There's nothing new under the sun.
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
And, oh yeah, Glenn Beck has never had an original thought in his life.
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In its broadest strokes, this book argues that whiteness was a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline. As the US working class matured, principally in the North, within a slaveholding republic, the heritage of the Revolution made independence a powerful masculine personal ideal. But slave labor and ‘hireling’ labor proliferated in the new nation. One way to make peace with the latter was to differentiate it sharply from the former. Through direct comparisons between bondage and wage labor were tried out ("white slavery") the rallying cry of ‘free labor’ understandably proved more durable and popular for antebellum white workers, especially in the North. At the same time, the white working class, disciplined and made anxious by fear of dependency, began during its formation to construct an image of the Black population as ‘other’ – as embodying the preindustrial, erotic, careless style of life the white workers hated and longed for. This logic had particular attractions for Irish-American immigrant workers, even as the ‘whiteness’ of these very workers was under dispute.
Dave Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, Revised Edition, Verso Press, 1999
Professor Roediger’s seminal work discussed the evolution of racial attitudes in the working class in pre-Civil War America, yet it sounds compellingly prescient. I encourage everyone to read the whole book, but this paragraph captures much of the essence of his work, and so much that reflects the current state of tea-bagging winguttery today:
"Fear of Dependency" – Economic insecurity in this country has been growing steadily for decades, after a long trend of increasing prosperity and overall increasing security from one generation to the next, we are currently seeing a sharp increase in insecurity from one generation to the next.
Immigration –The appeal of anti-immigration rhetoric goes with this and seems as much about the xenophobic "other" as pure economic concerns.
Gender identity – Roediger implies economic dependency was a threat to a "powerful masculine ideal." The dug-in, last-ditch opposition to gay rights seems to me tied up to this kind of fear as well.
Good Ole Fashioned Racism like Grandpappy used to make – literacy tests! Grotesque parodies of the Obamas!
The tea-baggers – we like to make fun of them, dismiss them as wingnuts, but truth be told, at some level they give me the willies. I look at these guys and wonder if I’m not seeing the birth of the first broad-based American fascist party. Sure, it’s astro-turfed all to hell, but what if it gets out of control?
Far better, I think, to deprive them of oxygen – remove the sources of fear – provide a basis for real long-term stable economic security in this country. And, ultimately, that’s going to mean a set of policies that drive income redistribution from the richest 1-2% down to the middle. It’s going to mean rebalancing economic and political power in this country, away from huge corporations, and back toward actual human beings.