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We Are All Deplorables
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Posted on Nov 20, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish
My relatives in Maine are deplorables
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-basket-of-dep
lorables.html?_r=0 ) . I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their
defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by
deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents
lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill
closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The
jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their
neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without
benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot
afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is
rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the
street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common.
Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among
the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia
and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also
nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian
right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment
industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle
on television screens-"The Apprentice" typified this-that foster
unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity.
Those who are cast aside as human refuse often have a psychological need for
illusions and scapegoats. They desperately seek the promise of divine
intervention. They unplug from a reality that is too hard to bear. They see
in others, especially those who are different, the obstacles to their
advancement and success. We must recognize and understand the profound
despair that leads to these reactions. To understand these reactions is not
to condone them.
The suffering of the white underclass is real. Its members struggle with
humiliation and a crippling loss of self-worth and dignity. The last thing
they need, or deserve, is politically correct thought police telling them
what to say and think and condemning them as mutations of human beings.
Those cast aside by the neoliberal order
(http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376 ;) have an economic identity
that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge.
This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other
discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color
demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic
reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.
The self-righteousness of the liberal class, which revels in imagined
tolerance and enlightenment while condemning the white underclass as
irredeemable, widens the divide between white low-wage workers and urban
elites. Liberals have no right to pass judgment on these so-called
deplorables without acknowledging their pain. They must listen to their
stories, which the corporate media shut out. They must offer solutions that
provide the possibility of economic stability and self-respect.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood the downward spiral of hating those who
hate you. "In a real sense all life is inter-related," he wrote in "Letter
From a Birmingham Jail." "All men are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until
you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be
until I am what I ought to be. ."
We cannot battle the racism, bigotry and hate crimes that will be stoked by
the Donald Trump presidency without first battling for economic justice.
This is not a gap between the tolerant and the intolerant. It is a gap
between most of the American population and our oligarchic and corporate
elites, which Trump epitomizes. It is a gap that is understood only in the
light of the demand for economic justice. And when we start to speak in the
language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will
begin to blunt the protofascism being embraced by many Trump supporters.
I spent two years writing a book on the Christian right called "American
Fascists
(http://www.powells.com/book/american-fascists-the-christian-right-the-war-o
n-america-9780743284431 ) : The Christian Right and the War on America." I
spent many months with dispossessed white workers in states such as
Missouri, Kansas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California. I carried into
the book project all the prejudices that come with being raised in the
liberal church-a disdain for a magic Jesus who answers your prayers and
makes you rich, a repugnance at the rejection of rationality and science and
at the literal interpretation of the Bible, a horror of the sacralization of
the American empire, and a revulsion against the racism, misogyny,
homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and blind intolerance that often
afflict those who retreat into a binary world of good and evil.
Those enthralled by such thinking are Christian heretics-Jesus did not come
to make us rich and powerful and bless America's empire-and potential
fascists. They have fused the iconography and symbols of the American state
with the iconography and symbols of the Christian religion. They believe
they can create a "Christian" America. The American flag is given the same
sacred value as the Christian cross. The Pledge of Allegiance has the
religious power of the Lord's Prayer. That a sleazy developer and con artist
was chosen as their vehicle-81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump-for
achieving this goal is startling, to say the least. But this is not a
reality-based movement. Most of those who profit from this culture of
despair, many wrapped in the halo of the ministry, are, like Trump, slick,
amoral trolls.
My view of the tens of millions of Americans who have fallen into the
embrace of the Christian right's magical thinking underwent a profound
change as I conducted interviews for the book. During that time I did what
good reporters do: I listened. And the stories I heard were heartbreaking. I
grew to like many of these people. The communities they lived in, many of
which I visited, looked like the towns where my family lived in Maine. They
were terrified of the future, especially for their children. They struggled
with feelings of worthlessness and abandonment. I fear the Christianized
fascism in which they enshroud themselves, but I also see them as its pawns.
They hate a secular world they see as destroying them. They long for the
apocalyptic visions of Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" series
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind ;) . They want the cruelty and rot
of "secular humanism" to be obliterated before they and their families are
lifted into heaven by the rapture (an event never mentioned in the Bible).
I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like
Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian
right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who
desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist
venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are
responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy.
The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free
themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer
adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities
and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will
not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally
incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize
ourselves.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
(http://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschild) 's
book "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right"
in story after story makes clear that members of the white underclass are
also victims and deserve our empathy.
The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism
until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of
being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable
socialism. Corporate capitalism cannot be regulated, reformed or corrected.
A socialist movement dedicated to demolishing the cruelty of the corporate
state will do more to curb the racism of the white underclass than lessons
by liberals in moral purity. Preaching multiculturalism and gender and
identity politics will not save us from the rising sadism in American
society. It will only fuel the anti-politics
(http://thesmartset.com/against-anti-politics/) that has replaced politics.
Liberals have sprinkled academic, corporate, media and political
institutions with men and women of different races and religions. This has
done nothing to protect the majority of marginalized people who live in
conditions that are worse than those that existed when King marched on
Selma. It is boutique activism. It is about branding, not justice.
Murray Bookchin
(https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-kurdistan-pkk-ro
java-technology-environmentalism-anarchy/) excoriated the irrelevancy of a
liberal class that busied itself with "the numbing quietude of the polling
booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car[-]bumper
sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the
spectator sports of public rallies and finally, the knee-bent humble pleas
for small reforms-in short the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled
commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every
revolutionary project in history."
Human history, as Bookchin and Karl Marx understood, is defined by class
struggle. America's corporate elites successfully fused the two major
political parties into a single corporate party, one that seized control of
electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, universities, the
arts, finance and nearly all forms of popular communication, including
Hollywood, public relations and the press. There is no way within the system
to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war
profiteers. And Trump is about to remove whatever tepid restraints are left.
Oswald Spengler (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oswald-Spengler) in
"The Decline of the West" predicted that, as Western democracies calcified
and died, a class of "monied thugs," people such as Trump, would replace the
traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be
fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The only route left is revolt. If this revolt is to succeed it must be
expressed in the language of economic justice. A continuation of the
language of multiculturalism and identity politics as our primary means of
communication is self-defeating. It stokes the culture wars. It feeds the
anti-politics that define the corporate state.
"The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy,
a cultural Left," Richard Rorty
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/19/donald-trump-us-election-pr
ediction-richard-rorty ) wrote. "Many members of this Left specialize in
what they call the 'politics of difference' or 'of identity' or 'of
recognition.' This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money,
more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and
evident greed."
Our enemy is not the white working poor any more than it is
African-Americans, undocumented workers, Muslims, Latinos or members of the
GBLT community. The oligarchs and corporations, many of them proponents of
political correctness, are our enemy. If we shed our self-righteousness and
hubris, if we speak to the pain and suffering of the working poor, we will
unmask the toxins of bigotry and racism. We will turn the rage of an
abandoned working class, no matter what its members' color, race or
religious creed, against those who deserve it.
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