In Mr. King’s view, the fight to organize workers and improve their wages and benefits is important, but it’s part of a much broader effort to improve the lives of individuals and families throughout the country and beyond. He is a believer in cooperative efforts and shared sacrifice, and is unabashedly idealistic as he outlines what can only be described as a new activism on labor’s part.

He promised his members last month that the U.A.W. would be marching and campaigning and organizing  for jobs, for a moratorium on home foreclosures, for civil and human rights and against the mistreatment of immigrants, and for peace.

“The Tea Party has been more vocal than we’ve been,” he said. “There is something wrong with that picture.”

This is not the way that prominent leaders in any segment of our society have spoken for a long time. The pragmatists and cynics, who have gotten a stranglehold on the culture, will scoff. But the pragmatists and cynics, with their hubris and half-baked ideologies, have handed all the wealth of the nation to a favored few and left the rest of the society a ragged mess.

It’s no accident that the great progressive successes of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, a variety of other social justice movements, and the emergence of a vast and thriving middle class all converged in the early post-World War II decades.

But the counterattack from the right, with its assaults on labor, its outlandishly regressive tax policies, its slavish devotion to corporate power and its divide-and-conquer strategies on racial and ethnic issues all combined to halt the remarkable advances of ordinary working people.

All you have to do now is look around at what the right has wrought.

Bob King has a vision that draws upon the lessons of that postwar period, starting with the basic right of workers to organize if they wish without being terrorized by employers. It was the fact that workers were organized in the auto and other manufacturing industries that sparked the creation of a large middle class in America. Those well-paying union jobs allowed working families to buy a home, to put their children through school, to build better lives.

The wages from those jobs fueled the consumer demand that powered America’s economic success.

Even as he looks toward the future, Mr. King is trying to remind us of what went right in the past.