A Real Worker's Revolution
I doubt this is what Karl Marx had in mind.
The most startling change in America’s political dynamic has been the tectonic shift in party identification of the “working class” from Democrats to Republicans. Since 2008, Democrats have lost roughly 30 percent of the “working class” vote, and in our two-party system, that means the Republicans (Trump) have picked them up.
I put “working class” in scare quotes because this shift has little if anything to do with class (as we traditionally think of it). The conventional wisdom is that identity groups vote for “what’s best for them” and those with their shared identity. Democrats’ new (“new” new, but really yesteryears’ shopworn) emergent focus on class is just a proxy for their tired, losing slogan about “kitchen table issues”, which elites like Chuck Schumer pretend helps “working class” voters identify with him. Recall from another era when Horndawg Clinton emoted “I feel your pain.” That’s the drift.
But there is something different going on here, and it’s big. The “working class” shift is just a symptom of that something.
Traditionally, Democrats have played on envy to motivate voters - the desire to have what others have. But listen to Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond (if you haven’t in a while). There’s absolutely zero envy in that song. If anything, it’s a bitter resentment of those who’ve never worked a day in their lives dictating the rules for the rest of us.
This sentiment crosses all class and racial lines - because there’s a different class of people comprised of all classes and races who have been (or currently are) workers. People who get their hands dirty, who know how to do useful things, who’ve put in the time and effort to overcome adversity.
While much has been made of the (recent) propensity to vote Democrat with higher education attainment and higher income, the counterpoint to that is where all the resentment to the elites has shifted: to Republicans, if you’re a worker, irrespective of your degrees or financial status. This is a multi-class movement.
This hasn’t always been the case, in fact, it’s a very recent change. Since Trump, you could say. Because for the past 70 years or so, the Republican “brand” was the country club set. To be fair, over the years, many working class and middle class people voted Republican despite the snooty exclusivity, because of their aspiration to one day “join the club” themselves. They believed in the mantra of working hard and getting ahead. For sure, the Republican party’s professional establishment cynically exploited that belief for a very long time. Like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, they somehow always pulled the ball away at the last moment. Nothing ever changed. It was the uniparty way.
Until now. Until Trump upended the Republican party and made it about workers. And not just blue-collar workers - workers everywhere. Strivers. Achievers. People from Oliver Anthony to Elon Musk.
I don’t believe the “social surveys” or political polling have yet to tap into this theme. So you’re seeing it here first.
While the “working class numbers for Trump” in the election results are irrefutable, the theme that Trump tapped into has nothing whatsoever to do with “class” (at least not as Democrats understand it) - and has everything to do with the value of work: vocation, aspiration and how one perceives the correlation between effort and reward. People unafraid of hard work have left the Democrats.
Under Democrats, work has been disparaged - treated as “dirty” or undesirable, something to be avoided. Something to lift people out of. “I don’t want my kids to struggle.” Democrats have invented countless programs and policies to distort the correlation between struggle and reward - condescendingly substituting in “free” government handouts to placate the wants and needs of the underclass. Vote buying.
But struggle is a necessary part of the human condition. We need struggle because in struggle and sacrifice we find meaning. Things are of value because we worked for those things - we clearly visualize the hours, days, weeks, seasons, years and decades of effort and sacrifice put into attaining (or obtaining) something. Something that is never guaranteed. That gives things meaning. It gives life itself meaning because it associates our lives with purpose.
Now it’s true that all of us are born lazy - or at very least, with a propensity to seek an easier way. That’s normal. We all fight it. It’s coded into our “lizard brain” to want something for nothing. This is evident everywhere in the animal kingdom as survival itself is predicated on securing food and reproduction with the least hazard and least effort. Humans are an evolutionary product of this, and while our intellectual attainments may be higher order, we’re still fundamentally wired to avoid effort to the extent possible.
We can’t change that. But as higher thinking creatures, we can understand the inherent problems with laziness - that we get addicted to the free lunch, such that when the “free lunch” disappears we’re left desperate and destitute. We work to avoid the “freebies” precisely for that reason - we don’t trust the free lunch because we know there are stings attached.
So laziness can be an addiction of sorts. It’s not just the false thrill of getting something for nothing - it becomes a dependency when you lose the ability to produce anything of value for yourself. This is why they have signs in the parks that say “Don’t feed the bears” after all.
Why would human beings be radically different? The fact is, we’re not. And this has been well-understood for hundreds, probably thousands of years. It’s just now “an issue” because we live in an age of easy survival where we’re far removed from the soil and the blood of animals. We simply move into shelters - we don’t build them ourselves. We order food - we don’t find it or create it. It’s just there like everything else we take for granted: heat, light, potable water.
The only protection we have against ennui (and the resultant mental illness) associated with this easy lifestyle is work. One has to work in order to have the comfortable lifestyle. And we save and invest and pinch pennies for that day when we’re no longer able to work. This is normal, healthy behavior.
If you look at Trump and who Trump has surrounded himself with - this time - you’ll see workers. These are people who’ve built things, risked, put in the effort, sacrificed to achieve things - people who eschew the Free Government Cheese. No better example is Vice President JD Vance - who started out as a dirt-poor Appalachian kid with a drug-addicted mother. JD enlisted in the Marines and clawed his way out of poverty, and never lost his work ethic no matter how much he’s attained.
These are people who don’t like spending money - their own or ours. If they can, many of them cut their own grass, cook their own food, clean their own toilets, change their own oil and do their own laundry. They are estranged from the class of patrician spendthrifts who’ve ruled Washington for decades - the “elites” or so-called “best and brightest” who won’t be bothered with life’s “little things” that are so much the focus of Normal Lives.
Trump’s people share an identity with workers everywhere. We prefer the meaning of work to the lazy, addictive alternative. We aren’t afraid to do the math, to pick up a shovel and to learn through effort.
This is the Real Worker’s Revolution. It’s about work ethic, not class. It’s all about Rich Men North of Richmond getting fat off of unearned entitlement while everybody else we know goes to work for a living.
Don’t tell that to Democrat thought leader Ruy Teixeira. While Ruy is indeed a thoughtful and intelligent Democrat, he’s trapped in the same doom loop as other Dems. He wrote a nice article about how Dems need to be talking to the “working class” - as if America today is akin to the pre-Soviet days of exploiters and exploited. I’m not sure - if Democrats could lower themselves to talking to “dirty people” at all - what they’d “talk about”. The price of eggs? Their heating bill?
The problem with Democrats is they’re now the party of government dependence - which is a huge group of people estranged from productive work. Working people, of all classes, are repulsed by what our government has become: a massive disincentive against productive work. They pay people tax dollars to not work at all - or as has been revealed among legions of government “workers”: sit at home and collect a huge paycheck and benefits for no real effort - or no recognizably productive effort.
What government workers (and their millions of beneficiaries) have enjoyed (up until now) does not exactly reflect what Karl Marx had in mind - if he had anything in mind. It’s reminiscent of the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, while we’re the exhausted workhorse Boxer looking in from the farmhouse window:
This is the new dividing line - workers vs nonworkers. It has nothing to do with class. Trump alluded to this throughout the campaign, and now Musk’s DOGE has ripped the mask off the ugly facts we long suspected. And the Democrat coalition isn’t limited to just government, government workers and the wealthy NGO class - it exists throughout academia and the media as well as Big Pharma, Big Agra, Wall Street bazillionaires and the academy. The elites - all living it up on an endless river of unearned, unproductive federal cash, taxed from the likes of Oliver Anthony.
In this context, we just can’t help but recall Peter Strzok’s text message to his lover about “smelly Walmart people” and how this is “what Trump support smells like.” Yes, those stinking workhorses who pinch pennies to make ends meet - and pay the salaries of those pampered, perfumed pigs who rule over us.
I guess we’re ungrateful.
Afeura!