I had a nice long chat yesterday with Leighton Woodhouse, the guy I blogged about the other day. He wrote “The Fall of Oakland” on his substack, which I published here, and which quite a few of you admired.
Leighton by his own description is a former far-left Democrat. He was an organizer for SEIU and radically pro-worker, but in recent years he, like me, has grown disillusioned with the Democratic Party. He re-registered Independent, and describes his politics today as heterodox, which I think means nonpartisan or independent.
I had a lot of questions for Leighton and he was kind enough to answer at length. I told him how, as a lifelong Democrat, I’ve struggled to support the party even as its drift toward irrational wokeism has pissed me off. But I could never vote Republican, I explained, for two overwhelming reasons: The Republican Party’s horrific homophobia, and because it’s been taken over by a far-right Christian minority that, I fear, would establish a religious dictatorship in America. (Obviously, the two phenomena are related.) I pointed out the heavy presence of conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court. When he said he didn’t think the Supreme Court had an anti-gay agenda, I pointed out what Clarence Thomas said, after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade: “that the high court should revisit all cases built on similar legal footing [as Roe]—including cases that guarantee the right to contraception, same-sex consensual sexual relations, and same-sex marriage.”
I do not see how this can be interpreted in any way other than that the reactionary Court is not finished abolishing priorly-established rights in the arena of sex and women’s freedoms, and particularly with respect to LGBTQ people who are so loathed by Christian Republicans. Leighton didn’t agree with me, so I guess it was one of those examples of friends agreeing to disagree about minor matters.
But anti-gay legislation is hardly a minor matter if you’re gay. Indeed, it’s a matter of life and death. We know what happens in dictatorships when a particular group is villainized and an armed, angry majority that controls the courts, the army and the police wants to be spared their nuisance. “It can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote, but it can; Nazi Germany did it, and they were the most civilized, best-educated country in Europe, not a bunch of ignorant drooling Bible thumpers, but the culture that gave us Goethe, Bach, Einstein, Freud.
Leighton described also how much he admires Trump’s, and the Republican Party’s, self-professed shift to supporting the working classes, as evidenced (he said) by the speech that the Teamsters Union president, Sean O’Brien, gave at the Republican National Convention. Leighton still considers himself powerfully on the side of American workers; he just feels that the Democrats, who used to support labor, left them behind when they allowed wokeism to take over the party. I explained that I was born into a union household and I support unions, too, but what puzzles me is how many unions today seem to have become woke and embraced social “equity,” when their own members are personally becoming more conservative. This seems to me to be an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the union movement and its relationship to Republicans and MAGAism. Leighton explained that there are different sorts of unions: here in Oakland, for example, SEIU is strongly woke, but their membership consists primarily of healthcare workers and government/office workers, whereas the Teamsters are primarily skilled workers who tend to be more conservative. I accept that, but it leaves unresolved the question of why so many knowledge workers (clerical, secretaries, etc.) skew woke, while so many skilled workers (electricians, plumbers, construction) skew conservative. Could it be a gender thing?
We may not have resolved a lot of issues, but I was glad to have had a hearty sit-down with Leighton. One of the delights of being President of the Coalition for a Better Oakland is the opportunity to meet smart, accomplished people and engage in deep conversation. I always learn from these experiences, even at my age. Leighton doesn’t agree with me that the Democratic Party is salvageable and can be saved from its own extremes, but he made me think, and I hope I made him think, too.
Steve Heimoff