So, this is a Saturday thought before I have to go do a zillion things, but talking with @dangainor made me wonder about something. (This is not about Dan or a zinger at him.) It's about a generational issue I have with both the left and right in 2020.
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Growing up during the Cold War, making a class transition from working class to professional class after getting an education, and studying the Soviet Union for as long as I did - I wonder now if that makes me hyper-sensitive about people who deploy class warfare rhetoric. /2
For me, class warfare was poisonous and stupid. We didn't know a lot of rich people, but the idea of storming the mansions of Bellevue Avenue seemed to be the kind of thing college kids dreamed up while the rest of us had to work real jobs. To me, the Left was screechy drama. /3
And the richest people we knew in Massachusetts were, with some exceptions here and there, Democrats. As were the Democrats in public life when you grow up near the Kennedy cult. I was aware that I was not of that class, but like I said, I had to get a job, so... /4
But even worse, class warfare was the tool of our common enemy, the USSR. The more time I spent studying the Soviets, the less empathy I had with arguments about "uniting the workers" and "elites vs masses" because those were arguments to divide Americans. /5
So for years I was contentedly a conservative, mostly - not always - voting GOP because I was so hostile to class warfare appeals. And now I am not a Republican, because no one plays that card harder than Trump: A guy who pees in gold toilets while riling up the townies. /6
I despise Trumpism and it's revanchist memes, which come right out of the early 1970s playbook of the *LEFT*. "It's not your fault, the system is rigged, The Man screwed you, of course you're on drugs because who WOULDN'T be, it's all the rich elites" blah blah blah. /7
All the "drain the swamp" bullshit with Trump is, to me, just another effort to use class warfare to convince Americans that their divisions are more important than their common political heritage and their shared aspirations. No one has played that card better than Trump. /8
So I damn well reject it with the same contempt I once aimed at the "eat the rich" college kids when I was young. It is a ideology of pure resentment that was weaponized by the left and is now the screechy emotional whine of the Trumpy Right. /9
But Tom: You would have voted for Sanders if you'd had to! Yes. I despise Sanders. And Sanders and Trump now come from the same place - but Sanders isn't a mentally unstable sociopath surrounded by gangsters. I'd have puked and then pulled the lever to get rid of Bill Barr. /10
But maybe age and having gone through this by seeing the Left and the Soviets play this social resentment card first are the secret sauce that makes me *extra* contemptuous of it on the Right - because conservatives were once, long ago, fighting that kind of bullshit. /11x
