump signs everywhere.

The Brookwood strike tests what the two parties value most. If the core of the Trump-era Republican Party is cultural populism, its politicians should support culturally conservative coal miners against the globalist corporation denying them decent working conditions and a living wage. If the core of the Biden-era Democratic Party is cultural liberalism, it should scorn the coal miners because they’re not on board with the greening of America.

The answer is revealing. In Alabama, a bright-red state where Trump is king, Republican politician after Republican politician—from Governor Kay Ivey to Senator Tommy Tuberville to the local Republican judge who issued injunction after injunction restricting the miners’ ability to strike—sided with the coal company. Fox News, which portrays itself as the tribune of the lunch bucket Americans in fly-over country, has ignored the strikers almost entirely.

To be fair, mainstream Democrats haven’t made them a cause celebre either. The Timesnotes that the coal strike hasn’t received nearly as much attention from Democratic politicians as a strike at an Amazon warehouse nearby. But one faction of Democrats have embraced the coal miners, the same faction that is most often depicted as hostile to Americans with conservative values: Democratic socialists. Which national publications have covered the coal strike? The Nation, The Guardian and Jacobin. Which member of the Senate has publicly expressed his support? Bernie Sanders. Which activist organization has come to the strikers’ aid? Democratic Socialists of America, that supposed hotbed of pierced trust fund hipsters. “They support workers,” a coal miner named Braxton Wright told the Times. “It doesn’t matter the industry. To them, we’re still a worker.”


Will The Real Populists Please Stand Up