The American experience overflows with examples of ordinary people — the working class — siding with corporations and the powerful against their own economic interests.

The most tragic example is the nearly 300,000 Confederate soldiers, the “Johnnie Rebs,” who died to preserve slavery, the South’s “peculiar institution” that undercut the value of their own labor and reduced their income.

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As another Labor Day arrives, it’s not hard to see many in the present-day workforce doing the same thing, this time by accepting the notion that organized labor (e.g., teachers, auto workers, public employees) — not Wall Street and a reckless, unregulated financial industry — collapsed the economy.

Anyone who dares point this out is charged with inciting “class warfare.” And the critics are right; it is class warfare, though not quite as they mean it. There is, indeed, a fierce class war under way and the working class is losing it.

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