Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches

Sure, there are plenty of pissed-off white people. Should there not be? Should working-class whites--and every other working-class constituency, and all of their progressive allies--not be furious that their lives have been destroyed over the past thirty years by what Paul Street calls "a relentless top-down class war on their livelihoods, unions, and standard of living," and over the past eight years by the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the country to the top ten-thousandth of the population? Should they not bridle at the infinite increase in military spending and the endless series of wars to which their children are sent, which have no discernible interest for them? Should they not be livid at the utterly corrupt private health insurance system, now called Obamacare, that is flaying them to death with increasing premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, for fewer coverage options?

Should middle-aged white Americans not object when they have been struck by one of the starkest indicators of a group that's been relegated to the social wastebin: "Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling." As two Dartmouth economists remark : "It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude."Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this."

This is the kind of scourge that happens when a population has been discarded and has lost hope, as have "Millions of once 'productively employed' white working class people " [who have] become 'surplus Americans' in a time when Silicon Valley geniuses soberly design the near total elimination of manual labor and intellectuals debate the coming of ' a world without work .'"

Liberals delight in perplexing about how working-class Republican voters can be too ignorant to realize how they're being conned by oligarchs in populist drag. It's the process Christopher Hitchens, in his better days, called "the essence of American politics"the manipulation of populism by elitism," and Paul Street restates as: "the cloaking of plutocratic agendas, of service to the rich and powerful, in the false rebels' clothing of popular rebellion." We've seen this repeatedly, and Trump is the latest example.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |  12  |  13

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).