Current Events > National Review op-ed: Trump's White Minstrel Show

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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452910/white-working-class-populism-underclass-anti-elitism-acting-white-incompatible-conservativism

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.

Choice tidbits:

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.

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 Trumps 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: Im 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.
Trumps rhetoric ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. has always been about reducing. Trump doesnt have the intellectual capacity to duke it out with even the modest wits at the New York Times, hence its the failing New York Times. Never mind that the New York Times isnt actually failing and that any number of Trump-related businesses have failed so thoroughly that theyve gone into bankruptcy; the truth doesnt matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kids lunch money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. Thats 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.

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

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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 snicker at people who ask that question? Are we supposed to abandon our traditional defense of standards to mimic Trumps 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 Springsteens act, once acidly (and perfectly) described as a white minstrel show.

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 doesnt 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.

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.

To be clear, it's not poor-shaming. They talk about the working class and how it's the opposite of this shit. Article is far from perfect, but the parts putting anti-intellectual minority-scapegoating populism on blast are very good.
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I read this Friday and thought it was a pretty amusing take. Ultimately, I think the current state of things is due to knee-jerk tribalism, and the capacity of people to be shaped and molded by the media they consumed; Fox News has been bottling and selling crassness and anger to its consumers for a generation now. You are what you eat.

Savage
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solid essay. And of course these criticisms always sting 100x worse when coming from inside the group rather than outside. It's always refreshing to see that there are still sane conservatives out there.
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Can you imagine what would happen if Obama was seen eating KFC or if he had a golden toliet?
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the National Review has always been a socialist SJW rag, who cares what they say

Is this their attempt to divide white people into opposing camps?

Hilarious.
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The writer unpacks a lot. I think he's off-base in some parts, especially in the set-up where he talks about black people and their problems. Personally, I think it would be kind of nice if white folks could talk shit about other white folks without also talking shit about black folks. Especially since anti-intellectualism in black Americans has always been overblown, and hip hop has countless examples of artists who defy the "thug" stereotype which the writer doesn't mention, since it's obvious he's not a fan of the genre. He also doesn't talk about the "why" behind his observations. What is responsible for the upsurge in anti-intellectualism among white Americans? One thing he also seems to miss: the average Trump voter isn't some poor rural ne'er-do-well. He got a ton of middle-class votes. Seems to me this disrupts his thesis a little bit.
But the piece certainly provides food for thought. I wonder how Trump supporters feel being likened to ghetto dwellers.

Besides the end of the article wasn't too far off.
"Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions is what conservatism used to offer, before it became a white-minstrel show. It is a sad spectacle, but I do have some hope that the current degraded state of the conservative movement will not last forever."

That last paragraph is great, and something I would have expected to see in the New Yorker, not the National Review.

Mal_Fet posted...

Is this their attempt to divide white people into opposing camps?

Hilarious.

Lol

treewojima posted...

the National Review has always been a socialist SJW rag, who cares what they say

The National Review is a conservative right-wing publication... Ironic post?

Glass_Phantom posted...

The National Review is a conservative right-wing publication... Ironic post?

Donald J. Trump is conservatism

KarmaMuffin posted...

It is a sad spectacle, but I do have some hope that the current degraded state of the conservative movement will not last forever."

you're going to have to fix income inequality if you want to see the unity this country had in decades past. 80% of the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck and to say that external sources aren't the cause for problems is a little bit of a lie, especially in regards to China and outsourcing.
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treewojima posted...

the National Review has always been a socialist SJW rag, who cares what they say

Wat
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The writer unpacks a lot. I think he's off-base in some parts, especially in the set-up where he talks about black people and their problems. Personally, I think it would be kind of nice if white folks could talk shit about other white folks without also talking shit about black folks.

obsessed folk normally have problems not talking about their obsession
*whistles*
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