Divide & Conquer, Part 4: VBNW v. MAGA

This installment in my series examining how our corporate overlords stoke the flames of civil war in the hopes of avoiding a revolution will focus on the two corporate parties.

After a divisive speech in Philadelphia with the inflammatory title "Remarks by President Biden on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation," I was inspired to do some compare and contrast on this topic. Rather than a Venn diagram which offers a very small space for similarities, I used a "top hat" graphic organizer from my teaching days. Not exhaustive by any means, but here's what I came up with:

Why such divisive, inflammatory rhetoric on the eve of midterm elections? Because, with the scene below repeated all over the planet, the ruling class in the U.S. fear they are next.

One of the huge differences we were supposed to believe distinguished red from blue was a scientific approach to the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. The demogogue with bad hair that leads the MAGA cult disinguished himself in the White House spouting unscientific nonsense about a disease the public knew almost nothing about at that point. Oddly, his administration still delivered more "covid relief" at least in economic terms than has Biden's. 

Once the current administration came to power, we got plenty of vaccines and boosters that didn't actually keep us from getting infected but no mitigation effects like N95 masks for all to protect the vulnerable, nor high quality air filtration in public spaces like classrooms. Science became "the science" which is science in the service of commerce -- not the same thing. And economic relief from the effects of layoffs, illness, lack of free public school daycare? Fuggidaboudit.

I think history will show that, if not for the pandemic, 45 might very well have been a two term president. But never mind about the current ~400 deaths per day. It's pretty clear that our rulers of either color have lost interest in protecting us from premature death. Neither party supports the universal health care fundamental to success in adressing public health elsewhere.

But what about January 6?

It's clear that the outgoing president incited his followers to stage a riot at Congress on the day the election results were to be certified. The legal fallout from that is pretty intense for said followers who are receiving hefty jail sentences for their participation. The fallout for 45 remains to be seen. It would, however, be unprecedented for him alone among presidents to be held to account for any of his crimes, including a new possibility, that of mishandling classified documents.

The war crimes of each successive president are never called to account, no matter whether the man in the White House has a D or an R after his name.

The other science topic that was once supposed to be -- and is still heavily sold as -- a HUGE difference between blue and red was protecting access to reproductive health care, including abortion.

I say supposed because Democrats for decades did nothing to codify Roe v. Wade into law. They were able to fearmonger and fundraise so successfully off the prospect of it being overturned that they didn't want to give it up.

The fact that the Supreme Court is now a swamp of sex offenders and religious zealots was the fundamental reason used to promote the need to Vote Blue No Matter Who. But this argument doesn't hold up. The Obama administration failed to insist on hearings for their 11th hour nominee Merrick Garland, and failed to block the 11th hour confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett. For that matter, the Democratic Party failed to convince elderly, ailing Ruth Bader Ginsberg to step down in time for Obama to replace her.

Once upon a time, we were able to distinguish the two parties by their differing aesthetics. When the GOP was in the White House, we were embarrassed on the international stage. 45 pandering to his base had to stoop pretty low, and George W. Bush was the most inarticulate president since the advent of television.

Those days are gone. Or maybe the White House just kept on the same art director?

I'll end with a few of the zillions of tweets commenting on Biden's speech.

Onward, to Civil War 2.0. 

Corporate Parties, Media Selling Civil War -- But The People Need Revolution

The constant yammering about what divides us is an enormous smokescreen intended to obscure that which really divides us. As Liz Theoharis writes in "The New Politics of the Poor..."

Today, in the early winter of an uncurbed pandemic and the economic crisis that accompanies it, there are 140 million poor or low-income Americans, disproportionately people of color, but reaching into every community in this country: 24 million Blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asians, two million Native peoples, and 66 million whites. More than a third of the potential electorate, in other words, has been relegated to poverty and precariousness and yet how little of the political discourse in recent elections was directed at those who were poor or one storm, fire, job loss, eviction, or healthcare crisis away from poverty and economic chaos. In the distorted mirror of public policy, those 140 million people have remained essentially invisible. 

White boomers like me are most easily confused by this barrage of propaganda. We lived through a period of relative prosperity for ourselves and our neighbors, and a whole bunch of lies about those who didn't share our prosperity.

Allegedly, the poor of my lifetime were lazy, or addicted to substances, or poorly parented by elders who were lazy or addicted. Plenty of photos of Black and brown faces accompanied the "investigative" reporting on the failed life in the segregated communities targeted by the war on drugs that was really a war on the poor. Or crime reporting about arrests that always seemed to have a Black or brown face featured despite the fact that crime rates among white people are higher.

Where were the reports on how Black veterans did not receive the GI benefits that allowed my father to complete a college education and buy a house for me to grow up in?

Where were the reports on the redlining by mortgage lenders and real estate brokers that kept Black families from moving into the neighborhoods I grew up in?

Where were the living wage jobs with union protections for working conditions available to Black and brown wage earners my father never had to compete with?

Photo credit Steven Depolo, Flickr

Where was the income for unpaid caregivers like the moms, aunties, and grandmothers that raised children in substandard housing and had to send them to substandard schools nearby?

Where were the reports on how highly addictive crack cocaine was sponsored by the CIA and deliberately introduced into segregated neighborhoods?

Where was the universal health care to treat substance use disorders like health issues rather than criminalizing and filling prisons with enslaved laborers disenfranchised from their right to vote?

Young people today understand the reality of the situation much better than most boomers, even when they are part of the dominant white caste. A common slogan I see them sharing --

No war but class war 

-- expresses this understanding. 

Note that this graph is from before the pandemic, which has greatly accelerated income inequality in the US.

Because the rich got so much richer and the poor got so much poorer in the last several decades, it takes a whole lot of propaganda to convince poor whites that what's wrong with their lives is brown immigrants taking "their" jobs. Or the Black Lives Matter movement. Or, more to the point, that liberals are the problem.

There is some truth to that and it fuels the furor to "own the libs" that the demagogue with bad hair rode to the White House.

In the crash of 2008 when banks got bailed out but regular working people got sold out, there was a liberal presiding over it all. His VP, now our president-elect, had previously been the architect of the student loan crisis that younger people continue being crushed by.

It's clear that our corporate overlords, the ones who own the media and the means of production, are ginning up a civil war. Their invisible strategy: make sure the masses kill each other over culture rather than turning on the 1% and removing them from positions of power so that the people can eat.

There's a reason the guillotine has become a common image in social media shared by the young. Also the slogan, Eat the rich.

But this history major will never advocate violent revolution. Wars, including revolutions, harm many innocent people, most often children and the women who care for them.

A general strike would be much more to the point. No wealth can be created without our labor. That is our greatest power. 

No propaganda can change the fact that Jeff Bezos could give every person who risks covid exposure to work in his Amazon warehouses an entire year's salary as a bonus and still have more money than he did when the pandemic started. And, no propaganda can change the fact that, if they went on strike, his income from that source would dry up quickly.

But we are too broke to strike! young people tell me. I believe them. I also know that every strike that brought down a regime was mounted by people who lacked the resources to survive without income. Mutual aid -- another thing young people are good at, putting most boomers to shame -- is the cure for that ailment.

But the ruling class will bring the violence if there is a general strike, is another argument I've heard against it. But isn't dire poverty, homelessness, and lack of health care for working class people violent? Isn't a lifetime of student debt violent? Isn't mass incarceration and the routine execution of unarmed Black people by police violent?

Certainly our endless wars for resource extraction and transport are violent. Think Afghanistan, Ecuador, and Standing Rock just for starters.

Who knows how a general strike will start, or whether I'll live long enough to see it. 

Mass uprisings are often set off by a spark no one expected. 

Will it begin with a rent strike? A nurses strike? The pandemic has put a lot of pressure on both renters and frontline health care providers. Once a specific strike is underway, others who are economically desperate may be motivated to join in.

Remember, the Mongtomery, Alabama bus boycott of the civil rights movement was planned to last one day, intended to demonstrate how much the city bus system needed the revenue from Black customers. It lasted more than a year as that first day inspired the weary, the timid, and the fencesitters to join in.

It was also, most significantly, supported by extensive organizing in advance.

Let's get busy.