I’ll probably get in trouble for today’s post, but who cares.
I’m re-reading the 2016 bestseller, “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America,” which did so much to highlight the national conversation about Trump voters whom Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.” The book is a scholarly analysis of these people, and the role they’ve played in America since the first colonizers. As author Nancy Isenberg writes, “Each era in [America’s] vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people—unwanted and unsalvageable.”
The conventional contemporary view of America’s White underclass is that these waste people, deplorables, rednecks, poor white trash, clay eaters, mongrels, crackers, hillbillies, mudsills, dregs of society (they’ve been called many unflattering things over the last 400 years) became MAGA voters due to the resentment they’ve felt over the condescending attitudes toward them of coastal elites. I’d like to draw an analogy between these reactionary rightwing Republicans, on the one hand, and their equivalents on the leftwing side of the ledger: the radical, woke “progressives” who, in their own way, are just as stupid, reactionary, stubborn, oblivious to fact, irrational, resistant to truth and common sense and, yes, deplorable, as the most diehard Trumpers.
I refer, of course, to the Fife-Price-Cat Brooks-Bas-Kaplan-Thao crowd. We have no name for them like MAGA (and its neologistic epithet MAGAt), other than woke. (I refuse to use “progressive” because they’re not.) The beautiful thing about the word MAGA is that it wasn’t coined by liberals but by Trump himself; the very name conjures up all the absurdities, inanities, sociopathies and dangers that the MAGA crowd marinates in.
The wokes are our modern big-city version of trailer trash. Where actual MAGA trailer trash are rural, under-educated (and proud of it), allegedly “Christian,” poor, often obese, sexually confused and resentful of non-White people, our modern Democratic trailer trash are most often Black, resentful of White people, hyper-educated (usually with law or liberal arts degrees), middle-class, and urban, and they may profess any religion, although secular humanism best describes their theological inclination. What both forms of trash have in common is an anti-intellectualism that pushes them toward ideological extremes, and a fierce resentment, bordering on hatred, of their political opposites. “White Trash” did a good job of describing how potentially disruptive these rural Christians were (and keep in mind that the book was written before Donald Trump was elected)—a prognostication that has amply been borne out in the eight years since. It would be helpful if there were a New York Times bestseller (as “White Trash” was) that comparably described Democratic trash. The last few years, with the rise of MAGA, have given us a flood of such books, some of the more interesting of which are by Christopher Rufo. But most are marred by Christian triumphalism, rigid phobias, an absence of empathy, and—worst of all—a refusal to call out the moral and intellectual perversions of MAGA ideology and its threat to our democracy.
At any rate, the goal of moderate liberals, which I think most of us are, ought to be making “woke” as derisory a descriptor of the extreme left as “trailor”or “white” trash is of the extreme right. I think we’re succeeding. Tomorrow’s election results will confirm or refute this, at least here in Oakland.
Vote if you haven’t already! And stay safe. We may be in for a bumpy ride.
Steve Heimoff