gracchusdixit

In the years leading up to the Civil War and in the decades that followed it, the phrase “white trash” was a commonly used insult in the American South, eventually becoming the white man’s equivalent of the “n-word”.  This slur was not, of course, a racial insult, since it was used by certain white people to express their disdain for other white people.  It was, rather, a withering statement of class snobbery in a society that liked to pretend, and still likes to pretend, that it is immune to such things.

The phrase “white trash” was originally used by the Southern landed gentry to describe poor, uneducated whites, the tenant farmers and share croppers who weren’t rich enough to own land or slaves, lacked social graces, and were ignorant and culturally backward.  During the period of Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution, the term expanded to include the nouveau riche—opportunistic parvenus who accumulated money, often lots of money, but little social refinement and even less intellectual capacity.

Nobody understood this slice of American society better than the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who grew up in rural and small-town Texas, a part of the country that has always incubated more than its fair share of “white trash”.  Regarding such people, Johnson famously observed:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

That bitter quip describes, in a nutshell, not only the “white trash” mentality, but the strategy of politicians, who, for generations, have exploited and manipulated their mean-spirited insecurities.  Standing close to the bottom rung of the social ladder, their only hope of status, their only way to feel superior, has been to make sure that somebody else is forever standing one rung below them and to demonize the “elites” who stand above them. 

In terms of domestic politics, this has meant the branding of black and brown people as undeserving parasites and the smearing of social and intellectual elites as inauthentically American.  Projected to the world stage, it has led to a flag-waving, chest-thumping, aggressive nationalism, which has nothing whatever to do with genuine patriotism but everything to do with the desperate need of America’s “white trash” to feel superior to somebody, anybody—in this case, to foreigners and immigrants.

Politicians, particularly Southern politicians, have been manipulating this pathology for generations, and no one has done it more effectively or ruthlessly than Mitch McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader of the United States Senate.  McConnell’s home state of Kentucky may well be the “white trash” epicenter of America.  Its high school graduation rate is 45th in the country; its college graduation rate is 47th.  Five of its counties are among the poorest in the land.  Average household income in Kentucky is $10,000 below the national average, and in its poorest counties, the disparity is twice that.  As Ethiopia is to Europe, Kentucky is to the United States of America.

Although he has done absolutely nothing to ameliorate the endemic problems that ail his state, McConnell continues to be reelected, artfully playing on the fears and prejudices of his “white trash” electorate.  All the while, he has pocketed millions in contributions from the coal industry and the big donors who dominate his party.

It is tempting to lay the blame for all this at the feet of politicians like McConnell.  But that would be too easy, because the victims of this scam have been fully complicit in their own victimhood.  For example, no state has benefitted more from the “Obamacare” than Kentucky, yet a majority of its citizens profess to be opposed to the very program they signed up for in droves. Donald Trump won the state by more than 30 points, and a large majority of Kentuckians still support him, despite the fact that he has done nothing whatsoever to improve their circumstances.  They are bound to him, not by logic, not even for economic self-interest, but entirely out of spite and imagined social grievance.  

Such are the people who populate Trump rallies.  Such are the people who hoot and holler at his every word, cheer his lies, and threaten the journalists at back of the room.  

Since Trump’s election, there has been a concerted effort—ironically, by liberals far more than conservatives—to empathize with, and even romanticize, those who used to be called “white trash”.  They are depicted as victims of a social and economic system that has uprooted their lives, depriving them of the dignity they supposedly once possessed.  There are countless calls for the Democratic Party to “win them back” by attending to their grievances.  There is a demand that the phrase “white trash” along with its various synonyms—“hillbillies,” “hicks,” rubes,” “rednecks,” “trailer trash,” and so on—be expunged from our public discourse, because it is somehow insulting and thus politically incorrect.   No wonder, then, that Hillary Clinton was immediately pilloried when she used the word “deplorable’s” to describe a certain tranche of Trump voters.  The only surprise was that the critical voices on the left were even louder than those on the right.

All this hand-wringing about “white trash” Americans is hogwash.  

Far from shunning the phrase “white trash,” we should resurrect and affirm it, because it describes to a tee deeply unpleasant truths about a not insignificant slice of American society.  It speaks to their ignorance, their toxic insecurities, and their racism.

“White trash” Americans can complain all they want about victimhood and grievances, but that does not excuse their genuinely deplorable behavior.  Whatever their economic plight may or may not be, nothing required them to embrace a liar, a philanderer, and a criminal as their political hero.  Nothing required them to blame hapless immigrants for the bleak circumstances of their own lives.  Nothing required them to extract their own sense of dignity from the demonization of other human beings.  These are the deplorable choices made by “white trash” Americans, and they must answer for them.  

Contrast those choices with those made by black Americans.  Having suffered three centuries of slavery, discrimination, and enduring prejudice, black Americans have far more to complain about, and their grievances are infinitely more substantial.  Despite all that, black Americans have made very different moral choices.  Despite all their suffering, despite all the humiliation and intimidation they confront on a daily basis, despite all their frustrated attempts to win the equal place in our society which they deserve, black Americans have never embraced a racist demagogue as their spiritual or political leader.  Instead, they turned to the likes of Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.

Who between the two, I ask you, occupies the moral high ground?  It certainly isn’t “white trash” Americans and their “white trash” president.