Why the Trumpers May Win in the End
(How Economic Freedom Destroys Political Freedom and the Sorry Saga of the “Petty Bourgeois Philistine”)
By
David Gottfried
In America, and other Western States, we are granted freedom to make money.
In the West, our freedom to make money is inextricably linked to the threat of losing our money.
We are so busy exercising our economic freedoms, and weathering the economic threats that are the consequence of our economic freedoms (For example, if you invest in the futures market you can earn a lot but you can also be ripped to shreds), that we have no time to exercise any other freedoms, such as our freedom to try to change the status quo. In short, economic activity consumes all of our time and political action is eviscerated.
A large proportion of the Trumpers are lower middle class and resigned to a high modicum of shabbiness wholly inconsistent with our catty, consumer culture. Their political beliefs are more fervent than their appetite for the ludicrous consumer goods and diversions that bedevil the bicoastal communities who laud Joe Biden. In any event even though the anti Trumpers are more numerous than the Trumpers, the latter group will be much more apt to demonstrate, to protest and to fight. The bi coastal “liberals” are often too busy savoring new types of cappuccino (or whatever it is that those spoiled, precious pussies adore these days) to fight for their beliefs.
I think the Trumpers might have won in 2020, even though Trump lost by 7 million votes, because of the comparative cowardliness and political diffidence of the progressives. After all, in 2000 Gore clearly beat George Bush, as a) he won the popular vote by half a million, b) the Supreme Court’s decision turned longstanding law on preliminary injunctions and other legal principles on their head, c) the recount was illegally terminated in Miami-Dade County, d) votes were lost because of the butterfly ballots of Palm Beach County, e) votes were lost because of errors in Black parts of the panhandle, and f) in the vicinity of 100,000 votes were robbed because of the “scrubbing” of voter rolls. However, Democrats behaved like perfect little ladies and let themselves get screwed.
I think that the increased activism of 2020, sparked by the murders of innocent blacks by the police, was made possible by Covid and the concomitant strangulation of the economy. For once, people had more important things to do than to make billion-dollar companies become even richer. The economic depression led to a social and political renaissance as people, no longer shackled to their jobs, were able to demonstrate and raise Cain.
Ironically enough, if Biden is successful in battling covid, and if there is a resurgence in the economy, that may help Trump. The successful. Nerdy people on the coasts will once again be shackled to their “brilliant careers.” The Trumpers, lost in the economic malaise of middle America, may surge ahead and obtain electoral triumph.
I am not alone in contending that our economic freedoms swallow and devour our political freedoms. Marx reserved some of his harshest polemical salvos for the Petty bourgeois Philistines, loathsome souls who did not bother to try to change the political system, were resigned to being “little people,” and so smugly looked out only for number one, trying to optimize their economic position no matter who was in power.
In the West, we usually castigate Marxists as people who revile freedom. If Westerners read Marx’s diatribe against the grubby, selfish, cowardly petty bourgeois philistines, they would realize that at heart Marxism rests on a belief that people should fight for their political beliefs.
The failure to exercise political freedom in a nation supposedly dedicated to political freedom reminds me of my first boss in the legal profession.
He was an Orthodox Jew who represented moderately rich individuals and corporations. He had a few intense pet peeves. His biggest pet peeve was my proclivity toward reading the New York Times and intelligent journals. His reasoning was based on the most practical and crassest common sense:
“David, why do you want to read such demanding stuff with all them fancy words. It will make your brain tired and then you won’t have enough energy to do my work. If you want to read something, you read the NY Post, which has lots of gossip on page 6, and you read it on the subway while returning home from work. Besides, you’re a little person and you can’t do anything about politics so you should just try to make money for yourself.”
He thought I was a bad Jew because I was not observant and gay. But that selfish, slimy sewer rat was the worst Jew because he and his kind, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, were so busy kissing the ass of Christian America and shutting their eyes to politics (Oh, once every four years they cast a vote for FDR but real political action means a whole lot more than voting in November) that they .let six million Jews perish.