White Nimrods and American Politics
Few people would question the meaning of the word, nimrod, if they heard it in casual conversation. It's a colloquial term that's used as a substitute for idiot, moron, and a slew of other unsavory synonyms.
White nimrods became the base of the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Bills passed by the Democratic Congress elected in 1964. The erstwhile Solid South became Solidly Republican and Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes dominated American politics until the paradigm blew up during the disgraceful Shrub presidency which opened the White House door to a guy named Barack Hussein Obama.
At the start of that 40 year run of “conservative” government; Richard Nixon called his constituency of white yokels the Silent Majority. Their prime beef with the Dems was over racial policy. The most common denominator among the millions of white folk who consistently voted Republican was a feeling that the liberals were going “too far” in their efforts to assist the unwhite.
Many were overt in their antipathy toward back people, but most of the ones I knew as family and friends over that long Republican ride in power, self-righteously and preposterously claimed that it was black people who were racist and that they were just trying to bring things back to “fairness” with the government not favoring any race.
Of course their rationalization of their opposition to the Civil Rights Act and the Dems who passed it into law was nonsense. White privilege was real. The dems were”giving” it away.
Lesson taught to White NImrods: If white folk don’t have any privileges, then nobody has any privileges. We all become niggers.
Meanwhile, the Republican politicians turned capitalism loose to maximize corporate profit through union busting and off-shoring of operations. Real spendable income for those privileged white nimrods declined decade by decade. Voting for Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes did not do anything to reverse the long term decline in working people’s standard of living.
Eventually demographic change and weariness with the antics of Alfred E. Bush made way for Obama and his fraudulent “progressive agenda.” Without warning, Big Money changed sides, and left the legion of white nimrods without anybody to cater to them.
Along came Trump from reality TV sand the World Wrestling Federation to fill the void. When he says Make America Great Again, the key word is again. It promises to restore the world of 1972, when Nixon trounced my personal hero, George McGovern, gasoline cost around 30 cents a gallon, and my monthly rent for an apartment in Austin. Texas was $90.
Participants on this board of course know that “liberals” and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with the economic decline for the millions of Americans who found themselves without representation in the GOP as of the Obama years. But you cannot honestly claim they are wrong about how the rest of the Republicans are worthless and that our economy is stacked against everybody but the Already Rich.
And it is more of a Lefty take on things to be concerned with the fortunes of working class Americans. But the cynical White Nimrod formulation of “If they take away white privilege, then everybody will be a nigger” is not inaccurate. That's just the nature of Capitalism.
So we now have a 40+ percent segment of the national population who firmly believe that the country they have been taught to “love” has been taken away from them. They also see how crazy he makes the “liberals” who have long been the villains of the White Nimrod world view. In this connection they see the fanciful legal actions afoot to bring him down.
How’s that working out?
Trump has already sewed up the GOP nomination. If you don’t want to settle our differences with mass violence and chaos, we, collectively, must find a way to co-exist in a multi-ethnic world.
A zero-sum game does nothing good for anybody.
Comments
Astute
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especially this line ..
3-5-0-0
It took a couple of reads
...before I picked up the beat of the narrative here. Nothing here strikes a false note in the telling, to my ear. But I do pick up on a regional spin about how things went down. I'm guessing a Left Coast influence, but not as happy and detached. Maybe SoCal. A wild guess.
In any event, no real disagreement, here. I do notice that events are strongly colored by the concept of party ideology as the force that shapes executive decisions and popular opinion. I don't see the parties as strategic advisors.
What does come to mind for me is how this narrative is shaved to fit inside the isolated box that holds Western Civilization in the uninterrupted self-delusion that limited information makes possible. Furthermore, the wider world is not a player in descriptions of the US experience of life on earth. So, while there is a collective vision of the giant meta-issues the earth and human cultures are facing, it is an unfocused diorama of threats that slide by in the background, unconnected to decisive executive actions. The American capitalist point of view evolved with an attitude of easy unaccountability toward the rest of the planet. Everything beyond US borders is labeled "free stuff to exploit for big profits. Bring guns."
I tend to analyze what happens in the world using a whole planet view — as if we lived inside an complex operating system that also creates mandatory interdependence, willing or not. But this doesn't really conflict with your view. My world tends to be a sadder place, with much of humanity stuck in a risky space and subject to 'invisible' forces that can instantly throw their lives into chaos. Which brings to mind an important rule about global migration I recently noticed: All spikes in migration (and racism) throughout the history of civilizations are caused by the same deliberate action: Wealthy capitalists will pool their finances and bribe global politicians to weaken migratory regulations and throw their doors wide open to cheap foreign labor from politically helpless locations. (Slavery models work equally well.) This one act will rapidly boost the economy of the country that follows the strategy to a significant degree. This is absolutely true for the US, forensically and historically speaking. So no more helpless confusion, Americans! Hating the migrants and fawning over the success and wealth of the working elite is something a nimrod would do. Super-charged belligerence is their core competence. Any Presidential candidate can keep their promise to boost the economy with this one special trick. And they do! This does not result in domestic job losses according to the data. That only happens when manufacturing is off-shored.
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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
the isolated box that holds Western Civilization
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in uninterrupted self-delusion.
Yep, no argument there.
It is why the CNN's and others of the
media machine hold the attention of so
may people. Feeds the narrative.
It is a shame the free thinkers have not a
similar platform.
I grew up in Dallas, Texas,
,surrounded by Republicans and overt racists.
I moved to California at age 46. I said to myself, "I don't HAVE to live here."
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
It's funny how Texas, Florida, and California
....have such an independent identity among the United States. I mark these as the first to become regional powers and put the Federal Government in a straight jacket. Seattle, yes. But New York will cling to the Fed like a WATB.
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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
my thought for years
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a separate structure in several areas
to return the legal power of identity
back to states then to regions
quite different from 'balkanization'