New article from Liberating Porn. I thought about this topic after hearing a bunch of guys at my corner bar talking about how much they hate hippies (my neighborhood is mostly working class or poor).

I debated whether or not to post this, because I didn't want to offend too many posters on this board. Then again, this article targets idiot hippies, not smart ones. So anyway, I hope you all enjoy the new Lib Porn article.

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Man, I miss the blue collar left. The remnants of working class solidarity in politics are a few measly unions who, when not choking their members with corruption, are overshadowed by bored college kids who ditch class to organize rain dance protests in front of kitty litter manufacturers. Given the most common images of the left, it's not hard to figure out why so many blue collar voters flock to the warm, fuzzy man-tits of the right wing.

The Birthers, Tea Baggers, and Socialist Witch Hunters aren't the educated and refined free marketeers who pull the political strings of the right. The footsoldiers of the right are populated by many working class people who scream until their red in the face about how leftist ideals that will totally benefit them are actually pure evil supplied by homosexual black nationalists that want to bayonet pregnant white women. This sort of uninformed, mob-fueled anger cannot be excused; the blue collar soldiers of the right aren't stupid, or, at least, have the means to cure any stupidity they may have. America is not Somalia. We have public libraries where one, despite any socioeconomic stratification, can go and, ya know, read about shit. Us working class dregs have the means to inform ourselves, and we totally would, if we would just turn off the damn television.

Two billion years ago, when FDR was scaring the shit out of capitalists, the working class was generally composed of leftists. That isn't to say that working class people formed a monolithic voting structure, but they knew enough to vote for their own interests. Social safety nets were viewed as a good thing, because working class people knew that there was this little thing called the Great Depression going on, and those who weren't unemployed were crapping their pants at the prospect of losing their jobs. Working class people are still afraid of all this ominous economic stuff, but they have one brilliant invention that our predecessors didn't have: Cable news outlets!

Imagine what our talking heads would have made of FDR. Instead of thoughtful and intelligent critics of that time, like H.L. Mencken, the 1930s and 40s would have been infested with the one-liner intelligentsia, screaming that social security would plunge the country into a communistic spiral of death and gulag vacations, punctuated by kinky wheelchair sex in the Oval Office whenever Stalin made a visit. Olbermann would offer a smug smile, O'Reilly would yell at everyone, and Beck would break down into tears while throwing poop at his audience. The New Deal would have been gutted so thoroughly that the soup kitchens, which were guilty of feeding lazy communists, would have been burned to the ground and Ronald Reagan, although barely old enough to drink, would have taken office fifty years earlier and convinced half the nation's working men that voting for their own self interest was a very un-American thing to do.

We were spared this fate and instead suffered an equally horrifying event: The birth of the hippies. The New Left of the 1960s would have been awesome if those involved hadn't been such pansies. The hippies were quite an embarrassment. While all the black people were fighting for equality and the conscientious objectors and dejected veterans were saying that maybe the war in Vietnam wasn't such a good idea, a bunch of bored college kids decided that they would dress terribly and follow Abbie Hoffman around, not realizing that Hoffman was, most times, a blithering idiot.

True, the hippies helped push some good shit through our government, but mostly they just turned people off. A working class dude who spends his young adulthood in a factory only to be sent off to some dump of a country to get his legs blown off won't respond too positively to a bunch of rich kids calling him a baby killer. The so-called “Silent Majority” of the Vietnam era were probably tired of the war too, but they weren't about to try and levitate the Pentagon or, twenty years later, move to Nicaragua and join the Sandinistas. Really, with the idiocy of certain hippies, is it such a shock that so many working class people eventually shifted to the right?

This isn't a hit job on the New Left, or any of the great thinkers that gained notoriety during that era. It's the opposite, actually. The Howard Zinns and Bobby Seales were stuck in a crowd of lazy kids from the suburbs who just wanted to fuck in the mud. Those hippies lived in vans and communes and squatted in abandoned buildings because, unlike working class youth, they often had financially stable families that would bail them out later in life. Poor and working class people who decide to run off and live in a commune usually end up starving in a gutter. After all, many older yuppies of the Eighties were hippies in the Sixties. Just look at Dennis Hopper.

The modern working class, what's left of it anyway, has been monumentally fucked over. Many fled to the right wing, only to find out that Regan wasn't looking out for them, yet helped bring a dramatic rightward shift in American politics. Remember folks, the word 'socialist' was once a term of hope for the working class. Today, it's a four letter word that conjures images of Van Jones machine-gunning mega churches while screaming black pride slogans. The working class has been fooled into thinking it's the middle class, while the middle class class overspends itself stupid, and all still find the time to frequent town hall meetings where they demand that the nigg...um, I mean, “socialists” in the White House return America to its former glory.

Of course, the annoying traits of the hippie left aren't the only reasons why the working class shifted to the right. One-Liner political discourse, fear, and old fashioned misinformation have a hand in the rightward shift as well. The idea of the beer guzzling Joe-The-Plumber-esque socioeconomic conservative is a relatively new concept, hardly comparable to (not insane) working class Goldwater lovers, an abomination born out of social conservatism that bled into economic conservatism, leading to a horrendous blood disease of the American working class which, somehow, has fooled us into thinking that Rush Limbaugh isn't just as stupid as Abbie Hoffman or Ingrid Newkirk.

Lib Porn doesn't support cut-and-dry politics. Lib Porn leans to the left on many ideas, but we realize that there are some real doofuses in the left wing. Although it isn't fashionable to say so, we believe that there are some good ideas in the right wing, and maybe if we all used our heads a little, we could find great ways to mush these good ideas together. We also believe that people should be thoughtful when trying to push their ideas. PETA protesters basically kill their own argument with their theatrics, just like those doofuses who broke into a very terrible, terrible (terrible!) song at the AHIP conference. The working class left, unfortunately, gets overshadowed by loudmouth college pansies.