There’s been a saying going around for a few years: “You can’t win an election by calling people stupid.” Well, 2016 and 2024 were empirical evidence to the contrary. Liberals and progressives weren’t merely called stupid, but evil and deranged and socialist. The name-calling was constant, because MAGA weren’t trying to convert anybody. They were trying to reinforce the voters that they already had.
This afternoon, I was in the parking lot of the local Shaw’s supermarket, always an ethnographically rich experience. Macho cars and pickups in various states of disrepair, people far too young to be missing all of their teeth, gaggles of people whose family relations were impossible to even begin to guess. (One of our neighbors got remarried to a far younger woman; they had another kid themselves, and a friend pointed out that the new wife now had a daughter-in-law older than she was.) And the word that came to mind was lumpenproletariat.
I can call out my white-trash relations because I was one. My father couldn’t move away from the African Americans he despised because he’d spent all his money on beer, cigarettes, project cars that rarely ran, and fishing boats. I know that black-flag-bumper-sticking-2A-god-guts-and-glory bad beer bullshit far too well. We aren’t converting any of those folks, even though we’ve invisibly supported their dysfunction for decades. You want to talk about “makers and takers?” Makers: California, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware. Takers: Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Idaho.
Indeed, because it acted only out of socially ignorant self-interest, the lumpenproletariat was easily bribed by reactionary forces and could be used to combat the true proletariat in its efforts to bring about the end of bourgeois society. Without a clear class-consciousness, the lumpenproletariat could not play a positive role in society. Instead, it exploited society for its own ends, and was in turn exploited as a tool of destruction and reaction.—Robert Brussard, 1987.
Does this sound familiar to you? Does this sound like your “Let’s Go Brandon” neighbors? Easily bribed, exploited as a tool of destruction and reaction? Complaining that they can’t get ahead, never considering the role of the monster Ram coal-rolling pickup in the driveway and the scatter of other discarded and broken notions all around the house?
The lumpenproletariat hates the well-educated, mistaking us for the elites like Musk and Trump and Bezos who’ve actually gotten rich from exploitation. We live closer by, and are more visible and thus easier targets of their resentment. (Pretty much EVERYBODY is doing better than the lumpenprole, so their resentment overfloweth.) Own the libs, amirite?
I try. I really do. I don’t mind paying taxes to support things I don’t use directly, because I understand the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer. I can be kind to stupid people. But I can’t be kind to people who want to hurt millions of others just because they feel aggrieved. The fact that they simultaneously hurt themselves is just an inevitable byproduct, and one that I can’t be too upset about. I’ll help take care of them after the fact, as good liberals always do.
- Forgive your brother seventy times seven.
- Whatever you did for the least of my brothers, you did for me.
- Let’s abandon Ukraine, threaten Canada and Mexico, and eliminate USAID.
Which of these things is not like the other?
Do better.
Herb Childress 