The roots of May Day

"Today's marches and boycotts are restoring to May Day something of its old civic meaning and working-class glory. Even some of the most viciously anti-union employers of Latino labor, like Perdue, Cargill, and Tyson Foods, kept their factories closed. As in the crucial struggles that began more than a century ago, today's marches have forged a link among working-class aspiration, celebrations of ethnic identity, and insistence on full American citizenship. It's an explosive combination. And it could revive and reshape liberal politics in our time."

Crucially too, it seems to me, this movement has nothing to do with America's counter-productive and masochistically self-destructive academic left, the kiss of death to social action for decades. But watching the marching crowds on TV was at least partly watching people walk straight out of the Republican party's "big tent".