OPINION:
What could be more working-class than truck drivers? Spending 12 straight hours on the road, driving a big rig, isn’t for sissies. And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to the manner born (the son of a prime minister), with his beautifully styled hair, has the audacity to call them fascists because they protest his arbitrary COVID-19 restrictions.
Now, our own Freedom Convoy is forming up in Barstow, California. It could be on the road as early as Wednesday. According to organizers, more than 38,000 people have signed up so far.
They’re putting up fencing around the Capitol again, ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union address. The same that was in place for most of last year in response to the “insurrection” of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. Will the Army Corps of Engineers begin blowing up bridges leading to Washington to quell an imaginary uprising? And to think, we used to call it First Amendment speech.
Mr. Biden will use the Capitol Police, as Mr. Trudeau used Canadian cops, to quell demonstrations — visions of the czar’s Cossacks swinging their sabers at marchers.
Old Joe and Young Justin are cut from the same cloth.
In 2020, the president’s campaign styled him “lunch bucket Joe.” Mr. Biden went to Washington in 1973, at age 29. And there he stayed, and stayed, and stayed. The president and physical labor are not well-acquainted. Mr. Trudeau entered the House of Commons at age 36.
In the fairy tale version of socialism, socialists are champions of the working class thus, the communist symbol is a hammer and sickle — representing those who toil on farms and in factories.
In reality, Marxists/socialists gave up on the proletariat a century ago when they refused to join the revolution.
This gave rise to cultural Marxism, formulated by Antonio Gramsci, who said workers were being held back by faith and family. Like Soviet communism, progressives’ “wokeism” is aimed at deconstructing both.
This contempt for the working class started with Marx himself, who loved the proletariat — but only at a safe distance.
During his 61 years on earth, he never set foot in a factory. His collaborator, Friedrich Engels, offered to take him on a tour of one of his families’ factories. Marx refused. He didn’t want reality to intrude on his fantasies. He preferred to spend his time reading statistical tables in the library of the British Museum and turning out stultifying tracts.
Revolutionaries are invariably drawn from the middle or upper-middle class — from Vladimir Lenin to Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez to Mr. Trudeau.
Workers sense the hypocrisy of their would-be liberators. When I was a student at Boston University in the 1960s, the local (Maoist) Progressive Labor Party leader ordered her cadre to join a picket line with striking GE workers. They reported back: “Emily, these people hate us. They hit us and spit on us.”
When his soulmate Castro died in 2016, Mr. Trudeau waxed eloquently on the love the Cuban people had for their “commandant” — to such an extent that he ruled them for 50 years without ever standing for election and sent a million of them into exile.
The typical socialist has never done hard, tedious or boring labor. Most have a post-graduate liberal arts degree. At age 30, they’re still living at home. If they ever marry, they won’t have children. They think the earth is overpopulated and diapers are a capitalist conspiracy.
They fret over saving the planet, saving the trees, saving the whales, saving endangered species — anything but saving the people.
Like climate change, COVID-19 has been a godsend for the left, another opportunity to coerce people, reallocate resources and get them used to taking orders and living like the “proles” of Orwell’s “1984.” The faceless masses are here.
Many Trump supporters are drawn from the lower end of the middle class. You’re more likely to find them on a gun range or at a motorcycle rally than slapping bumper-stickers on their electric cars that urge us to “Think globally, act locally.”
In 1917, during the October Revolution, protestors were in the streets of Moscow, calling for an end to the Romanov monarchy. This time it could be patriots in America’s streets calling for the restoration of small r republican government.
“Power to the People” was a slogan from the era of protest. Guess what? We are the People.
• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.
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