Thaddeus Russell: Undercover Boss' Creepy Politics
At first glance, CBS' fully hyped new reality show, Undercover Boss, could appear to be a fairy tale scripted by the Republican National Committee. The series follows corporate chiefs whose hearts are so large and commitment to the well-being of their employees so great that they work alongside them, disguised as entry-level grunts, to learn "the truth" about their jobs and make their lives better. In the pilot episode—which aired after the Super Bowl, the most coveted launch pad on television— Waste Management president and COO Larry O'Donnell is so touched by his workers' self-sacrifice and loyalty to the company that he corrects work rules "unfair" to them, improves conditions to make them more comfortable on the job, and grants them promotions....
But what should be troubling to both conservatives and liberals is that Undercover Boss not only promotes a political ideology with a dark and little-known history, it is also the fullest expression in popular culture of the dream promised by Barack Obama.
As the show itself implies, the kind of unconditional devotion demonstrated by both the boss and workers in Undercover Boss is not normally found in the American workplace. But it is often found in the American family. And it is what President Obama promised to build between blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, government officials and citizens, and employers and employees.
American politicians often speak of family, work, and nation but few have merged the three concepts as effectively as Obama. At the core of his campaign rhetoric was the declaration that "we're all connected as one people," obligated to uphold the Biblical injunction that "I am my brother's keeper." Obama pledged to dissolve the lines among Americans and make us "come together as a single American family."
Workers like those in Undercover Boss—"men and women obscure in their labor," as the president put it in his inaugural address–keep his vision of the national family together. They "work hard and give back and keep going without complaint." They are like the automobile workers in Michigan he honored in accepting the Democratic nomination who, after they learned their plant was closing, "kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made."
Obama has also repeatedly called on business leaders to behave toward workers the way the television version of Larry O'Donnell behaves toward his. As he said in his nomination acceptance speech, "Businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road."
What to Obama is the politics of "mutual responsibility" is what political scientists have labeled "corporatism." It is a political ideology with a largely unknown, and troubled, history. Corporatism originated in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum,which responded to socialists' demands to abolish class divisions with a call for both classes to "not only be united in the bonds of friendship, but also in those of brotherly love." This required that owners treat their workers with "fatherly solicitude" and that workers "fully and faithfully perform their work."
In the United States, corporatism was advocated most famously in the 1930s. Several commentators have noticed parallels between the Obama administration's oversight of General Motors and Wall Street firms and the National Recovery Administration of the early New Deal, which oversaw industries and was charged with merging the interests of business and labor until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a massive following, sympathized with the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini—whose economic systems were also based upon corporatist principles—and directed employers to act as caring fathers and workers to behave as loyal children....