[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]A[/dropcap] rare example of a rightist populist slogan that, miraculously enough, carries depth and resonance: “Deplorable Lives Matter.”
They are on to something. Deplorable lives, that is, alienated, enraged working class and poor whites do not matter to the Liberal Class, for the same reason black lives don’t matter to the white supremacist order. There is no profit for capitalism’s elitist classes in it, the Liberal Class included.
Excerpt from an article published in the neoliberal mouthpiece, The New York Times, during the first days of Trump’s “hot mic” media frenzy:
“But the real source of comfort to Mr. Trump seemed to be the small band of supporters waving Trump signs on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk outside the building. His fans clashed with people walking by, including a woman who told a female Trump supporter that she should go back to her “trailer.”’
Of course, Trump’s sub-cretinous remarks about women were the very emblem of sexism. Yet the remark by the passing Hillaryite is the very emblem of liberal classism. Yet rarely do members of the Liberal Class cry foul regarding their caste’s proclivity for class-based shaming.
The supercilious mindset is the result of an insularity born of privilege. When do liberals ever speak, one on one, to members of the labouring class (unless the situation involves the de facto master/servant relationship evinced in a service industry exchange)?
The liberals I used to clash with when I was a resident of Manhattan, almost to a person, were completely removed from and, worse, completely incurious, about the lives of the working class. Their attitude is revealed in a shitshow of class snobbery and smugness.
When visiting my wife’s family in the South Carolina Low Country, I have found the people there far more receptive to a socialist critique of the capitalist order than that of liberals. Why? Unlike upscale liberals the working class, on a day by day basis, languish, are stripped of hope, and are humiliated under the depravations of capitalism.
Yet liberals blame Trump and other Republican blowhards for the rage of the white working class. Convenient, that. And intellectually dishonest and mercenary to boot. Why do liberals refuse to acknowledge class-based deprivation as a defining factor in the angst and animus of the labouring class?
In short, an honest reckoning would cause Liberalcrats to acknowledge classism is every bit as hurtful, destructive, and reprehensible as sexism and racism, and, moreover, would call them to account for their own privilege. Finally an acknowledgment of the situation would imply the imperative to make amends and restitution for their complicity in the oppression inflicted on the less fortunate by the mechanisms of capitalism, a system that is the source of their affluence and the progenitor of their snobbery.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
