Saturday, September 5, 2015

Taibbi on Trumpism- the suckers fight back

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has long been one of my favorite writers, mostly for the way he showcases Wall Street and the rest of the financial services industry as the sociopathic casino that it really is. He put out an excellent article yesterday discussing how the rise of Donald Trump exposes the Republicans as "Officially the Party of White Paranoia."

The whole thing is great, but let me give you this taster, where Taibbi mentions how the Republican oligarchs that run the party have frequently used the grievances of angry white dopes who hate the social changes and developments of the 21st Century to distract them from real economic issues, which allows the rich and powerful to steal from them. Hilariously, it is an inherited wealth billionaire like Trump that is bringing that fact into reality, and now the monster of pissed of white-dom is turning on this Dr. Frankenstein project and the political puppets it's created in the GOP.
While it's certainly been fun laughing about the lunacies of people like Bachmann and John Ashcroft and Ted Cruz, who see the face of Jesus in every tree stump and believe the globalist left is planning to abolish golf courses and force country-dwellers to live in city apartments lit by energy-efficient light bulbs, the truth is that the voters they represented have been irrelevant for decades.

At least on the Democratic side there was that 5-10 percent of industry policy demands that voters occasionally rejected, putting a tiny dent in what otherwise has been a pretty smoothly running oligarchy.

Now that's over. Trump has pulled all of those previously irrelevant voters completely out of pocket. In a development that has to horrify the donors who run the GOP, the candidate Trump espouses some truly populist policy beliefs, including stern warnings about the dire consequences companies will face under a Trump presidency if they ship American jobs to Mexico and China.

All that energy the party devoted for decades telling middle American voters that protectionism was invented by Satan and Karl Marx during a poker game in Brussels in the mid-1840s, that just disappeared in a puff of smoke.

And all that money the Republican kingmakers funneled into Fox and Clear Channel over the years, making sure that their voters stayed focused on ACORN and immigrant-transmitted measles and the New Black Panthers (has anyone ever actually seen a New Black Panther? Ever?) instead of, say, the complete disappearance of the manufacturing sector or the mass theft of their retirement income, all of that's now backing up on them.
Taibbi closes by mentioning that this "pissed-off white guy" contingent is so noisy and shallow on issues, that it turns lots of our politics into a battle between those of us who live in the 21st Century and like it, and those who fear it, which devolves elections into turnout battles. And you wonder why low-turnout midterms in 2010 and 2014 have led to horrid Congresses where nothing but symbolism seems to get done?

You know what's really funny? Wait till the rubes figure out that their racism and religiosity was used to trick them into electing politicians that are determined to keep these rubes' lives miserable. Maybe they'll realize those "dangerous socialists" that the AM radio host has warned them about might be the ones who were right all along, and there will be a true realignment along class lines and demanding an end to corporate domination of society, with the end of dark money as an electoral strategy, and an end to the rigging of elections that comes from gerrymandering.

NAAAAHHHHH! Who am I kidding?

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