Labor is Politically Orphaned…For Now

Something that I’ve been wanting to write about, but I can’t fully form my thesis, is how labor has no home in either party. Democrats were once, sort-of, the party of labor, but their advocacy for the working man often veered very close to communism, with its hostility to private enterprise.

With the Democrat Party now controlled by the anti-American climate and gender crowd, patriotic working people have drifted toward the Republican Party. But much of the GOP leadership and its financial supporters are still actively hostile to blue collar Americans, preferring to outsource manufacturing to countries that use slave and child labor rather than pay Americans a living wage.

Labor has no party, and that is a situation that cannot hold indefinitely.

Maybe that is my thesis. A huge voting block that is scorned by the leadership of both parties is setting the stage for something to change, but I don’t know what it will be or how.

There was a piece by George Liebmann today at The American Conservative that I found interesting. Although it doesn’t discuss how Labor is politically orphaned right now, it does discuss how the Democrats abandoned Labor.

“The Democrats and Labor: The Democratic Party was once the party of Labor. That has changed.” [The American Conservative – 9/04/2023]

American manufacturing has dwindled, along with interest in the related parts of its educational system, engineering, and high school vocational education. Labor Day Democratic celebrations have become almost as rare as politically incorrect Jefferson-Jackson Dinners.

A major difference between Franklin Roosevelt and modern Democrats is how they like to spend government assistance money. While I am no fan of Franklin Roosevelt, at least his federal programs paid people for labor, not to be on the dole. As Liebmann notes, that is a far cry from Obama’s assistance programs, which paid people not to work.

The recovery program carried out through various New Deal agencies—the PWA, WPA, CCC, and NYA—in the 1930s had been a work program, not a dole, founded on Roosevelt’s declared premise that “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the national spirit.” The Obama administration, by contrast, engaged in a sub rosa expansion of cash relief, through extended unemployment compensation, food stamps, and lax administration of the Social Security disability program.

The people whom Hillary smeared as being “deplorables” and whom Obama smeared as being “bitter clingers” were abandoned by the Democrats. To a great extent, the working man didn’t leave the Democrat Party, he was kicked out.

On this Labor Day, we will hear more from the Democrats about the Stonewall gay rights demonstration against behavior-oriented health insurance premiums than we will about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that gave rise to the labor-protective legislation of the Al Smith and FDR administrations.

The working men and women of America will not remain politically powerless forever.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 05:36 PM

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