Every time I read about the American working class in the pages of the New York Times, I feel I’m reading someone who can just barely speak English, who has no idea they can just barely speak English but is manifestly convinced their command of English is mustachioed, donning a pith helmet and entitled to shout when the justbarely-ness of their English is in doubt.
Every once and a while, but with more frequency when a Republican is in the White House, the Times dispatches correspondents to the dark heart of the American continent to enter into talks with native inhabitants who entribal themselves there without first considering they have no idea what they care about, what they’re interested in, what they love or what they fear. And they don’t, because, well, they know everything they need to know. Just ask them!
The results are tidings of hinterland living that make thoroughgoing sense to the rarified readers of the newspaper of record founded by, for and continuing to serve the top of America’s social, political and economic status heap but that, to everyone else, especially the American working class, betray a profound befuddlement about anyone who isn’t atop America’s status heap.
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So when it came time to interpret the president’s latest State of the Union address through the lens of class, status and labor, on account of Joe Biden’s call for a “blue-collar revival of America's economy,” the Times ran a “news analysis” that gives the appearance, to the paper’s rarified readership, of being highly nuanced, deeply informed and shot through with arch-citizen seriousness, but in reality, reflects arch-know-it-all know-nothingness.
That wouldn’t so bad if the Times’s reputation for being seriously the most serious of all serious newspapers didn’t give such smug know-nothingness a veneer of authority, as if the Times spoke for God instead of what it does in fact, which is giving pride of place to the views and interests of the very obscenely rich. It would be better for everyone, including the American working class, if the Times gave up and said these people make no sense.
The cash value of whiteness
The American working class is, as Soviet Russia was to Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That, however, is only because those trying to solve the riddle-mystery-enigma spend their time recounting Churchill’s characterization of Soviet Russia. To the working-class Americans, however, the American working class is plain and simple, because there’s no other way of looking at it when you’re on the inside looking out.
First, if you’re not white, well, that’s it. Everything else is reasonsreasons. When you’re not-white in a white world, the truth is clear. When you’re white in a white world, the truth is the last thing you want to be clear. You’ll do anything to hide it, including making up all kinds of reasonsreasons.
So whatever riddle-mystery-enigma there is starts there. The reasonsreasons white people made up to hide the truth constitute the beginning of questions about the American working class as well as the ending to answers to them. So it’s a white working class. The white people there may not want to hear the truth about their whiteness, but they are exquisitely sensitive to it, probably because they don’t want to hear the truth about their whiteness.
Which is why Donald Trump appealed so dramatically to the white working class. The criminal former president reminded them one way or another that their whiteness is worth something. Not-white people cannot afford to make up reasonsreasons for why the world is white. That white people can and not-white people can’t is a cash-value difference worthy of protection.
What you really want is a new deal
Though exquisitely sensitive to the truth about their whiteness, I don’t think the white working class would have cemented itself to Trump quite so much without material conditions thrown into crisis. Most Americans are white. Most of those Americans don’t have college degrees. Most jobs that don’t require college degrees have gone – or they’re just not what they used to be.
So if you’re white in a white world in which you don’t have to face the truth about your whiteness but nevertheless have witnessed the value of that whiteness fall, slowly and then quickly – well, that’s when a man comes along and says he’s going to protect your whiteness against those not-white people who want to afford to live in a world in which they don’t have to think about being not-white. That’s the kind of white supremacist who gets your vote.
That’s where things will stay as long material conditions thrown into crisis continue to be. To change that state of affairs, someone in power must come along and say: I see the cash value of your whiteness and raise you the cash value of a terrific job providing wealth on which to base a terrific life.
He doesn’t doubt the value of your whiteness. Indeed, he sees it as a basis from which to advance his own political interests. He thinks only that it’s less important than acquiring actual wealth, status, etc. In effect, he’s saying that the old deal isn’t what you really want. What you really want is a new deal.
Buying off the racists
That’s what Joe Biden did Tuesday. He told white working-class Americans who can afford to make up reasonsreasons for the world being white that he’s not asking them to think about anything they don’t want to think about. He’s not saying Trump and the rest of the Republicans are scamming them.
All the president is asking is to consider the material differences between the choices offered by Donald Trump and the choices offered by him. You can choose the wages of whiteness, Biden is saying, or you can choose wages.
Legislation signed into law during Biden’s first two years in office is about to push trillions into an already booming economy. According to the Times, “the money from those laws has just begun to flow, and a surge of hiring is coming. Many of those jobs will be in the industrial battlegrounds that Democrats either took back from Mr. Trump in 2020 or will need in 2024, when endangered senators like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin face re-election.”
Biden is reindustrializing a midwest long deindustrialized. That process will rise to its peak in a couple of years, around the time the president asks white working-class Americans for their vote. He won’t get them all. Some are racist to their holiest of holies. But others, though also racist, will take up his offer.
“Here’s the deal,” Biden said over and over, knowing it’s so sweet most white working-class Americans will take it. He’s buying them off. It’s that simple.
You don’t need reasonsreasons to understand that.
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