Trego's Mountain Ear

I was listening to Victor David Hanson – and his comments suggested that Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition is becoming a working class coalition whose members are realizing that they have more issues  in common with other working class folks than they do with folks that are ethnically or racially the same.  It’s a thought – not since Baker’s Rebellion have we seen this sort of thing.

The very idea that Trump’s MAGA coalition could be a group composed of workers who are aware of, and act on their shared interest in living a better life would shock the grad student teaching the typical introductory sociology course.  This could logically occur in grassroots labor movements – I’m writing from Trego, where some Wobbly organizing occurred – but to most people the idea of a Republican presidential candidate building a large movement based on their shared class consciousness doesn’t seem right.

Yet in those early days of the Republican party, there are times when it’s hard to tell whether a quote comes from Lincoln or Karl Marx.  I’ve seen no references to Communists in Jeff Davis’ Cabinet, or Communist Confederate Generals – but Lincoln’s Union officers included Major General August Willich (who challenged Karl Marx to a duel because Marx was too conservative), Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig, Major General Franz Siegel, and Brigadier General Louis Blenker.  After listening to the Russia Collusion Hoax of 2016, there is a certain irony to seeing Trump take a few pages from the Manifesto and return the Republican Party to its Red roots.

To read a bit more on the connection between Karl Marx, the early Communists, and the beginnings of the Republican party, click Abraham Lincoln and the Ghost of Karl Marx – Abbeville Institute – the article explains

“In his first annual message—his first State of the Union address—in December 1861 he ends the address with a peroration on what the Chicago Tribune at the time called a meditation on “capital versus labor.” “Capital is only the fruit of labor,” Lincoln elaborated, “and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Those words could have come almost directly from Karl Marx, but they were spoken by Lincoln. Fascinating, since the sixteenth president was an avid reader of the father of Marxism and corresponded with him during the War Between the States. Abraham Lincoln was not a declared socialist, certainly not in the modern sense.  But Lincoln and Marx ⁠— born only nine years apart ⁠— were contemporaries. They had many mutual friends, read each other’s work, and, in 1865, exchanged letters.”

Click the link and read more about the connection.