Of course we know who foots the bills for inciting all the hate - the billionaire class - the Mercers, the Koch, and many others who prefer to stay in the shadows. They don’t want America to fix its own problems. They want to keep their taxes low and their jets always at the ready.
2 Likes
I don’t know if I would agree they “foot the bill.” Their resources make racial and class divisions worse through their funding of think tanks and various other entities that spread their ideology around. For which they get tax credits, you know. And the other thing that they fund, which is controlling the economic agenda in Congress through their surrogates, pays off “bigly” for them regardless of the cost as they reap the advantages that the tax code gives to those at the top.
3 Likes
Brilliant
Everybody’s favorite parlour game, but particularly among the progressive left (I’m lookin’ at you Thomas Frank and the Baffler crowd) is to announce, with an air of omniscience, that “Democrats have lost working class whites.” Which is, with some qualification and exceptions, true. Thanks for the tip, guys.
They then proceed to lecture us that Democrats must never appear to condescend to people who take fentanyl and sniff QAnon crumbs and appear in crowded public venues without masks. And we need to understand their economic anxiety. We need to take their every grievance SERIOUSLY.
By contrast, I’ve come to the conclusion that what the Democrats can do this for these working class white Trump voters: basically nothing.
Because NO conceivable rational argument would make them suddenly realize, after 4 years of Trump, of unpunished felonies exploding from the White House, and 240,000 deaths, that they should vote differently than they do.
They are just not amenable to reason, period. Any more than members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were persuadable.
Sure, the Dems COULD make appeals that would attract them: like, say, make a white nationalist pitch or something equally odious. Even then, the GOP could effortlessly outbid the Dems on the racist front.
We have to realize that a minimum of 72 million adults in this country are immune from ordinary political appeals to a better life of the kind we have traditionally heard in political discourse. They want a race war, most of them.
For years to come, the Democrats will have to adopt an aggressive but circumspect strategy to consolidate and protect the gains they have made, strengthen the party in the state legislatures, and figure out a fundraising model that can consistently match the GOP’s billionaires (yes, I know, American campaign finance is a corrupt system. I’d much rather ban private money in elections, but, you know, the Supreme Court and all). And cultivate decent candidates who aren’t octogenarians.
For 10 or 20 years, the Democrats will have to conduct policy the way the West conducted the cold war, with a policy of containment. We had no strategy (short of Armageddon) to magically make the USSR go away, but firm containment for a prolonged period ultimately yielded positive change.
That’s how we’ll have to do it, meanwhile fighting a grinding war of attrition against the Republicans over multiple trench lines, never yielding and never saying it’s too hard.
It’s a crappy formula for conducting politics, but we saw just a glimpse of the alternative since 2016. Now imagine if the GOP found a guy with Trump’s malignance but more competence.
And believe me, the odds are they will.
6 Likes
Of course, it is hate. When some, too many, white people see someone of a different race, a different gender, a different sexual orientation and hate them other them. It is so obviously hate born of fear.
71 million plus. God help us.
Hatred, racism, nativism and scapegoating are mentally and/or morally subnormal Americans deal with their failure, misery, fear and faults. It’s a way of offsetting the source of their unhappiness from themselves and bad luck onto others and of making an often confusing and scary world more understandable and safe. The way that prehistoric people looked at the sun and moon and stars and said “There, that’s why there are horrible storms and people dying suddenly, they’re angry at us so let’s sacrifice Uggo, he’s weird anyway” and invented god, so do these deplorables (and they’re all deplorable in some way) invent made-up explanations for their suffering (much of which is itself made-up) in order to avoid blaming either themselves or bad luck.
Our fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. It’s all about character, which foretells destiny.
1 Like
All of these are noxious cures for certain underlying conditions. Diminish the condition and the cures lose appeal. They are the media equivalent of drugs. Religion is no longer the opiate of the people. Opium, the RWNM and mass media in general are.
America can look to Australia and Rupert Murdoch. The poison may not have started there but he gave it currency.
Right. Think of it as an investment.
The billionaires invest relative pennies to induce gullible imbeciles to elect GOP candidates, who will then hand the keys to the Treasury to the billionaires.
2 Likes
Interaction between and among individuals mutually assumed as equals.
That’s what we want
1 Like
Excellent article; here’s the key words.
“gave them a sense of identity.”
They had nothing but thinly-hidden racist grievance before that, somehow they turned it into a cult identity. The Tea Mob was just that… a mob on a leash, held by wingnut media stars.
The fact is that its current disparate parts, from the bitter Boogaloo Boys to the bitter Oath Keepers, are all diametrically opposed to each other at the core of their loose-knit ideologies, but somehow they have joined in their mutual grievance, as if it is the same thing, when the only thing they really share is that blind bitterness.
In a real world they would shoot each other, not one of us.
Their lack of identity was always their weakness, without a Capo de Capo, they were lost and drifting in a sea of hate, with no one at the rudder. and when they got Trump to fill the position, well, what you see is what we got.
At its spiritual core this is all Chaos v. Order, plain and simple.
2 Likes