The White Working Class is the Designated Scapegoat of the Ruling Elites

Watching the Chicago street theater on Fox News as leftist groups shut down a Trump rally, I got to thinking that even Fox follows the liberal rules. They interviewed a lefty grandma outraged about fascism; they interviewed a middle-aged African American woman outraged about Trump coming into her neighborhood. We got to see African Americans disrupting the Trump event after the cancellation. But we never got to hear from a Trump supporter. And the next day Ted Cruz blamed Trump for the violence, and Hillary Clinton grated on about “divisive” rhetoric. And then it occurred to me. There is one thing you are not allowed to do in America today, and that is cater to the tribalism of the white working class. You must cater to black racism; you must cater to feminist cant. You must cater to gentry liberal tribal totems. You can grow to love green crony capitalism. You can cater to Christians, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But you, Donald Trump, are a scandal. You may not inflame the tribalism of the white working class, not, as the protesters said, in our Chicago. No free speech for you.

This explains why the Republican Party has failed to earn and keep the votes of the white working class over the last few decades. It does not dare raise the issues that would let the white working class feel that someone actually cared about people like them. Until Trump. Late last week I blogged about lawyer Michael A. Cooper, Jr., writing about “Trump's America, where working-class whites are dying from despair." He says the problem is that both parties have abandoned them: As productivity climbed, working-class Americans wanted their wages to rise also. Instead, Republicans gave them tax cuts for the rich while liberal Democrats called them racists and bigots. No, that’s not the reason. The reason for white working class despair is that they have been designated as the sacrificial victim for the racist, sexist, bigoted sins of America, and nobody has been allowed to speak up for them. Until Donald Trump. But why the white working class? Its ancestors were starving on the land and working in sweatshops in Europe when all the sins of America were committed. How can they be to blame? Let us turn to René Girard and his Violence and the Sacred. On his theory humans have learned to end escalating violence between factions by sacrificing a victim, a scapegoat. All of the hate and the rage of a divided community is diverted from hating each other and onto the newly selected victim. Somehow, at the civil rights revolution of the Sixties, the white working class got selected as sacrificial victim. Thus the necessity of Archie Bunker, racist, sexist, and bigot, that Norman Lear wanted to teach us all to hate. But once the white working class had been selected as sacrificial victim to cleanse the nation of its racial sins, it is obvious that every so often a wooden stake would have to be driven through its corpse to make sure it could never be brought back to life. It could not be permitted for anyone to say that right-wing militias are embarrassing but marginal, or that the remnant of the KKK is anything less than a demonic threat that every Republican politician must condemn without equivocation. The sacrificial victim must stay dead and buried. Then Donald Trump pulled the stake out of its heart. Here is how I make sense of the leftist student protesters doing fieldwork for their Safe Spaces 101 course at the University of Illinois Chicago at the Trump rally on Friday night, and why the Trump phenomenon is anathema not just to liberals, but to many conservatives. If working class white issues were admitted back into the public square, then the sacrificed victim would be brought back to life, and who knows where it might end? Now you know what liberal activism is for, and race studies and gender studies and diversity and political correctness. They are there to apply muscle for the ruling class, to make sure that the Verdict of the Sixties is never reversed. Black Lives Matter and MoveOn.org and the Friday night lefty coalition are all rushing forward to drive the wooden stake back in. What is another name for street thugs indulged and funded by the ruling class? The word is Fascists. The lefty protesters are fools. They don’t understand that they are not marginalized victims valiantly battling against the system, as Alinsky and Ayers have taught them. They are ordinary brownshirted government goons denying the American people the right to peaceably assemble and petition the ruling class for a redress of grievances. This ignorance in the protesters, and evil in their enablers, is not just a crime, it is a blunder. So go ahead lefties. Make my day. Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.