I’m a proud redneck. Not because I run a small farm or because I happen to be born in Texas, though both are true. I’m a redneck because I was born into the working class, remain in the working class and openly champion our shared cause. I wear it like a badge of honor. And I’ll tell you right now: when Senator Chuck Schumer bragged that Democrats could afford to lose working-class voters as long as they picked up “two moderate Republicans in the suburbs,” it was utter betrayal.
That was in 2016, before the political earthquake. Schumer said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Translation: abandon the union hall, embrace the cul-de-sac. And what happened? The bottom fell out. The party of labor walked out on labor, and into the vacuum slithered the demagogues.
America has a labor history the textbooks bury in the footnotes because it scares the hell out of the powerful. Ludlow, 1914 — miners and their families slaughtered by the National Guard and Rockefeller’s thugs for daring to demand a life beyond hunger. Blair Mountain, 1921 — ten thousand miners, rifles slung and red bandanas around their necks, took up arms against coal barons and their bought sheriffs. That’s where the word redneck comes from, not from some caricature of ignorance, but from solidarity written in blood.
You can thank them, by the way, for what little rights we still have. The eight hour workday, weekends — those rights came out of the blood of the working class. Now those reforms are being eroded without much fuss.
Those stories are buried because the powerful fear we will repeat them. They don’t want you to know your great-grandparents fought wars not overseas, but here — against the bosses who ground them into dust. They don’t want you to realize that you still can.
Meanwhile, Democrats rebranded themselves as managers of decline. They traded the steel mill for the hedge fund, the picket line for the donor cocktail hour. The result? A hollowed-out working class sold opioid dreams while CEOs stack record profits. The warehouse worker with no bathroom breaks, the gig driver waiting for scraps of tips, the adjunct professor teaching three classes without health insurance — all told to be grateful for the “booming economy” while staring down eviction notices.
And when people are abandoned, when they’re told their lives don’t matter unless they live behind a white picket fence in some manicured suburb, they reach for anyone who says “I see you”. That’s how fascism creeps in. It feeds on betrayal. On the void where solidarity once lived.
Look at Europe, where far-right movements surge in countries once proud of their social safety nets. Look at Brazil, where agribusiness barons bankroll authoritarian strongmen.
Look here, at America, where demagogues who never worked a day in their lives wrap themselves in the flag and claim to speak for real Americans, while selling you out to the same boardrooms.
This isn’t left vs. right. That’s a carnival trick. It’s working people versus the hoarders of wealth. Always has been. Always will be so long as we base the value of things on the accumulation of capital.
This is how Democrats lost the narrative. The far right learned something from the 1930s: how to do it better next time. Meanwhile, the liberals thought the Gilded Age was the best thing ever, but this time we can slap rainbows on it and call it progress. This is how democracy dies, to the thunderous applause of the donor class.
So yes, I am a redneck. And I’m proud of it. Proud because it means something. It means my people once wore red bandanas in open revolt against the barons of capital. It means I come from a class that can shut this country down if it ever remembers its strength. It means solidarity is not nostalgia, but a necessity.
They want you to forget. They want you to bicker over parties, over race, over geography, while they cash checks written with your blood, sweat and tears. They want you too tired, too busy, too divided to see the truth.
They want you to forget your power.
Don’t.
