“Tonight’s event at the White House demonstrated that we are in another great crisis in American history. A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.”
~ Historian Heather Cox Richardson
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
~ President Lyndon B. Johnson
Never before has President Lyndon Johnson been so right.
And, the irony for the white working class people who support Donald Trump’s white supremacist vision is double in that, first, filthy rich oligarchs who share nothing (including their profits) with them but skin hue are the ones actually in control, not working class whites, and they not only see nothing in common with them, they are using those workers’ fear of the future to exploit them; and second, the global future does not care that they see themselves superior due to the color of their skin, and their political spasms will not lessen – and in fact will only increase – the destructive effects that future will have on them when it inevitably crushes them under its inexorable progress.
It’s like the movie trope where someone is trying to escape an onrushing train by running down the tracks. They may run a hundred, a thousand, a million paces before the train strikes them, but it will eventually strike them, and grind them into a bloody pulp under its multitude of steel wheels. However, they need take only one step to the side to avoid the train all together.
In this case, however, the Republicans, who white workers think their savior, are in fact sitting in the locomotive engineer’s seat hysterically screaming down to those on the track “Run! Run for your lives!” While Democrats are calmly telling them, “Just step off the tracks.”