The lesser evil? Really?

Steven M

I left this comment at the post to which I link above.

You will see the relevance.

. . . .

Many are the liberals these days who think O should have focused on jobs creation and dealing with issues of inequality instead of on Obamacare, somehow itself not perceived as an issue of class or anyway as one sufficiently pressing.

It is believed that throughout his tenure he has not sufficiently focused on the working class – aka “middle class” in American political writing – and that this lack of focus has helped strengthen a perception among white voters of that class that the Democrats are not their party, any more.

Meanwhile, it is acknowledged that such class conscious policies would have benefitted by no means only white Americans or white Americans of the working class but Americans of all races.

And few would be so bigoted as to say that O has been sweating to advance the position or agenda of blacks in particular.

Sure, his cabinet and staff are too black to look like America.

But any suggestion he has neglected the white working class to be a black people’s president would be some sort of Klan delusion.

All which amounts to saying he would have been a better president for black people had he been a better president for white workers, and in just the same measure.

All the same, the impression has been created during his presidency more than any other in recent decades among whites and maybe not only among whites that the Democrats have become all too seriously the part of non-whites and anti-American, counter-cultural radicals, a party not only devoted mostly to the interests and aspirations of such folks but actually hostile to whites.

And that has deepened the alienation of whites, and in particular the white working class, from the Democrats.

The greatest part of the responsibility for this does not lie with O or his White House, his staff, or his policies.

It lies with repeated deluges of liberal, radical, black, and feminist propaganda attacking Republicans not over issues of class but for being men, for being white, and for being a party of white men all of whom in America hate women, gays, and everybody of all other races and religions.

That propaganda expresses the venom and wins the hearts and minds of a base that really does loathe pretty much everything about the ordinary white person, and especially the ordinary white male, in the United States.

But with every passing year it makes the Democratic Party less and less the progressive party of all of the non-rich and more and more the bigoted, narrow party of non-working class interests.

And I haven’t said a word about the abysmal impact on the American working class of mass, low-wage immigration, killer competition from overseas manufacturing thanks to free trade, and climate deals that paralyze American production to the advantage of those same overseas centers of manufacturing, on which issues the agenda of the Democrats is even worse for American workers than the agenda of Main Street, and apart from immigration even Wall Street, Republicans.

For the American working class of all races though in the minds mostly of the white working class, voting is a choice between enemies, between Republicans who would destroy every remaining vestige of the gains of a century of progressivism including Social Security and Medicare and Democrats whose policies also kill wages, jobs, and their future and even put Social Security and Medicare at risk.

The Republicans are their devoted class enemies, and even say so with their well know lust to destroy progressivism.

But the Democrats are also their enemies, doing little or nothing to protect them from conservative policies that hurt them in trade and economics and constantly beating the hell out of them because they are white, because they are male, because they are Christians, and because they are Americans.

As time passes, more and more such Americans see the Republicans, not the Democrats, as the less hostile party.

Whose fault is that?

All of which illustrates a point evident to many all along.

The many do not rule; the few govern.

Under any mixed government in Aristotle’s sense, or any popular government in the sense used from Machiavelli to Mill, Maine, Taft, and even to our own time, parties dominated by the rich and politicians drawn from the upper classes control the state.

Often in such cases it falls out that two major parties compete, and so must have distinguishable agendas.

Sometimes the differences make one of the two more plausibly the party of the plebs and the other the party of the oligarchs.

But not always, and other issues are always more or less part of the mix.

In fact, religion, ethnicity, or other factors can equally well be predominant in differentiating parties whose characterization, vis-a-vis each other, as reflecting interests of high and low is little better than derisory.

Sometimes describing political rivalries as very like sport rivalries is less metaphoric than at other times.

Sometimes such characterization is not only literally correct but comes close to exhausting the nature of the rivalry, altogether, its other content – and so its class content – diminishing to nothing, or next to nothing.

Nika riots

Of course, the Nika riots happened under a regime in no sense popular that nevertheless had to cope with elite and popular parties (factions) sufficiently organized and well-financed to sponsor racing teams, gangs, and rioters.