Redstate

By tacitus Posted in Culture — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

As we celebrate this Labor Day, it befits us to recall that we are not celebrating May Day. The former is an explicit recognition of the dignity of American workers; the latter is a glorification of the old Marxist illusion of international class solidarity. Republicans have recognized the value of labor and its intrinsic necessity from the beginning, even if the party -- along with the rest of America -- has too often been blind to the oft-bloody struggles of the American worker for a just wage and a humane life.

Read on.

Not that those struggles needed to be bloody to be noteworthy: my great-grandmother, widowed too young and with five daugthers to support in the Great Depression, worked for years in the Morton salt mines of Grand Saline, Texas, and the damage to her lungs killed her in the end: that too is a struggle as surely as any West Virginia coal war. And not that those bloodlettings were purely the faults of the owner or the company -- my own grandfather remembers well his father, a coal-hauler in southern Illinois, recounting his run-ins with the thugs of John L. Lewis.

Therein lies a crucial point: being a friend to labor, or to the worker, does not ipso facto mean being a friend to the union. Nothing benefits the worker so much as an expanding economy, expanding trade, and new jobs. And yet, it is too often the unions in the modern era that consistently throw their weight behind the candidates who wish to strangle the economy with new taxes and new spending; who oppose free trade; and who wish to constrict the labor market, and hence jobs, by opposing right-to-work laws and, especially in the public sector, meritocratic promotion. This is not to demonize the unions, which are organizations seeking to self-preserve like any other: it is to point out that whatever our misguided efforts as Republicans to woo them, they will assuredly be our electoral opponents for some time to some.

But that does not mean their members will be. The great Reagan coalition would have been impossible without the laborer and union man casting his ballot for the great liberator; and his liberating work would have been assuredly the more difficult without his own steadfast support for a certain labor union.

As a small child, I myself remember the family of refugees who stayed across the street from us before moving on to new homes elsewhere in the vastness of America. They had a daughter about my age, and we would play on the neighborhood swingsets, she chattering in Polish, and me not knowing what to say. They were workers fighting for workers' rights, which were inherently the rights of all Poles, which were inherently the rights of all men. If Labor Day celebrates anything, it is the sacrifices of these individuals. It is up to us as Republicans, not to honor and respect in America their oft-moribund, oft-regressive organizational representatives; but to honor and respect them.

And indeed we can. The popular stereotype of the Republican Party is not that of the party of the little man -- the worker, the laborer, the single parent. But the reality belies the stereotype: it is the "little person" who keeps the party going, with more and smaller contributions on average than the Democrats have had for over a generation now. I would not presume to claim an unblemished record for our party on the issue of labor and its rights -- but I would claim a proud one. And I would claim that, more than the Democrats, we are the party of the voiceless and defenseless in the modern era. Oh, they talk a big game, and doubtless many of them mean it: they sincerely believe that they are the true party of compassion for the weak, the small, and the defenseless.

Unless they need your money.

Unless you're unborn.

Unless you're a foreigner.

More on the latter very shortly to come. In the meantime, happy Labor Day.