By Theo Baker
In the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest, the Left and the media shouldn’t be shocked at the militias’ show of armed resistance. Under political, economic and cultural siege, the underlying message behind the display of heavy weaponry is that the NRA has become the defacto affirmative action agency for a segment of Americans fearing extinction.
And the Left has nobody to blame but itself.
Following World War II the Left represented the working class through the formation and support of labor unions. Called commies, Trotskyites and Socialists the industrial-age unions fought for a living wage, workplace safety, pensions and social justice. Despite race and gender inequality at the time, union members appreciated a powerful American organization with their best interest in mind that could protect and further their hard-earned way of life.
It was a time when the American dream, on steroids from victory in World War II, meant that immigrants coming to this country could strive to integrate themselves into society through steady employment. For international newcomers the notion of being American included a personal transformation to the ideal of upward mobility, language proficiency, educated children and freedom of expression despite struggles against prejudice from incumbent groups. Left-leaning labor unions facilitated the economic empowerment that enabled people to achieve a higher degree of success and financial independence.
Come the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s and 1970s, cultural hyper-awareness and radicalization inspired people of color to demand ethnic studies programs at colleges and universities. This cataclysm gave rise to hyphenated identities: African-American, Mexican-American, Italian-American and Native-American. Likewise, the concurrent sexual revolution created gender-identity curriculums that laid the groundwork for today’s gender fluidity where the sex you identify with supersedes the genitalia assigned in the womb.
These new-millennium Leftists gained affirmative action and civil rights legal triumphs for ethnic and gender minorities. In the process, the Left abandoned the social and legal causes on behalf of traditional working families at a time when digital innovations such as robotics, Just in Time Manufacturing and global communications networks were starting to replace humans.
Technology in the workplace took root when the middle class felt under siege as their merit-based American dream was undermined by legally sanctioned minority quotas on the job and in the schools. Independent upstanding citizen struggling to make ends meet found themselves thrown under the bus by the Left − sacrificed in the name of Political Correctness and globalization. The bleeding hearts of the Left believed that a worker in Vietnam deserved their $100-per-month job more than the American earning a living wage.
The ever-increasing success of the Left’s agenda bled into anti-gun and anti-hunting vitriol. Unaware or unconcerned that hunting was a tradition and rite-of-passage in communities throughout America’s heartland, firearms and hunting enthusiasts felt pressure to seek representation in a spirit similar to the organized labor renaissance of the 1950s.
So in the brief period following World War II leading to the Cultural Revolution endemic to the 1960s and 1970s, the Left moved away from supporting the working class to fighting for identity dignity and firearms constraints (as animal rights became the next logical cause célèbre). At the same time, globalization and automation eroded labor unions. Workers suffered from a combination punch to the head and gut that triggered a similar sense of alienation in their own country that immigrants from other countries felt upon arriving here. Who was going to champion the incumbent working class now that the Left chased trendy, media-friendly interests to the detriment of their time-honored commitment to legitimate labor?
A report dated January 26, 2017 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the union membership rate − the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions was 10.7 percent in 2016 − had dropped 0.4 percentage point from 2015. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.6 million in 2016, declined by 240,000 from 2015. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers. And guess what? Nobody cared. The Left still clung to the anti-labor battle cry of White Privilege when in fact a growing body of evidence was proving the contrary. The White middle class was on the ropes (and consequently Donald Trump became President).
The Obama presidency fueled the NRA’s membership and record-setting gun sales through the paranoia of impending firearm ownership restrictions concurrent with the Left’s aggressive campaigns for identity and gender equality that undermined people’s core sense of security in fly-over states. With unions hobbled by new management theories and technological advances, and the prevailing dread that minorities were stealing jobs, the NRA’s messages of freedom, self-reliance and empowerment resonated with the disenfranchised middle class. For them, the NRA had, in fact, become their own affirmative action lobby to rival the NAACP, The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Organization for Women and The Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The militia’s show of force in the Charlottesville demonstrations of August 2017 constituted a display of power that, in the ultra-right collective consciousness, quashed the snowflake rhetoric of identity politics and nanny-state ethnic and gender favoritism. It was the NRA, along with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, that have fought for the mainstreaming of concealed firearms and military-grade semi-automatic weapons and in the right hands inadvertently turned them into tools of social engineering for the disenfranchised working class as we witnessed in Charlottesville.
Ultimately, we have to ask “What outcome did the Left expect?” President Obama’s push for equal rights certainly won in the courts, but the angry backlash to the Left’s growing arrogance of overrunning desperate traditional Americans was clearly bulking up NRA members directly under the turn-up nose of the Left. A showdown was inevitable. And unfortunately it was tragic.
Thanks to the Left’s abandonment of America’s working class, the NRA can now, more than ever, substantiate itself as “the oldest civil rights organization in the country” with some five-million members – many discarded by the Left.
Theo Baker is a journalist living in the American South. He’s author of the novel “The Pretty Boy Gun Club,” available on Amazon at https://goo.gl/AtTMJW