Should we coddle angry white men or tell them the truth?

[BainsBane]

13. The entirety of contemporary politics is about coddling angry white men

And not just Trump supporters. The most egregious example comes from the Tiki torch wielding Nazis, but that sense of aggrievement is not unique to them; nor is the politics of entitlement, which dominates political discourse today.

Pronouncing race a fiction is easy for those whose lives aren't dominated by racial discrimination. Race was not constructed to "divide" the middle and upper-middle class from the non-white (or even the white) poor. The relative affluence of the white bourgeoisie, and their determination that their own privilege is what matters most achieves that. Race was constructed to justify SLAVERY, an institution in which white men owned and profited from the labor of other human beings. Liberty for white men was made possible by slavery. The two were integrally connected, as historian Edmund Morgan demonstrated 45 yrs ago. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1888384?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents The prosperity for the white bourgeoisie that some insist we must return to was paid for by the enslavement, subjugation, and oppression of everyone but them. In the 20th century, that white middle-class prosperity as propped up through empire, through regime change, plunder and the enforcement of neoliberal economic policies. And that was during the days those who now use the term neoliberal as an insult want to return to. And it hasn't exactly gone unnoticed that many of those insulted as neoliberal and establishment are less affluent, less privileged, and more likely to be people of color than those doing the insulting.

We see a vision of politics advanced that is all about white bourgeois prosperity. We see concerns of the poor and marginalized treated with contempt, rhetorical divisions of "progressives" vs. "centrist" or establishment, with the former disproportionately represented by middle-to upper-middle class, or even rich, white men and the latter disproportionately comprised of the poor, women, and people of color. We see historical mythology--like "the party of FDR"--repeatedly invoked, ignoring what is now years of critiques pointing out that the history they invoke was also one of Jim Crow and lynchings, with a president who enforced the former and refused to act on the later out of deference to, and a priority on, the feelings of white Southerners. When that mythology is repeated after having the dark side of that history pointed out hundreds of times, it can no longer be dismissed as mere ignorance.

The rhetoric about "establishment" only came to dominate during the presidency of a black man, whose successor might have been a woman. The mantra of "corporatist" is used very selectively, almost always directed toward women and people of color, while people's whose incomes are far in excess of the national median think nothing of insulting the poorest and most marginalized citizens as "corporatists" and "establishment." Catering to corporate interests of huge swaths of the economy is defended by those claiming to be anti-corporatist. Great wealth in the hands of certain people are justified while others are vilified. There is no standard or principle, only pretext. Immunity for gun corporations is treated as a positive good. Hundreds of billions for Lockheed-Martin for the F-25, no problem. But if profits come from finance rather than murder, war, and genocide, then they're bad. Yet despite the way "corporatist" was invoked during the election, as a justification for failing to stand up to the rise of fascism, since then we haven't seen a single action, proposal, or initiative that focuses on corporations or banking. What we have seen is systematic attacks on politicians of color. We see demands that women and people of color be removed from party leadership, for reasons they refuse to apply to men they believe are owed power. Such rhetoric has NOTHING to do with a critique of capital. The extensive exemptions for merchants of deaths and certain rich people--including the mythologizing of a president born into the aristocracy who worked as a Wall Street financier--prove as much. Corporatist and establishment are insults used to in pursuit of power, designed to justify efforts to restore the social order that those people hurling the insults are explicit about wanting to return to.

When political consciousness is built entirely around the white, male bourgeois self, people pretend race doesn't matter. When those making that argument repeatedly refuse to respect or even consider the concerns of those from other demographics (like the black men and women regularly insulted on Twitter as "neoliberal," it becomes clear that something quite deliberate is at work.

And it isn't just about race. It's also about gender and class. It's a class project designed to promote the interests of a particular demographic, the white, largely male, bourgeoisie. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. It becomes problematic when it is presented as the ONLY approach, when the interests of that narrow demographic are treated as universal, and the concerns of those who lack their privilege--whether racial, gender, or class, are dismissed and insulted.

What that bourgeoisie fails to acknowledge is that it sits at the center of the global capitalist system, right near the very top. Those with household incomes of $100k a year, one of the lower demographics that Trump won, are in the top 0.3% of richest people in the world and twice the median US income. An income of just $33k puts a household in the top 5% globally. http://www.worldwealthcalculator.org/resultsWhite men are upset about their relative decline compared to the rest of the population, and that decline is relative to the Global South and people of color and single women in the US, people who don't exist in a political discourse that claims that wages have dropped since the 50s or 70s. That is only true for one group: white men in the US. Any honest critique of capital has to include the relationship between core and periphery, between the affluent Western Empires and the Global South. Nationalist critiques may convey grievances within a given nation, like the US, but they do not constitute a challenge to or understanding of capitalism.

The plutocracy doesn't keep all white men from establishing unity with people of color, and it doesn't keep the bourgeoisie from establishing unity with the poor. That is something some of those white men choose to perpetuate by refusing to listen, respect, or consider the concerns, or the lives, of anyone but themselves. People can choose to stop it, to bridge divides, but that requires a willingness to listen and understand, and focus on something larger than their own sense of persecution.