We had just finished installing the shelves for the bakery section when the music system popped to life. The first song it played? Salt ’n’ Pepa’s “Whatta Man.”

It was appropriate on many levels. For one, we were building a grocery store from the ground up, which took a lot of muscle, and “Whatta Man” is a paean to strong, faithful, intelligent, and confident men. In these heated times, however, the song (which came out in the early 1990s) reminded me of a time before politics took over our lives.

“Whatta Man” is a banging dance track, conjuring up the days when Americans could go out, socialize, get away from the “real” world, and cut loose without eyeing one another with political suspicion. It’s part of the soundtrack to a saner time when people could do things without being plugged into the political matrix. Indeed, one could go an entire summer and never hear a thing about politics unless one actively sought it out. Those days are gone.

Still, there is a part of America that survives and thrives from politics. A couple months ago I was hired to help a new grocery store launch. The store is somewhere in the American Mid-Atlantic region and part of a larger retail operation that has seen tremendous growth in the last two decades. Part of that growth is opening a new, huge, and shiny food store in the busy part of town. A group of about 20 of us was hired to do the grunt work.

We mount shelves, unload truck deliveries, move equipment around, and occasionally have to start a shift at 4 a.m. We’re preparing for an August opening. As I’ve written in the past, I think every journalist in America need to spend at least a season every few years working a manual labor job. Not only would it boost their testosterone, something that’s in short supply among the media, but it would make them confront a striking fact: Outside the green rooms, anchor desks, and op-ed pages, America is working and working beautifully.

America, in what is probably news to most journalists, is still a country where a group of us guys—black, white, Asian, Christian, Muslim, and everything in-between—can go to work, get along, form friendships, and flourish. I know some liberals are appalled by the ”excesses” and “conspicuous consumption” in our country, but while stocking all those rows of spaghetti sauce, seafood, bread, candy, salad, and soup, I just felt gratitude. My Irish ancestors had to come here to escape famine and British repression. The freedom that produces this so-called excess is pretty darn sweet.

America is forward-looking even as it retains many worthwhile traditions. One day at the store a young guy whose parents immigrated to the United States from Cameroon was talking to me about music. I’m in my 50s and he’s in his 20s, but we found common ground while discussing the greatness of Kendrick Lamar, a rapper and songwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Lamar started as gangsta rapper, even if a kind of poetic and insightful one. Later, however, he developed his sound to accommodate more jazz influences. As our conversation soared over stocking frozen pizzas, it occurred to me: The hopeful, resourceful, future-oriented, and optimistic America is not composed of those banging away at computers to produce content for the pages of The New York Times or segments for cable news or researching in some office on Capitol Hill. Those people, like President Joe Biden, are essentially decaying in their Procrustean beds. 

The world of the working class was once more familiar to the elite because America’s wealthy once put their teenage kids to work on summer jobs doing construction, mowing lawns, or bagging groceries. It gave us muscle memory we would have the rest of our lives if we ever chose to do that kind of work again. These tasks also gave us an appreciation for the world of work—and a healthy dose of disdain for the fairy dust world of politics and media.

Yet the working world was always considered a bit square and stagnant. We, the suburban and collegiate club kids, were the trend-setters. Now the grittier world of real work is full of kids and immigrants with bright futures who get excited about books and movies and music. The kinds of kids who used to talk with me about culture in the 1980s, as we frequented dance clubs and listened to Salt ’n’ Pepa, are now working at your local grocery store. Or they’re fixing cars or doing construction. They’ve left the politicians and the journalists far behind. They—we—all get along and respect each other as Americans. We don’t need the elite.

Hard work also gives us a sense of honor—of doing one’s job and watching out for co-workers like one does for friends.

After the Republican National Convention a writer for the absurd website The Bulwark tried to explain why Hulk Hogan’s appearance at the convention excited conservatives: 

Here’s what your average low-education white voter in the Gen X cohort sees: “Hahaha, yeah, it’s Hulkamania, remember take your vitamins, say your prayers, the 48-inch pythons? I remember that. I remember being young, and having fun. Things were better then, right? When I was 13? I would very much like things to be better again.”

You can mock it all you want, but it’s a vibes play, and vibes matter more in politics than a lot of people seem willing to admit. It may have been dumb, it may have felt low-class, but Hogan up there, ripping off his shirt like the Hulkster of old, giving that old carny razzle dazzle to an amped-up crowd: It’s a winning, nostalgic moment, and one specifically designed to activate feelings of warmth in the voters Trump’s team is targeting. And sneering at that moment only reinforces the resentment centers primed by J.D. Vance’s ascendancy.

That’s an awful lot of wankery in the service of missing the point. The crowd went wild when Hogan appeared because Hogan was doing what J.D. Vance does: expressing the importance of honor. Hulk Hogan’s friend, former president Donald J. Trump, had just been shot by a would-be assassin. Hogan ripped off his shirt and pounded his chest not as a throwback to a campy, beloved Gen-X entertainment phenomenon, but as an expression of his defense of a friend whose life had almost been taken. It’s something we learned growing up in Irish culture and something understood by workers who earn their living as we hammer and sand and lug and nail on a grocery store floor.

If someone comes for one of your crew, you come back twice as hard. It’s something a Bulwark writer who has never dug a ditch could never get.

There is pride and honor in Hogan, just as there is pride and honor in constructing a space that will help people feed their kids and sell them soup that will warm them on cold winter days.

So, it’s back to work. The grand opening is soon coming. Drowning out the noise of the construction crew—their whirring, clanking, and grinding—is the defiant anthem from Salt ‘n’ Pepa. For us it stands for joy, happiness, honor, and togetherness—regardless of what the media and the politicians may say:

He’s not a fake wannabe tryin’ to be a pimp
He dresses like a dapper don, but even in jeans
He’s a God-sent original, the man of my dreams