'The Decade of Shitty White People'

All I can really say about this is that I wish I had written it. Titled ‘The 2010’s: The Decade of Shitty White People,’ by Buck Down, and appearing on Medium.com, it stands just fine on its own without any input from me.

It pretty much summarizes the decade, in the tradition of Charles Pierce and even Hunter S. Thompson. Or Matt Taibbi before he self-immolated. Anyway, below are some excerpts with minor rolling commentary on what I’m omitting so you can get the full flavor of the piece.

Down begins with the election of President Barack Obama, a brief, singular moment in time that suggested, however fleetingly, that Americans may have finally come to their senses after enduring eight years of incompetence, a pointless war, a hapless quagmire, and an economic catastrophe from “a half-witted dufus by the name of George W. Bush, who seized that opportunity to fail spectacularly at virtually every conceivable measure of the public trust in return.”

During the Bush years — It took almost eight full years for people to realize that some random hirsute foreigner probably wasn’t going to blow up their ’91 Ford Taurus or reduce the local Piggly Wiggly to rubble in Allah’s name, but not before they let largely the same people who scared them into thinking so demolish their 401ks and drive the entire global economy screaming over a cliff. All this while simultaneously building the world’s largest self-service surveillance network ever conceived. Any pretense of the American notion of giving a shit about human rights took a pretty solid beating in the 00s, along with a lot of guys with names like Mohamed in CIA black sites scattered around the world.

For anyone who remembers the inauguration of Barack Obama, it was the only time I could conceive when the mostly white support staff in my stodgy, putatively apolitical firm literally burst out in applause from the 11th floor conference room where the event was being live-screened.  Yes, Bush was that bad. It’s just hard to remember that now because Trump is so much worse.

But while the election of Obama brought with it so much promise, it also brought the full extent of the country’s racism to the forefront, in the persona of the astro-turfed “Tea Party.” Down acknowledges that prior to Obama’s election, white people in this country were hardly models of tolerance. But at least they had the sense to hide their racism in the closet.

To be clear — Shitty White People doing Shitty White People Stuff isn’t anything new. SWPs have been on a pretty hard roll for at least the last six centuries. But for about forty of the last fifty or so years in America, we have at least made it impolite to be openly racist in most rooms. Usually, that didn’t comprise of much more than at least taking a cursory glance over each shoulder before making a racist joke, but when you consider we aren’t that far out in geologic time from when a white person could buy and sell black people out in the open market — it’s at least some sort of progress.

Down cites Lee Atwater’s infamous 1981 interview where he laid out the essence of the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy.” Down quotes verbatim from Atwater himself.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

That pretty much set the tone for Republican politics from 1981 until, as Down notes, Barack Obama’s election caused conservative white America (”Shitty White People”) to collectively lose their shit.  Thus within a mere finger-snap in our country’s history were we suddenly deluged with horror stories, as Down notes, about everything from FEMA concentration camps to “death panels,” as the right’s well-coaxed Fear of a Black President gripped white America.

The war over the ACA was really about health care the same way the civil war was about state’s rights. Some of the sickest people in the developed world actively pushed back on the attempt to give themselves affordable health care simply because the person trying to give it to them was black. Thus began the Tea Party Movement — essentially a Lee Atwater wet dream of white grievance orchestrated around right wing political fan fiction sculpted into a surprising array of bullshit policy positions all seemingly hand crafted as a trojan horse hope chest full of seething racism and resentment.

Meanwhile, the full impact of the Bush recession and the Great Financial Meltdown was making itself felt across America, as foreclosures mounted and jobs and 401k’s disappeared. Thus were the seeds of Donald Trump planted in the heads of those same Shitty White People, primed to swallow whatever swill was fed to them as long as it allowed them to place blame on someone, anyone other than the people who actually caused this disaster.

Rather than blaming capitalism, it was just far easier, and much more on-brand for Shitty White People to punch down and blame the least powerful people in society as the cause of their problems instead. Rather than accept that the supposedly meritocratic prosperity doctrine that they bought into as a religion their whole lives was a total sham to all but a handful of winners — they declared open season on anyone darker than a grocery bag, and while they were at it, threw in women and the LGBT communities for good measure.

The bulk of Down’s piece deals with Trump himself, his appeal to white America and his eventual election. Thanks to Fair Use I can’t quote much more of it. But this will give you an idea.

After burning though whatever money he inherited, along with all the money other people loaned him, It was the dumb luck of a Hollywood writer’s strike (and the end of antena-based television in rural areas) that helped launch his stupid reality show into the homes of slack jawed yokels in the flyover states, where he cemented his status as a poor person’s idea of what a rich person was. The longer Trump could keep a camera and a microphone in front of his face (things that Trump needs more than water or oxygen to survive) the longer they realized that Trump, for all his money, was a Shitty White Person just like them. He spoke their same language of perpetual victimhood and grievance, even in the midst of a game they were clearly doing so much better in than the people they were blaming for their perceived lack of success on. It turns out privilege is just like money — you can never have too much of it, especially if you believe in a zero sum game where your every failure is the result of someone else’s success. This is exactly why equality feels like oppression to people accustomed to privilege.

 

(I added the highlight because that passage appears to be favored by Medium’s readers)

The bottom line, according to Down, is that Trump provided Shitty White Americans an easy way out—he provided someone to identify with that didn’t require them to make the painful leap of reasoning that would equate their grievances with the folks actually responsible for their situation. And allowed them the opportunity to spew their inner racism to boot.

Down concludes with the same somber reflection we all must face as 2020 dawns. Will we be able to shove these Shitty White People people “back in the closet” or are we stuck with them and their idiocy through the waning days of this Republic?

Unfortunately, it’s too early to tell.