Keep Resisting!(VOX POPULIST) (Column)

• Date: 01 August 2018
• Author: Hightower, Jim

"Progress is a nice word," said Bobby Kennedy. "But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies."

Over the decades, that sobering reality has confronted every group of Americans who've endeavored to advance our society's democratic ideals of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all. From the revolutionaries of the 1770s to today's grassroots rebels engaged in multiple struggles for democratic rights, every inch of progress has been vehemently (and usually violently) opposed by entrenched enemies of change.

Invariably, the upstart activists of democracy movements find themselves trivialized as unworthy and uppity by elite protectors of the status quo. "What is it those people want, anyway?" they ask with dismissive sneers.

In the early 1900s, that question was answered succinctly and eloquently by Samuel Gompers, the founding president of the American Federation of Labor. Union organizers were routinely oppressed and brutalized by rapacious...