{"id":9461,"date":"2016-09-28T09:56:12","date_gmt":"2016-09-28T16:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9461"},"modified":"2016-09-28T09:56:12","modified_gmt":"2016-09-28T16:56:12","slug":"the-construct-of-the-white-working-class-zombies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-construct-of-the-white-working-class-zombies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Construct of the White Working-Class Zombies"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u2018deplorables\u2019 have their antecedents in Obama\u2019s \u2018deplorables.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

O<\/span>ne of the strangest transformations in the era of Obama has been the overt and often gratuitous\u00a0stereotyping of so-called white people \u2014 most often the white working classes who have become constructed into veritable unthinking and unrecognizable zombies. For progressives especially these were not the sympathetic old foundation of the Democratic party, who were once romanticized as the \u201cpeople\u201d pitted against the industrialists and the bluestockings, but rather have become monstrous caricatures of all sorts of incorrect race\/class\/and gender behavior and speech.<\/p>\n

Stranger still, this disparagement was concurrent to the release of a variety of recent studies that have shown that the white working class has been \u201closing ground\u201d in far more dramatic terms than have other ethnic groups, especially in key areas such as health and life expectancy. Such news might once have earned liberal sympathies rather than derision. Odder still, the so-called one percenters \u2014 that includes high percentages of whites, who have benefited from globalization and changes in the U.S. economy \u2014 are often precisely those who damn the less fortunate for supposedly enjoying racially based privileges that are largely confined to themselves.<\/p>\n

From \u2018tricks\u2019 to \u2018clingers\u2019<\/span>
\nObama himself had long ago made popular the idea that there are not individual white people, good and bad, lazy and industrious, but more generally a collective Borg of racist and culpable \u201cwhite people.\u201d Or, as he characterized his own \u201ceffective\u201d tricks over clueless whites in his admittedly fictional memoir Dreams from My Father<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cit was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: [White] People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The president himself repeatedly amplified this emphasis on clueless retrograde whites during his two presidential campaigns, which in toto can be fairly characterized as a refutation of his earlier admirable 2004 speech at the Democratic convention (\u2018There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America \u2014 there\u2019s the United States of America\u201d).<\/p>\n

Indeed, on a number of occasions during the 2008 campaign, Obama\u00a0reverted to the \u201cwhite men\u201d tropes\u00a0earlier\u00a0found in Dreams from My Father<\/em> and commonly heard in\u00a0Jeremiah Wright\u2019s Trinity Church. In Obama\u2019s much heralded March 2008 apologia (\u201cA More Perfect Union\u201d) for\u00a0intimacy with the racist Reverend Wright, he drew a moral\u00a0equivalence between the racist firebrand Wright and his own grandmother, who had sacrificed to send him to prep school (\u201cI can no more disown him [Wright] than I can\u00a0my white grandmother<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

When later he was called on equating Wright\u2019s racism with his clueless grandmother\u2019s supposed racist fears of being alone on a street with young African-American males (in the manner that progressives such as Jesse Jackson, Mark Cuban, and Lena Dunham have similarly confessed), Obama further dismissed her with the curt remark that \u201cshe is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn\u2019t know, you know, there\u2019s a reaction that\u2019s been bred in our experiences that don\u2019t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that\u2019s just the nature of race in our society.\u201d\u00a0In a public reading of Dreams From My Father<\/em> in Cambridge, Mass., in September 1995, a young Obama emulated his prejudicial grandmother\u2019s supposedly nerdy white accent.<\/p>\n

\u201cTypical\u201d (along with \u201cthey\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d) is a favorite stereotyping adjective of Obama\u2019s and\u00a0reappeared recently during his Laos trip, when\u00a0he blasted Americans as racist:\u00a0\u201cTypically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don\u2019t look like them.\u201d That invoked memories of his clinger speech eight years earlier. After losing the Pennsylvania primary, Obama generalized the white working classes as mindless zombies of a xenophobic and racist sort who had not supported his candidacy: \u201cAnd it\u2019s not surprising, then. They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.\u201d<\/p>\n

In repeatedly emphasizing \u201cthey\u201d and \u201cthem,\u201d Obama sought to\u00a0reinvent the country into two groups \u2014 one, a noble if not long-suffering\u00a0ascendant coalition of various aware racial minorities, aided by largely\u00a0sympathetic but na\u00efve and condescending well-meaning whites. The other half were the\u00a0\u201clazy\u201d Americans who in times of economic stress \u201ctypically\u201d revealed their innate ignorance through racism and nativism.<\/p>\n

The Deplorables, B+ers, and Such<\/span>
\nSince then, such progressive disparagement of so-called whites has become pro forma, as campuses and popular culture have become emboldened by Obama\u2019s imprimatur. Most recently, Obama\u2019s\u00a0\u201cclingers\u201d reemerged as Hillary Clinton\u2019s\u00a0\u201cdeplorables\u201d:<\/p>\n

You know, to just be grossly\u00a0generalistic [sic<\/em>], you could put half of Trump\u2019s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic \u2014 you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people \u2014 now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks \u2014 they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ironically the white working classes whom Hillary now had written off as\u00a0\u201cnot America\u201d and \u201cirredeemable\u201d (if so, what ultimately are we to do with such reprobate zombies who are incapable of ever being reeducated or saved?) were precisely those whom as a candidate in 2008 she had sought to\u00a0pander to along racial lines to counteract Obama\u2019s own race-based appeals:<\/p>\n

Senator Obama\u2019s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0There\u2019s a pattern emerging here.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0These are the people you have to win if you\u2019re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In our new age of racial polarization, few have been quite as crude as Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, who lashed out at any Minnesotans who questioned the wisdom of allowing into his state mostly unvetted refugees from Somalia, a few with demonstrable Islamist ties:\u00a0\u201cIf you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state. Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever.\u201d Then Dayton zeroed in with contempt for the\u00a0white working class: \u201cOur economy cannot expand based on white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens. We don\u2019t have enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are we to make of the clingers,\u00a0the deplorables, and B+ whites? What, for example, were Dayton\u2019s criteria in labeling white B+ers as intrinsically less admirable (or valuable?) than immigrants from Somalia?<\/p>\n

Low Expectations and Zombie Corpses<\/span>
\nThe new normal is to double down on such pejorative stereotyping, on the assumption that there is such a thing as a\u00a0typically culpable white person, that such a person is mostly a foul creature deserving of condemnation, and that there is only an upside is saying just that. Or as Ta-Nehisi Coates phrased such disdain in supposedly high-brow fashion:\u00a0\u201cWhen people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I\u2019m always surprised.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s my low expectations for white people or what.\u201d<\/p>\n

The low-brow version of Coates\u2019s hard bigotry of low expectations is\u00a0something\u00a0akin to Kendrick Lamar\u2019s (the president recently gushed over Lamar at the White House) album cover of a mutilated corpse of a white judge (replete with xed-out zombie eyes), amid young\u00a0African-Americans toasting his demise\u00a0on the White House lawn. And of course the lowest-brow manifested itself in something like the recent video, taken during the rioting in Charlotte, of a white bystander who was chased into a parking garage, stripped, and kicked unmercifully on the ground by black youths \u2014 apparently a sidebar to the ongoing protests against racism.<\/p>\n

The white working classes are increasingly the butt of popular caricature. They are the grammatically incorrect, dentally challenged, and obese who inhabit reality-televisions shows of the last decade, such as Ice Road Truckers<\/em> or\u00a0Ax-Men<\/em> or\u00a0the hunting, fishing, and survivalist loser vignettes set in Sarah Palin\u2019s Alaska. Sometimes New York Times<\/em> reporters or columnists, in the role of cultural anthropologists, venture out in the field to do survey work and to report back how strange such folk are who live between the coastal corridors.<\/p>\n

For all the charges of Islamophobia in Hollywood, today\u2019s collective villains are not so much jihadists, Communist Chinese, or even bluestocking conniving corporationists but increasingly demented and tattooed right-wing white\u00a0nihilists \u2014 sometimes inept buffoons from rural America, sometimes Russian criminal psychopaths disfigured with full-body tattoos and struggling with sinister accents, and even sometimes the sun-burnt white racist remnants from South Africa or the Old Confederacy, with properly Germanic accents or Southern drawls.<\/p>\n

What is behind the new disparagement of the white working classes?<\/p>\n

Useful Know-Nothings<\/span>
\nOne reason for the new stereotyping is simply careerism and demography. The construction of a xenophobic monolithic white know-nothing class empowers a notion of an antithetical and ascendant collective \u201cnon-white\u201d nation. The idea, common in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 (e.g., \u201cget in their<\/em> faces,\u201d \u201cpunish our<\/em> enemies\u201d), was that illiberal whites can help to establish commonalities among otherwise often disparate Asians, blacks, and Latinos, who are supposedly fashioning a \u201cnew America\u201d from the shrinking and embittered old white world. When the nation is no longer 90 percent white and 10 percent black but rather 70 percent white, 20 percent minorities, and 10 percent \u201cother,\u201d how else can an us\u2013them reductionist dichotomy be maintained that pays any political dividends? In 2016 progressive thinking, a wealthy Punjabi broker, an Asian ophthalmologist, and an inner-city resident apparently are all to share a common un-white status that transcends their own class and race differences \u2014 and any idea that they are all unique individuals who do not define their existences by their appearances.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the idea of non-white solidarity was taken to Orwellian lengths. Recall the buzz word \u201cwhite\u201d as used by the New York Times <\/em>to demonize the half-Peruvian George Zimmerman. When Zimmerman was reinvented as a \u201cwhite Hispanic,\u201d the Trayvon Martin case was not seen as a brawl between two people of color. Obama himself, of course, whose mixed ancestry mirror-images Zimmerman\u2019s, would call racist any similar attempt by the Times <\/em>to suggest that he was a \u201cwhite African American.\u201d But certainly with the aid of reversed linguistic gymnastics, a Barry Soetoro might have once seemed whiter than had George Zimmerman used his Hispanicized and maternal nomenclature, Jorge Mesa.<\/p>\n

White progressive elites also explain much of the disparagement. By focusing on the supposed racism of the working classes, they find exemption for their own often exclusionary lives. Paula Deen\u2019s long ago insensitive racial epithet was nearly a career-ending gaffe, whereas the nation simply shrugged off the more recent and racist characterization of Barack Obama in 2008 by then senators Joe Biden and Harry Reid. Saturday Night Live<\/em>, worried about the appearance of its nearly all-white cast, just hired a \u201cLatina\u201d comedian who in preemptory fashion deleted 2,000 tweets that had illustrated her own racial stereotyping of black men and Asians in general.<\/p>\n

Those with real \u201cwhite privilege\u201d can both alleviate guilt and navigate around the ramifications of their own racialist ideologies by expressing outrage at supposedly unrepentant Confederates and hillbillies \u2014 and, more recently, Trump supporters. I know hundreds of working-class whites in rural central California and have not heard racial slurs from any of them. But then again, none stereotype other white people as \u201cdeplorable\u201d in the fashion of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Maybe because none ever traffic in the race vocabulary of \u201cwhite people,\u201d in the fashion that Hillary Clinton did in 2008, they now feel no need to do so to demonize them.<\/p>\n

Cowardice too plays a role. It is much easier to blast faceless white supposed Neanderthals from afar when proximate whites are frequently the sensitive metrosexuals and pajama boys of the Yale campus, in the MSNBC green room, or among the Washington press corps. When a Princeton environmental-studies major confesses to her white privilege, she seeks exemption for her own apartheid by suggesting that white racists are epidemic in places she has never visited.<\/p>\n

Speaking truth to power is not chastising those of the same elite class but rather venturing to a Bakersfield NASCAR race or a rural Ohio fairground to blast \u201cwhite privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly Obama would not travel to Utah to caricature an audience as typically lazy and uninformed when it is so much easier to do so in Laos among the traveling White House press corps. Many minority politicians, journalists, and writers are of the class identical to that of\u00a0their culpable white counterparts, and all have become accustomed to stereotyping without any verbal pushback. It is not incongruous, but logical, in such an elite world for Colin Powell in his hacked e-mails to play his race card while caricaturing \u201cpoor white folks\u201d and thus blasting Trump as a pariah \u2014 all the while name-dropping at the Hamptons and Bohemian Grove and whining that Hillary Clinton\u2019s jacked-up campus-lecture fees imperiled his own.<\/p>\n

Finally, life is too confusing for the new racialists without an old demonized Other. Only that way can 64 percent of the white vote for Trump be seen as racist in a way that 95 percent of the black vote for Obama was not. If a female cop shoots a black suspect in Tulsa or a black policeman shoots a black suspect in Charlotte, how do the racial mechanics work out if there is not a large amorphous clinger-and-deplorable class to fall back on as the root cause that supposedly prompts such racist violence? White racism trumps free will. Cops of color in police departments headed by black chiefs can incite riots if they shoot black suspects precisely because ignorant racist whites created the rules by which the more enlightened were tragically forced to play.<\/p>\n

In a new world of racially segregated dorms, racially safe spaces on campus, and racial preferences for the children of Eric Holder and Jorge Ramos, one needs a quite unattractive white working class other than the sympathetic multimillionaire cadre of a John Kerry, Chelsea Clinton, or George Soros. In that context, the Clingers, the Deplorables, and the B+ers of America\u2019s vast loser interior serve well enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u2018deplorables\u2019 have their antecedents in Obama\u2019s \u2018deplorables.\u2019 By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online One of the strangest transformations in the era of Obama has been the overt and often gratuitous\u00a0stereotyping of so-called white people \u2014 most often the white working classes who have become constructed into veritable unthinking and unrecognizable zombies. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1092,1091,92,145,11,383,893,187,46,135,185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2sB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13226,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eeyores-cabinet-the-racial-golden-calf\/","url_meta":{"origin":9461,"position":0},"title":"Eeyore’s Cabinet: The Racial Golden Calf","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 26, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers A multiracial democracy of the 21st\u00a0century has abruptly begun worshiping superficial appearances, as it announces that everything from the order of vaccinations and farm aid to cash vouchers for the poor and dorm selections will be determined by race, in utter violation of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8479,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/sexism-and-racism-are-leftism\/","url_meta":{"origin":9461,"position":1},"title":"Sexism and Racism Are Leftism","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"In our time, sexism and racism have become the province of the rich. by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Discrimination by sex and by race are ancient innate pathologies and transcend particular cultures. But the American idea of sexismand racism in the 21st century \u2014 unfailing, endemic, and institutional\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "American Culture"","block_context":{"text":"American Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/sexism-racism-leftism-d-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9860,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-deplorables-shout-back\/","url_meta":{"origin":9461,"position":2},"title":"The Deplorables Shout Back","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/American Greatness Struggling rural America proved disenchanted with the country\u2019s trajectory into something like a continental version of Belgium or the Netherlands: borderless, with a global rather than national sense of self; identity politics in lieu of unity and assimilation; a statist and ossified economy with a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9792,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-democrat-patient\/","url_meta":{"origin":9461,"position":3},"title":"The Democrat Patient","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 31, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Ignoring the symptoms, misdiagnosing the malady, skipping the treatment If progressives were to become empiricists, they would look at the symptoms of the last election and come up with disinterested diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses. Although their hard-left candidate won the popular vote, even that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11276,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/deport-the-deplorables\/","url_meta":{"origin":9461,"position":4},"title":"Deport the Deplorables?","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Deport the Deplorables\u00a0is a slogan of popular culture, found on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and internet postings. But now the mini-industry of deplorable\/deportable sloganeering has made its way into more elite circles. With just three words, the phrase \u201cdeport the deplorables\u201d sends two popular messages:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Deplorables"","block_context":{"text":"Deplorables","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/deplorables\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9477,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-trump-admiral-bull-halsey-or-captain-queeg\/","url_meta":{"origin":9461,"position":5},"title":"Is Trump Admiral Bull Halsey or Captain Queeg?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 4, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review In debate No. 2, Trump owes it to the \u2018deplorables\u2019 to focus on the issues and exert some self-control. In the first debate, Hillary stuck out her jaw on cybersecurity, the treatment of women, sermons on the need for restrained language, and talk\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9462,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9461\/revisions\/9462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}