Opinion
Guest Essay
The
McDonaldization of American Politics
Oct. 21, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/opinion/trump-harris-mcdonalds.html
By Marcia Chatelain
Dr. Chatelain is a professor of Africana studies at the
University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Franchise: The Golden Arches in
Black America."
In presidential politics, you have to meet potential voters
where they are. So every four years, churches, college campuses and even
barbershops become the mainstays of the presidential campaign circuit. But,
this year, the contenders have added the McDonald’s fry station. On Sunday,
Donald Trump walked into a Bucks County, Pa., McDonald’s and told the store
owner that he was looking for a job, explaining that “I’ve always wanted to
work at McDonald’s.”
The public’s image of the typical McDonald’s employee has
overlapped with the elusive voter both parties are hoping to secure in the last
days of the race. The Trump and Harris campaigns have relied on the American
dream of industry and unbridled capitalism to tell a story about social
mobility and who can deliver it to more Americans. The story of who owns and
who works at McDonald’s is part of that story.
Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned in
campaign ads and interviews her experience working at McDonald’s as a student,
the Trump campaign has accused her of lying about her Big Mac bona fides. Even
the second gentleman Doug Emhoff’s revelation that he was a McDonald’s Employee
of the Month has not lessened the accusation that Democrats do not know or
understand the Golden Arches like Mr. Trump does. In Bucks County, Mr. Trump
repeated his unfounded claim that Ms. Harris never worked at McDonald’s.
When Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff worked at McDonald’s in the
early 1980s, the minimum wage never ticked higher than $3.35 per hour. This is
the period that solidified the impression that a majority of its employees were
like Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff, young people who temporarily worked to enhance
allowances or put money toward tuition payments. The average age of a fast-food
worker in 2021 was 26. In the ’80s, Mr. Trump — an aficionado and frequent
customer of McDonald’s — was being interviewed by news programs about his
ambitious pursuit of real estate in New York City. It’s a long way from real
estate developer to making fries and working the drive-through.
When Ms. Harris talks about McDonald’s, working-class voters
may see a future president who knows the fatigue of low-wage, service sector
jobs. According to McDonald’s most recent diversity snapshot, 20 percent of its
restaurant staff is Black and 35 percent of their co-workers are Hispanic, two
groups that can deliver a victory for Ms. Harris. When Mr. Trump shares what is
reportedly his favorite order of two Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, two Big Macs and
a shake, his fans may applaud a rich guy who doesn’t turn his nose up at fast
food. Much of Mr. Trump’s base may not relate to working at McDonald’s as much
as dreaming of gaining Mr. Trump’s wealth and owning one.
In the early days of McDonald’s franchising in the 1950s, an
array of public policies fueled a booming economy and made possible the
franchising system that ushered middle-class people into business. These
opportunities were often made available to white men, who had more access to
capital to enter the franchise business than their Black counterparts.
Additionally, McDonald’s head Ray Kroc focused his early leadership on suburbs,
many of which were racially exclusionary and provided a captive consumer base for
McDonald’s fare.
In the late 1960s, prompted by calls for racial justice
after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968,
McDonald’s began to offer franchises to African American men, in collaboration
with President Richard Nixon’s Black capitalism efforts. Mr. Nixon christened
an Office of Minority Business Enterprise to connect private companies with
public resources that could diversify business and establish small businesses
in communities that provided few options for retail and commerce.
McDonald’s was an early participant in these programs. Over
the course of a few years, Black diners in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis and
Kansas City, Mo., feted the opening of the first Black McDonald’s franchises
with great pride. Although these operators, as they are called, struggled to
get strong finance terms, maintain their business operations in economically
depressed areas and have their voices heard in the predominantly white
McDonald’s organization, many of them persevered and expanded their holdings to
other locations.
Mr. Nixon pointed to these businesses as signs of his
commitment to economic justice and enlisted a new generation of Black business
owners to articulate what he had made possible for them. In communities that
had been calling for federal action on Black unemployment, police brutality and
discrimination across all sectors, Mr. Nixon suggested those problems could be
resolved with shiny new businesses, many of them fast-food restaurants. He
reasoned that if he seeded economic initiatives in Black communities and grew
Black prosperity that way, he would not have to confront the more vexing
problems of residential and school segregation.
Mr. Nixon’s approach to generating pathways to Black wealth
was a way to attract Black voters. The Republican Party used its pro-business
appeals more broadly to co-opt Black Power supporters who saw Black-owned
businesses as a goal for building Black political and economic strength.
By the early 1980s, when Ms. Harris was donning her
McDonald’s uniform, the restaurant was a beacon of hope for minority
entrepreneurship, but also a symbol of economic marginalization of workers of
all colors. In the following decades, alarms would be sounded about the
negative impact of fast-food on health, especially on African Americans. Black
franchisees would allege racial discrimination within the system and
organizations would create campaigns to unionize fast-food workers. Despite all
of these critiques and conflicts, the government’s early relationship to
McDonald’s growth in Black America and the larger sense that business would
lead the way out of inequality has framed what Black voters are offered by both
parties.
As the 2024 election nears, both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris
have demonstrated that the McDonaldization of our politics continues. Last
week, the Harris campaign unveiled a platform for Black men that placed a
promise to create a million “forgivable loans up to $20,000 to Black
entrepreneurs” at the top of the list and included greater protection for
“cryptocurrency and other digital assets.” The inclusion of these items will
not make a sizable difference in steadying the economic precarity felt by
millions of Black families who have been vulnerable not only to the historical
legacies of racial discrimination, but also to the current challenges of rising
housing costs and inflation.
The Democrats’ business-driven approach mirrors some of Mr.
Trump’s 2020 Platinum Plan for Black voters, which promised “500,000 new
Black-owned businesses” and “access to capital in Black communities by almost
$500 billion.” There is little evidence that the Republican Party took measures
to make any of those promises real, even without Mr. Trump in the White House.
Although there are many things that Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris
disagree on, their view of the role of McDonald’s in economic mobility is
something they share. Both candidates appear to be running on the idea that
Black voters are enamored of promises of the free market more so than
guarantees for fair wages and labor protections, something fast-food workers
are all too often denied.
Marcia Chatelain is a professor of Africana studies at the
University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Franchise: The Golden Arches in
Black America.”
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