[pepperonikkid]

Shutdown: Who Is the Voice of the People?




https://www.americanthinker.com
By Christopher Chantrill
January 15, 2019


Article:

One of the conceits of our liberal and lefty friends is that they are the Voice of the People, the voice of the marginalized who, but for the political activism of the left, would never be heard.

This conceit was probably closest to the truth when Educated Youth began advocating for the working class in the 19th century. In any industrial city, the workers, I imagine, far outnumbered the middle class until at least the middle of the 20th century. What the workers wanted, was… Yes, what exactly did they want? Free education for their children, certainly; the right to organize labor unions. Wage and hour laws, for sure. But I don't think the workers were clamoring for cradle-to-grave social insurance. That was the idea of Educated Youth, implemented first by the reactionary Bismarck in Germany to steal a march on the Social Democrats.

What about the Civil Rights era? Here, all of a sudden, the Voice of the People was muted, and the whole affair was cast in moral terms. That's because the southern Negroes were a minority; if it was just a matter of The People, we would never have had a Civil Rights Act, because The People at the time were white working-class and lower middle-class GIs from World War II, children of immigrants. By the way, we still have the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 on the books. The idea there was to discriminate against blacks from the South competing for construction jobs in the northern cities.

Because the moral case for civil rights worked so well in the Sixties, our liberal and lefty friends have revised and extended it to cover all manner of political issues. That is why we live today in such a tangle of identity politics and moral witch-hunts. With every new issue that our liberal and lefty friends advocate they are trying to combine the Voice of the People notion with the blacks-and-civil-rights morality play that worked so well in the 1960s.

You may have noticed that our liberal and lefty friends keep getting blindsided by The People. They got blindsided in the 1970s by Richard Nixon and the "silent majority." They got blindsided in the 1990s when the voters gave the Congress to the Republicans in 1994, courtesy of HillaryCare. They got blindsided by the Tea Party of 2009-10 that revolted against ObamaCare and Obama's "fundamental transformation." They got blindsided by the "deplorables" of 2016.

Golly, do you think there is a pattern here?



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