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[Sho_Nuff82]

Long scathing article that has far too many good nuggets to summarize. But if you insist on a TLDR, author argues that Trump and the modern right wing embarrasses upper class whites by celebrating their crassness and idiocy as being "real American." The author parallels it with people who tell African Americans they're not "acting black" if they have intellectual pursuits and don't dress a certain way. Interesting takedown from a perspective I don't usually see, I wonder how many Republicans actively feel this way (and voted for him anyway).

http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...tism-acting-white-incompatible-conservativism

But we still rarely hear complaints about “acting un-white.” Instead, we hear complaints about “elitism.”

The parallels to the “acting white” phenomenon in black culture are fairly obvious: When aspiration takes the form of explicit or implicit cultural identification, however partial, with some hated or resented outside group that occupies a notionally superior social position, then “authenticity” is to be found in socially regressive manners, mores, and habits. It is purely reactionary.

Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?

White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish, promiscuous, consumerist. The white working class has a very different ethic.

Its opposite is the sneering, leveling, drag-’em-all-down-into-the-mud anti-“elitism” of contemporary right-wing populism. Self-respect says: “I’m an American citizen, and I can walk into any room, talk to any president, prince, or potentate, because I can rise to any occasion.” Populist anti-elitism says the opposite: “I can be rude enough and denigrating enough to drag anybody down to my level.” Trump’s rhetoric — ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. — has always been about reducing. Trump doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to duke it out with even the modest wits at the New York Times, hence it’s “the failing New York Times.” Never mind that the New York Times isn’t actually failing and that any number of Trump-related businesses have failed so thoroughly that they’ve gone into bankruptcy; the truth doesn’t matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kid’s lunch money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. That’s what all that ridiculous stuff about “winning” was all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives — and how “smart people” came to be a term of abuse.

This involves, inevitably, a good deal of fakery.

The man at the center of all this atavistic redneck revanchism is a pampered billionaire real-estate heir from New York City, and it has been something to watch the multi-millionaire populist pundits in Manhattan doing their best impersonations of beer-drinkin’ regular guys from the sticks. I assume Sean Hannity picked up his purported love for country music in the sawdust-floored honky-tonks of . . . Long Island.

Are we now to celebrate vulgarity as a virtue? Are we to embrace crassness? Are we supposed to pretend that a casino-cum-strip-joint is a civilizational contribution up there with Notre-Dame, that the Trump Taj Mahal trumps the Taj Mahal? Are we supposed to snigger at people who ask that question? Are we supposed to abandon our traditional defense of standards to mimic Trump’s bucket-of-KFC-and-gold-plated-toilet routine?

The “alpha male” posturing, the valorizing of underclass dysfunction, the rejection of “elite” tastes and manners — right-wing populism in the age of Trump is a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s act, once acidly (and perfectly) described as a “white minstrel show.”

I wonder if Bill Bennett can tap-dance.

 

[Slayven]

What do they do at the Onion all day? Got to be depressing

 

[Sickboy007]

Under the anti-Trump veneer, it's just standard National Review poor-shaming.

 

[SmackDaddy]

Phew, those tidbits are brutal.

"Dabs brow"

And then pissed off white people will wave away this truth as being butt hurt and offended. You really can't have a conversation with these people.

Under the anti-Trump veneer, it's just standard National Review poor-shaming.

Disagree. They talk about the working class and how it's the opposite of this shit.

 

[kirblar]

Ludwig von Mises was as clear-eyed a social critic as he was an economist, and he noted something peculiar about the anti-Semitism of the Nazi era: In the past, minority groups were despised for their purported vices — white American racists considered African Americans lazy and mentally deficient, the English thought the Irish drank too much to be trusted to rule their own country, everybody thought the Gypsies were put on this Earth to spread disease and thievery. But the Jews were hated by the Nazis for their virtues: They were too intelligent, too clever, too good at business, too cosmopolitan, too committed to their own distinctness, too rich, too influential, too thrifty.

Our billionaire-ensorcelled anti-elitists take much the same tack: Anybody with a prestigious job, a good income, an education at a selective university, and no oxy overdoses in the immediate family — and anybody who prefers hearing the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center to watching football on television — just doesn't know what life is like in ”the real America" or for the ”real men" who live there. No, the ”real America," in this telling, is little more than a series of dead factory towns, dying farms, pill mills — and, above all, victims.

How on earth did this get published in National Review? It's a gigantic rocket launcher aimed straight at the GOP base.

Article is far from perfect, but the parts putting anti-intellectual minority-scapegoating populism on blast are very good.

Under the anti-Trump veneer, it's just standard National Review poor-shaming.

Guys like Bannon and Trump are anything but poor though.

 

[Sickboy007]

Disagree. They talk about the working class and how it's the opposite of this shit.

He talks about the good working class, like the hilarious caricature of policemen saying 'yessir'. As opposed to unemployed people who have the gall to question their station in life.

 

[Amibguous Cad]

Disagree. They talk about the working class and how it's the opposite of this shit.

Deserving vs. undeserving poor is like textbook conservative assholery.

How on earth did this get published in National Review? It's a gigantic rocket launcher aimed straight at the GOP base.

Because the National Review doesn't sell to the GOP base, they sell to the GOP intelligensia that have always viewed the base with more than a little disdain.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

Under the anti-Trump veneer, it's just standard National Review poor-shaming.

The author doesn't hide his disdain (how could he, in an op-ed about classism), but his complaint about anti-intellectualism being force fed into popular culture is brutally true, for white and black America. White America was content to have a few chuckles at black minstrels, but now that their own version has taken the spotlight and its fans don't know that it's a work, it threatens old-money conservative values.

I imagine there are quite a few older, wealthy, white people who saw Trump the same way Congress did - as a useful idiot who could get the job done by rubber stamping - and are only now regretting what they've unleashed.

 

[sangreal]

half the article is pretty insightful, and the other half is bootstrap schlock, but overall I think it is worth a full reading