StickWithANose

As someone with a background in Cultural Studies, this piece from the BBC hit home for me. Cultural Studies emerged from Birmingham, England in response to the rise of Thatcherism. The central question that occupied the minds of those at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was the question of why it is that poor and working-class voters internalize a politics that undermines their own interests and well-being.  It is a research question that remains salient to this day.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

“It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”