You are under no obligation to empathize with people who want you dead.

[sabotabby]

Spotted in my neighbourhood.

If I read one more thinkpiece about the poor neglected American white working class men I swear to fuck I'll scream.

Their lives suck, sure. Hillbilly heroin and outsourcing. Their lives suck because of decisions made by rich maggots like Cheeto Hitler. Boo-fucking-oo. Their lives will continue to suck under Trump, in exactly the same way, except worse without Medicare and the ACA or whatever else half-assed government programs y'all have down there.

I ask you: Where were these guys when we were in the streets protesting NAFTA in the 90s? Voting for Bush, calling us terrorists and anarchists for holding up traffic, that's where. Yelling at us to get jobs.

But you know who else's lives suck? Black working class men and women. Trans working class men and women. Latino working class men and women. Muslims and Jews. Immigrants. Disabled people. None of whom are rich, coastal elites. And their lives are going to get worse in the same way that white working class men's lives will get worse, only exponentially more because their government has now declared open warfare on them. Losing your job is shit, trust me, I know; losing your job and then getting beaten to death by some brownshirt wannabe fuckhead is apparently something most whites can't empathize with, so why should they get empathy in return?

To the extent that any working class people actually voted for this bargain basement Mussolini, they have rendered themselves undeserving of your sympathy and understanding.

P.S. Same with white American women, though I see less pity pieces about them.

Comments

[rdi.livejournal.com]

I’m going start carrying a paint scraper and a sharpie...

[sabotabby]

Same.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean I don't think demonizing people or reducing people to the worst thing they've done (like voting for Trump) is a good thing, but the holding up of the white working class man as an exceptionally tragic figure to the exclusion of all others is nauseating.

There is the matter of understanding what the fuck happened and why and what can be done to stop it happening again. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan had not voted Republican since 1988. These places had swings to Trump compared to Romney that won him the election. So there are some people there, one speculates a lot of them are these storied white working class people, especially men, who in the past have voted Dem or not voted but went with Trump this time. Probably not a whole lot of them, compared with the numbers who have always or usually voted for the racist arseholes, and the ones who didn't by the snake oil. But just a few tens of thousands too many.

(I mean the answer is pretty obvious, it's neoliberalism and the lack of a clear positive alternative and so on, but that doesn't excuse people for voting for the worst possible choice available.)

And this is another crappy thing, that these poor suffering WWCM, while attributed this status of being supremely deserving of sympathy, are at the same time assumed to be incapable of thought, reflection, and free choice. Plenty of poor white people clearly didn't vote for Trump. (I haven't seen figures for lower income white people specifically though).

Ugh, sorry about the posters in your area. I guess your suspicions fall on Dmitri the Lover?

[sabotabby]

the holding up of the white working class man as an exceptionally tragic figure to the exclusion of all others is nauseating.

I think that's what's getting me the most. Why am I supposed to sympathize with them more than all the queer people and trans people and black people and brown people and disabled people who didn't have as well as white people to start off with and are now going to have it even worse.

these poor suffering WWCM, while attributed this status of being supremely deserving of sympathy, are at the same time assumed to be incapable of thought, reflection, and free choice.

Oh, that too. I'm sick of hearing about lack of education as well—as if white schools aren't superior to black schools.

Ugh, sorry about the posters in your area. I guess your suspicions fall on Dmitri the Lover?

Yep. Though his graphic design skills tend to be a bit more over-the-top, so it may be some other fucking Nazi.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

There is the matter of understanding what the fuck happened and why and what can be done to stop it happening again.

People have told me to shut up when I say, "Election Fraud!" but folks, it's incredibly easy with a program called "CrossCheck," which will throw potential voters off the rolls just for having the same name as someone else.

Also I came across this article about Trump's big "victory."

[sabotabby]

I don't even think there needs to be fraud. Disenfranchisement is enough to sway the vote.

[canonfire.livejournal.com]

Preach.

A sharpie and paint scraper sound like good ideas.

[sabotabby]

Yep. I need to get me some.

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

"Bargain basement Mussolini" is a lovely phrase for a horrid, horrid person.

I am, as usual, thoroughly ashamed of my fellow white women.

[sabotabby]

Same. Although I can take comfort in the fact that most Jews didn't vote for the fucker.

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Well, we Hebs would have been in for the rude awakening - what with the NAZI he just appointed to his cabinet.

[sabotabby]

Yep. And some still don't seem to get it.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Well THAT poster is a drop of shit from the current flood. Ugh.

Thank you for this.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, we're getting our share of vomit spray up here.

On the plus side, my neighbourhood retaliated with this:



And it was everywhere. I'm also working on a poster with some people.

[dancingdragon3.livejournal.com]

These are very excellent points. You mention not a lot has been said about working class white women, and that makes me wonder how much the MRA and like minded people are responsible for this uproar. White men have been crying for a while that they are endangered, not respected, don't get enough sex and money, etc.

I feel like I should apologize for my country already having such a negative effect on yours. That is scary that Trump has tapped into something that is spreading over Canada and who knows where else. And I really don't think him saying "Stop it" is going to do much good.

HUGS

[sabotabby]

Honestly, white Canadians are just as racist as Americans. We just bury it a little deeper, and I think it's based on a different impulse.

The alt-right recruits from the MRA/PUA communities. I think it's been happening for much longer than we realize.

[kukurbicin.livejournal.com]

A bit of a break from the worries of their...

[sabotabby]

Okay that's a bit random, but I'll accept it.

[wlach.livejournal.com]

It's hard to know which thinkpieces you're referring to exactly, but if you're talking about this essay, I disagree:

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism

I think it has valid points to make about just how insufferable progressives can be and why our ideas don't get traction. We have a real problem with thinking that being on the right side of issues is enough. It isn't. For all our talk, the track record of the liberal left in North America in improving most people's lives has been very poor over the past 20 years or so. Not really sure what to do about that. :(

[sabotabby]

I wouldn't say that this particular one is the worst offender, though I think a lot of the points it makes are quite silly. I'm thinking more of the ones where some New Yorker or Californian with dubious connections to the rural heartland ventures home to Trump Country, where Obama's miraculous economic recovery has left some people behind, and waxing eloquent about the broken-down pickup truck on the yellow lawn. Dale, whose father and grandfather worked in an auto plant but he lost his job after NAFTA, and a back injury means that he's on disability, and dependent on opioids, and his wife Marge who just "likes the way that Trump man is going to bring the jobs back to America." It's exploitative and gross and I think mostly wrong.

The left is a mess, but one thing that I haven't seen addressed is that the right never wins through empathy. Apparently what the working class wants is to be yelled at and insulted by a shouty man. We've seen it over and over again, with Ford, with Brexit, and now with Trump. I see it with my kids—the boys all love a shouty man and think he's "funny." And I don't think that most Americans are past the developmental stage of teenage boys.

Furthermore, I'm not sure white people, as a group, are even capable of empathy. I have theories on this.

In terms of what the solution is, I don't know either. Go harder, I think. The right wins by going increasingly right, and the left loses by offering a watered-down version of what the right is promoting. We need to focus on economics—serious radical change there—instead of just on social issues. We need to wait for the old people to die. Maybe we need to get more shouty, I don't know.

[wlach.livejournal.com]

Honestly I think much of what we call empathy in our culture is just empty sentimentality. What good does it do to feel bad for someone in the abstract if you're not going to actually help them in some kind of material way?

There was a really cool moment last year when it seemed like everyone in Canada wanted to help the Syrian refugees. There were signs all over the place saying "refugees welcome". People I knew were fundraising to sponsor families. And it became a major election issue, arguably one of the things that defeated Harper. We need more moments like that.

[sabotabby]

By empathy I mean a literal ability to imagine yourself in someone else's place. When I hear some of my kids—I should specify boys, because I have never actually seen a girl do this—talk about immigrants and refugees, this becomes obvious. They all do illegal things—smoke weed, get into fights, drink underage, steal shit—but they tend to like Trump's position on immigrants because "they're here illegally." Same with white boys talking about BLM. They will justify any police shooting because the guy was selling cigarettes, or whatever.

I try to draw a parallel between their own various minor criminal activities and that of non-status people or black victims of police brutality, but it seems to make their little brains short-circuit. They're just not capable of making that connection. I try to get them to imagine what they would do if Toronto suddenly became a war zone and they had to move somewhere else, and they just don't get it.

I've had the same types of conversations with adult men, with much the same result. I don't even think it's obstinance; I think if you've been trained that you are the only subject and everyone is is an object, it's hard to move past that mindset unless you consciously try.

FWIW, I'm organizing a thing at my school to sponsor a Syrian family.

[ironed_orchid]

A friend on facebook posted a link to The 'White Working Class' Can Kiss My Brown Ass, and added the comment "Understand that I actually am a white working-class man. Nobody has ever held a gun to my and ordered me to be a Nazi. Nazis are responsible for their own choices." Which is a statement I can get behind.

(Actually I might need to introduce you, you're both commies with cats.)

bargain basement Mussolini is an excellent description and I may steal it.

[sabotabby]

Ah, yes, I read that. I know plenty of white working class men who were never Nazis—in fact, 99% of them—and I think it's classism to assume that the working class is inherently more fascist minded when Republicans skew rich.

Introduce me to your friend, and feel free to steal the description. If I hadn't already tagged my Trump posts with "cheeto hitler" before I thought of this, it'd be my US politics tag for the next four years.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem I had was dealing with a manarchist from Boston who eventually slurred me by calling me part of the bourgeoisie and I'm like you fucker, I grew up poor in the countryside. We ate government cheese. Just because I espouse some liberal/progressive shit doesn't mean I'm bourgeois. I may hold some minor bourgeois cosmopolitan humanist politics ahead of your defense of working class racist whites. But don't you DARE tell me I'm not legit. I own no property. I am working class through and through. I never even fucking went to college. All I believe is directly from experience and self-education. Don't you dare impugn my working class credentials because I hold different views. Same sort of shit you accuse me of regarding working white class folks.

Fuck off.

Now the blame is on us for not fighting harder to oppose the neoliberal hegemony and destroying the Democrats and building a new party that's both cosmopolitan AND socialist/supporting the working class in orientation.

So long as the working class sees themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, we will not have a working class revolution. Don't blame me, blame all those fucking white people who both excuse racism in hopes of a tax rebate check, and those who actually hold property.

This is an era of reforging alliances, but we will never bow to the klan or the nazis. They must be curbstomped. If you defend or excuse it, you are an enemy to me. You can't call yourself an anarchist or a communist and try to poo poo away fascism. If you do, you are not a communist. You are an enabler and supporter, and also an enemy.

[sabotabby]

So long as the working class sees themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, we will not have a working class revolution. Don't blame me, blame all those fucking white people who both excuse racism in hopes of a tax rebate check, and those who actually hold property.

Fuck yeah.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

<3 Thank you.

I have certain friends - I have removed one from my list an old anarchist (manarchist, I think) from LJ. One I still keep because he has some interesting things to say and learn from despite some of this bullshit "poor white people" thing.

I am admittedly not the best data point, because my dad is a racist bigot from OK pre-segregation. But Mom has no excuse. Her religion teaches love. But one thing, one thing only and she told me - "When I knew I couldn't vote for Hillary - it was that she supports abortions"

That's it one issue voter. You can say fucking holocaust for all the abortions you want, but when you have a man who is literally screaming the type of rhetoric that an actual Hitler claimed, you might want to rethink your analogies (but Margaret Sanger was a eugenecist ergo Nazi ergo I may as well support the Nazi who claims to oppose abortion).

Anyways apart from my mom, I dunno. I don't know how to communicate to these voters. What they say? What am I to offer.

WE HAVE ALWAYS OFFERED SOLIDARITY ON ECONOMIC ISSUES. WE HAVE ALWAYS FOUGHT FOR FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM (or at least some way to fight against the bastards).

Unfortunately "we" are not "Democrats" (in the US - insert your Labour or whatever for Canada).

I keep trying to think of a way to beat this monster but everything I see keeps thinking we're in an era of acceleration. There is no way to defeat it by playing nice any longer. We are now at the phase where we need to be prepared for the worst.

[sabotabby]

In the Anglosphere the big problem is that the electoral left—liberals, basically—have cornered the market on social issues and the actual left is too disorganized to agitate around economic issues, leaving it wide open for a far-right resurgence. That much, I agree with the thinkpieces on.

But the thinkpieces also just don't take into account how rotten the fabric of American culture is. How it's more important to keep women and black people and especially black women in their place than to actually begin to address those economic issues.

I don't know. I'd be getting my gun license if I lived in the States now. Not that I think it would help, but I'd rather go out shooting.

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

Hear hear!

[sabotabby]

Thanks.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

This is what bothers me: The right (especially Republicans) have been flogging the mask of class/citizen authenticity as rationale/justification since the myth of the carpetbagger was used against Reconstruction. I've just been listening to a podcast series about the Blacklist in Hollywood and was struck by how "the enemy elite vs. real America " narrative has changed little since then, and how McCarthyism has roots not just in busting unions, but reactionary concerns about race mixing, sexual deviance and "premature anti-fascists" were built into that imagined elite.

So I watched with frustration as earnest sorts on the white left correctly identified class warfare and income gaps, but leapt from this into racist/reactionary authenticity, almost accusing the condescending left elite of not giving sufficient handjobs to suffering white nationalists. Except this is an equally condescending view of the poor, especially the rural poor as naturally moral idiots, unable not to be racist more than other classes (in addition to erasing all the non-white, non-male, non-status quo poor).

Meanwhile, hard data analysis of voter turn out didn't support this narrative for the primaries and doesn't in the general.

And I find it weird how many people who point out how prognosticators shit the bed then treat exit poll stories as established fact. Exit polling can be dubious in the best circumstances and shifts in technology is undermining accuracy. And most folks are repeating interpretations by reporters with little statistical knowledge and fondness for attention grabbing narratives.

Analysis of turnout indicates voters who couldn't or didn't vote Democratic matter as much or more. Republicans held their base, Dems declined. And Republican strongholds include a huge amount of comfortable but worried over the imagined salt of the earth.

And if one is going to spin a narrative, why not one that is more helpful if not more accurate: the poor and anxious classes in the city and rural areas have little contact because they are less mobile and social mediated, text and meme only contact isn't conducive to mutual empathy and support. While this didn't hand Trump the victory, it sure helps perpetuate the myth that anti-fascist means equal ivory tower and the hicks are brownshirts.

[sabotabby]

Agreed 1000x. I have friends and comrades who are giving this line and I chalk it up to a certain lack of exposure to anyone outside academia. None of this is a new phenomenon, and fascism has always been petit bourgeois above working class.

(Which is not to absolve the Democrats, the left, or the media or any wrongdoing. All of the above are out of touch, elitist or beholden to corporate wealth, or both.)

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

This... yes this, and your post covers the rage and fury I have felt after Brexit here in the UK. Here too, there have been so many pieces about the poor white working class, and all the reasons they must have voted Brexit for which we should be sympathetic to them, poor dears.
When I was campaigning for Remain, the worse Brexit culprits were white, middle-class and perfectly comfortable, what is their excuse? After discussing with them, the only real reasons they could give to vote Brexit boiled down to racism. (Honestly, if you cared about the economy, or keeping the NHS afloat, you'd have voted Remain, just see the shit we are in now.)
This satirical news site (http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/everyone-to-blame-for-twats-like-trump-except-the-people-who-vote-for-them-20161113117081) nails it.

[sabotabby]

Haha, I love the Daily Mash.

I'm sorry about your country. But thanks at least for trying to stop the ridiculous that was Brexit.