How much is “engineered division”?
“I would vote for a Bernie Sanders before I’d vote for a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio.”
“The working class has gotten beaten up by the loss of small businesses.”
Click-bait coverage of Trump rallies makes it easy to believe that the country is hopelessly divided. Or at least the 70% from the fringe-right 30%. If Trumpers don’t get their way, it’s civil war, etc., etc. As if these two below will lock and load and defend march to war behind some 21st-century Robert E. Lee.
Capitalism and democracy being strange bedfellows, it’s those voices that get air time because they draw eyeballs and generate clicks. But is it really as bad as quickie profiles of the blowhard right make it seem?
Under cover of mullet, John Russell of The Holler discovered that there is more common ground between the left and right than footage appearing on social media and in news coverage makes it seem. “Solidarity is waiting to have a moment.”
“You would never know [this]” about people at a Trump rally, Russell explains, “if you just watched Fox or CNN.”
“They’re trying to divide people,” one young woman says of the dominance of hot-button social issues.
Russell writes:
Would you expect to hear about how anti-trust laws were used to break up the telephone monopoly, Bell Systems, in the 80s and that it might be time to dust them off again? Or about small businesses being squeezed out by corporate consolidation? Or how the world’s largest asset managers, Blackrock and Vanguard, command nearly $20 trillion dollars of wealth?
I went to the Trump rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, and heard all of this and more from people waiting in line.
It’s not surprising to me. I poured drinks in a rust belt dive bar for the last year where plenty of the Trump faithful slaked their thirst. When your county votes for Trump by 71% and the bartender is me, a white guy with a mullet, most people assume you’re on the same page. When they find out that I’m a card-carrying labor leftist, there’s always shock that we occasionally *are* on the same page.
All of us live in a petri dish of engineered division. If the working class on the left and right ever united on things like reining in billionaire power, ending forever wars that enrich the already wealthy, breaking up corporate power structures, and unionizing major industries, the world would look a lot different than it is, and the ruling class would have far to fall.
One commenter (among over 10k) writes, “These are the conversations we need to see to bring people back together. It’s easy to punch down at Trump’s supporters and assume they’re all racists and idiots, this right here is the actual track to mending the country.”
It’s twelve, eye-opening minutes well worth your time. I subscribed, and I never subscribe.