Limousine Liberals and Solidarity

It was a classic limousine liberal moment. Actress and head of the actors union Fran Drescher appeared at a news conference last week to announce that her union had voted to join the writers in a strike. Her voice shook with indignation and she raised her fist.

“The eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labor are upon us,” she said. “I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us!” “It is disgusting. Shame on them!”

According to a story in the New York Times: “She has long expressed concerns about corporate greed, captioning photos with slogans like “STOP CAPITALIST GREED NOW.” It was enough for New York Magazine to put a headline on a 2017 blog post, “Your New Favorite Anti-Capitalist Icon Is Fran Drescher.””

Drescher drove, or was driven, to the press conference from her $10 million Malibu beach home. She may have been a bit jet-lagged as she had just been in Italy at Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda show, where she was photographed with Kim Kardashian. You can pick up a nice handbag at D&G for just under $2,300. Nothing says STOP CAPITALIST GREED like a $2,300 purse.

The limousine liberal meme is as old as Jane Fonda. It’s just that at one point it was more of an outlier than it is now. Back in the late 1960’s and 1970’s — the days before Reagan — Democrats really did represent the working class. Now pretty much all of the Democrats who run the party and supply its image (but not rank and file Democrats) really have become limousine liberals, though they insist that the limousine be electric.

Let me pause right here to make it clear that, on the merits, I support the actors and the writers. The actors union represents 50,000 people, not many of them worth $25 million, like Drescher. And, as a rule, I support the people working on the front lines. That’s why I think workers in other entertainment industries, like professional and college sports, should get paid more or, in the case of college athletes, just get paid.

But the Screen Actors Guild would have done themselves a favor by electing a leader who was one of that big rank-and-file. As it is, somebody like Drescher just underscores the awkwardness that is at the heart of what’s wrong with the left. Increasingly, the hard-left is made up of affluent, college-educated people who live in big cities or college towns but who claim to be advocates for blue collar workers and struggling farmers. They come off as preachy, self-righteous, condescending and hypocrtical. They repulse the very people they claim to be trying to help, mostly because they don’t understand that workers don’t want to be helped in the first place. They want a chance to earn their way up the economic ladder.

So when someone like Drescher uses language reminiscent of coal miners unions in the 1920s — or for that matter when teachers union representatives do the same kind of thing — it just comes off as ludicrous to people who work in boots instead of high heels. (When Drescher took heavy criticism from her own union members for her appearance in Italy just days before the strike vote, she whined: “I was in hair and makeup three hours a day, walking in heels on cobblestones. Doing things like that, which is work. Not fun.” Really?)

And it sounds even more hollow, if not silly, to the 90% of American workers who are not unionized. In fact, the most powerful unions today represent teachers and government workers. When they win your taxes go up. Solidarity only goes so far.

And, while I’m sympathetic to their cause, it’s not like the actors and writers are running trains or flying airplanes. If they don’t go to work the economy will not shut down. If we miss another season of the Chicago/CSI/Fire/MPD/ER/Streets & Sanitation/Comptroller’s Office – Special Audits Unit franchise, well, that’ll be okay. In fact, it’ll be good. Maybe people will spend more time outdoors or reading or playing board games with their kids or just catching up on their sleep.

In the meantime, the best thing that SAG can do for themselves and for the union movement would be to replace Drescher with somebody no one’s heard of and let that person talk like a normal human being with a nice, comfortable, but not fairly compensated, job in the year 2023.