{"id":115234,"date":"2024-08-29T17:05:42","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T15:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115234"},"modified":"2024-08-26T10:15:43","modified_gmt":"2024-08-26T08:15:43","slug":"26-05-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115234","title":{"rendered":"Attack of the Crypto-Nazis!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Attack of the Crypto-Nazis!<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Michael Lind<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Working-class Americans say they\u2019re voting for their interests. NPR apostles say they suffer from \u2018white rage\u2019 and \u2018precarious manhood.\u2019 Who\u2019s right?<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

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\nDiego Pati\u00f1o<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Are working-class men of all races, along with rural Americans in general, the greatest threats to the American republic today? According to Harold Meyerson, writing<\/a> in the progressive journal he co-founded, The American Prospect<\/em>, \u201c[y]ounger working-class men of all races\u201d who support Trump instead of Biden are emotionally disturbed individuals obsessed with their \u201cprecarious manhood\u201d who \u201clash out: blaming their problems on outsiders and anti-macho ideology, on feminized work rules, on capitalists and communists so long as they were Jewish, on novelty, on empiricism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If the thought of millions of young Hispanic, Black and white men whose manhood is precarious and who hate \u201cempiricism\u201d isn\u2019t scary enough, we should be even more terrified by the 16% of Americans who dwell in the rural wastelands that lie between big Democratic cities. This is the claim<\/a> of professor Tom Schaller and professor Paul Waldman, whose election-season campaign tract White Rural Rage <\/em>is the flavor of the month on NPR and MSNBC. On Morning Joe<\/em>, Schaller duly declared that white rural Americans are \u201cthe most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country. \u201dThis one-sixth of the American population,\u201d according to White Rural Rage<\/em>, is a \u201cthreat to the world\u2019s oldest constitutional democracy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No need to be polite; tell us what you really<\/em> think of your fellow Americans, gentlemen.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea that the barbaric masses are a menace to civilization is as old as the American republic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, well-to-do Yankees in the Federalist, Whig, and Republican parties who considered themselves America\u2019s natural governing class often depicted both Catholic immigrants and the rural white poor as threats to their supremacy. Many Progressives of the 1900s favored eugenic sterilization of \u201cinferior\u201d poor whites and European immigrants. Henry Adams, the descendant of two presidents from whom he inherited his rich snobbery, spoke for his patrician class when he wrote of the largely rural and working-class Democratic Party of his day that \u201cnothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and concentrated a machine [as the American industrial economy] by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the 1930s many high-toned East Coast Progressives\u2014now renamed \u201cliberals\u201d\u2014joined the Democratic Party. Even so, from FDR to LBJ, the Democrats essentially remained the old Jacksonian coalition of \u201cdeplorables\u201d\u2014farmers and workers. The fact that both these groups <\/a>were overwhelmingly white is not at all surprising in a country that was 87.4% non-Hispanic white as recently<\/a> as 1970, when 11.1% of Americans were Black and other \u201craces\u201d amounted to only 1.4%.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While contempt for the white working class and rural whites has been a constant among America\u2019s coastal elites for more than two centuries, the particular dangers that the laboring masses are said to pose have changed over time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The liberal \u201ceggheads\u201d of the New Deal era tended to view the workers and farmers who voted for the Democrats with unease. In New York, liberals like Roosevelt brain truster Adolf Berle supported the Liberal Party as an alternative to a Democratic machine controlled by political bosses who represented working-class, largely Catholic voters. Roosevelt\u2019s well-born secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, disliked the union leaders she worked with and remarked that she would rather pass a law than organize a union. After World War II, the urban and academic liberals made no secret of their disgust for \u201csprawling,\u201d unaesthetic suburbs inhabited by lower-class vulgarians\u2014whose home ownership was made possible by New Deal policies like the GI Bill, government-guaranteed home loans, highway spending, and rural electrification.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Like their Progressive forebears, Northeastern liberals held their noses in the presence of the lower orders for whose benefit they ostensibly acted. Their real goal was not the happiness of workers and farmers, but the more refined pleasures of science-based technocratic governance by a wise, disinterested elite, dominated if possible by patrician graduates of Ivy League universities. Accordingly, they preferred relatively conservative Harvard men like Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy to populist politicians from the provinces like Harry Truman (no college degree) and Lyndon Johnson (a graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sidelined during the long New Deal era between Roosevelt and Reagan by Democratic urban machines in the North and by Southern Democratic courthouse gangs, this elite liberal-progressive subculture\u2014today often called \u201cgentry liberals\u201d\u2014began to capture the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton (a Southern boy who went to Yale Law School). They consolidated their control of the party under Obama, a well-toned product of Harvard Law School and the billionaire NGO complex whose ego-ideal was Spock from Star Trek<\/em> (as President, Obama personally wrote a White House eulogy for the actor Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gentry liberals today control the Democratic Party under Biden, in alliance with billionaires in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Because they are few in number, the gentry liberals need alliances with blocs of non-college-educated voters who are promised the spoils of new, enlightened forms of grievance-based ethnic politics just like old fashioned Tammany Hall bosses. By licensing the new identity-based spoils system, progressive leaders hope that Democratic voting by \u201cpeople of color,\u201d both native and imported, can allow them to create a permanent one-party regime based on enlightened technocracy. Needless to say, progressive Democrats do not seek votes from icky white Catholics, white Southerners and white rural Americans who have been driven out of the party, and whose desires for full-time jobs at decent wages and an end to destructive corporate offshoring might lead to higher taxes and lower corporate profits.<\/span><\/p>\n

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While contempt for the white working class and rural whites has been a constant among America\u2019s coastal elites for more than two centuries, the particular dangers that the laboring masses are said to pose have changed over time. In the 1800s some Federalists feared that rural rebels or Irish immigrants might drown American democracy in a French Jacobin-style bloodbath or a papist takeover of Protestant America. In the second half of the 20th century, anti-populist propaganda adopted a new theme: Working-class Americans are dangerous proto-fascists like the members of the German working class which supposedly brought Hitler to power. At any moment American farmers and construction workers and maids, on orders from this or that American wannabe Hitler, might round up Fresh Air<\/em> listeners and Rachel Maddow fans and put them all in concentration camps.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The contemporary Democratic pundits and professors who toss around phrases like \u201cthe authoritarian personality\u201d and \u201cstatus anxiety\u201d to support such fantasies belong to a tradition going back to The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>, a book published by the German Marxist \u00e9migr\u00e9 Theodor Adorno and his several co-authors in 1950. The book sought to explain the rise of Nazism and other forms of fascism in terms of the psychological maladjustment of working-class individuals. Adorno and his co-authors claimed that their \u201cF-scale\u201d could measure how fascist an individual was. Among the factors that were supposed to identify fascist Americans in Truman\u2019s America were these: \u201cConventionalism. Rigid adherence to conservative, middle-class values \u2026 Exaggerated concern with sexual \u2018goings on.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The attempt to redefine the beliefs of the broad political center as harbingers of fascism isn\u2019t political science; it\u2019s the politics of gentry liberal technocrats.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The F-scale was nonsense\u2014as was the idea that Hitler rose to power with the support of the German working class. The Nazi Party never got more than a minority of the working-class vote. Most working-class Germans opposed the Nazis and preferred socialists, communists, or the Catholic Center Party. Once the Nazis seized power, many trade unionists along with socialists and communists wound up in concentration camps. Nor, with some exceptions prior to 1933, was big business on the side of the Nazis. Scholars have shown that the most pro-Nazi constituencies were small business owners and members of the military and civil services nostalgic for the authoritarianism of Imperial Germany, and who helped to undemocratically install Hitler as chancellor even though most Germans voted against the Nazis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Adorno\u2019s theory about German politics, then, was as comprehensively wrong as his view that many working-class Americans are potential Nazis. Indeed, in the International Journal of Political Psychology<\/em> in 2001, John Levi Martin wrote that \u201cThe Authoritarian Personality<\/em> is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nevertheless, today\u2019s gentry liberal social scientists carry on the discredited tradition of Adorno by redefining values that are widely shared not only by conservatives but also by centrists and even moderate liberals as \u201cauthoritarian\u201d and contrasting them with \u201cliberal\u201d values, which just happen to be the values of those of the one-fifth or so of the population that defines itself as \u201cvery liberal\u201d or \u201cprogressive.\u201d According to Harvard\u2019s Pippa Norris: \u201cAuthoritarian values are those which uphold belief in strong leaders, in a strong state, and in robust law and order. These are traditional values like family, home, religion \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet support for \u201cfamily, home, religion\u201d is far from being \u201cauthoritarian.\u201d In fact, it is shared by most people from the center right to the center left in the U.S. and other democracies. The attempt to redefine the beliefs of the broad political center as harbingers of fascism isn\u2019t political science; it\u2019s the politics of gentry liberal technocrats, who seek to claim the title of centrism even as they stigmatize the actual political center and polarize the country in order to facilitate their own power and influence.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the 1960s, liberals painted the toothbrush mustache on the libertarian Barry Goldwater. Since then, despite their differences, Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have all been potential American Hitlers, according to many of their Democratic contemporaries in American journalism and the universities and political life.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, the theory that many or most working-class and rural Americans are crypto-Nazis comes in several versions, depending on what exactly it is that is supposed to have triggered lower-class lowbrows to vote Republican instead of voting for Democrats who supposedly represent their \u201cinterests\u201d\u2014which now apparently include DEI, transgender surgeries for minors, unlimited immigration, and abolishing the police. In one version, rural and working-class voters were turned into democracy-wrecking monsters by economic disappointment. This was the theme of Barack Obama\u2019s famous leaked 2008 comments<\/a> from a confidential talk to wealthy Democratic donors in San Francisco:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing\u2019s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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The economic deprivation thesis, patronizing as it is, at least holds out the hope that if benevolent technocrats provide the moronic rabble with good jobs and benefits, they won\u2019t turn angry and mutate, Hulk-like, into American-style Nazis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More insulting to Republican working-class voters and therefore more appealing to snobbish gentry liberals is the noneconomic status-anxiety theory. If working-class and rural voters do not support the Democrats, the party of the people (the people of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and much of Wall Street, that is), then these voters must be motivated by deeply rooted irrational bigotry, not mere economic distress. While Obama provided the classic statement of the economic deprivation theory in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016 did the same for the working-class bigotry theory, in a statement which, like Obama\u2019s, was intended to be for the ears of rich Democratic donors in an invitation-only fundraiser in New York:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump\u2019s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They\u2019re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic\u2014you name it.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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In a New York Times<\/em> essay of Feb. 9, 2022, titled \u201cStatus Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump\u2019s Sails,\u201d the journalist Thomas B. Edsall quotes Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish academic, who claims that the increase in the \u201cstatus in society\u201d of \u201cracial, ethnic, and sexual minorities\u201d has pushed \u201cthose with lower education or those who feel challenged by the new emerging groups towards the right.\u201d Agreeing with Petersen, Edsall concludes that many working-class whites are therefore not only emotionally disturbed but also un-American: \u201cThe data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition \u2026 That this is dangerous does not need repeating.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ezra Klein, another gentry liberal New York Times<\/em> columnist, has aggressively pushed the claim that white resentment of nonwhite progress explains votes against the Democratic Party that he supports. Klein made the racial status anxiety thesis central to his book <\/a>Why We\u2019re Polarized <\/em>in 2020, which the billionaire Bill Gates, the Harvard dropout son of a wealthy lawyer, touted as one of \u201c5 books to read this summer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The thesis that racism explains the preference for Republicans of non-college-educated white working-class Americans confirms the biases of the average<\/a> New York Times<\/em> reader\u2014a 42-year-old Democrat with a college degree who makes more than $75,000 a year, in a country in which most people have no education beyond high school or some college and a median income <\/a>of $48,060.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The paying subscribers of The New York Times<\/em> are even more partisan than readers in general, according to former New York Times<\/em> editorial-page editor James Bennet, who wrote<\/a> in The Economist<\/em>: \u201cMore than 95% of Times <\/em>subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times <\/em>was also liberal. A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become \u2018a selling point,\u2019 reported one internal marketing memo.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there\u2019s a major problem with ascribing Republican votes to a longing for white supremacy. In 2020, after years in which Democratic pundits asserted that hatred of Hispanics was the essence of Trump\u2019s appeal, Hispanic voters <\/a>shifted toward Trump in numbers that almost permitted him to defeat Joe Biden\u2014with a shift of 26 points from 2016 for Cuban Americans, an 18-point shift among Puerto Rican Americans, and a 12-point shift among Mexican Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Democratic advantage among nonwhite working-class voters in general has shifted from 67 points for Obama to 48 points for Biden in 2020 to a mere 17 points for Biden today, according to a New York Times<\/em>\/Siena poll<\/a> in December 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And if I may be permitted an exercise in Tom Friedman-style anecdata, the last two Uber drivers I hired, one a recent Nigerian immigrant and a Venezuelan who immigrated to the U.S. under Biden, both told me that if they could vote they would vote for Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If racism and white nationalism are motivating voters who prefer Republicans to Democrats, how can progressives explain the fact that the Democratic Party is getting whiter and richer, while the Republican Party is getting browner and more working class? One option is to define Blacks and Hispanics who refuse to vote for Democrats as self-hating. Another is to claim that Blacks and Hispanics and Asian Americans are not authentic members of their groups. Candidate Joe Biden in May 2020 chose the latter strategy during an interview <\/a>with the popular Black drive-time radio host Charlamagne. When the host said he had more questions, Biden snapped, \u201cYou\u2019ve got more questions, but I tell you \u2026 if you\u2019ve got a problem whether or not you\u2019re for me or Trump, then you ain\u2019t Black\u201d\u2014compounding the damage of his patronizing remark with his use of the faux-Black dialect that white Democratic politicians of a certain age often employ when addressing Black Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Fortunately for gentry liberals, there is now a third alternative to the discredited white nationalist and economic deprivation theories of why working-class Americans vote for Republicans\u2014the \u201cprecarious manhood\u201d theory of Harold Meyerson and others. If \u201c[y]ounger working-class men of all races\u201d increasingly vote for Republicans, then the reason must be sexual frustration.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s not nonwhites whom the multiracial working class resents; it\u2019s women! The Republican Party is not the Ku Klux Klan after all; it\u2019s the He Man Woman Haters Club from The Little Rascals<\/em> (NO GURLZ ALLOWED).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The partisan gender gap between young men and young women, and men and women of all races in general, is an interesting political phenomenon. But the data suggest that the greatest emotional maladjustment is not on the side of \u201cyounger working-class men of all races.\u201d According to a recent study<\/a> by epidemiologists at Columbia University, depression rates have risen the most for young progressive women. A March 2020 Pew study reported<\/a> that 56% of young white liberal women, said they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition, compared to only 28% of young white moderates and a mere 27% of young white conservatives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Although Donald Trump will eventually be gone from the scene, elite center-left fear and loathing of the multiracial working class seems unlikely to change. Today\u2019s heirs of anti-populist and anti-egalitarian Progressives, Mugwumps, Whigs, and Federalists will continue to insist that working-class Americans and rural Americans are dangerous cretins who threaten to destroy democracy by putting their grubby fingers on the voting levers and committing an unforgivable crime: voting against gentry liberal candidates. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Michael Lind<\/strong> is a Tablet columnist, a fellow at New America, and author of Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Attack of the Crypto-Nazis! Michael Lind Working-class Americans say they\u2019re voting for their interests. NPR apostles say they suffer from \u2018white rage\u2019 and \u2018precarious manhood.\u2019 Who\u2019s right? . Diego Pati\u00f1o Are working-class men of all races, along with rural Americans in general, the greatest threats to the American republic today? According to Harold Meyerson, writing in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115234"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115319,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115234\/revisions\/115319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}