The upper panel might have -- I downloaded this image in August 2019, long before anyone even contemplated a pandemic for Christmas -- had the welfare-dependent boroughs of the big cities of the United States in mind. Last night, Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe made an on-point observation: "Non-essential is today's Deplorable." Thus, owners and employees of enterprises the dictatorial governors deemed non-essential get to experience the same reality as the hard-core welfare dependents, even though the responses of those populations to being shut down is different. It's also possible, as Jeffrey Tucker suggests, that the nachalstvo are treating the essential workers as human shields. "We are hurling ourselves in fits and starts toward a new system of castes, created in the name of disease mitigation."
That's hyperbolic, but trust the science.
Some people or most people have to take the risk of getting sick and acquiring immunity in order to move a virus from the status of epidemic or pandemic to become endemic; that is, predictably manageable. By the time the pathogen reaches the ruling class, it becomes less life-threatening. The lower classes in this system operate as the tonsils or kidneys in the human body: taking on the disease to protect the rest of the body and finally to expel it.The lockdown theater? Eleanor Roosevelt rolling bandages.
The ruling class designated the working classes and the poor as the groups that would need to get out there, work in the factories, warehouses, fields, and packing plants, and to deliver our groceries and supplies to our front door. We called these people “essential” but we really meant: they will build immunity for us while we wait in our apartments and hide from the disease until the infection rate falls and it is safe for us to go out.Thus the bottom panel. "Only Democrats can take the best economy in American history, turning it into the worst poverty in decades."
As an homage to the new unclean, and in consideration of the nice things they are doing for us, we will pretend to participate in their plight through perfunctory performances of disease mitigation. We will dress down. We will avoid revelry. And we will wear a mask in public. Very conveniently for the professional class, these little performances are also consistent with the underlying motivation of staying away from the bug and letting others grapple with gaining immunity.
The poor and the working class are the new unclean, while the professional class enjoys the luxury of waiting the pandemic out, interacting only with disease-free laptops. The Zoom call is the 21st century equivalent of the manor estate on the hill, a way to interact with others while avoiding the virus to which the people who keep the goods and services flowing must necessarily be exposed. These attitudes and behaviors are elitist and ultimately selfish, even vicious.
But the lockdowns, and the presidential election that followed, failed to demoralize the Deplorables.
The machinations worked, but at a high price: According to a McLaughlin poll, enough Joe Biden voters say they would have changed their votes had they known of the Hunter Biden scandal that they would have produced a solid Trump win. The impression of tech-media-corporate underhandedness will long endure.Social distancing with Chinese characteristics, ditto. "The fun is going to be in the populists of left and right finding common causes."
So the Deplorables are still around, and they’re still angry. And as long as they’re still around, and still angry, the Democrats can’t actually get what they want.
Trump was elected, remember, because in 2016, the elites had already lost their mojo. In the mid-20th century, elites brought us antibiotics, jet planes and trips to the moon. In more recent years, they’ve brought us failed wars, a failed health care reform with a lousy nonfunctioning website and economic policies that benefited the rich at the expense of the middle and working classes.
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