What
the Pundits Don't Get About Trump
The class war is already underway, and the petit
bourgeois media is clueless.
By Charles Hugh Smith
February 24, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Of
Two Minds"
- The
typical bourgeois mainstream media pundit is
confused and alarmed by Donald Trump's ascendancy.
The typical pundit is a member of the petit
bourgeois who has zero contact with the working
class in America, other than saying "hello" to
his/her auto mechanic, hair salon employee, etc.
The standard-issue pundit has an overweening
sense of their own insight due to their
academic/media success; nobody gets air time for
confessing "I'm clueless."
Their failure to grasp Trump's appeal has
revealed their absolute lack of insight and
understanding of the real world beyond the
media, Wall Street and D.C.
The conventional MSM pundit
compares Trump to the politicos of the past and
finds him wanting. He's
no FDR, Reagan, etc., they pout.
The pundits are outraged by
Trump's success as a candidate because in their
blindered view of the political/economic
landscape, he shouldn't
be successful and
so something is amiss with the Universe.
The standard petit bourgeois
media hack is comfortable with the conventional
politico stereotype: Slick
Willy I
feel your pain small-town mayor gone bigtime,
check; ambitious, duplicitous Lady Macbeth
(Hillary), check:
Lady Macbeth suppresses
her instincts toward compassion, motherhood, and
fragility — associated with femininity — in
favour of ambition, ruthlessness, and the
singleminded pursuit of power.
frat-boy fly-boy, got a nickname for everybody, just
put one over on you grin G.W. Bush, tail-end
of a dying dynasty, check; idealistic
insider/outsider Bernie Sanders, fired up by
injustice but unwilling to challenge the
Democratic Party's favored cartels, check, and a
crowd of also-rans climbing the hilltops in a
rainstorm, hoping political lightning strikes
their me-too campaigns, check.
Trump doesn't fit into any
stereotype of recent campaigns, and so the
perplexed pundits have attempted to label him a
demagogue or Id-fueled populist without a "real"
agenda--that is, a
candidate that should have burned out in the
first week ot two of the campaign.
They don't get it, and the reason
why they don't get it is because they are rooted
in the petit bourgeois technocrat class that
aspires to insider status within corrupt cliques
of centralized power. The
pundit burnishes their credentials with the
usual petit bourgeois baubles--advanced degrees
from "respected" universities, books published
by "respected" New York publishing houses, and
fellowships from "respected" poverty-pimp
foundations funded by guilt-ridden plunderers
and their dilettante offspring.
The media punditry's relationship
with the working class is akin to their
relationship with China: they
visited Shanghai once and stayed in a luxe hotel
and were entertained by bigshots in the glitzy
bars and cafes. Satisfied with their shiny new
profound knowledge of China, they return home
filled with insights into a nation they've never
actually visited-- what they visited was the
Hollywood tour version of China, not the actual
nation.
The petit bourgeois media, so
easily impressed with institutional "respect"
and other fabrications of the ruling class,
demeans the working class supporters of Trump
as lumpenproletariats,
which Marx described thusly:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of
subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside
ruined and adventurous offshoots of the
bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged
soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley
slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,
pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux
[pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati,
organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders,
tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole
indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither
and thither, which the French call la bohème.
Rather than describe the working class, this
describes the political class of the U.S.A. to
perfection.
What the blindered media pundits
don't grasp is their self-satisfied class of
country-club Republicrats and ersatz
we-feel-your-pain Demopublicans is the real
enemy of progress, for
what Trump supporters understand that the
technocrat class of social climbers fails to
grasp is the
only way to progress from here is to tear down
the institutions of privilege that the
technocrat class defends and aspires to join.
This is why the media is as much the class enemy
of the working class as the incestuous,
corrupted and corrupting pool of swindlers,
fakes, apparatchiks, lobbyist/brothel keepers
and grifters that populate Washington, D.C.
Technocrat pundits scratch their well-educated
heads and wonder why Trump enthusiasts would
vote for a bombastic scion of wealth. Let me
help you, gentle confused pundits: Trump
comes across like a plumber who's struck it
rich: he's got a beautiful (immigrant) wife
(second, third or fourth, who's counting, the
guy has it made), he speaks his mind regardless
of who's offended, and he doesn't bother with
bean-counter trivialities like a carefully
scripted agenda that includes all the key
demographic groups.
Trump tells people he doesn't need their
campaign contributions, but millions of dollars
in small donations flood in anyway.
Many of the working class supported G.W. Bush,
but they now understand he betrayed them and the
nation; hence Jeb Bush's $100 million campaign
flop.
The working class supported Slick Willy because
they knew his type--lady's man, snake charmer,
greasy go-to guy for the monied class in town, a
guy on the make every waking second. Slick Willy
was relentless, sweating, oozing, seething wth
ambition--a guy you could see though but also a
guy who had big dreams and worked them hard.
His wife, on the other hand, is
as phony as a 3-dollar bill,
incapable of irony or shame, a zealously
self-absorbed chameleon who changes her accent,
message, clothing and language to appeal to
whomever she's addressing at the moment, a
technocrat-lawyer who believes in nothing but
her own entitlement and will to power.
Trump supporters are 100%
confident their vote won't change; Hillary's
supports--not so much. Should
the storm-troopers of the Democratic Party's
elites crush Bernie Sander's nomination with
super-delegate trickery, Sander's supporters
will not vote for Lady Macbeth.
For what Sander's and Trump's supporters share
is the understanding that the status quo that
Hillary represents to a private-jet/$200 thou
speaking fees perfection has failed everyone but
the elites and their technocrat servants, and
the centers of power must be completely
disrupted if anything is going to change.
The class war is already underway, and the petit
bourgeois media is clueless.
Charles
Hugh Smith -
http://www.oftwominds.com
Copyright 2014 Charles Hugh Smith all rights
reserved in all media. |
