Vote Class War
No matter who wins today, please remember this: the rich are your enemy. This fact is built into the structure of our nation. The power of the rich must be arrested if any of the political reforms you hope for are ever to come about.
In a political environment like we have now it is easy to lose sight of the big, big picture. It is impossible not to become focused on the procession of daily outrages. And indeed, the daily outrages are not unimportant. Xenophobia. Racism. Sexism. Nationalism. Isolationism. Deregulation. Climate change. Grotesque corruption. Assault on the environment. Outright lies and a rejection of objective truths. Too many petty insults to count. And, as a backdrop to it all, the not so slow creep of modern day fascism, settling onto America like a fine acid rain.
We could all be excused for being drawn completely into the hope for a BLUE WAVE, anything to knock the Trump train off its tracks. Certainly, even a Democratic House of Representatives will be a meaningful improvement on the state of affairs we have now. At least a small brake. That is something to be celebrated. But everyone who claims to be part of #TheResistance should take a moment to think about what we truly need to be resisting. Not just Donald Trump, a buffoon who will surely drop dead of meatloaf poisoning in a decade or so.
Money.
The economic inequality that has been rising for 40 years is poisoning American society. It is sociopolitical sepsis. The tiny class of extremely rich people ultimately have an ideology that does not care about which party is in power. Their ideology rests on bending politics to protect their fortunes. Everything else is subservient to that. The reason that Trump can garner enough power to vault himself into the White House in the first place is that there is too much power in too few hands, and those hands pushed him over the fence. All of his racism and xenophobia is mere hand-waving while he arranges for the rich to further loot the country. The Republican Party is awfully inept but they sure were able to pass those tax cuts. In the long run, the battle is not between working class people who vote Republican and working class people who vote Democrat. The battle is between the rich and everyone else. Once you orient your viewpoint in the direction of taking power—economic, social, political—away from the rich and spreading it more fairly to everyone else, contentious issues can become much more clear. We are in a fight with the rich that the rich have been winning for my entire lifetime. Rich Democrats and rich Republicans are both winning as the majority of the country loses. That is what happened in 2016, and that is what’s happening in 2018, and that is what will be happening in 2020 and beyond. When you think about who to support, and what to fight for, think about who has all of the money, and who has all of the power, and how we can change that, for everyone.
Red vs. Blue and CNN vs. Fox is the sort of surface-level political sniping that keeps everything beneath the surface the same. Fascism is back in America. So is socialism. The rich will fall on a predictable side of that divide. We need to take from the rich and give to everyone else. We’ve been losing the class war for many decades. Electoral politics is just one way to help us turn that around. Politicians come and go, but compound interest and capital gains and minimum wage and unemployment will be here a long, long time. Class war 2018. Class war 2020. Class war until billionaires and homelessness both disappear.