When did the word labor become something we mouth at each other across a dinner table the way other generations whispered cancer? I ask because on Thursday afternoon, while several hundred thousand Americans poured into the streets of more than a thousand cities to demand the right to be treated as people who work for a living, the capital I have covered for thirty years was preoccupied with whether 16th Street would be passable by six.
The night before, my friend Eliza had us over for what she insists on calling a kitchen supper, which means the same china she uses for everything else. The talk turned, briefly, to May Day. “Are you going downtown tomorrow?” someone asked, in the tone you’d use to ask about a thunderstorm. A man across from me — a lobbyist I will describe, charitably, as bipartisan — said he’d told his assistant to work from home, because “these things get rowdy.” Nobody at the table asked what “these things” were. Nobody asked who was marching, or why, or for what. We moved on to the lamb.
This is, I have come to believe, the actual story of American politics in 2025: not the protests themselves, which have grown larger and more numerous than any organized labor action in a generation, but the practiced, almost choreographed ability of the people who run this town to treat them as a localized weather event. A thousand cities. Teachers and warehouse workers and nurses and graduate students and line cooks and the people who deliver your groceries. And the cable chyrons from yesterday afternoon, which I clipped because I am a masochist, read TRAFFIC ALERT: DEMONSTRATIONS EXPECTED.
Demonstrations expected. As if labor were a kind of pollen.
The bipartisan lobbyist, warming to his theme over the second bottle, explained to the table that the trouble with “the labor stuff” is that it has become — and I am quoting now — “culturally downscale.” He meant this as analysis. He meant that the Democratic donor class finds worker embarrassing the way it once found union embarrassing, and that the Republican donor class finds it actively threatening, and that the only people in Washington who use the word without flinching are the four senators everyone else avoids in the elevator. He said all of this approvingly. He said it the way a man explains the weather to a child.
I want to be clear about what I am describing. I am not describing a failure of one party. The current administration spent the last six weeks gutting the National Labor Relations Board and reclassifying half a million federal workers as fireable-at-will, and the opposition spent those same six weeks workshopping the phrase working families in front of a focus group in suburban Cleveland. Working families is what you call workers when you cannot bring yourself to say workers. It is the word labor with the calories removed.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent the better part of three decades at the National Archives and has the deadpan to prove it, called me Thursday night to point out that the FBI used to generate hundreds of pages of surveillance product on May 1 every year, going back to the 1920s. Entire careers were built tracking who marched and where and with whom. “Now,” she said, “the bureau’s busy investigating librarians.” She said it without laughing. Judy almost never laughs.
What I keep returning to is the silence. Not the silence of the streets — the streets were loud, the streets were the loudest thing in America yesterday — but the silence afterward, the silence at the dinner table, the silence in the Sunday show bookings I can already predict will not include a single organizer from a single one of those thousand cities. The silence of a political class that has decided, across both parties, that the people who do the actual work of the country are a logistical nuisance to be routed around.
You can tell what a country has stopped believing in by what it can no longer say at dinner. We can say a great many things at dinner now — things that would have ended careers in 1995, things that would have ended marriages in 1975. What we cannot say, apparently, is the simplest sentence in the American vocabulary: those people work, and they would like to be paid, and they would like not to die at it.
The marchers said it Thursday. They said it in a thousand cities. The question is whether anyone in this one was listening, or whether we will simply wait for the traffic to clear.