How Grover Cleveland used Labor Day to divide the Left

CFP: Almost no one pays tribute to the American labor movement on Labor Day nowadays because America, despite its leftward drift in recent years, is not a nation that exalts brawn over brains or socialism over capitalism.

Americans don’t care about President Obama’s final Labor Day message, a mixture of facts and well-worn leftist propaganda.

“For generations, every time the economy changed, hardworking Americans marched and organized and joined unions to demand not simply a bigger paycheck for themselves, but better conditions and more security for the folks working next to them, too,” Obama said in his weekly address. “Their efforts are why we can enjoy things like the 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, and a minimum wage. Their efforts are why we can depend on health insurance, Social Security, Medicare and retirement plans.”

“All of that progress,” he added, “is stamped with the union label.”

Americans are smart enough to take Obama’s socialist claptrap with a grain of salt. This is a man who derides hard work, saying “you didn’t built that,” and “when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.”

Americans respect hard work but they do not engage in the hateful Marxist tribalism and redistributionism that consumes backwards, kleptoparasitic states like Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.

“I think most people consider Labor Day an end-of-summer three-day weekend,” David Ray Papke, a law professor at Marquette University, told the Huffington Post. “Very few Americans stop to reflect on the working man, on labor, on the union movement or any of those things.”

And that is a wonderful thing.  MORE