They Don’t Give Us No Respect

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October 10, 2023

As all of you know, last week Hillary Clinton finally couldn’t take the transgender madness any more. Said she to Christiane Amanpour:

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Because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen[.]

Oh wait! I got it wrong! She was speaking about Trump supporters! My bad!

Perhaps the Babylon Bee has it right: “Elderly Woman Escapes Nursing Home, Rants About Deprogramming The Populace.” You never know, with our present media meltdown.

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Okay. That’s the end of the fun. Now let’s get serious.

Remember when Candidate Obama spoke about the “bitter clingers” in 2008? He was talking about factory towns after all the good jobs had left. He was telling the world that the Democratic Party had moved on from being the party of the workers.

 Remember when Candidate Clinton talked about a “basket of deplorables” in 2016? She went on:

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And [Trump] has lifted them up.

She was telling the world that the Democratic Party had moved on from being the party of ordinary people: now it was the Ally of the Oppressed.

Today Hillary Clinton is saying that supporters of Donald Trump are members of a cult and need to be deprogrammed. She is telling the world that the Democratic Party has got to the point where it just won’t put up with the supporters of the Other Party any more. It’s time to lobotomize them and put them away — in their own best interests, of course.

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These three statements, accidentally telling the truth, are what Michael Kinsley called “gaffes,” as in: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

So what do we do? Create a super-MAGA populist nationalist mass movement the likes of which the world has never seen? I thought I had better turn to longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, who wrote in the New York Times in 1964 in “The Negro Revolution” that:

What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

Anyway, Hoffer writes, “Like his fellow Americans, the Negro sets his heart not of ‘things which are not” but on things he sees in store windows. Hence when the Negro masses act, you have looting orgies and not a mass movement.” He wrote that in 1964!

Then in 1968, in “The Madhouse of Change” in Playboy:

America is hard on mass movements. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a corporation or a racket.

His argument, back in the 1960s, was that the civil-rights revolution wouldn’t lift up America’s Blacks. They would have to do it themselves, like the immigrants from Europe had done in the previous century.

He goes on to assert that political change, or revolution, occurs after a social or economic change.

We used to think that revolution is the cause of change. Actually, it is the other way around: revolution is a by-product of change. Change comes first, and it is the difficulties and irritations inherent in change which set the stage for revolution.

Exactly. Our present ruling class, the educated class, came to power after it had eclipsed the old feudal nobility, and feudal monarchs like Prussia’s Frederick the Great decided that they wanted a bit of street cred by talking to intellectual headliners like Voltaire.

What is to be done? Hoffer’s answer is not a mass movement, but “community building,” with dedicated people creating community organs: community centers, clubs, mutual-aid societies, but all separate from government.

The insulting dismissals of the Commoner middle class by headline politicians like Obama and Clinton — and the current no-holds-barred legal attack on Commoner leader Trump — means that we Commoners are not yet powerful enough to earn the rulers’ respect. It has not yet dawned on our glorious leaders that they need us more than we need them.

What will it take? Will it be when the rulers come on hands and knees to beg us to let them draft our sons for World War III? Will it be when they need us to dig the U.S. out of the disaster of a world without fossil fuels? Will it be after the DEI hires wreck corporate America? Will it be when the entitlement programs run out of money and there needs to be a Grand Compromise to redistribute the spoils of political power? Will the rulers suddenly decide that they need more stay-at-home moms to make babies? Or will it be another flubbed financial crisis, as in 1929 and 2008?

I just don’t think we can solve our problems with politics, any more than Hillary Clinton can get rid of Trump cultists by deprogramming them.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Jean-Baptiste Charpentier the Elder

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