Perhaps We Owe Thanks to The Mad President
For decades and decades the Republicans have held on to power by exploiting the racialized consciousness of whites who not just mistakenly but also self-deceptively believed that the social safety net has historically served mainly the interest of the dark-skinned other, whom they have stigmatized as undeserving, alien, the other who cannot or will not assimilate, the other who storms our borders from abroad, who infest our cities, who are stuffed in our over-crowded jails.
The Republicans have always known this was a lie. They have known how much the social safety net serves whites too. But it was a useful and powerful lie to encourage whites to think otherwise. That powerful lie helped to block the consolidation of class consciousness, helped to undermine support for redistributive schemes, helped to destroy unions, prop-up the prison-industrial complex, strip government of its moral legitimacy. The big and powerful lie has thus made our politics ripe for the pickings by a Republican elite, who want nothing from government except to protect the unrestrained "liberty" of their sponsors and enablers in a rapacious capitalist class. It also put the Democrats -- including both those who wanted most of all to give capitalism a human face and those who wanted to transcend capitalism altogether -- in a permanently defensive crouch, reduced to fighting rearguard battles in defense of incremental change here and there.
But perhaps we are at a moment when the big and powerful lie is finally about to be exposed for what it really is. For with the rise of the Mad President, partly on the back of the anger of those whose unreconstructed racialized consciousness has been so long manipulated, and partly on the backs of an absurd electoral system that is by design indifferent to the popular will. perhaps the chickens are finally coming home to roost. For with the Mad King's cruel and incoherent budget, with the Republicans heartless repeal and replacement of the ACA which is clearly mostly about ending redistributive schemes for the provision of health care, perhaps, at long last, the truth will have to be faced. The social safety net is not a leftist scheme to take things away from the good, god-fearing, true blue American rural and ex-urban whites -- who want most of all to be free of the dark-skinned other -- and give it to the very dark-skinned others that they have striven so long to flee. For they too are the Republicans target. They too are seen by them as too dependent on the leveling and protective power of the state.
What cognitive dissonance they will feel when they are forced finally to make common political cause with the dark skinned other and are forced to finally see who the real adversary is. It is not the person you have sought to exclude and imprison. It is the carnival barker on the stage trying to sell you what is ultimately poison for your soul.
Perhaps we should thank the Mad President, after all, for heightening the contradictions of our politics, if for nothing else. For from such moments of profound ruptures perhaps a new politics will finally be born.
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