There was a time when the Democratic Party adhered to the needs of the working class. It advanced public services for the collective good and met corporate greed with rigorous regulation. One such visionary among the Democrats was Frances Perkins, the U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It was under Perkins’s guidance that Roosevelt passed the monumental New Deal, which included the Social Security Act, the minimum wage, child labor bans and, for the first time, protections for workers unionizing.
Thanks to her activism, millions of Americans have since reaped the benefits of old-age pensions and labor rights. Perkins was one of those politicians who held the belief that the power of government should be flexed to improve the lives of everyday people, and she used her position to apply pressure on those above her to pursue it. She was also the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.
Today, our Democratic Party is overrun by moderates who have forgotten working people. Congressmen like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who accept money from the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and investment company BlackRock, cater to the demands of billionaire donors instead of defending workers’ interests.
Former Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned independent from West Virginia, raked in campaign cash from oil conglomerates and then famously refused to fund President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act that would have guaranteed paid leave, universal Pre-K and subsidies for education.