Have Democrats retreated so far from their workingman roots that their knee-jerk impulse is to dump on a blue-collar guy?
A self-described high school dropout living in a camper with a tarp on the roof sings a plaintive cri de coeur about blue-collar workers being shafted by the wealthy, and it is right-wing Republicans who rush to embrace him, while Democrats wag their fingers and scold him for insensitivity.
“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day,” Anthony laments. He blames the travails of workers on “rich men north of Richmond” — a swipe at Washington and elites generally. Some of his lines aren’t so different from elements in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech about “the forgotten man” or in Robert Kennedy’s elegy for “the shattered dreams of others.”
Anthony, who calls himself “just some idiot and his guitar,” seemed taken aback by the assumption that he must be a right-winger. He said his song was meant to blast politicians on both sides, including those in the GOP presidential debate who were trying to weaponize his words. “I wrote that song about those people,” he said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics figures offer a metric of the catastrophe: Average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were actually higher in 1969 than they were this year. Meanwhile, bosses are earning far, far more. Anthony makes the valid point that these disparate social crises reflect a broader pathology that is holding America back. “People talk about epidemics in this country, and the homelessness and the drug use and the lack of skilled labor and the suicide rates,” he said. “Those aren’t problems; those are symptoms of a bigger universal problem … we don’t talk about it enough.”
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