Democratic Party needs to go back to its roots
Out late at night with nothing special to do? Mosey over to Wal-Mart and look around, not at the merchandise but at the men and women stocking the shelves.
Around midnight you’ll notice pallets halfway blocking the aisles as an assortment of individuals cut open crates of goods, bend down, pick up and put these in their proper place for customers to come along and snatch up.
The people working the late shift at Wal-Mart and similar retail stores are old and young, white and black. They are different, but the same: they are hard workers, many dedicated to their families. The younger ones may be holding down their first job. The older ones their last.
In any event, they are not getting paid all that well, probably not much more than minimum wage. As a result, making ends meet is a struggle.
They also have this in common: they are the forgotten men and women of our politics.
True, many of them do not vote; maybe they have never voted. For many, politics consists of phonies grubbing for power and prominence; to their way of thinking, politicians are mostly crooks, shysters, charlatans. And those that aren’t are fools or incompetents.
Government and politics are thought of as irrelevant – so irrelevant they are hardly thought of at all.
The workers share some of the blame for this sad state of affairs. The greatest blame, however rests on the shoulders of the politicians themselves.
Thirty or more years ago the political party that for decades had been their patron largely turned its back on these Americans of modest means. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany was transformed into the party of Gloria Steinem and Harvey Milk.
The party of full employment became the party of immigration reform.
Not that immigration reform or gender equality or gay rights are bad things. The problem is, these and other matters have largely supplanted, for the Democratic Party, concern for the welfare of working stiffs like the men and women at Wal-Mart.
History will praise Barack Obama for giving the country Obamacare. It’s the third leg of a compact with present and future generations – measures reaping huge benefits for millions of Americans. Social Security was a product of the 1930s and Medicare of the 1960s.
The Affordable Care Act, based on a proposal first put forward by the conservative Heritage Foundation and deeply enmeshed in the competitive business marketplace, was a product of the president’s determination to complete a journey that began with Republican Theodore Roosevelt 100 years ago.
But just as President Obama has frequently walked the walk, he has failed, many times, to talk the talk, and that’s significant.
At his press conference following the mid-term elections, the president ticked off some people he would be fighting for during the final two years of his presidency. These included single moms and college students. Nothing wrong with that.
He did not mention the people who work at Wal-Mart, however. He did not mention blue collar factory workers or truck drivers, either. He did not mention coal miners, the few that remain.
Something is wrong when, as in the mid-terms, five states vote to boost their minimum wage at the same time that the party of the minimum wage was going down to crushing defeat in those same five states.
It’s incongruous that the party that passed the Wagner Act in the 1930s, igniting the labor movement and revolutionizing the politics of western Pennsylvania (and Fayette County), should lose the support of white working class Americans in 2014 to the Republicans by an astounding 30 percent.
Democrats have to get back on track. It won’t be easy. In the decades since Hubert Humphrey took his last breath, a yawning cultural and political gap has developed between working people and the liberal core of the Democratic Party.
It is far too frequently the case that people who consider themselves enlightened privately deride the people who work at places like Wal-Mart. They don’t like their accents; they can’t abide their high school diplomas; they don’t understand, let alone appreciate, their affinity for hunting and guns.
As late as the 1960s, the wellbeing of working stiffs was a central concern of the Democratic Party.
Then the party drifted off to embrace other constituencies. The challenge for Democrats is to hold on to those while steering back to pick up the working Joes and Janes of America, to once again include them in a winning political coalition.
Half a century ago the folks working at Wal-Mart would likely have been laboring for good incomes in our western Pennsylvania mines and steel mills. They haven’t changed. The country and the world did. But that is a discussion for another day.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books of local history: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.