The COVID Class War Heats Up

Michael Lind is always a delight to read.

He is from Texas. He is an economic progressive. He also reflexively writes from a historical perspective like I do. This is a great take on what is going on with contemporary progressivism, the lockdowns which devastated the economy and the realignment of the two parties.

Tablet Mag:

“The bitter debate over lockdowns and mask mandates in America is not just another polarizing culture war between left and right. It also has elements of a class war. But it’s not the class war you might think it is.

Some on the populist right and anti-capitalist left interpret the prolonged state lockdowns as a conspiracy by big business against small business. It is easy to see how people could reach this conclusion. …

The major debate over lockdowns has been between small-business owners, who form the political base of the Republican Party, and professionals, particularly in the educational, government, and nonprofit sectors, who provide the political base of the Democrats. …

As Christopher Caldwell noted in a recent article, the three occupations with the greatest proportion of donors to the Democrats in 2020 were professors, librarians, and therapists, joined by nurses and teachers. …

What I describe in The New Class War as America’s dominant public philosophy of “technocratic neoliberalism” is a synthesis of two distinct traditions: pro-market neoliberalism in economics, and technocratic progressivism in political culture. While economic neoliberalism is a moderate form of right-wing libertarianism, the second strain of this hybrid ideology, technocratic progressivism, can be traced back to the original American progressives of the 1900s. …

American progressivism was marked from the beginning not only by its fetishizing of social science but also by an irrational crusading streak inspired by Social Gospel Protestantism.  …

Contrary to popular belief, however, the New Deal was not the sequel to Wilson-era progressivism. From Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party was a Jacksonian coalition of white Southerners, family farmers, and members of private sector trade unions (collective bargaining for public sector workers was only authorized on the federal level in the Kennedy years). The rural “courthouse gangs” and the urban working-class machine bosses made sure that the Johnny-come-lately progressives, many of them Ivy League eggheads from the Northeast, had little influence on Democratic policy. The mainstream New Dealers viewed the government as a pragmatic power broker among organized, negotiating interests—“interest group liberalism”—and rejected the progressive idea of government as expert technocracy.

Between the mid-20th century and today, however, college-educated, professional-class progressives went from being the least influential members of a New Deal Democratic coalition dominated by representatives of the urban working class and rural Americans, to being the social base of the Clinton-Obama-Biden Democrats. One factor has been population transfer among the parties, with former elite liberal Rockefeller Republicans joining the Democrats, while former working-class Reagan Democrats have become Republicans. …

While agriculture and related industries now provide 10.9% of U.S. employment, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, direct on-farm employment accounts for only 1.3% of U.S. employment today. Meanwhile, in 2019, 35.4% of men and 36.6% of women had completed four years of college.

Because American colleges and universities since the 1900s have been the main carriers of technocratic progressive culture, the expansion of college graduates from a tiny minority to a third of the population has massively expanded the social base for this worldview. As university graduates go into business and finance and media, they bring the technocratic progressive values they learned in college. This explains in part the phenomenon of “woke capitalism” driven by the younger generation in the private sector. At the same time, the nonprofit sector, which shares its early 20th-century culture of technocratic progressivism with the universities, has ballooned in the last few decades, as tech and finance billionaires have poured large fortunes into it. …”

Read the whole thing.

Jimmy Dore said yesterday on his show that there has been no major progressive legislation passed by Congress in his entire lifetime. Obviously, this includes my entire lifetime as well. We have gotten nothing but Reaganism from both parties for my entire lifetime. I turned forty years old last year.

There are two major reasons for this which Michael Lind hits on above with glancing blows, but which are not discussed in the article and need to be spelled out:

The first reason is that modernism finally trickled down from American elites and hit a critical mass among the Baby Boomers in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The Boomers were the first generation to attend college en masse and also the first to grow up watching television which exposed them to modernist values. The elitist, anti-traditional mindset of modernism unleashed a bitter culture war which has been raging for fifty years now. The current debate over “trans” is another debate over modernism because these people have always romanticized and elevated the interior self over anything external to the self like the family, kinship or class relations. The idea that a man can become a woman by wishing it were so and that “her” true self is different from biology and that society should go along with this lifestyle is the ultimate example of the modernist mindset. This is why they are so bizarrely obsessed with internal or non-material things: the self and its expression and actualization, controlling the narrative online, controlling and dictating thoughts, scolding and policing words people say on the internet, etc. They are more interested in transforming consciousness than material reality. This is what really animates them: cultural liberalism or eliminating all traditional barriers to their own self-expression, an obsession with identity, turning the world upside down, novelty seeking, etc.

This is a funny illustration of modernist and woke and middle class progressive liberalism:

The second major reason is the Voting Rights Act. It accomplished what it was designed to do which was to end Jim Crow. It enfranchised Southern blacks and created a new mass constituency for Democrats in the South who as a result had less need for their old constituency. The unanticipated consequence of the Voting Rights Act was that it radically changed the internal balance of power within the South. Specifically, it nullified much of the former political power of the Southern White working class while also alienating them. This had the effect within the South of empowering the White suburbanites who became the demographic base of Reaganism. Meanwhile, Democrats could essentially “wave the bloody shirt” of Jim Crow for the next 50 years to keep their own base in line. This is why charges of “white supremacy” have become more and more vitriolic and hysterical as we have moved further and further away from it in time. The current lib narrative, for example, is that “anti-Asian hate” and “racism” and “white supremacy” is the reason that Coomer shot and killed those sex workers in Atlanta the other day.

The reason that we had so much progressive legislation in the early 20th century from the Bryan era through the Wilson and FDR era and through the LBJ era is because we had created a lily White electorate in the South. We had settled the race question and reduced sectionalism in the 1900s when Jim Crow was created. This was because a new generation came to power that had grown up during the Gilded Age and the people who fought in the Civil War were dying off and the whole country was ready to move on from 19th century conflicts. The South was much poorer, much more rural and less educated than it is today. The Southern electorate was overwhelmingly White. There were still a few black voters here and there and especially after World War II. As a result of this settlement, White Southerners elected a different breed of politician and that had the effect of changing the politics of the entire country.

Consider this irony which I never see discussed in the media: when Jim Crow existed, when blacks were actually disenfranchised, when “white supremacy” was at its height in the South, when the South was far more “racist” than it is today, it was also much more populist and economically progressive and supported reforms which improved the well being of everyone in the country. Libs talk about restoring the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial and investment banking. It was written by two Southerners during the Great Depression. The most “racist” White Southerners of that era like Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi have more “progressive” accomplishments like the GI Bill, the TVA and the Rural Electrification Administration than any of these libs do today. Unlike Joe Biden whose only accomplishment will be the COVID relief bill, FDR literally collaborated with actual “white supremacy.” The South voted for Bryan three times, Wilson twice, FDR four times and even LBJ which is why Medicare exists.

We’re at the end of the Reagan era now though. The forces which brought the True Cons to power within the South and within the Republican Party and thus to power in the country as a whole are played out. Now these people in the wealthy suburbs are drowning in a sea of White working class voters who have been steadily attracted to the Republican Party through its culture war strategy. The center of gravity within the Republican Party has steadily shifted away from the True Cons or Republican establishment wing. Trump has brought into the Republican Party a horde of White working class voters who reject its conservative ideology not unlike how Bryan hijacked the Democratic Party in the 1890s.

Young progressives are much more woke or politically correct and prone to extremism than older generations. Young conservatives are far more populist, nationalist and reactionary and also prone to extremism than older generations. The funniest thing about this dynamic is how it plays out with non-Whites too. There are “woke” blacks like Ibram X. Kendi, Charles Blow and Jonathan Capehart. There are also Trumpist blacks and Trumpist “Latinx” who also hate “libs” for all the same reasons that we do. Older blacks and Hispanics are confused and alienated by younger woke White lib progressives.

America is bitterly polarized, but it is not racially polarized. In fact, it is becoming less racially polarized. The most bitter divide in the country is between two groups of White people who hate each other. The divide is a cultural, class and educational divide between college-educated White libs who tend to be urban or suburban professionals and who have have cosmopolitan and modernist values – which is the reason they hate other White people – and White working class voters with traditional values who tend to be small business owners or workers and who live in rural areas or the suburbs. It is really two groups of White people who are fighting each other and exchanging fire with non-Whites caught in the middle.

I think this explains what I am seeing whenever I watch the corporate media. Supposedly, I am a “white supremacist” and a “far right bigot” who is driven by “hate” (this is what libs say about us), but when I watch television and read the media what strikes me most is how these people turn everything into a racial issue. COVID is a flu-like virus which kills everyone and which we know really just kills old and sick people. And yet, the lib narrative about COVID is that it is an example of systematic racism due to racial inequity in death rates as if the virus is somehow racist. I think the reason that libs are doing this is because racial polarization is their political strategy. In order to retain power, they have to win an overwhelming majority of the black, Hispanic and Asian vote so they constantly exaggerate racism. This is also fundamental to their self-image: they are the White saviors who are far better than everyone else below them. If you watch them on television, they talk mainly about themselves and how virtuous they are and how vicious and bad other White people are. They are signaling their social status to other members of their in-group.

Unfortunately, these people are simply incapable of passing progressive legislation that benefits everyone in the country. They have been far less successful at this than Jim Crow era segregationists like Sen. Theodore “The Man” Bilbo. George Wallace accomplished more here in Alabama by building community colleges than these people. 90% of blacks in Alabama voted for George Wallace in 1982. In contrast, the White upper middle class professional wing of the Democratic Party is so culturally toxic with White working class voters in rural states these days that they can’t do anything!

Libs will say that you can’t talk to people like Tucker Carlson. He is a “racist” and “white supremacist.” BTW, this hysterical and impractical mindset is why have accomplished nothing in fifty years and overall well-being in this country has plummeted for our entire lives and all we have to show for it is neoliberalism, political correctness and a bunch of people virtue signaling and doing nothing in Congress. Is Tucker Carlson really as bad as Theodore Bilbo? Is there anyone in all of American politics like Bilbo?

Maybe we have hit rock bottom though or we are now approaching the bottom like we did around 1900. The rise of populism in the 1890s and 1900s was a good thing, not a bad thing. It changed the two parties and was the beginning of a big upswing that lasted until the 1960s.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

15 Comments

  1. >polarization is their political strategy

    It is also how the entire Washington system legitimates itself. A political theology, if you will. It believes in equality and justifies itself in terms of equality. It also has hegemony at home and abroad, has good intentions, tight control over old and new media, dominance in education and entertainment, ownership of HR departments, and continues to spend awesome resources.

    Why then does inequality persist? Our elite is either illegitimate on its own terms, or something else is wrong. This is where privilege does the work of legitimization — we would have a Utopia, if only we do the work and cast out the demons of white supremacy, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, fatphobia, etc.

    Conveniently, the rich remain untouched. Privilege merely repurposes the “bootstraps” from the Reagan era. Imagine Patrick Bateman telling someone, “why don’t you take advantage of your white privilege and become a Wall Street investment banker like me?” That’s where we’re at.

  2. “Boomers…….the first to grow up watching television.”
    The crux of 90% of our problems. It’s too powerful !

    DON’T LET YOUR KIDS WATCH TV !!!

    PS. great article

  3. You know I beginning to see why there is a certian romantic quality, in the memory of guys like Bilbo, the Kingfish, Wallace, etc. Your history lessons are also starting to make some of the things I heard from my primarily southern family, make more sense to me. My mother’s family came from the Mississippi River delta across from Tennessee, in the Missouri bootheel. they worked cotton fields, and Papa ran cotton Gins most of his life. They made rare, but interesting comments along the lines of what you are talking about. Great content, Hunter.

  4. You are absolutely right about Michael Lind. He is the kind of honest “public intellectual” needed in American 2021, who notices underlying psychological and material rationales for what we see in the socio-political-economic river of modern life. Any genuine and effective nationalist-populist political party and/or politician must have Lind, or someone equally insightful and honest, as an advisor. His articles are a must-read.

    • Thing is, “Hunter,” you are still looking down on “white (s)upremacy” when you should be looking up at white (S)upremacy. You have acceded to the dominant frame of your enemies, imbibed their conception of “white (s)upremacy,” AND refused to intuit your own cognitively consonant conception.

      “Critical Race Theory” aka “woke” ideology is just white racial self-annihilation.

      “White (s)upremacy” is ANY thought or action which opposes white racial self-annihilation.

      Yet, white (S)upremacy is EVEN MORE than this as it just must be.

      It is not good enough for whites to merely protest against their own racial self-annihilation.

      There has to be a viable vision of a future not automatically giving way to nihilism, despair, violence and dystopia.

      This is what the cyst-STEM truly fears most.

      Yet, this collective racial vision does not exist because our “best and brightest” are anti-white (S)upremacy.

  5. “The most bitter divide in the country is between two groups of White people who hate each other. ”

    Not really. The anti-whiteness is a mile wide but an inch deep. If it weren’t for a specific group of white people who do not see themselves as white, there would be no intellectual heft to the anti-white movement and it would not be so well financed.

    The Republicans could hold “affirmative action bake sales” even into the 2000’s. But now they would be slandered all over the mass media as “white supremacists” etc. The GOP could win big victories against anti-whiteness, but they can’t because of the media and the status-granting institutions like academia.

    It was NOT black people who purged all the old “traditionalists” and race realists out of academia. It was not “Hispanics” and it wasn’t even “liberal WASPs” or whatever. It was the ADL, the SPLC, etc.

    Look how much loyalty Trump inspired simply by HINTING that he wasn’t anti-white. Look at how the media flipped their shit because of that.

    As Kevin MacDonald has noted, white anti-whites are incentivized to be anti-white. They get cold hard cash, fame, fortune, positive media coverage, and even awards, social recognition.

    It ain’t black people doing that, and it ain’t exactly “liberals” either.

    It’s not a “racial” fight, per se, but it is an ethnic conflict.

    Ideology and values follow material conditions, and the material conditions of the last 75 years means the media.

    If Kevin MacDonald and Greg Johnson made regular appearances on CNN as commenters, the ideology and values would be very different.

    • “If it weren’t for a specific group of white people who do not see themselves as white, there would be no intellectual heft to the anti-white movement and it would not be so well financed.

      No. If Jews were removed from society, Whites would still find a way to divide and conquer ourselves. There was no Jewish agitation in the lead up to the Civil War, nor were Jews particularly involved in either the early 20th century iteration of Progressivism or the modern version.

      Whites invented and aggressively pushed Wokeism, not Jews. Whites are personally invested in the “righteousness” of Wokeism, whereas Jews merely latched onto it because they correctly saw it as a weapon of mass destruction to use against their eternal enemy.

      “White Unity” is not a thing and will never be a thing. Progressives have made sure of that.

      The GOP could win big victories against anti-whiteness, but they can’t because of the media and the status-granting institutions like academia.

      The media is not all powerful like you imply it is. Conservatives and Populist Whites of all varieties don’t listen to it and tuned it out years ago. The only Whites who follow media organizations like CNN and MSNBC are the Woke Progressive types described above. They are 1/3 of the population and thus have a big enough collective voice to force the institutions to listen to them, and they provide all the viewership that keeps CNN and MSNBC going.

      But no, the media did not create them. The media gave them what they already believed in to begin with. The market – in this case, the media market – always meets consumer demands. And Progressive consumers want their cultural poison.

      It was NOT black people who purged all the old “traditionalists” and race realists out of academia. It was not “Hispanics” and it wasn’t even “liberal WASPs” or whatever. It was the ADL, the SPLC, etc.

      Taylor Lorenz and Chris Hayes are much bigger threats to the existence of White people and a future for White children than Jonathan Greenblat and whoever is running the SPLC these days. Jewish law firms are marginal in cultural influence compared to the goy dominated Huffington Post or the Daily Beast. Goy dogs like Lorenz and Hayes are the enforces of our displacement and humiliation. Jews are punks and pimpsqueaks, but lefty White journalists are an organized crime syndicate.

      Look how much loyalty Trump inspired simply by HINTING that he wasn’t anti-white

      Yeah, he inspired so much loyalty among Whites that they kicked him out of office to the tune of a national record 80 million votes for some pedophile grandpa with dementia. College-educated White Suburbanities decided that Trump was a “Fascist” who is “caging Brown kids,” and now Trump is no longer President. Some loyalty!

      As Kevin MacDonald has noted, white anti-whites are incentivized to be anti-white.

      And yet, it is ONLY college-educated White suburbanities and urban dwellers who are actually anti-white. At what point do you acknowledge that they chose anti-whiteness out of their own free will, and believe in it as literally and as fervently as Evangelicals believe in Noah’s Ark or Creationism?

      Ideology and values follow material conditions, and the material conditions of the last 75 years means the media.

      Nope, that’s not how it works. As our Jew friend Zach Beauchamp wrote last week in Vox:

      So if white college-educated suburbanites really are turning to the left, why might this be?

      The simplest and best explanation appears to be partisanship.

      In their book Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution, scholars Christopher Johnston, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine take a close look at the psychological underpinnings of people’s views on economic policy. What they find is surprising, and more than a little counterintuitive: Economic policy has become, to an extent, an annex of the partisan culture war.

      Increasingly, Americans pick their party on the basis of cultural affinity: whether people like them, who share their cultural values on topics like race and immigration, are in one party or the other.This is why college graduates, who tend to be culturally progressive, are an increasingly Democratic bloc, and non-college whites, who have conservative cultural views, are increasingly voting Republican.

      https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22256052/democrats-white-suburban-voters-economy

      If Kevin MacDonald and Greg Johnson made regular appearances on CNN as commenters, the ideology and values would be very different

      And therein lies the rot of Liberal WN types such as yourself, or Academic WN types like William Pierce, who was a former Physics Professor. Just like how the Progressives see the rubes “below” them as interchangable automatons, and just like how Pierce saw regular Whites as “lemmings,” you stupidly and arrogantly think that Whites are only anti-white because they are “programmed” to do so.

      If Greg Johnson and Dr. Mac were making regular CNN appearances, CNN would go bankrupt within a year, and White Liberals would find new media groups staffed and run by race traitors and spiritual vermin like Lorenz and Hayes. CNN is merely a reflection of what White Liberals already hold dear to their dark little hearts.

      In order for the White Race to be saved, the cancer infecting it – Progressives and Leftists of all varieties – must be reduced to a subsistence existence. A Morgantheu Plan for Liberals.

      • @DP84

        So, in other words, ignore the Jews attack the “liberals.”

        Whatever you do, don’t say nothing bad about the Jews, because – look – if you go way back to the Civil War, things weren’t perfect, so therefore stop talking about Jews!

        Yeah, I already heard this one.

        So you side with the Jews against Whites who are liberal. Got it. Good to know we’re not on the same side. You’re anti-white.

        • “So, in other words, ignore the Jews attack the “liberals.”

          Liberals are spiritual Jews in Aryan bodies. Just as bad as Jews. Worse, actually, since traitors are always worse than known enemies. You ignore them at your peril.

          if you go way back to the Civil War, things weren’t perfect, so therefore stop talking about Jews!

          There’s “not perfect,” and then there’s murdering 700,000 of your own race so that negroes can be your equal. Whites wanted equality with Blacks out of their own free will. Fredrick Douglass cried that his back hurt, and Whites listened.

          So you side with the Jews against Whites who are liberal.

          I side with neither. They are both my enemies.

  6. The price of homes is way up. The price of renting is way up. Paying more, you’re getting far less for your dollar. Everyone wants your money.
    Since the American Dream of owning a home is now in left field, let’s see how all of the “rights” and “class warfare” end up.

  7. There’s going to be a big attempt by the Democratic Party to pretend that anti vaccination sentiment in the US is largely a white and rural thing. The real problem is always going to be urban compliance. So make sure that is focussed on. Major cities will always be the place to watch out for.

  8. Some good stuff up there Hunter, pointing to how the oligarchy is running the classic ‘divide n rule’ scam by hyping notions of racial conflict, that are increasingly striking a false note with Democratic voters

    When the scenario is something like this –

    Minorities will vote Left when it seems to mean
    (1) more benefits / gibs for themselves
    (2) more power and numbers for their group

    But otherwise minorities tend to be more ‘conservative family values’ people than whites in general – and this comes to the fore, when benefits being distributed are more or less at reasonable max level.

    The miscalculation by Democratic party types, is that (1) and (2) both have limitations, given the USA context and its blacks and Hispanics.

    A fair amount of Hispanics are small business / entrepreneurs, are not so gibs-obsessed, and have some tax sensitivity. And whilst some are La Raza Reconquista types, many are not.

    USA blacks are strong on benefits, but not particularly interested in bringing in more blacks.

    USA Democrats seem to think their base is like Europe’s Muslims, hugely eager for more Muslims to arrive, voting left because the left supports both benefits and migration … Muslim social values are overall on the Right too, tho not their voting priority now

    Consider what happened in Brazil with Bolsonaro’s election. In Brasil, whites are truly a minority, most are mixed Latinos or outright blacks or natives.

    Yet in Brasil where not much more in benefits seemed affordable, non-whites there voted Right to address the massive crime (murder rate more than 3x USA).

  9. Hunter
    I haven’t been here that long. From what I have read in the last few months, I believe this might be one of your best articles. Thank you!

  10. This country is an absolute failure. It needs to be done away with. The problem is the population will still remain and will carry over to whatever new country that would get made. The population is even worse.

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