Mark Storms, accused of killing a man in church (with a gun) over who would sit where
As a liberal and as a Democrat, I am predisposed to being sympathetic to the plight of the white working class. But I’ve just about gotten over it.
While the low-end media that serve low-information white voters carry on with the usual anger and distraction, the media followed by more-intelligent Americans is trying to grapple with a serious issue. How did Donald Trump happen? Andrew Sullivan worries that America has never been more ripe for fascism. Many intellectuals have accused the Democratic Party of abandoning the white working class. In the elite right-wing media, the problems of the white working class are attributed to moral failure — white working folks just aren’t honoring anymore the “moral” regimen that the high church and their social betters have rammed down their throats for so long.
Like many liberals, I was appalled at the right-wing media blaming white working people — blaming the victim — for global factors that are shutting them out of the economy and robbing them of their pride and dignity.
But a friend pushed back. They did bring it on themselves in many ways, he said. The more I have thought about it, the more I think my friend is right. The white working class has become mired in hatred and racism. It is proud of its ignorance. Its preferred religion — the low-church glorification of the rich, glorification of the military and war, vilification of the poor, gun worship, overt hatred of anyone who isn’t just like them, its dreams of theocracy with crushing power over the rest of us — this religion is so vile that I don’t hesitate to call it evil. Don’t miss this recent piece in the Washington Post which says that there have been 626 violent deaths in “houses of worship” since 1999. Most of those deaths occur in Baptist churches. Yet white losers are so deluded about the nature of the real world that their terror-de-jour is fear of transsexuals in bathrooms. That is moral insanity. I do believe that, as a whole, the white working class has become morally insane.
I am chairman of the Democratic Party in my county. Of course I have asked myself whether we have abandoned these white working class voters and whether there is anything we can do to win them back. But now I am pretty much persuaded that such a thing would be completely impossible. Nor is this the fault of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party thought that it could go on harnessing white resentment. Elite Republicans thought they could control white losers and inflame white losers with the right-wing propaganda system and keep on using white losers and their hatreds to win elections. But white so-called conservatives (I don’t think they’re conservatives at all — I call them right-wingers, or losers) were smart enough (though just barely) to catch on to the bait and switch. They figured out (or Donald Trump explained it to them with one-syllable and a few two-syllable words) that the Republican Party was only bilking them for votes while screwing them economically with the true agenda of the Republican Party, the billionaire agenda.
If the Republican Party couldn’t contain these people and actually is being destroyed by them, then who is crazy enough to think that the Democratic Party could do any better? White haters have simply become unfit for the modern world. They know nothing. Their skills are mostly obsolete. They lack the intelligence to adapt. They’d rather go down in angry flames and celebrate their hatreds than join the rest of us in the pluralistic modern world, with our arc toward justice.
Republicans are pretty much all alike, except that a very few of them are rich. Whereas we Democrats are a diverse coalition. Could any coalition possibly contain the white working class? No. They don’t do coalitions anymore. It took them 35 years to destroy the Republican Party. But the fragile Democratic coalition wouldn’t be able to handle these holy folks for even a single election cycle. They truly believe, from their trashed enclaves in the interior of America, that their god hates the same people they hate, that God is on their side, and that they are entitled to dominate the world, even though they and their preachers don’t know a thing about the world and the nature of the change that is destroying them.
Let’s admit it. White working people think very highly of themselves and their morals, but the truth is that they are morally degenerate and dangerous. The right-wing propaganda system, with its hate radio and fake news, which bilked them for decades to win elections by pumping up their anger and hatred, made these people far worse than they already were. Remember how nice they were during the Civil Rights era?
I don’t see a solution. We just have to hope that the United States of America can survive these people without the tyranny and fascism that Andrew Sullivan describes in the link above. We need to do everything possible to save their children from becoming just like their parents and grandparents. But all we can do now is try to contain them, anesthetize them with bread and circuses, and wait for them to die off — which they are doing at an accelerating rate, not least because of their own self-destructive behavior.
Further reading:
God tells tow truck driver to leave woman stranded on the highway because of her Bernie Sanders sticker. “The conservative Christian, 51, from Travelers Rest, South Carolina, said he felt proud that he ‘finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.’ ”
