This tweet was slightly opaque; here's a probably-equally opaque unpacking:
One of the (plausible) cliches of left discourse is that racism + racial divisions make it hard to build a united working class front in America, bc the capitalist class can use racial bias + suspicion to divide and conquer.
One could extend a version of that analysis to the prospects for a successful as opposed to evanescent American conservative populism as well, in two related ways.
First, most obviously, racial divisions in American life tend to link conservative populism with white-identitarian politics, which cuts it off politically from the black and Hispanic population that might share its outsider v. insider, country party vs. court party view.
You can see this problem in Trump's occasional flails toward black and Hispanic voters, which are actually plausible moves ... were they not also linked to a politician who built his brand on birtherism etc.
But the other, less obvious issue is that the way conservative populism often intertwines w/white-identitarian impulses gives a certain kind of non-populist -- @RadioFreeTom being the example here -- a strong reason/excuse to declare "no quarter" against the populists.
So instead of populism prompting an elite rethink, it prompts an elite "Carthago delenda est" mentality that dismisses everything from opioid addiction to joblessness to unemployment as just the *fault* of the racist, blinkered WWC.
Combine those two things -- conservative populism's inability to win enough minority support to govern, and the delenda-est backlash it prompts among meritocrats -- and you get the path to the Michael Lind endgame wherein ...
"...today’s class war will come to an end when the managerial minority, with its near-monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise, and media influence, completely and successfully represses the numerically greater but politically weaker working-class majority."
Not sure that's any clearer than the initial tweet, but those are the thoughts behind it. Also Europe might be different. (cc: Emmanuel Macron)
