David Corn: The GOP Plays the Race Card with a Train Wreck

[Nevilledog]

https://link.motherjones.com/public/30654093


Shortly before the midterm elections, I was reviewing the statements of J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican who would soon win a Senate seat, and I discovered that he had concocted a populist brew blending working class resentment and white racial grievance. In various interviews, Vance contended that unidentified elite plutocrats were conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they were) to shut up Middle America. He claimed these nefarious and powerful interests used false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face. In his narrative, there was no legitimate debate about race and America. Instead, unnamed fat cats brand patriotic Americans racists to preserve their own riches and to keep legions of hard-working but struggling white Americans under heel. Critical race theory, in his view, was a bludgeon deployed to “control people,” and “white privilege” was a “lie used to silence” working-class Americans.

This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:

Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback form the real people.

This is deft demagoguery, conflating legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It goes beyond the usual crass GOP playbook of waving the racism card, instead fusing toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. I don’t know if this sly maneuver—assailing wokeness as the weapon of the 1 percenters—was responsible for Vance’s Senate victory. But it sure didn’t hurt. And in the days since the horrific train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Republicans and right-wingers have been beating this drum.

Fox News host and conspiracy theory-pusher Tucker Carlson made this clear eleven days after the accident. “East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative,” he said on his show. “That shouldn’t be relevant but as you’re about to hear, it very much is.” He went on to explain: “If this had happened to the rich or the ‘favored poor,’ it would be the lead of every news channel in the world. But it happened to the poor town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable.” His message: the good folks of East Palestine were being screwed because they were white.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

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[Diamond_Dog]

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