Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Fascists on the rampage – then and now

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Thousands of far-right fanatics, many of them armed, gather in front of the seat of government, whipped-up by fake news and racist propaganda, convinced that the political elite is mired in corruption. They battle with the police, who open fire. At least 15 demonstrators and one police officer are killed and about 2,000 people are injured. One important far-right leader marches his troops away from the battle and the rest are forced to retreat.

You may notice that this is not what happened in Washington on Wednesday.

It is a very brief summary of events in Paris on 6 February 1934 when far-right groups collectively known as les ligues (let’s leave aside the debate of how fascist they were) demonstrated against a government that had been hit by a series of corruption scandals and had decided to transfer the right-wing prefect of police, Jean Chiappe, to Morocco.

Corruption, anti-Semitism, xenophobia

Over the preceding weeks, there had been a series of right-wing demonstrations against corruption, fuelled by anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, as well as another French right-wing hobby-horse, anti-freemasonry.  

Veterans’ groups aligned with the Communist Party, at the time still tied to the third period line that dubbed social-democrats “social-fascists”, had also organised their own simultaneous protests.

Far-right demonstrators face police on Paris’s Place de la Concorde

This all culminated in the 6 February demonstrations, during which thousands of far-right street-fighters assembled in various parts of Paris, a large number of them in front of the National Assembly. Many were carrying projectiles, fireworks or fire-arms, as well as ball-bearings to throw under the hooves police horses or poles with razor blades attached to cut their tendons.

Unlike the US authorities, the French government pulled out the police in force. Then as now, nobody would accuse French cops of being woolly-minded liberals but, having already suffered the attentions of the right-wing militias on previous protests, they opened fire in response to explosions that may or may not have been shots, with the results noted above.

The contrast with the failure to mobilise adequate defence for the Capitol and the lack of the police’s customary brio when it comes to crowd control is obvious. Then again, the sitting French president had not incited the mob to demonstrate.

The riot inspired an immediate debate as to whether there had been at attempted putsch. In both cases, the insurgents don’t seem to have had a coherent plan and didn’t know what to do once they had put thousands on the streets, or in the American case, in the seat of government.

Left unites against fascism

So what happened after the 1934 riot?

Its immediate result was a shift to the right in government, which led to the first appearance of Marshall Philippe Pétain in a ministerial position. (According to General Bornet, he revoked the honour awarded to garde mobile who was killed during the riot and the medal was removed from the officer’s coffin in front of his family as they attended his funeral.)

But, coup attempt or not, the presence of thousands of armed far-right activists on the streets shocked the left into action.

The French Communist Party joined the Socialist Party (SFIO) in demonstrations and strikes against fascism and was instrumental in persuading the Communist International to ditch the third period’s sectarianism.

That in turn led to the 1936 election of the popular front government, led by the SFIO with the bourgeois Radical Socialists holding ministerial posts and the Communists supporting from outside.

The popular front government is still remembered for important reforms – the introduction of the first paid holidays and unemployment pay, the reduction of the working week from 48 hours to 40, and the nationalisation of the rail network and other important industries, although it was a massive strike movement that forced this radical turn.

The bad news is that it failed in its initial primary aim, that of preventing fascism.

A significant number of members of the 200 families who notoriously controlled the French economy at the time – the Michelins, Renaults, Cotys, Taittingers (you’ll notice that these names are still around) – continued to finance the far right, sponsoring anti-Semitism, coup plots and reactionary conspiracy theories as an ideological bulwark against the expropriation of their wealth.

They chose Pétain and collaboration with the Nazis when it came to the national humiliation of 1940. And, while a few of the far right took their patriotism seriously and joined the resistance, many of the ligues’ members ended up in the Vichy government’s militias, in the editorial chairs of collaborationist papers or in important political positions.

Post-Trump Republicans and the modern militias

The US today is clearly not the same as France in the 30s.

Trump is on his way out of office and the violent attempts to prevent his departure have fizzled out.

But, despite all the talk of “moderate” Republicans being forced to distance themselves from him, he has pushed his party even further to the right. Despite all the racism, vulgarity, narcissism and contempt for democratic institutions, the mainstream Republican voter cast his or her ballot for Trump. To really build a worthwhile momentum, the ambitious careerist has to fire up the crazies with just those attributes that shock the rest of us so that is the path many Republicans seem likely to follow over the next few years.

Although the spectre of Bolshevism may not be obviously haunting the West, the US and Europe have entered an era of economic, social, demographic and ideological turmoil. Capitalism is being called into question, especially by young people, in a way it has not been since long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, capital is increasingly addicted to short-term gains, emptying businesses’ coffers to pay out dividends and enormous salaries to top bosses. Many of the wealthy are deeply committed to defending their right to amass ever vaster fortunes, especially in the US where a kind of neo-Calvinism preaches that the rich are rich because they deserve to be so.

This is now the Republicans’ creed. Combined with white suprematism and a load of other ideological junk, it is the dogma of the Proud Boys and other modern-day ligues and the lumpen bourgeoisie will continue to sponsor them.

Nobody but an idiot would expect the Biden presidency to come up with any reforms as significant as those of the French Popular Front. That means it will be an even less reliable bulwark against the right, once they have caught their breath and launched new political offensives.

Polarisation, turmoil, confusion lie ahead of us. The looming climate catastrophe means that the long-term stakes are even higher than in the 1930s, while those who oppose the solutions remain as ruthless as ever. Let’s hope we have the courage and the means to face them down.

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Coronavirus diary day 69 – France tightens hydroxychloroquine rules after Lancet article

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France’s rules on using hydroxychloroquine are to change following the Lancet’s publication of two studies indicating that it can be dangerous when used to fight Covid-19.

Health Minister Olivier Véran has ordered national health officials to review the conditions for prescribing the drug, along with others mentioned in the studies.

The French rules were already quite restrictive, limiting its use to serious cases in hospitals and requiring the agreement of several doctors.

The move is a blow to the flamboyant Professor Didier Raoult but is unlikely to undermine his popularity in certain circles. In fact, it may even enhance it among the conspiracy-theory inclined.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump tweets on.

Local councillors in the 30,000 towns and villages where a party or coalition won a clear majority in the first round of elections were finally able to take their seats yesterday, two months after the poll.

A further 5,000, including Champigny, await the second round, now set for 28 June (virus permitting) to decide on a winner.

The handover usually takes five days but has been prolonged due to lockdown and other epidemic-induced complications. Apparently, there has been tension in some areas between outgoing administrations and those who will replace them.

Among the new mayors is Gérald Darmanin, who you might think has his hands with being the country’s finance minister.

He has been elected mayor of the northern French town of Tourcoing, a post he held between 2014 and 2017.

The 37-year-old minister-mayor appears to be something of a workaholic, or at least a positionaholic.

When he took up his post in Macron’s government, he was also a deputy mayor, a regional councillor and vice-president of the metropolitan area around Lille, which includes Tourcoing. He also represented the local authorities on 28 public and private-sector bodies.

After this omnipresence was revealed by l’Obs magazine, he resigned from the 28 jobs but held onto his municipal, regional and metropolitan seats, resigning from the latter in November 2018 after further press coverage.

There has been some controversy over the various incomes he received in the past. Today Darmanin, who came to Macronism from the mainstream right UMP/Républicains, says he will donate his mayoral salary to the Society for the Protection of Animals.

Accumulation of mandates is a habit French politicians have found difficult to kick. While aspiring to the padded seats of ministerial office, they want to keep a buttock in their local bases, which are indispensable to their careers and a useful fallback if they fall victim to the whims of presidents or voters.

Clearly it is not easy to fulfil all these functions with extreme conscientiousness – Darmanin was found to be to have attended 20% of the sessions of the regional council, while being paid 100% of his allowances.

Every time there’s an election in France, there’s a lot of tut-tutting about this situation and promises to phase out the practice. Last year Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said that his ministers would have to choose between a ministry or a mairie.

Darmanin said today that he has the government’s permission to do both jobs.

Philippe himself heads a list that faces a second-round showdown in Le Havre, the town he was mayor of before becoming prime minister. He has indicated that he will not be both mayor and prime minister. Culture Minister Franck Riester, who heads a list at Coulommiers, has made a similar commitment.

France’s Covid-19 death toll total will not be available until tomorrow because of the difficulty in obtaining figures from care homes during the holiday weekend. The rest of the figures show no sign of a second wave so far, with 17,178 people in hospital, down 205 in 24 hours, with 1,665 in intensive care, down 36. 64,547 patients have been discharged from hospital, 338 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 68 – Catholics, evangelicals, Trump and the virus

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Don’t put your faith in miracles – Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus

Today is a long weekend in France, thanks to Thursday being the Feast of the Ascension, a public holiday in a secular country that still observes Christian festivals. After victory in a spat with the government, traditionalist Catholics will be able to celebrate in Church tomorrow. Muslims have been advised to celebrate Eid at home.

Five days ago, France’s Conseil d’Etat ordered the lifting of a ban on religious services within a week. The government has gone one better and scrapped it now, in time for Sunday mass, while reminding the faithful that they should still observe social distancing and other precautions against the spread of Covid-19.

The case was taken to the State Council by right-wing traditionalist Catholic organisations, whose adepts have accused France’s bishops of insufficient zeal in their attempts to overturn the decision.

Muslims, however, will not be going to mosque for prayers to mark Eid. The French Muslim Council, which yesterday announced that the end of Ramadan would be marked on Sunday, said it would abide by the government’s anti-epidemic advice not to organise events that would bring groups of people together.

Perhaps chastened by the role played by a megachurch in spreading the virus in eastern France, evangelicals have warned believers that their services are “at-risk events” and advised them not to hold baptisms and communal meals.

Religion is grist to the political-exploitation mill for Donald Trump, of course.

He has declared that he will order state governors to lift bans on religious assembly, a power that appears not to be vested in him by any worldly authority.

“In America we need more prayer, not less,” he said, ignoring as ever the lack of clinical evidence for his preferred methods for fending off plagues. It would be interesting to know how often Trump prays to any god other than Mammon, although such speculation does not seem to trouble his evangelical voters, at whom this latest sally seems to be aimed.

Questioned about it, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attempted to outdo her employer in spiteful fatuity by telling a press conference “ … boy, it’s interesting to be in a room that desperately wants to seem to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed”, the kind of remark that sorely tests one’s commitment to religious tolerance.

More on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine: A study published in the Lancet concludes “Although generally safe when used for approved indications such as autoimmune disease or malaria, the safety and benefit of these treatment regimens are poorly evaluated in COVID-19.”

Since a Marseille-based sociologist whom I have enjoyed interviewing in the past declared that coverage of two recent studies that I cited shows that “French journalists don’t know either how to read or how to interpret a medical study”, I’ll just leave the link here.

France’s Covid-19 death toll has not been officially declared today, apparently because reliable figures are not available for care homes during the holiday weekend. 17,383 people are in hospital, down 393 yesterday, with 1,701 in intensive care, down 44. 64,209 patients have been discharged from hospital, 351 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 63 – Schools, slaughterhouses and worrying about America

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As more French pupils go back to school this Monday, 70 new cases of Covid-19 have been identified in infant schools, which partially reopened last week. Several schools, in various parts of the country, have had to close again.

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer says the kids probably caught the virus before returning to school on 11 May and insists that the closures show that “we are strict”.

Collèges, whose pupils are aged between 11 and 15, partially reopen today in green zones of low infection rates.

Of the 25 clusters found last week, some in green zones, two large ones are in slaughterhouses, reinforcing international concern that abattoirs are particularly prone to infection.

More than 100 workers have tested positive – 63 in a slaughterhouse in Brittany, 34 in another near Orléans.

More cases may be found in the latter, since the 400 employees are to be tested today and tomorrow. Officials say that the required precautions – hand gel, temperature taken on entry – seem to have been observed.

There have been a number of cases in meat-packing plants in the US and Germany, leading to concerns that they are particularly vulnerable to the virus.

The authorities in the two French regions have launched investigations.

In general the signs a week after lockdown are relatively good.

Although the number of deaths went over 28,000 on Sunday, there have been no more than 700 new cases recorded on any given day, way below the 3,000 that Prime Minister Edouard Phlippe said would lead to him confining us to our homes again.

The number of people infected by a carrier is 0.6, below the one per carrier that indicates epidemic, and testing has become more widespread over the last week with only 2% proving positive.

But the virus’s incubation period is seven to 14 days, so the experts say we have to wait a week before breathing a sigh of relief (through our face-masks, of course).

Is anybody else worried about a Trump coup after the US presidential election?

Here’s the scenario: Assuming the election isn’t called off because of a second wave of Covid-19 and assuming Biden wins, despite being a terrible candidate and despite the possibility that the economy will pick up if the virus subsides, will Trump accept the result?

Isn’t he likely to declare there was fraud and that he actually won? Neither he nor his hard-core supporters are constrained by the requirement of proof for an assertion they want to believe, so hundreds of thousands of hard-right fanatics could be mobilised to support his claim.

As we have seen in the anti-lockdown demos, those die-hards come largely from the enraged petite bourgeoisie, the classic base of fascist movements, with the all-American ideology of an SUV-driving Calvinist elect, entitled to unlimited consumption, but convinced of their own victimhood.

Some of them are armed and able to march into seats of government unhindered.

What would the Democrats do if they did so across the country in the aftermath of the election results?

What would the police and the army do? Would generals and police chiefs order the dispersal of these militias, using arms if necessary?

Would the ranks obey those orders if they came? Would they split more or less on racial lines?

So what would happen? Civil war? A coup, followed by pogroms and purges?                                                                                                                                       

The US is showing the symptoms of an empire in decline. But none of its leaders show any sign of accepting the loss of world hegemony, Trump least of all. How would he face up to China’s rise if he returned to power?

Back to France. The official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 28,108, 483 in the past 24 hours. 19,361 people are in hospital, 71 down yesterday, and 2,087 in intensive care, down 45. 61,213 people have been discharged from hospital, 147 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 40 – The sordid history of the Covid-19 pseudo-cure Trump publicised

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The bleach-based “miracle cure” mentioned by Donald “Sarcastic” Trump during a Coronavirus briefing on Thursday has been knocking about since 2006, despite numerous warnings about its potentially harmful effects. It was foisted on Ugandans last year, thanks to a US-based pseudo-church.

Screen shot of the Uganda use of MMS

The Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) is made from the industrial bleach chlorine dioxide mixed with citric acid. It can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

It can also kill you by inducing low blood pressure due to dehydration. A Mexican woman travelling in a yacht with her American husband off Vanuatu died after taking MMS in 2009, Wikipedia tell us.

Despite warnings by health authorities in the US, the UK, Australia, Belgium and France, a New Jersey pastor called Robert Baldwin, working with British “clairvoyant” Sam Little, imported bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China, the Guardian reported last year.

Through a network of 1,200 pastors, the most enthusiastic of whom were given smartphones, some 50,000 Ugandans, including children as young as 14 months old, were given the fake medicine, diluted in water.

Baldwin’s Global Healing ministry claimed it was a cure for cancer, HIV/Aids, malaria and pretty much anything else you care to think of.

After the Guardian exposed the scam, he shut down his operations, telling NJ Advance Media “People are calling me Satan.” This seems to have come as a surprise.

Baldwin chose Uganda because it was a poor country with weak regulation, as he told Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against quack medicine who spoke to him posing as a freelance journalist.

“Those people in poor countries they don’t have the options that we have in the richer countries,” he said. “They are much more open to receiving the blessings that God has given them.”

Two French scientists were recently slammed for suggesting that Coronavirus drug trials should be run in Africa, where multinationals have tested other drugs in the past.

WHO boss Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the idea “racist” and a hangover of “colonial mentality” and there was an outcry on social media.

Less-than-successful trials in the developing world haven’t deterred mumbo-jumbo peddlers from pushing their product in the imperial heartland, now that a lot of worried people opens up the gullible market.

The bleach cure idea appears to have been planted in Trump’s disorderly brain by another US MMS advocate, the self-styled “Bishop” Mark Grenon, the Guardian reports.

Grenon, who runs Genesis II – a Florida-based establishment that claims to be a church and which is the largest MMS producer and distributor in the US – wrote to Trump earlier in the week, claiming the bleach mix could cure Covid-19.

Even before Trump’s statement, he was bragging about this initiative in a video on the Genesis II website.

“Trump has got the MMS and all the info!!! Things are happening folks! Lord help others to see the Truth!” he exalted on his Facebook page, which also carries posts relating to various conspiracy theories, on Friday.

Now that the US’s Food and Drug Administration has repeated its warnings about MMS, posts on the Genesis II website have become more defensive, accusing the FDA of “attacks on our Sacraments” and pleading “THIS INSANITY HAS TO STOP!!” (their capitals, obviously).

The term MMS seems to have been dreamt up by the founder and archbishop of Genesis II, former Scientologist Jim Humble, in a self-published book, The Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century.

Tracked down in Mexico by ABC News in 2016, he told reporters, “MMS cures nothing”.

A website jimhumble.co continues to describe his “discovery” of chlorine dioxide’s supposed properties as “a breakthrough that can save your life”, however.

Grenon continues to carry the flame. And sell the product.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,245, up 389 in 24 hours. 28,658 people are in hospital, down 561 in a day, 4,870 In intensive care, down 183. 43,493 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 39 – Don’t cheer healthworkers if you don’t want to pay tax

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If the Covid-19 epidemic has proved one thing, it’s that there is such a thing as society. A French opinion poll shows people valuing health and the environment far more than individualistic concerns such as spending power and law and order or that hobby horse of conventional economists, the deficit and public debt.

The epidemic is the principal worry of 76% of respondents, the health service comes second at 42% and global warming 33%.

Spending power comes next at 31%, the deficit and debt 24%, unemployment only scores 18% and the hard right’s favourite dog whistle, law and order, a mere 16%.

Of course, all this can change. There could be an orgy of self-indulgence once the first wave of the virus is over.

But there are signs that some lessons have been well implanted in the public mind. The importance of the health service seems to be solidly established. Combating the virus has shown us how interdependent we are, that if one person is infected, that is a threat to the rest of us, that we can’t afford to say “Fuck you, I’m virus-proof!” and that we must act collectively to prevent its spread.

But it remains to be seen whether people will be ready to pay for public services.

Because, frankly, if you’re applauding healthworkers every evening but voted for politicians because they promised to cut your taxes, donning sack-cloth and ashes would be a more appropriate gesture.

The right’s greatest ideological victory has been to convince large swathes of the middle and working classes that they have a community of interest with the rich in cutting taxes. They have succeeded in making this the electorally decisive question in Europe and the US.

They have done so with the complicity of the social democrats, who “realistically” took fright at being labelled tax-and-spenders and swallowed economic liberalism whole. Even the real left usually dodges the question, because it is, indeed, difficult to convince people that they should sacrifice the immediate pleasure of disposable income to the social investment in public services.

Of course, the pillaging of society by the rich – in tax dodges, soaring dividend payouts, huge CEO salaries etc – has to be reversed. But that won’t be enough. Public services can’t be maintained and expanded without ordinary people contributing to their finances. And it’s important that we all understand that these services are our common property, that we invest in. You can’t have socialism – or even welfare capitalism – without that.

Nor can we save the planet without accepting some radical changes to our daily lives.

The crazed SUV-driving hordes demonstrating against lockdown in the US will fight against this. But it is encouraging that they are a small minority. On the other hand, they have guns.

And it remains to be seen whether today’s epidemo-Keynesians will revert to free-economy form once the crisis has subsided and whether there will be popular mobilisation to prevent them doing so.

As Donald Trump suggests that people might be injected with disinfectant to fend off Covid-19, there have been disappointments in the search for a cure.

Researchers in China found the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir didn’t improve patients’ conditions or reduce the amount of virus in their bloodstream, according to the Financial Times.

And a French drugs watchdog has found 54 cases of serious heart problems due to the use of hydroxochloroquine, the anti-malaria drug championed by Marseille doctor Didier Raoult and touted as a possible cure by Trump. There were four sudden or unexplained deaths and a total of 96 cases of undesirable side-effects, the Centre régional de pharmacovigilance (CRPV) in Nice reports.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now stands at 21,856, 516 in the last 24 hours. 29,219 people are in hospital, 522 fewer than the previous day, and 5,053 are in intensive care, down 165. 42,088 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,413 of them yesterday.

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The white working class – does it exist and should you despise it?

FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailIn the US, the Republican right have taken to sneering at the “white working class”. But they’re not alone. Middle-class liberals same and the media feel free to caricature “white trash” or “chavs”. Class hatred lives on … when it’s top-down.

It’s so difficult to hate in peace these days. Overt racism is generally frowned upon – even by racists (“I’m not racist but …”).  Islamophobia is having a moment, it’s true. And then there’s class hatred, as long as it’s de haut en bas, especially if you target the “white working class”, the subject of sneers from the American right recently but also portrayed by media and liberals as the repository of all bigotry, backwardness and bad taste.

Having created a monster, the Republican establishment is desperately trying to shift the blame for flipping the switch that brought Donald Trump to political life. Two writers in the New Republic have found the perfect suspect – “the white working class”.

“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles”, writes Kevin Williamson, going on to decry “the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog”.

Cheering him on, David French claims Williamson has debunked “the idea that the white working-class (the heart of Trump’s support) is a victim class”. His church tried to help these people, he reports, but found its efforts wasted because they prefer welfare to work, drop out of education on a whim, shag the neighbour at the first sign of marital discord and neck prescription drugs with the same gusto that respectable people sip Chardonnay.

Reassuringly, French “hate[s] the mockery that poor and working-class people of all races endure” and doesn’t think that the drug-addicted fornicators are solely responsible for their fate. The government, the “cultural elite”, “progressive culture”, “progressive policies”, the “progressive welfare state” and the “elitist sexual revolutionaries” are not blameless, he adds … to no-one’s surprise.

For the New Republic, while both the causes and the guilt seem to be collective, the solutions must be individual – don’t claim disability, be faithful, stop snorting OxyContin move to get a job – and the way to achieve this is to give “white working class” – collectively – a good telling-off.

It isn’t just the right that lumps white working-class people into a homogeneous, contemptible mass.

“[S]ince Donald Trump’s charade of a candidacy caught fire, I have heard many fellow liberals freely toss around the terms ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’,” writes US journalist Connie Schultz. “These are people who would never dream of telling a racist joke, but they think nothing of ridiculing those of lesser economic means.”

Jack Metzgar in In These Times points out that the statistics don’t bear out the assertion that Trump’s support comes disproportionately from non-college-educated whites, the definition of working-class adopted by a Brookings article that says it does, while Charles Davis of TeleSur claims that among white voters who make less than US$25,000 a year, it is Bernie Sanders who is in the lead by a margin of 15 per cent.

But Trump isn’t really the point.

“Every group has its ‘other’,” Schultz observes. “For too many white intellectuals, it’s the working class.”

When Hillary Clinton was fighting Barak Obama for the Democratic nomination, she was accused of playing to racist sentiment to appeal to the white working class. In France the white working class is often blamed for the rise of the Front National’s support, as it is for Ukip’s successes in the UK, where “chav” is now a term of abuse and the poor are the given the reality-TV treatment. These are standard liberal media analyses, repeated again and again in various forms, but generally identifying a hazily defined racial-cum-socio-economic category with whatever prejudice is to be decried at any given moment.

My own experience is that there are selfish shits and bigots in all social classes, although upbringing and level of education may influence the degree of subtlety with which these characteristics are manifested. Generosity and open-mindedness can be found everywhere, too, although I’ve found solidarity, in the sense of standing together in the face of common oppression, is somewhat lacking in the middle and upper classes.

But, however you define it, the working class is not ethnically homogeneous.

So what is that adjective doing in front of that noun?

We don’t talk about the black female gender, so why would a socio-economic category have an additional racial characterisation?

I understand one can reasonably talk about a white bourgeoisie in some Latin American countries, we could certainly talk about a white slave-owning class in the southern United States and the Caribbean in the past but, despite racist employment practices, membership of the working class is not such a privilege that it is restricted to any one race.

When factories close workers of all ethnic groups are thrown out of work. When incomes are squeezed, the banks foreclose with a lack of discrimination that would be praiseworthy in another context.

Some working-class people may react to the loss of relative security with racism or other prejudices – as may middle-class business owners or professionals who feel the pinch – but, when they do so, they are identifying as white, not working-class. When you express contempt for someone who is less privileged than yourself, whether in education, income or status, you’re defining them by class. And that’s a form of bigotry, too.Facebooktwitterlinkedinrssyoutube
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