How Trump Exploits the Schism Between Liberal Beliefs and Behavior
Liberals call for the King’s head while Behaving like Page Boys and Sycophants of Louis the Fourteenth
By
David Gottfried
“The degeneration of the Left in San Francisco is something akin to Mother Mary becoming a kept whore, dressed-up in garish silks and jewels which twinkle with irradiating wrath… The youthful gayness of San Francisco soon became the gayness of a dyspeptic antique queen who behaves like Mrs. Drysdale of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” And as that queen got more and more wrinkled, she became increasingly grotesque, miserly and mean. She studied the market, she married Silicon Valley which married technology to tyranny, and she is the apotheosis of the new social order, sterile and sadistic.
David Gottfried
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Ideologically, Liberal democrats have, as of late, reaffirmed their working-class roots and have moved further to the Left on economics. However, they sneer and scowl like arrogant aristocrats complaining that they can’t get good help. Hence, much of the working class wants to tear the Democrats to death.
Plainly there is a mile wide schism between what Democrats purport to believe in and the pampered, posh way they talk and behave. Sometimes they call to mind the vermillion ideology of unreconstructed Abbie Hoffmans, but in all their pampered finery, they remind me of Lord Sebastian Flyte of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” an effete, spoiled specimen and scion of the parasitic gentry and nobility.
The Democratic Party has seemed to have re discovered its progressive faith because, among other things, Biden participated in and praised a recent UAW strike and Democrats have acceded to some of Bernie Sanders’ demands for a redistribution of economic clout and power to poor and working people. However, Trump’s seduction of working-class whites is largely intact.
Whether we feel rich or poor, or identify with the bourgeoise or proletariat, is a function of much more than objective economic data; our self-perception as rich or poor is determined by our placement on the pecking order of life.
Whether we feel rich or poor is not merely a function of objective economic data. A salary of 100 Grand a year is not exactly starvation wages. However, if one’s salary is 100 Grand and everyone one grew-up with is earning more than 200 Grand a year, 100 Grand a year is grounds for suicide –or mass murder (Just joking)
Indeed, a play on the Moscow stage, shortly before the Soviet Union fell, poignantly expressed the belief that a society in which everyone is a little bit poor is better than a society in which the great majority of people are middle class but a few people are filthy rich. The great majority of people who are middle class may have more money than the people in the allegedly superior society, who are a little bit poor, but they feel poorer because they are continually humiliated and persecuted by richer people.
Indeed, even back in the days when the American economy was the cat’s meow, the Fifties and the Sixties, the psychological wreckage wrought by capitalism was fairly substantial. In the Seventies, the socialist economist Stanley Aronowitz, anxious to understand working Americans, spent a year as an automobile worker in Michigan (He did not tell his fellow workers that he had several doctorates), and he reported that workers felt like second class citizens no matter how much they earned and that their resentment inspired at best only petty theft and at worst industrial sabotage. Nowadays, as workers are objectively poorer than they were in the first three and a half decades of the post war era, (Until about 1980), and as the nation’s penchant for bourgeois sarcasm becomes more and more intense 1 workers have a much greater impetus to depart from the Democratic Party and more pacific and supposedly saner political paths.
The bitchiness and insulting swagger of the rich has only been getting worse. Frank Bruni of the New York Times recently noted that purchasers for goods and services are tracked into different lanes or classes. One can go to public school, or private school, or to even more deluxe private schools. If one is rich, one can see a doctor who can write a note enabling one to get extra time on one’s SATs (the doctor will say that you have a “cognitive processing defect” or some other such new age nonsense which is affirmative action for wealthy children), and prospective colleges won’t even know that you got extra time. If you are rich, you can buy the special tour of the amusement park which exempts you from standing on line for an hour. If you are rich, you can afford better foods with fewer carcinogens, have insurance which will let you get brand name drugs instead of generics from India and China that are infested with at best impurities and at worst toxins. Hell, look at the burgeoning gap in life expectancy between people in the top stanine (Ninth) of wealth and the bottom stanine of wealth.
And the very citadels of American liberalism are simply playgrounds for the super-rich where the poor and middle class are spat on by the utter unaffordability of these temples of Mammon. Yes, Reagan’s shining city on a hill is alive and well and people who call themselves liberal wine and dine and cavort there, in places like New York and San Francisco, and they exude all the smug, kingly contempt of Ronald Reagan, at the 1964 Republican Convention, ridiculing recently murdered John F Kennedy for expressing sorrow over hunger: Reagan said that of course some Americans went to bed hungry; they were on a well-deserved diet because they were fat pigs.
Consider the ethical and moral debasement of, for example, San Francisco. In that storied city, the rich are so rich and the poor are so poor it seems to be the ancien regime and the dungeons of torture of Louis the Fourteenth updated for the 21st Century.
The degeneration of the Left in San Francisco is something akin to Mother Mary becoming a kept whore, dressed up in garish silks and jewels which twinkle with irradiating wrath. There once was a San Francisco which had a short-lived but earnest socialist uprising after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. There once was a San Francisco that took center stage in California’s socialist political revolution of the Depression, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign. There once was a San Francisco which sparked student activism across the country. There once was a San Francisco which led the nation in opposition to the War in Vietnam. There once was a San Francisco that was the gayest metropolis in America and that heralded a gayness that was free, liberating and happy.
But the youthful gayness of San Francisco soon became the gayness of a dyspeptic antique queen who behaves like Mrs. Drysdale of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” And as that queen got more and more wrinkled, she became increasingly grotesque, miserly and mean. She studied the market, she married Silicon Valley which married technology to tyranny, and she is the apotheosis of the new social order, sterile and sadistic.
And the supposedly loving liberals of San Francisco are the selfish sadists which have created a city which is now famous for the breadth and severity of its homelessness crisis. Millionaires became richer and richer as their real estate skyrocketed in value and what once were nice but modest one family homes are now valued at one million dollars, and this unholy concentration of almost cancerous wealth has put schoolteachers, firemen and hard-working people on the streets.
Now I am sure not too many teachers and firemen are among the looters, but they would be well within their rights if they were. Very simply, the castles of the preening, oppressive princes and potentates should not sparkle with such verve and elan. The parapets of their mansions should not be permitted to scowl at the common people who walk by. The towering steepled tops of their homes should no longer spike like swords in the sky. They should fall to the ground, and a new Joshua should make the walls of Jericho come “tumbling down” once again.
Of course, we are not going to get Joshua. America is too mean and hostile to idealism and love to ever permit such a beautiful thing to happen. So instead it may very well get Trump.