America’s ruling class keeps inventing new boogeymen to disguise its endless war on workers, while wealth flows upward and capitalism’s collapse accelerates.
Barnstorming the United States in his failed 1976 bid to challenge the incumbent President Gerald Ford in the Republican primary, California Governor Ronald Reagan introduced into the national political lexicon a female bête noire–or boogeywoman as it were–who would soon change the course of American history. There’s a woman in Chicago, he told voters, who
“used eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare.”
Continuing to deplore the dole that he described in cryptic terms as soul-rotting, budget-wrecking, and rife with fraud, Reagan returned again and again to the anonymous Chicago woman who was presumably Black. She wore a fur coat. She drove a Cadillac. She paid for T-bone steaks with food stamps.
She was the welfare queen.
Americans of a certain age could be pardoned for feeling a sense of deja vu while listening to Republican lawmakers this month defend their endorsement of the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which some economists have described as the largest transfer of wealth in U.S. history. Signed into law on July 4, the budget legislation cuts deeply into the nation’s social safety net, including the federal supplemental nutrition program known as SNAP, housing subsidies, education grants, clean energy credits and most controversially, slashes $880 million from the federal health insurance program for the indigent, Medicaid, over the next decade.
Speaking to CNN, the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said that the bill’s work requirement “restores the dignity of work” by specifically targeting:
“29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games. We’re going to find those guys and we’re going to send them back to work.”
Johnson’s remarks echoed almost verbatim a raft of Republican lawmakers who endorsed the deep spending cuts in the White House budget bill. Representative Jim Parsons of Florida told CNN:
“The able-bodied person I’m talking about is the 25-year-old sitting on his couch playing Xbox.”
Describing the narrative as an obvious Republican talking point, social media has exploded in derision of the GOP’s creation of yet another scapegoat to alibi a deeply unpopular measure. Referencing a 2024 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that found that two of three Medicaid enrollees work, the nonprofit advocacy group, More Perfect Union, wrote in an Instagram Post:
“Republicans want you to believe that there are millions of able-bodied, 25-year-old men playing video games on Medicaid, and that’s why they need to make $880 billion in cuts.
The truth? The vast majority of Medicaid recipients are working–and those who aren’t working are caregivers, disabled, or in school. The GOP bill will hurt the most vulnerable people, all to transfer massive amounts of wealth to the top 1%.”
In an America that is today teetering on collapse, video-game playing white slackers are the new Cadillac-driving, Black welfare queens. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 92.33 percent of all Medicaid disbursements were proper in 2024, and in the old welfare program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, fraud rarely exceeded 2 percent of all cases. Indeed, Reagan’s welfare queen was modeled on one extraordinary African American woman, Linda Thomas, whose fraud ironically was likely aided and abetted by her light complexion that allowed her to pass for white.
That both the Black welfare queen and the slacker/stoner playing video games in the basement are canards is not nearly as interesting as their utilitarian purpose in America’s enduring class war. You needn’t be a Marxist to understand that capitalism pits capital against labor: capitalists are primarily concerned with raking in as much profit as possible by requiring labor to work longer and harder for the lowest wages possible. Workers want just the opposite: the highest wages for their labor, or at the very least, work that is safe, meets their financial needs, and that might even be personally fulfilling.
When Reagan invoked the narrative of the lazy Black welfare cheat, employees were pocketing more than half of the National Gross Domestic Product in wages. Correspondingly, fewer Americans were living in poverty—about 1-in-10—and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans were taking home their smallest share of national income, roughly 5 percent, than at any time in the history of the Republic. Couples married more and divorced less, spent less of their income on housing, a kilowatt of electricity, or college tuition.
Reagan’s racialized storytelling was intended to divide a working class movement that had begun to congeal 40 years earlier at the nadir of the Great Depression. Appealing to white racism, Reagan convinced a broad swath of the white working class to turn on their Black coworkers in a misguided effort to recapture the country’s postwar prosperity that was just beginning to fade in the mid-1970s. Reagan would fail in his bid to win the White House in 1976, but he would prevail four years later. Yet, his political narrative helped set in motion the neoliberal era. Nearly a third of all workers were employed in the industrial sector in 1953; by 1977, that number had dipped to a quarter and would plummet to less than 10 percent today.
Initially, however, the ax did not fall on everyone equally: Between 1975 and 1980, the number of unemployed white workers fell by 562,000 while the number of jobless Blacks increased by 200,000 over the same period.
To anyone paying close attention, neoliberalism and its policies of privatization, deregulation, and austerity have proven fraudulent, far more than any Cadillac-driving welfare queen. Shipping decent-paying manufacturing jobs overseas lowered wages–especially for African Americans–but it killed the goose that laid the golden age: industrialism. In their bipartisan zeal, America’s politicians failed to realize that dispossessing Black workers of wages, income, and wealth would ultimately short-circuit the entire economy by depriving it of consumer buying power.
No longer making anything of value, the capitalists increasingly have to rely on speculation to turn a profit, but that has obvious limits: at some point, their debts outstrip borrowers’ ability to pay.
Reagan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queen augured Trump’s basement-dwelling slacker but with a few critical differences. First, most everyone understands the slacker as white rather than Black, meaning that whites, at least, might tend to be more sympathetic to the scapegoat that has emerged in the Trump era. Secondly, 50 years of austerity politics have left the cupboard bare–employees’ share of GDP is about 42 percent today–which means that Trump’s spending cuts are deeply unpopular with American voters. Hence, it is not clear that the elites will be able to disguise their larceny this time around by blaming it on unemployed, young, white men.
It’s not an entirely new idea. The relationship between the Black civil rights community and a white counterculture dates back more than 50 years. In 1974, Mississippi’s U.S. Senator James Eastland, who had once asserted that Blacks were of “an inferior race,” launched a series of Senate subcommittee hearings titled “Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on US National Security.” Unsurprisingly, the Senate hearings relied heavily on a theory known as “amotivational syndrome,” which was a state of stupefaction that was used to characterize cannabis users, accounting for hippies and poor people withdrawing from the mainstream.
The problem, of course, was not marijuana but capitalism itself, which demanded employees do more and more work for less and less pay, a tension that is exponentially worse in today’s postindustrial economy than it was in Eastland’s day. African American workers were among the first to articulate this unequal relationship. During Detroit’s 1967 uprising, a Black autoworker and activist named General Baker noted that the National Guard would only allow those African Americans to pass who could identify themselves as autoworkers. Baker would say later:
“That let us know that our only value to America was as workers.”
What Baker and other radicals in the Black Power movement knew, however, was that European settler governments will eventually begin to treat whites similarly to colonized populations. Dependent on the extraction of wealth from workers, capitalism, Baker noted, was not only unjust but unsustainable; there simply comes a juncture at which the bosses cannot steal anymore without triggering social upheaval. Baker died in 2014, but were he alive today, he would almost certainly say gloatingly:
I told you so!
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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