Fuck the white working class [View all]

[sheshe2]

The Rude Pundit calls it like it is.

Look. We liberals gave them health care and addiction treatment and retraining help and an auto industry bailout that saved millions of their jobs. We created the programs that brought electricity and indoor plumbing and phone service to them. We gave them tons of shit that the Republicans fought tooth and nail to prevent or take away. We kept them fucking alive, goddammmit. And in the end, none of that made a damn bit of difference because it’s not about how bad their life is with them. It’s all about identity politics. It’s all about sticking it to The Man, about being upset that n***ers and f****ts no longer know their place, about a fear their children might get edumacated and move the fuck away from the hellhole they’ve made of the place they live.

And since I’m sure some sanctimonious Republican dickwad is gonna flounce in here at any moment and decry El Rudo and me as some New Yawk Elite and other bullshit like that, El Rudo is from Louisiana, like me. We went to the same high school, actually, and I remember him well though he was two years behind me (folks, he was loud, profane, and funny as hell even as a young El Rudo). When he says that Democrats chasing white working class voters is a lost cause, he’s not doing it from some elite coast viewpoint, he’s doing it as someone who grew up there and knows how people think there (for some definition of the word “think”). Identity politics trumps economics, in the end.

We liberals should feel their pain if we want their votes? Fuck that shit. We should do what’s right by them because unlike them, we embody the Christian virtues of caring for the least amongst us, but that ain’t gonna make a bit of difference in terms of votes because when you see people who repeatedly time and time again spew racist blather like it’s God’s own truth, who continually over and over vote against the people who created the government programs that keep their butts alive and give them a chance for the future (programs like Medicaid and food stamps and retraining programs and so forth), when you see people who time and again vote for politicians making shallow promises about things that even a moment’s worth of thought can never happen because reality just don’t work that way (those coal jobs are *gone*, people, and they aren’t coming back, because even the Chinese are retiring coal-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind), when you continually see people who vote against their own self-interests because they care more about sticking it to “The Man”, some caricature in some far-off state that they don’t really comprehend but they know has to exist, than they care about their own self-interests… screw’em. Yeah, call me smug if you want. Won’t be the first time. Won’t be the last time. But I’ll just point out that Trump won with fewer votes than McCain lost by. Trump didn’t win because white working class voters deserted to him. Trump won because the Democrats forgot their own coalition and didn’t turn out their own voters. A coalition that today trends urban, more educated, more minority, and younger than Republican, and which was broken up this year by a number of things, but none of which had a damn thing to do with white working class people.

As for white working class people? Yeah, their plight sucks. 99% of it is their own fault for hanging on to their own petty bigotries and hanging on to their own ignorance and refusing education when it was offered to them, but yeah, their plight sucks. And we liberals ought to do something about that. But because it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re going to be grateful and vote for us. This election wasn’t about economics. Trump’s voters actually trended *wealthier* than in the last election. Claiming the election was about economics is nonsense. This election was about identity politics, pure and simple. It was about a whole class of people saying, “Stop the world, we want off, we want to go back to when you could graduate high school dumber than a rock and still make a good living at the coal mine, and black people knew their place, and gay people were somewhere else, not in our face in our towns, and we didn’t have all these strange ideas coming into our towns via satellite TV and the Internet.” Well that ain’t happenin’. That train done rolled. The left-behind are pissed about that. Well, there’s not a bloody thing we can do to make them un-pissed about it. You know what the take-up rates are on re-training programs in Kentucky coal towns? You know how many of those who *did* take the re-training courses were willing to move in order to get a job in their new field? 0.5%. Zero. Point. Five. Percent. You got people who aren’t willing to help themselves, and then they’re blaming Democrats for that fact. Boo fucking hoo.

So fuck the white working class. We liberals have no outreach to do there that has any political import. What we need to do is get the liberal coalition back together again, and kick their politicians out of office and help these stupid motherfuckers despite their unwillingness to show a dime’s worth of gratitude for that help, not because we’re going to get their votes — the dumb ass motherfuckers ain’t gonna vote for a liberal, nosirree — but because it’s the right thing to do. And then we need to dump all the bullshit that the KGB spread to divide Democrats against themselves, and get our people pumped up and ready to vote these motherfuckers out of office and get in there and fix this shit, already. Wasting time on the white working class trying to win their votes, in the end, as about as useful as outreach to Amazon jungle tribesmen. They’re both a bunch of primitive dipshits who aren’t gonna vote for us regardless, so. Offer them help because it’s the right thing to do, but obsessing about getting the votes of these primitive inbreds is about as useful as a bicycle for fish. We need to get our own shit together and get our own people out to vote. That’s the solution, in the end.

– Badtux the Rude Penguin

Ouch. Fact.