White Like Me
by digby
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. . . .They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates. . . . They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama. They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks. America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
That’s Pat Buchanan — speaking about the white working class.
I’m afraid if the white working class ever thought it was “their” country, they were fooling themselves. It has always been owned by the white upper class, who have also always manipulated the prejudices of the white working class into believing that they are being threatened by the exotic “other.” Keep the rubes fighting among themselves and maybe they won’t notice that they are being screwed sideways by the Master of the Universe.
That’s why the conservatives are working so hard to keep people looking at the government as the cause of all their problems, a government that they insist no longer works for Real Americans and instead takes their hard earned money and gives it to the undeserving racial minorities and feminazis who don’t know how to keep a man. It’s a sad scam that’s always pulled out in times of economic stress to misdirect the folks so they don’t get too focused on the wealthy.
Buchanan is one of the most obvious practitioners of this, but it plays itself out in other ways in the media, with gasbags like Matthews and Russert (when he was alive) fetishizing their own self-image as working class white ethnics. Multi-millionaire celebrities pretending to be average working stiffs is offensive enough — as if “working class” is only an identity, not an economic circumstance — but when they project their own self-interest as being the interest of the “working class” it is laughable. Or it would be laughable if it weren’t so evil.
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