Smarter Than Mayonnaise

I'm caught up with pretty much everything except reading (which I'll never catch up with), so I've run out of excuses for not writing.  Then the Subway where I ate lunch was tuned to a broadcast of one of those Nuremberg rallies we call American professional football, one of the broadcasters announced that people would stand for the National Anthem, a lugubrious basso began singing it badly, and I had the impetus I needed to push me to the keyboard.

A few weeks ago, the notorious Fasco-American provocateuse Tomi Lahren attempted to mock US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by tweeting that she -- that is, Lahren -- was going to dress as Ocasio-Cortez for Halloween.

Sensibly, Ocasio-Cortez wasn't offended by Lahren's costume.  She drew attention to Lahren's attempted slur, "former bartender."  Lahren backed down while pretending not to back down:

Responding to critics, a seemingly unphased Lahren refused to back down, tweeting: "I mean this truly and sincerely, being a former bartender is the best and most admirable thing about @AOC."

She lied, of course.  Like most Republicans, she believes that having been a service worker somehow discredits Ocasio-Cortez. But then, so do right-wing Democrats. Numerous AOC fans and supporters pointed out that though elites pretend to care about working people, putting us in our place is one of their go-tos.  They'll usually back down, as Lahren did, when they get called on it, but if they didn't believe it, their ids wouldn't spew out the contemptuous dismissals in the first place.  What it amounts to is that while they value proles in our place, we had better not get too big for our britches by, say, getting elected to Congress.

I've often come up against versions of this pattern myself, from my liberal law-professor friend who refused to recognize that mocking college dropouts was not only invalid, it included me.  "It didn't refer to you," she protested, "You're not a newscaster."  But I am a college dropout, so it did refer to me.

I came up against this same mindset several times earlier, on a university-owned BBS in the 1990s, which was open to university staff, students, and faculty.  Someone would dismiss my opinions by pointing out that I was a dishwasher, what did I know?  Usually some of my friends would defend me as being real smart anyway, and the offender would backtrack and protest that he (it was always a he) totally respected me and would be proud to have me teach his children.  This was still irrelevant, and I don't think I ever got an answer to my follow-up question, which was why, if these people respected me so much, why did they begin with a pointless ad hominem dismissal?  The important thing, I take it, was that they should never actually have to engage with a rational argument.  That's a right guaranteed by the Constitution, you know.

The worst thing about social media, as far as I'm concerned, is not the right-wing loonies, toadies, and thugs who populate it, but the liberal and left loonies, toadies, and thugs who populate it. That's a personal reaction, since both do equal harm to rational discourse, but it bothers me more because the liberals and leftists are supposed to be on my side, my allies and shields against the Trump threat, defenders of reality-based, fact-based discourse in a post-truth world. 

Take my liberal law-professor friend, who posted authoritatively on Facebook just last week that hate speech is not Constitutionally protected.  She was either ignorant or lying, and in either case I'm concerned for her students, just as I am for the students of right-wing bigots who teach in public universities.  Even in the red state where she teaches, even in law school, she may encounter people who disagree with her from the left, the kind of people liberals hate even more than they hate Donald Trump.  I don't know that she'd fail a student who corrected her factual errors, but I'm confident that she'd try to pull rank based on her education and authority as a professor. 

That doesn't work on me: she can't hurt me by giving me a low grade, and I don't even give her the benefit of the doubt anymore.  But it could intimidate her students, and that's not good.   I hope none of them have worked as bartenders, table servers, or in other low-class jobs.

The True-Born Englishman

But wait, there's more. I began looking at Owen Jones's Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Verso, 2011), which is about class warfare in Britain. Early on, Jones discusses an ad campaign for an upscale fitness club called Gymbox, which started a self-defense class called Chav Fighting. (A chav -- from a Romany word for "child," according to Jones (2) -- is a lower-class Briton; there are other derogatory terms for non-whites.)

The leaflets for the class included such enticements as "Why hone your skills on punch bags and planks of wood when you can deck some Chavs". The Advertising Standards Authority dismissed complaints on the ground that such classes "would be unlikely to condone or incite violence against particular social groups..." (3); "social groups" presumably referring only to "racial" minorities.

Jones quotes Richard Hilton, the CEO of Gymbox:

They tend to live in England but would probably pronounce it 'Engerland.' They have trouble articulating themselves and have little ability to spell or write. They love their pit bull dogs as well as their blades. And would happily 'shank' you if you accidentally brush past them or look at them in the wrong way. They tend to breed by the age of fifteen, and spend most of their days trying to score 'super-skunk' or whatever 'gear' they can get their teenage hands on. If they are not institutionalized by twenty-one they are considered pillars of strength. in the community or get 'much respect' for being lucky [4].

"And yet, intriguingly, Mr Hilton does not think of himself as a bigot -- far from it. Sexism, racism and homophobia, for example, were 'completely unacceptable," Jones reports (4.)

When travel firm Activities Abroad took heat for promising "Chav-Free Activity Holidays," "'I simply feel it is time the middle classes stood up for themselves,' declared managing director Alistair McLean, "Regardless of whether it's class warfare or not, I make no apology for proclaiming myself to be middle class'" (5). I enjoyed McClean's implication that it takes courage to "proclaim" one's membership in the middle class, against the PC Guardian readers -- also probably middle-class -- who objected to their ads. (Just as it takes courage to admit to being a liberal or a Christian nowadays.) "Activities Abroad exploited resentment against the cheap flights which allowed working-class people to 'invade' the middle-class space of the foreign holiday. 'You can't even flee abroad to escape them these days' -- that sort of sentiment" (5), commented Jones.

This is the kind of thing that makes me dismissive when (usually white) well-meaning Americans argue that the answer to America's racial and ethnic conflicts is to intermarriage, to the point where everybody is the same color. Skin color is a handy divisor, but as the pasty white Brits quoted above reveal, it's really just an excuse. If there were no "racial" differences in the US, others would be invented and exploited. (And remember, many groups now classed as white here didn't used to be: Irish, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Jews.)

What really intrigues me is the way the same language, the same tropes, are used to demonize whatever group is currently being classified as Them. The parallel to Black English in Hilton's diatribe should be obvious, but don't forget the way white liberals worked themselves into a lather over George Bush's difficulties with pronunciation and syntax. I don't suppose that these themes are "genetic," but it is very interesting how they recur over time and in different contexts: They are dirty lazy animals who breed like rabbits, steal like monkeys, and babble unintelligible gibberish; they don't have language, they don't have morals, they band together and hate all outsiders. They don't belong here, why don't they go back where they came from? (There are echoes of these attitudes in John Preston's contempt for the "sightseers" who defiled the edgy, exclusive world of the leather bar.)

Of course Richard Hilton and Alistair McLean aren't bigots; as my Right Wing Acquaintance would say, they're just trying to protect their culture. But how remarkable that the threat is as true-born as they are. And why do defenders of culture keep falling back on the same giveway themes, regardless of the origin or status of the barbarians at their gates?

Why Do They Hate Our Freedoms?

One of my right-wing classmates on Facebook posted a link to this article from the American Spectator, a charming little rag whose main function appears to be to make the National Review look moderate. My friend commented on the link:

If we are so upset with our Government ... Why do 80 % of incumbents win re-election. ...... Read the article below "Breaking the Ruling Class"

The link came via a Facebook page belonging to the American Majority, a right-wing organization that evidently chose its name on the same principle as the Bolsheviks did, though with less basis in reality. (And goodness gracious! The article was written by the "founder and President" of the American Majority, one Ned Ryun.) their link included the comment:

At re-election rates of over 80%, we do indeed have a ruling class. How can we stop this?

... illustrated by a picture of Charlie Rangel. I guess the idea is that since so many in Congress serve multiple terms, they constitute a "class." Tied to this is a call for the highly anti-democratic quick fix of term limits. The American Majority's wall photos include images of scary Negroes and many of politicians, but only one is of a Republican, Chris Christie.

The article itself misses a few things:

During the American Revolution, roughly a third of all colonists supported King George III, and, for the most part, Parliament. Though completely surrounded by the wildfire of political rebellion, these Tories continued to support the status quo. Thankfully, our founders did not, no more than the Tea Party accepts today's status quo. ...

Of course, "our founders" -- certainly the iconic ones -- were the ruling class of their day, and they didn't want to shake things up too much. They were very concerned to protect the wealthy elites against the envious rabble. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry -- all were gentry. (I just looked up Henry and noticed that after failing more than once in business he became a lawyer. That would qualify him for political office today, wouldn't it?) But hey, only Communists study history; Real Americans can just make it up.

I don't mean to oversimplify; the Founders made some appeal to radical ideas to gain support from the bulk of the population, including those of Thomas Paine. At least some of them had some personal and political integrity. But they were still the Ruling Class. I thought that the historical chapters of Roger D. Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope (HarperCollins, 2010) cast some interesting light on the crony capitalism of the late 1700s; if you want an introduction to the problem, check it out. (Look up the Panic of 1792, especially.)

In 2009, a full 76 percent of people polled said that elected officials put their own interests ahead of those of the American people. Yet despite such numbers, in 2010, during one of the most dramatic political shifts in decades, more than 80 percent of incumbents at all levels won reelection, largely preserving the political status quo.

Funny, that. Leftists have been pointing it out for some time. But I think that the 2010 elections can only be linked to "one of the most dramatic political shifts in decades" if you relate them to the 2008 elections, which were a much more dramatic rejection of the status quo. It's interesting what short (or well-trained) memories the Right have; 2008 isn't that long ago, yet they forget that American voters delivered a stinging defeat to the Republican party. (But then, no wonder they prefer to forget that.)

At first glance, it doesn't make sense: a highly unpopular Congress (and president, for that matter), governing over an economy and country careening out of control, yet some eight out of 10 members of Congress can expect to be re-elected. Many have served for years and have brought this country to its current predicament. Yet they keep winning re-election to continue their tenures of failure: If current spending levels hold, the United States' public debt will eclipse 300 percent of our economy before midcentury. And when confronted with massive debt, our leaders, lacking the political courage to undertake fundamental change, shave infinitesimal amounts here and there, exfoliating the elephant of debt while it keeps plowing ahead toward the inevitable cliff.

Again, what a short memory you have, Grandma! True, Congress is unpopular, but the Republicans are even less popular. Obama's approval numbers are dropping, but the last I heard they hadn't reached George W. Bush levels yet. Most Americans still remember Bush and what he and his cronies did to this country; it's only the Republican fringe who have scrubbed their minds of such inconvenient facts.

Ryun is also carefully vague about the context of Congressional corruption: he has Congress floating there in mid-air, full of motiveless malignity, security in its incumbency. He uses the Ruling Class to refer only to Congress and the Executive Branch; the Corporate Branch doesn't enter the picture at all. You'd think that Congress and Obama (who in the right-wing imagination must have taken office in 2001; Bush's effect on the economy is simply forgotten) were getting the country into debt purely for their own personal enrichment; that they do so in the service of the financial and corporate sectors is conspicuous by its absence from the, erm, discussion.

Which brings me to the most entertaining aspect of the article and my friend's recommendation: it's a call for Class Warfare, the great bugbear of the Right, the epithet they hurl at Occupy Wall Street, Obama, the Democrats -- but not at the Tea Party, who doesn't like Wall Street any better than the rest of the 99 percent do. I guess that's Tea Party Exceptionalism: it's only bad when their enemies do it, not when they do it.