The class interests are of course real and the Dems will never realize it, but part of materialist analysis is also understanding hegemony and reification of cultural norms that spawned out of material interests long gone. That’s how you get false consciousness - people are willing to act against their best interests precisely because they have been inculcated to believe they are better than the other race, religion, state etc. It is ultimately foolish to not accept that there are deeply reactionary currents in this country that have gripped working people, particularly white rural working people, in such false consciousness.
It is ultimately foolish to not accept that there are deeply reactionary currents in this country that have gripped working people, particularly white rural working people, in such false consciousness.
Do you even live in the rural south around these supposed ‘reactionary’ white people?
I do, and most of them are pissed off (and rightfully so) cause they’ve been forgotten about by the federal government and both political parties basically treat them like they don’t exist. A lot of conspiracy theorists out in the rural south aren’t really all that stupid and typically have good intentions, but no leftists want to actually talk to them, cause their too white and reactionary I guess.
Rural small towns across the south look like something out of a third world country. They are de-industrialized, their jobs destroyed and there’s really no hope in these places unless you consider a shitty job at the Dollar store or McDonalds as good. This is the main reason so many young people there enlist for the military as a way to ESCAPE.
Those are the people the left needs to be talking to. But they’re “white and reactionary” as I’m told on here often. If you actually lived there, you’d see it’s a completely different social world. There is no hope in a lot of those places. They once had strong labor rights, unions and actual jobs… until they were all shipped overseas and their unions dismantled by both political parties.
It’s fucking appalling how some of you on here talk about the working class and just assume that white workers in the rural south are all reactionary. If you don’t talk to them, SOMEONE ELSE WILL. And that’s what happened with Trump. These people feel forgotten and they are constantly ignored. Then this smooth talking proto-fascist comes along and promises to bring their jobs back and that he’ll make America great again for them. It’s not hard to figure out why some of them flocked to him.
I’ve lived in the American south (South Carolina) and the English North, which has a similar feel in some respects. I am not a stranger to the people you are talking about. Nor am I saying we cannot reach people just because they are reactionary. Reactionary is not even, as I see it, a value judgement. It is simply a product of the dire material conditions you have outlined.
But let us not pretend that racism or xenophobia play no role whatsoever in the attraction that certain groups within the very broad category of ‘white working class’ have to the Republican Party. Again, this is why I mentioned false consciousness. It is really easy to convert even people who had unions and good jobs and care about worker’s rights etc to a reactionary cause if certain conditions are right, which you have outlined. But equally I think we also underestimate how much sway racial narratives and ideas of parochial communities have for people, to the extent that even if you do put good choices up to them, they may not often take it. I canvassed for Corbyn in 2017 even before Brexit shattered him. Plenty of people in the English North were willing to abandon Labour on the grounds of racism alone (me being brown did not help).
That isn’t a reason to give up, but it does need to be part of the conversation. Saying simply that all we need is to reach out and give them good policies and they will flip like a switch is a very vulgar type of materialism that also does little credit to these people or their agency. We need to educate, we need to radicalize, and we need to also combat reactionary tendencies when we see them.
I think a decent amount of motivation for these reactionary tendencies is that they see the left as pandering to blacks without giving a shit about white rurals. They then support racism because they feel its justified.
