Sweeping through a week’s worth of ‘white people twitter’, this is the one that spoke to me, because it’s both hilarious and chilling.
There is a big problem, and it’s very literally about dog eating dog, or dog infecting dog out of sheer ignorance and bellicosity on the mask question, as we run up on a quarter million of needless dead.
At least I don’t live in South Dakota, but even so, it’s by this 3 friends to 2 margin, optimistically.
97% of the Navajo Nation, the largest tribe still standing and a brutally poor place, voted Biden, and that’s what flipped Arizona. As for the whites off the Rez in towns like this, it’s still half and half at best.
Speaking of poor people on the right side of history, and speaking of ignorance, have a listen to Cori Bush, who went to her new job in Congress wearing a Breonna Taylor button, and got called Breonna over and over. Even after she explained who Miss Taylor actually was, she says, the white boys were uniformly wearing blank stares.
She also has some good things to say about the Dem Party civil war that’s brewing between real people like herself, and the corporate drones like this Spam Burger woman out in the tree-lined burbs.
God bless Breonna. God bless Cori, and Nina, and black womanhood generally, and anyone who knows what it is to be poor and marginalized, and anyone who has ever lived in their car, on or off the Rez.
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Adding on a postscript.
“You know, since around 1980, inequality has been rising. Or another way to put it is, when the economy goes up, the benefits are disproportionately distributed to people at the top, not equitably distributed across the board. And this has caused enormous distress around the world with enormous political implications. And it’s caused internal revolts among the – both major American parties. This is especially visible since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed it.
So there’s just a lot of populist energy out there in the world. Some of it is right-wing. Some of it is left-wing. And I don’t think it’s going to go away. And it’s fundamentally about the end of such verities as ‘prosperity helps everybody equally’ … ‘You can count on your children doing better than you did.’ … ‘if you have a good, blue-collar job, you’ll be able to live a decent life and have a measure of security’. Those things went away. And that, to me, is the mega-political fact of our time. And it’s not going away either. And that’s going to be what to watch in politics for the next decade, at least.”
This is verbatim quote from yesterday’s Fresh Air interview with a guy named Nicholas Lemann, a writer at the New Yorker; the emphasis is mine.
The entirety of Trump’s hardcore base is compromised of people who got shafted by the system in just this way over the last 30 years of Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama. You can call them stupid if you want, and most of them are, but not so stupid as to not be righteously pissed off about it.
They are not the only ones, either.
There are plenty of other working and even middle-class people, smart and dumb, of all races, who know just as certainly that they’ve taken it in the ass in the only way that matters, especially in the world’s center of capitalism. Some of them are also being murdered in the streets by the guardians of the capitalist hegemony with guns and badges. Some of them are living in their cars. They all know the game is rigged even harder than it was for their parents.
They cry out in anguish about the Fraud and the Fake News about prosperity. It’s not always very logical, well-put, or even comprehensible. The bare truth is often lost in a vague sense of conspiracy. But the big lie, the most massive conspiracy of all, is perfectly real. They’re being fucked over, and they’re paying the price for it.
Their anger is indeed the mega-political fact of our time.