How many workers are able (for now) to survive, but unable to earn a living? How many workers are testing agents for the end of work and the death of leisure, not because automation is the precursor to personal autonomy, but because machines threaten to render the unemployed unemployable? How many workers labor every day to preserve a scintilla of hope, in spite of the fact that Labor Day is just another day in a year without work?
The American worker has few things to celebrate this Labor Day, and fewer chances to find work in the days ahead. In New York City, he can neither afford to do nothing nor wait for the city to allow him to return to work. In Chicago, he can neither withstand months of idleness nor weather a year of discontent. In Los Angeles, he can neither pay his rent nor house his family in the streets.
In every city, he faces the cruelty of the overclass and the contempt of the underclass. Both groups hate the working class because neither group values the middle class; neither group shares the values of hard work for good pay and good works to lessen the hardships of life. Both groups are fellow travelers on a flight toward oblivion; in flight, too, from a reckoning they cannot escape.
The flight is a cultural Hindenburg. The flight is the fault not of a royal Wilhelm, but an imperial mayor named Warren Wilhelm, Jr. The mayor’s legal alias is Bill de Blasio. His bonds of political affection extend throughout America.
Members of the same party, and party to the fast undoing of schools and public safety in their respective states and cities, their bonds of partisanship stretch from Springfield to Saint Paul to Salem to Sacramento.
The bonds of one-party rule tighten while doing nothing to stanch the bleeding of jobs and people. The bonds are the gubernatorial handiwork of Pritzker and Walz and Brown and Newsom. The bonds belong to the party of Cuomo and de Blasio. The bonds connect all willing Democrats to the policies of Biden and Harris.
The bonds have an economic cost, too, because they reach maturity on Tuesday, November 3, Election Day. If a majority or plurality of voters chooses to cash these bonds instead of cashiering the underwriters of these worthless securities, the price will be too big to repay.
The bonds will be a bonus check—a blank check—for Democrats, marking the descent of blue states into a permanent state of red. The bonds will make it impossible to achieve moral or financial balance.
Workers will pay the price, as is typical, with neither an ounce of gratitude from the callous nor a penny of interest from the careless.