Why Appealing To White Working Class Folk Is A Race To The Bottom?
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Democrats in America are scratching their heads over Trump’s victory in the recent presidential election. Soul searching is going on, as to how they lost this contest. Democratic elections are popularity contests. They are part evaluations, part bribery, and mirrors held up to societies. Op eds are being written about the role of working class America in the outcome. Chasing this vote is problematic in my view. Why appealing to white working class folk is a race to the bottom? Demagogues, like Donald Trump, falsely court this vote and pretend to champion their grievances. Trump did not deliver for them the first time around and will not again. It is a cynical game and losers always lose out in the end.
Woke Is Broke In The Working Class World
Woke is broke, is the tagline of one op ed I heard about. What is woke? Political correctness imposed by elites upon the masses from above, could be a viable definition. What is politically correct behaviour?
“Conformity to prevailing liberal or radical opinion, in particular by carefully avoiding forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalise groups of people who are disadvantaged…”
- (Google dictionary)
Much of what is said about wokeness involves its application to language and how language is used. Really the anti-woke mood is in the main a childish reaction by people not wishing to be corrected about stuff and the way they have talked about stuff all their lives. Right wing political strategists have seized on this and run campaigns complaining about seemingly ludicrous examples of woke in action. The banning of the character Big Ears from the children’s books of Noddy, due to his racially offensive remarks. Working class folk who grew up with these stories and characters from their childhoods take umbrage at such unilateral actions. Words like ‘midget’ and ‘dwarf’ becoming banned from approved usage within the English language, as they are perceived as offensive by people of short stature. Many ordinary folk find this a ridiculous overreach by elites and their power within the state apparatus. What it really is, is the dominant cohort within society stamping its feet and saying this is our lexicon of language and we are more important than the minority of people claiming to be negatively impacted. It is mob rule.
Humour is another area of human life adversely affected by politically correct behaviour and is why you get a bunch of famous comedians coming out against woke. Humour is actually based on finding funny someone else’s misery. Yes, there is self-deprecating humour too and lots of shades in-between about what we find funny in life. However, in the most part successful comedy views the other via the lens of the many, which is why we find it so hilarious. We laugh at the misery of others.
Language & How We Talk About Stuff
The thing about language is that most folk don’t think about the words they use in everyday life. Words are, often, just a means for getting what a person wants. A tool utilised for a job. Language, common talk, is learned around family and friends. The way we talk is shaped by our community. Working class communities and racially distinctive suburbs have distinguishing ways of talking. Similarly, in historically class affected places like Britain the posh or upper class folk speak differently from everyone else. People do become attached to the way they express themselves and take offence at being corrected by someone telling them something is wrong about the way they talk. Freedom of speech? Well, it is not how this constitutional right was intended but political campaigns stretch this document in all sorts of directions to accommodate their desires. Language is a highly emotive topic and thus deemed perfect for the right wing anti woke campaign.
People don’t think about how they talk until they are told there is something wrong with it.
Racism & Working Class Folk
Another aspect of the woke impositions upon how ‘so called’ ordinary folk talk about stuff is that it often involves perceived racism. There is a thing called Theory of Mind, which is presented by developmental scientists as what sets Homo sapiens apart from other primates and what sets us apart from autistic individuals on the spectrum. It is the ability to think about how another may be thinking about something, putting yourself in another’s shoes, so to speak. This exclusively human ability is academically developed further when you do higher learning at university. You study how other people from different groups and nations think about stuff. This, obviously, changes how you then express yourself and the language and concepts you employ. The majority of working class people who have not attended college/university are not taught to enter these novel zones of thinking. In the main, most folk talk about stuff almost entirely from their own perspective. Indeed, they take great pride in being authentic to their own point of view, which in their view has, often, been hard won via experience. Here we get the clash between intellectual learning and experiential learning. And yes, I take the point that experience can deliver a more real level of learning, but in this instance, its scope is far more limited and it cannot think outside its own box. Racism lives inside the walls of parochialism, where exposure to racially different folk is often limited. White supremacy feeds on fear and paranoia. Demonising dark skinned people is easy in places where they are in the minority.
I often hear white folk say, I am not a racist and then proceed to say something racially offensive. They have no idea that what they are saying could be perceived to be offensive.
Accusations of woke folk being thin skinned and not willing to take a joke. However, if you are a darker skinned person and everywhere you go within a community dominated by white folk and you hear the same kind of offensive humour it starts to wear very thin pretty quickly. This is about the dominant group wanting to stay in their comfort zone and thinking why should I have to make an effort to think about what I say! It reminds me of little kids not wanting to share their toys and needing to be taught what sharing really means. Meanwhile, those on the Right are telling these folk, hey it is your country, you go on acting as if nothing else matters but your own point of view, as limited as that may be.
The Rules Of A Brutal Meritocracy
Why appealing to white working class folk is a race to the bottom? What fashions what we call the working class? Traditionally, a brutal meritocracy. The tough survive and get ahead, whilst the weak are crushed beneath the boots of commerce driven outcomes. Construction sites, mines, and labour yards are not home to touchy feely workplace cultures, rather they are more like the jungle where the laws of nature exact bloody vengeance on vulnerabilities. Woke culture is attempting to improve this state of affairs. Yet, there are still young men who flee these workplaces because of bullying and violence. Occupational health and safety has made lots of changes to the sectors where the working class ply their trades and this has come on the back of the deaths and injuries in their many tens of thousands at workplaces over the years. Wokeness has played its part in drafting the new laws and guidelines governing workplace health and safety. It is lazy thinking about stuff, which has previously cost the lives of workers at work. Now, a lot of retraining of how to go about things has been happening around the globe. Employers, managers and workers are all having to be retrained. What people used to think was the way to go about things has been proven to be lacking.
Thus, this idea of the unimpeachable virtue of common sense is a furphy.
What Is Common Sense?
Common sense, you hear some people singing the praises of this panacea for all things. Breaking down the term, we get ‘common’ which just means most often done by the majority of the people. Mob rule does not make something right. It does not automatically confer ‘righteousness’ upon something. Things change, communities change and their makeup of people alters. The world does not stay the same, despite what some would like to think. Sense – a sane and realistic attitude to situations. Sanity and reality are agreements held between people within societies, as to what are considered normal and appropriate behaviours. Who is in and who is out. What is in and what is out. Again these settings change over time and do not remain the same throughout the course of history.
Violence As The Ultimate Decider
Physical violence stands as a viable pillar that holds up our civilisations still, despite those who hold out against it. War in Ukraine and bloody fighting in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and surrounds illustrate this. Record levels of domestic violence within our wealthy Western communities, also, tell us this. Both of these theatres of war are about power and the fight for it. Men remain committed to violence as a viable means of getting what they want at the expense of others. Wokeness stands at one extreme on this spectrum and physical violence is at the other. Outsourcing this violence and killing to machines via drones, missiles and guns is advancing at a rapid pace around the globe. The belief in violence, however, remains in the hearts of human beings, mainly men. Is it fair or unfair to say that working class men are closer to this belief in the practical viability of violence than others? I think that most men are more violent than women when you get down to it. Whether working with tools and manual labouring acclimatises one to violence more readily than white collar men I don’t really know. I studied ancient history and our roots are in the glorification of violence and its spoils. Success in battle and raiding delivers wealth, status and power. Aristocracies and kingships are established on the back of violently taking what was once someone elses. Laws are then made to sanctify and protect the status quo. Hierarchies are established on the back of this violence and histories rewritten to reward the victors. Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine from the map and rewrite its history as part of Russia and he is doing this via the means of invasion and massive violence wrought upon the Ukrainian people.
The Demagogue & His Working Class Cult
Donald Trump as demagogue, and there were plenty of these in the ancient world revving up the demos for their own benefit. Trump has become the presumed champion of the white working class American. A man who calls a spade a spade, in both senses of this word. Will he take these disgruntled folk to the promised land of milk and honey? I don’t think so. It seems that lots of these folk just want to rain on the parade of elites at whatever the cost to the country and the world. Working class people are sick of being ripped off at the cash register and blame the nearest leader at hand. The demagogue repeats the grievances of the mob and this tells them that someone important hears them. Whether he goes on to enact economic policies which will actually help them is another matter entirely. Trump has made so many promises and deals with people that many of them will be diametrically opposed and contradictory for sure. Elon Musk is reported to have spent $100 million getting Trump elected. You cannot represent the billionaires and be the people’s champion. The working class are not the most intelligent group, otherwise they would not be where they find themselves. The irrationality of the political sphere is exemplified by the Muslims who voted for Trump because of what is happening in Gaza, the 50, 000 killed by the IDF, and that Biden did not do enough to stop it. This is short termism thinking writ large, as it was Trump who enacted bans on Muslim’s coming to America in his first term in office. Desperate people do what they can with what is available to them, I suppose.
“In 2017, President Trump signed an executive order banning people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the USA, and slamming the door on refugees. After being temporarily stopped multiple times, the US Supreme Court overturned a block on the devastating ban in June. “
Right Wing Media
The right wing media in America, Fox News and the many other voices operating in a variety of platforms run riot with the truth. Distortion and misinformation are their metiers. Listeners and viewers are soaked in outpourings of lies, exaggerations, and the demonizing of Democrats. Why appealing to white working class folk is a race to the bottom? Those individuals who subscribe to this virulent drivel are part of the problem and not the solution. This growing plethora of media outlets with no commitment to factual reporting is creating a world where people just make shit up to justify their own positions. America is fast becoming a land of fictions fuelling hatreds based on greed, paranoia and fear.
Hoi Poloi Dreams
The hoi poloi, the working class, those who we call ordinary citizens will not save America and will not make the world a better place. They, perhaps, have the excuse that they lack deep enough pockets to endure hard times. They are, however, very quick to ditch commitments in the face of seemingly better offers by con men like Trump. The lottery is a good example of a graft on the working poor but something that is enduringly supported by them. There is little chance via the really bad odds of ever winning the lottery but working class folk go on buying them tickets in hope of a miraculous win. The Republican party does no economic favours for the white working class but they vote for the GOP because they oppose any special treatment for minorities. Keeping the Black and coloured folk down appeals to many white Americans. The messaging of Republicans strikes a chord with these voters, especially as Trump gives voice to their disparaging of minorities. Blame it on someone other than yourself and your kind.
Kamala Harris presented America with a different vision, one not based on hatred and grievances, but a majority of Americans rejected this. Folk not willing to believe in it? 52% of white American women who voted did so for Trump. Americans were revelling in their dystopian view of things. They had drunk the kool aid and Democrats were devils. They voted for a convicted felon. Every adult in America knows that Donald Trump is a crook by any reasonable definition. Bring on the dysfunction and watch it burn! This could be the catch cry of this election. There may be no coming back from this, only time will tell.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©MidasWord
