Real Americans should be willing to “do a little starving”
by digby
This should be fun. It looks like conservatives are starting to turn on their own voters. Michelle Goldberg reviews the new book by Charlotte Hayes called When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question.
A chapter on the foreclosure crisis and crushing student debt, for example, is called “White Trash Money Management.” “There are, I thus adduce, two keys to not being White Trash: having a job and paying your bills on time,” Hays sniffs. “The first is getting more difficult in this economy, but it is still White Trash to go on disability if you aren’t positively unable to lift a finger.”
Hays’s work is saturated with that partiuclar kind of right-wing smugness born of the conviction that one’s willingness to express common prejudices is a sign of free-thinking audacity. What’s interesting is where it’s directed—not at liberals or their sacred cows, but at fat, broke, ordinary Americans. “We look like hell as a nation, and fat people bear a large brunt of responsibility for this,” she writes. “I can remember when going to New York meant seeing beautiful, pencil-thin people in stylish clothes on Fifth Avenue. Where are they now? The other day I saw a fat guy in polyester in my favorite New York restaurant.” Heaven forfend! She’s so delighted with her description of diabetes as “the talismanic White Trash disease” that she uses it twice.
Nice. If conservatives don’t want liberal elites to vote for them and don’t want African Americans to vote for them and don’t want Latinos to vote for them and now don’t want fat, white people to vote for them, just how the hell do they think they can put together a majority?
Goldberg points out that this isn’t the only sign that the conservative movement may be dropping their good ole boy act. She discusses the popularity of the snotty Fox fop Stuart Varney whose plummy accent makes Prince Charles sound like a dockworker by comparison and the infamous Charles Murray who’s recently taken to deriding the white working class in an apparent effort to demonstrate that the only people in America who are worth a damn are in his immediate family:
And now we have this nasty little book, which has received favorable coverage in The National Review, The Washington Times and The Weekly Standard. Writing in the latter, Judy Bachrach called it a “plaintive tract…a serious political one, in fact.” In a sense, Bachrach is right. Hays’s flip dehumanization of struggling people does have a serious purpose. It’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore inequality’s ravages or to blame them on gay marriage or snotty university professors. Conservatives find themselves faced with a choice: either acknowledge that our economic system is failing the American people, or deride the American people for failing our economic system.
Hays opts for the latter. Her book’s message is essentially the same as Murray’s: Americans are falling behind because they are lazy and dissolute. She even mocks the idea that full-time work alone should be enough to escape poverty. The colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth, she writes, “knew you had to work full time—and then some—and maybe still do a little starving.”
If this is a trend, it portends a huge change. The faux populist, neo-confederate, Joe the Plumber image of the Republican Party has been essential to its ability to maintain its edge, even though it represents a minority of the country. Calling these folks “white trash” has been fighting words for a long time. If they keep it up some of them might start looking at their own bank accounts and wondering if maybe voting in the same party as African Americans and feminazis isn’t so bad after all.
I just can’t wait to hear what Rush Limbaugh has to say about all this …
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