The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. Died For The Dignity and Rights of Trash Men

The pride and conceit of the formerly rising educated middle-class was one of the most successful weapons that the oligarchs used to destroy the middle-class. Those will finish the job unless the educated middle-class gives them up and makes common cause with those they love to look down on.   As I've pointed out before, those who made fun of Archie Bunker lost to real life Archie Bunkers and that pride and conceit and disdain of the slightly more affluent, slightly better educated were some of the most potent tools used by right-wing Republicans to dupe the lower-middle class who were the target of that pride and conceit.  Instead of demonstrating, with respect, that the class stereotyped by Archie Bunker had a lot more to gain by making common cause with black people in the same economic class, the media that passed as liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s made that impossible.

Those who suffered weren't the oligarchs who used everyone, including the snobs who were as duped as those they disdained as ignorant white trash.  It was, first, everyone in the underclass who payed the price and, as the Republican ascendancy made possible by that situation took hold and populated the courts, legislatures, the congress and executive offices around the country, the very middle-class who are now forced out of a college education or burdened with a crushing debt that insures its value in economic terms is a lot less than it once was.

So the pride of the educated middle-class turned out to be enjoyed at their own expense, even as they preened in it.

Within the next five years,  Oxfam estimates that the top 1% of the richest will own more of the world's wealth than everyone else.

This is a product of legal and economic theories cooked up in our elite universities and sold through the very media that sold the college educated class talked about above on the very ideas that produced it.   I  believe that in the United States it was, as much as anything, public television and radio that sold those theories.  PBS made Milton Friedman a household name with his falsely named "Free To Choose".   I know that people who had never heard of Milton Friedman and his market religion started gassing on about it on talk radio even as that series was airing in 1980 and that it was part of what brought Ronald Reagan into office.  It made ideas that had been abandoned as they brought ruin to the middle and underclass before Franklin Roosevelt current with a generation that had never experienced life before the Second-World War.  And those ideas are so entrenched that even the experience of the Bush II crash of 2008 hasn't led to them being abandoned.

I think the two things were part of an actual strategy which has developed over time, the success of it has been built on by the oligarchs and their kept media, the presence of Barack Obama made useful to them due to his color, no doubt about that, but also due to his having largely bought the same University of Chicago - Harvard based economic and legal theory.   Had he been a Roosevelt Democrat instead of a Harvard Democrat things might have been different (remembering that FDR relished his status as a class traitor, something Obama never would be).  If Obama hadn't betrayed his disdain for the white underclass* even as he showed some appreciation for their actual condition, things would have been entirely different.

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As that piece I posted yesterday (we didn't lose power as I'd feared) pointed out, the economic justice that was as much a part of The Reverend Martin Luther King's struggle is what has been most effectively buried by the oligarchs.  And, I think, the class snobbery of so many media and university based "liberals" was useful to those who buried that major part of what he called for.   That it was probably the most powerful means of persuading and converting the white underclass to the cause of equal justice, through improving the material well-being of them as well as the other members of that class, made it the most dangerous to the oligarchs.

The very people who prided themselves on their intellectual superiority aided the divide and conquer strategy of the oligarchs through the witty, class-based put-downs of the white underclass even as they had the proof that those people could put a Richard Nixon into office if they weren't won over.  Though the role of the very same white "left" who called for dumping Johnson and who undermined Hubert Humphrey's candidacy had a large part to play in that too.  I have no doubt, at all, that Supreme Court justices nominated by Humphrey would have never embarked on the same attacks on the legacies of Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson that Nixon's did.  I have no doubt that the economic situation we have today would not have happened if he had won instead of Nixon, I have no doubt that an effective margin of the white underclass who we lost to the Republicans would not have defected, though the snobbery of the pseudo-left may have done that, by itself.

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Well, if you look around the "leftist" webloids and blogs you'll see that the "left" such as write those and who leave comments on those are as full of themselves as they ever were.   A lot of those, one generation or more removed from the parents and grandparents of the "new left" of the 1960s seem to me to be even more entrenched in their conceit, even as they find themselves overloaded with college debt and stuck in jobs as dead-end and on their way to being as hopeless as trash collectors and other menial workers, though some of them still have labor contracts that give them some dignity in their work, those whose jobs haven't been outsourced or the such.  If this will be the last generation of white, college educated middle-class people who can maintain that pose of superiority, I won't guess at.  Its expectations of material privilege are a fading expectation and a myth, though they can still disdain such as make the faux pas of eating at an Olive Garden restaurant.   Their educations, bought with such lavish borrowing doesn't seem to have made them any smarter.  If they find that insulting, they should consider that the "trailer trash" they like to insult don't like it any better than they do.   And they've demonstrated more political power than the snobs have over the past forty years.

I have given up on them and don't seem much hope for a revival of the liberal legacy coming from them, though there are certainly college educated folk, liberals who aren't part of their fifty-years in the wilderness and counting.  I put my hopes in them and in those members of the underclass, white as well as of color, who are not snobs, I think those are some of the people closest to The Reverend King's Beloved Community.

They  don't despise people so they can tell themselves how much smarter they are or, as it actually is the case, that they're more sophisticated, fashionable and cool.   That's what the pride of those snobs actually is based in, their idiocy over the course of the political disasters they've aided shows it's not a matter of intelligence or a real education.

* "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."   The media, the media that counts due to its right-wing ubiquity, from the overtly racist oligarchic tool, FOX, to the more genteel oligarchic tools that pretty much constitute the rest of it, shortened that into a slogan "guns or religion" in a way that helped to blight the chances of him having as successful a presidency as he might have.

The economics of his chosen team of Ivy Leaguers certainly didn't do much to help those members of the underclass he targeted.  You will have noticed that he was as eager to protect "trade" as he was the groups of mere people he referred to and he certainly has pushed "trade" harder than he did immigration issues, up til now, something he agrees with Republicans on far more than he does even those in his party more interested in justice for the underclass and middle class who have been the losers during the period of freest trade in history.   The situation in which the top 1% have stolen the bulk of the worlds wealth is made possible by free-trade, the proof of that is as ubiquitous as the proof for global-warming, denying its reality is willful self-deception.