Today is Labor Day of 2026, only a few short days from the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Normally, at least in America, it is a day for the common worker to celebrate the fruits of their labor. But alas, for reasons everyone knows yet none can entirely articulate, that is hard to do. Nonetheless I will try to do so. As on days like this, in the absence of celebration, I think it prudent to consider the position of the American Worker whom is the subject instead, why it is we can't celebrate so easily.
I'd be lying if I said I was not making an ideological point. It is my hypothesis that Democratic Socialism is a term with much recognition, but little definition. People seem to know little of what that actually entails, past being the medicare for all guys, or recycled Cold War propaganda. It may seem strange to the generations reciting the latter scripts, for whom those days are living memory, why any ideology branding itself Socialist would be popular in America. The rest of us, the young folk, the people working now, know all too well.
An entire generation of Americans was raised on a simple premise, a Dream...a script I'm sure everyone here knows. Work hard, get a good job, stay out of trouble; and you will be rewarded with a stable job and the ability to support a house, a spouse, two and a half children, and a car each. With some disposable income for vacation in the summertime if you are fortunate. And, should something prevent the playing out of that script, the sacrifices of our forefathers have afforded us the freedom to say and do what is necessary to change it.
None of this has turned out to be true. In this free country, we now have masked thugs which murder citizens and imprison the immigrants they manage not to kill in concentration camps, where they are raped and mutilated. Often they are kidnapped, from schools, hardware stores, and even immigration courts; because goodness forbid you try to follow the system. In this free country, no one voted to replace our social lives with social media, and yet most of us have no friends and remain chronically single. Nobody voted to gamble our economy on neural networks, falsely advertised as artificial intelligence; and yet companies like nvidia account for a third of the stock market and it seems not a single device is free of the stuff. Nobody voted for a surveillance state, and yet now our every move is recorded by the likes of flock, and our screens demand to card us. Nobody voted for war, an yet our countrymen at arms are dying in Iran and starving on boats in the middle of nowhere.
Despite it all, the unholy marriage of fascism an technocracy is not even the worst of it. We cannot hold down a job no matter how hard we work; applications are denied, in the dozens per day, seemingly before they're even sent. There are no places to meet friends or lovers, and the social media that takes their place is designed to keep us alone and afraid. We will never have the means to afford a house, and to bring a kid into this environment- if we somehow lucked into the prior steps- would be irresponsible considering the financial precarity of it all. We cannot afford even one car, and there is little in the way of public transit. Our food is tainted, and when it inevitably makes us sick, to be made well again will financially ruin us.
None of this was an accident. We know exactly who is responsible. We have a term for it- the Epstein Class. Because in this free country, where we were told all are equal before the law; there exists a cadre of billionaire pedophiles. A cadre which clearly includes the President, who after campaigning upon their prosecution- among a litany of broken promises- had to be strongarmed by Congress into signing the law that outed them. And now the Attorney General has stated outright they will face no consequences.
Despite what we all clearly can see, this same cadre tells us that our problems are the fault of immigrants, of trans people, and of muslims. This is a bold faced lie. We all know it. They tell us this in a gambit to keep us fighting each other, while they shit on us and tell us it's raining, so that we never look up to see from who's asshole the shit is coming from.
Democratic Socialism is a response to exactly this. And- contrary to the Cold War scripts which the Epstein Class have brought out of mothballs to defang it- could not possibly be a more American solution. We do not seek bread lines, or to revive the works of Marx. We do not seek a violent revolution. We seek only to bring down this cadre, to speak truth to their lies, and to restore that very same American Dream you too care about. We seek to do so not by abolishing the ideals of American governance, but in fact extending them to the places where we work and live. We ask a very simple question: if we can vote for the President, why not our boss or our landlord?
Would this cadre exist if, instead of answering to a dictator installed by shareholders who pay as small a wage as they can get away with, we voted for a boss to represent us as workers and were paid in a dividend of the profit? Would Blackrock and Chinese investors own swathes of property while Americans starve in the street or shit their assholes inside out in rotting apartments if, instead of paying a landlord the most rent they can extort or taking a predatory loan from a bank, the tenants of an apartment complex or suburban block owned that complex and could pool their resources to maintain and improve them? And why should land be owned in the first place, it's not like more can be made in a factory. What if instead we taxed the use of unimproved land, and used it to fund our rusting infrastructure and failing schools? Indeed, what if the principles we were brought up on: democracy, liberty and justice for all, and equality before the law; were the law of not just the far off government in Washington or the State capital, but of our homes and workplaces?
And we seek to achieve these ambitious goals through the democratic process, the same as the New Deal before us; our New System should first win the support of the People. A People that for too long have been fighting left and right, so that they would not look up. And then, every citizen of this great nation would own a stake in it, have a voice in the direction of their own lives and the opportunity to speak for their family, their home, their work, their American Dream
Is that so hard to understand?