The Classist Cruelty Of Neoliberal Democrats

While the New York Times published an article last week called “Why Democrats Need Wall Street,” tens of millions of people in this country were living in unacceptable conditions. 51% of American workers now make less than $30,000 a year, not enough for them to afford basic needs without going massively into debt. 80% of Americans are in some level of debt, and 70% have less than a thousand dollars in savings. This is making the country regress into a developing world lifestyle for the majority of the population, with most unable to afford a new car and one third unable to afford food, shelter or medical care.

When the Times endorses economic terrorism against the poor like it did in the mentioned article, or denies the collapse of our democracy, or makes false intelligence claims that help create genocide in the middle east, it doesn’t try to appeal to those lower class people. It talks to the top ten percent of Americans, targeted in the upper class metropolitan areas whose lifestyle the paper often identifies with, that still feel comfortable aligning with neoliberalism. But the class that the Times ultimately works for is that of several hundred billionaires, who also own the government and its military, the intelligence agencies, and the vast majority of the world’s wealth.

As this class has imbibed on luxury and power, it’s developed a pathology to rationalize endless exploitation. This pathology makes the poor, and even the middle class, look like undeserving commodities that can be made into fodder for the successful. The plan to bring about our current oligarchy was rationalized in this way from the start, with one of neoliberalism’s architects James McGill Buchanan having taught 1970’s elites that lower class people don’t deserve to have a voice in government.

The corporate coup that’s since taken place, like with all gradual despotic takeovers, has involved leaders always claiming commitment to liberty and fairness while dismantling freedom. This tactic of inverted totalitarianism, exemplified so well in the corporate Democrats’ presenting themselves as working class allies, can no longer persuade those outside that privileged top ten percent. 

Through a criminal justice system that Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, black, brown, and poor Americans live under threat of being arrested for petty offenses so that they can serve private prisons with free labor. Police forces that have been heavily militarized routinely shoot people of color, assault leftist protesters while enabling neo-Nazi protesters, and increasingly harass or kill people at random. This fascist state was elevated recently when Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave all police the right to seize property from people without any cause.

The votes of poor people, African Americans, and anyone else who might want to change the power structure have been suppressed or flipped on mass scales in all the recent election cycles. Their disenfranchisement, especially in the case of last year’s stolen Democratic primary, has been aggressively buried by neoliberals that want to hide their ideology’s lack of support.

The bitterness and political disengagement that this creates resulted in the election of Donald Trump last year, who won as 90 million registered voters declined to participate and his opponent had been nominated through massive electoral fraud. Trump’s plutocrat-filled administration has expanded the police state, further bloated the impunity of large corporations, and expanded Obama’s wars, all of which has been virtually ignored by the corporate media. And the liberal elites that produced all this can only keep putting out their dry defenses of the old order while retreating to their enclaves.

Censorship, voter disenfranchisement, and police violence are what the ruling class have ready for those who aren’t convinced by its propaganda. But those dissidents are mobilizing right now. And every action they take, no matter how small, makes the corporate state a little less powerful.