The Myth of the Working Class Politician

I asked one of my school classmates to write a review of my memoir, The Times of My Life. He wrote, in part, on the back cover of my book: “One of Squire’s classmates in first through twelfth grade in public in school, David Spence wrote the following: “This is an entertaining and engaging read that is full of wit and wisdom, sorrow and joy, but most of a chronicle of a life well lived and what it should mean to be human. Those of a certain age will be reminded, for better or worse, what it was like to grow up in the 50s and 60s in working class America.”

I always indicate in my bio along with schools attended such as Berkeley at Yale, Duke University, and Duke University Medical Center that I include my youth in working in a Paint Factory, a Steel Mill, and a Ball Bearing plant, etc. I learned as much in those places, as one person put it, my hardscrabble youth, as I did in any school. It was a different kind of education.  I also learned what it was like to live in the have not and the have’s world. My vocation in life as Chaplain in at Episcopal Academy was a position I loved for my work met the needs of a range of people in the good times and the bad times.

It is why I place the gap between the haves and have nots, classism, is getting wider as the basis for so many challenges such as racism and the other isms. It didn’t help the situation when Elon Musk became the first trillionaire.

Have you ever noticed that when people are running for a political office, they suddenly brag that they came from the “working class”?

I read an eye-opening column in the Inquirer (June 11) written by Jonathan Ziimerman who teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. His article shattered the myth of politicians emerging from the working class. This includes the current working class, one already elected, John Fetterman, and current candidate Graham Platner from Maine.

Platner is being scrutinized for a Nazi tattoo (that is now covered up) and various inappropriate texts sent to women. Fetterman dressed the part of a working glass candidate with his hoodie and shorts that stood out at the capitol.

Platner recently told a Maine television station that he is a working-class guy living a working-class life. The Democrats said that they need “regular people” who will fight more in Congress for their agenda. To use Michelle Obama’s phrase “when they go low, we go high”. The opposite is now the case. The Democrats want working class fighters. Trump figured this out and created MAGA who are white working-class people. Why do you think Trump recently had a cage fight on the front lawn? He couldn’t fight himself out of a paper bag, so he creates the image that doesn’t go along with polite society. He wants to be seen as a tough guy. He wouldn’t last a day where I grew up and where I worked in mills.

The reality is Platner has a father who is a prominent lawyer and his grandfather was an architect who built a family estate modeled after chateaus in France. Platner attended Hotchkiss, an elite boarding school.

Fetterman grew up in a cushy suburb. During his 13 years as mayor of Braddock, he received large sums of money from his parents. The hoodie and shorts were like a Halloween costume.

Say it isn’t so, but most of our presidents and political leaders come from significant wealth. They put on a uniform and create a fiction as man of the working- class people because with 67% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck that is where the votes are.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were Virginia planters.

John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams were prominent New England lawyers.

Andrew Jackson regarded highly by Trump because he was a man of the people was not working class. He was raised on a Carolina farm with a gristmill, a whiskey still, and enslaved servants created his own story of being working class.

My hero Abraham Lincoln is remembered as a rail splitter who did hard agricultural work as a young man. He fed that narrative, but he was born in 1809 to a family that owned two farms. His father was in the top 15% of taxpaying property owners in his rural Inidiana community.

Lyndon Johson’s father was a member of the Texas State Legislature who earned a small salary there because only people of great wealth could afford to be in the legislature.

You get the picture! It is common knowledge of the wealth that Reagan and the Bushes emerged from families with lots of cash.

Here’s the deal! You can always tell someone who comes legitimately from the working class. Working class people don’t have back up as the above-mentioned presidents had.

Working-class people are always thinking about money. They have a depression era mentality with back up in the form of money. It’s like a line from a Willie Nelson song (paraphrased differently). “You are always on my mind meaning someone you love but in working class culture, “money is always on my mind.”

Working class people believe that there is no back up. You know that you must do it on your own. Mommy and daddy aren’t hanging in the wings. Working class people pray every day that they will have the grit and work ethic to keep going when it would be easier to give up and blame it on something else. The lucky ones know that hard work and education is the way out. Trump had his daddy and a million inherited bucks. I had a culture that said, “No excuses!” When I was at Yale, a woman asked me where “I prepped because I speak so well, and I had a great vocabulary” I told her, “I went to the Alan Wood School (steel mill).” She said, “that must be a great school”. I just smiled back at her. Enough said!