All work should be honored for its dignity. 

 

Whether laying bricks, picking up garbage, taking, performing surgery, managing a small tool & dies shop, it is all work...these people should all be considered working class.

 

Somehow, the Democratic Party, which was traditionally the party of all working and retired Americans, has fallen into that mistaken trap that a bircklayer's children for example, should "better" themselves by becoming, let's say, a lawyer.   What a crock! 

 

That is far from the Democratic Party I knew and grew up with.  Get back to your roots!

 

David Sirots agrees as he writes at In These Times: "...the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. The story revolves around a 20-year-old orphan from working-class South Boston, who opts for manual labor jobs rather than using his math genius to get a professional gig.

" 'I don't see anythin' wrong with layin' brick,' he says at one point. 'That's somebody's home I'm buildin'. Or fixin' somebody's car, somebody's gonna get to work the next day ˜cause of me. There's honor in that.'  But that outlook is simply unacceptable to his blue-collar buddies.

" 'In 20 years, if you're livin' next door to me, comin' over watchin' the fuckin' Patriots' games and still workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill you, his friend warns him. "You're sittin' on a winning lottery ticket.¦ It'd be a fuckin' insult to us if you're still here in 20 years.'

Movies may be fiction, but they represent the attitudes of the media and Hollywood elite who shape pop culture.

"...we see one of the least examined shifts in how work is presented in popular discourse” from both blue-collar and white-collar jobs being depicted as respectable ends, to blue-collar work portrayed as respectable inasmuch as it helps the laborer reach the venerated professional class.

"This is the profound but subtle message of the last scene of another movie, Office Space, in which Peter Gibbons quits his suit-and-tie cubicle job and realizes his dream is to work construction. That we are trained to see this decision as rare only shows how deep the elitists' rabbit hole goes.

"Political messages so closely mirroring Hollywood narratives may seem like life imitating art, but this is actually class imitating class. Most politicians, pundits and activist leaders” like most television producers and movie directors” have lived the professional dream, climbing the white-collar ladder. They therefore have no connection to, or appreciation of, any other kind of dream, even though it exists as an ideal to so many Americans.

"Writing in September for the online edition of the cultural/political magazine n+1, Yale Law School fellow Aziz Rana noted that in rhetorically ignoring a wide swath of America that either hasn't lived that professional life and/or has no desire to, Democrats denigrate those demographics and exacerbate the party's problem of winning back the working-class voters known as Reagan Democrats. Rana wrote:

From 1932 until 1968, the Democratic Party rested on two descriptions of American life” the American Dream as embodied by the rural farmer and the industrial worker. It gained sustenance from a respect for these accounts of middle-class achievement, economic independence and democratic inclusion. Today's party, however, has given up on establishing new forms of solidarity for nonprofessional citizens. All it has to offer is a lose-lose proposition: Join the competition for professional status and cultural privilege at a severe disadvantage, or don't join it at all.

"The same could be said of the GOP , but it has become more adept at winning on so-called "values." Republicans may economically insult blue-collar America like so many Democrats, but they have long manufactured cultural solidarity” on everything from social issues to personal security ("tough on crime" laws, anti-gun control positions) to geographical polarization (rural vs. urban rhetoric).

"Obama has eschewed the argot of blue-collar class struggle in favor of a vague and professorial consensus-ism and he has cautiously avoided populist language on issues like NAFTA that have become symbols of government disregard for non-professionals.

"Worse, when Obama's spokespeople discuss trade, they preface any vaguely populist declaration with reassurances that Obama isn't a "protectionist" ”the implication being that Democrats believe blue-collar jobs are undesirable and thus not really worth protecting.

"Fortunately for Democrats, Wall Street's meltdown may save them from themselves. The Bush administration's request for $700 billion for the financial industry has allowed Democrats” at least rhetorically” to better answer Geoghegan's which-side-are-you-on question. They can posture as the defenders of the working class" tax dollars and simultaneously lacerate the professional class in a way that will be perceived as appropriate to an already angry country.

"If Democrats conclude the 2008 campaign with a full-throated criticism of Wall Street, speculators, brokers and executives, they could help break the perception among working-class voters that they are the party interested only in such professionals. They could prove that Democrats do identify with and respect non-professionals.

"Everyone” except for a few at the top ”feels exposed, everyone feels their own vision of the American Dream imperiled, whether they believe in an agricultural, blue-collar or white-collar dream. That convergence could nudge Obama and the Democrats far enough to the populist left on taboo issues like trade and regulation that they end up showing they value more than just professional America — that they actually respect Will Hunting, even if he keeps laying brick."

Quit with the non-professional, professional; blue collar, white collar, working class, middle class terminology.  Unless people are part of the wealthy Republican few, they are either in school getting ready to work, working now, or retired workers. They are working Americans and should be Democrats, the party of the common good and working people, all working people