Workers needed: apply November 4

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

In our Main Street Cafe, having a conversation over a friendly cup of coffee, I often overhear friends at the next table talking about politics. Our fellows there are what we can call without a doubt "working class Americans," ordinary people in a small town in Southside Virginia, a solid Baptist bastion in what was once the proud tobacco belt. They are good, unpretentious, real American workers. I learn a lot just hearing them chat. What caught my attention in the past few weeks was not the varying themes of conversation, the opinions, or the political predictions. Nope, none of that. What really made me think was the almost unnoticeable tone. Something revealing that an election had already taken place among those working class men and women.

For all the hoopla and media attention that the Democratic primaries got, I say the result of that race was almost irrelevant to the American working class. The messages from Obama and Hillary were the usual Democratic "I, me, mine", that we have been hearing for decades. "I feel your pain" Bill the Great said. He did a lot of feeling, we all agree on that. The party of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson and Tip O'Neill has changed over the decades into the party of the Kennedys, the Gores, the Clintons, the Obamas. The party of those who nearly never held a job to make ends meet.

Clearly since 1968 the Democratic Party has been veering more and more towards the elites of the leftist intelligentsia and away from those sweaty workers who refuse to have Frapuccinos and keep sticking to their guns, their religion and a simple cuppa joe.

The workers of America are now very aware that there is no one there to represent them. There was a time when the Democrats were the political brokers of the labor side of the economy, while the Republicans were the brokers of the capital side. They may not have agreed in much, but they needed each other in an America where there was a lot of work to be done, and a lot of money to be made. In those days the political forces were dealing with the challenges of keeping the social contract going in a country that was unleashing creative forces unknown until then in the history of the world.

But that was then.

In the late sixties the Democrats were facing defeat on the War on Poverty programs. Entire neighborhoods across the country had turned into slums. As taxation and welfare programs grew, so did poverty. The force and popular appeal of the Civil Rights movement attracted the Democrats' attention. They decided then to change their modus operandi and quickly jettisoned the workers' interests to invest their time in political causes that had a guaranteed pseudo-high moral ground. The great thing about this long march towards equality on everything was that success did not have to be measured in fiscal or economic terms. The Democrats only had to find "victims" and "fight" for their causes.

In time the party became the champion of feminism, the sex revolution, homosexualism, free abortion, environazism, and atheism. When those causes reached their natural positive limits, then they started to foster all the "anti" movements and the Democratic Party became what it is now: the anti-family, anti-life, anti-normality federation of loons. There is no room for any guy or gal in blue overalls in the files of the blue party. If he survives until he is born, he has to face the destructive power of the educational system. After that, if he still has his natural sexuality intact, has managed to reasonably avoid catching any STD's or addictions, the survivor may have to dodge the minefield of broken families, debt and the burden of taxes that weigh on the working class like ton of bricks. Fighting alone, the plain worker as such is represented by no one in the drawing of the American social contract of today: "a working class hero is something to be."

I think the conversations in the Main Street Cafe revealed to me that there is something very important going on in American politics now. The working class is awakening to the fact that the Republicans are closer to them in the values they hold, and they feel more comfortable with the GOP. The Republican Party is also feeling the effects of this shift. They are not used to deal with popular issues. The emergence of Ronald Reagan should have shown the way but the party brainiacs (mostly of the Bush persuasion) lost that train. Now McCain, Ron Paul and others like them have seized the concept instinctively. McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate shows a clear direction, away from the ways of the old leanings of the GOP and back to the principles of Reaganism. If McCain and Palin can articulate these issues to the working class, they may be putting the last nail on the Democratic Party coffin. A new political party may be in the making. If Palin and McCain embrace the American workers and give them a voice, they may succeed in internalizing the dialog of the social contract within the Republican Party, leaving the Democrats to represent only the foolish and the unnatural.

Having gone from Labor Omnia Vincit to Mors Omnia Vincit, the Party of Death may get a taste of its own medicine, namely being aborted from having any meaningful role in our political life and join Marxism-Leninism, into the ash-heap of history.