GOP establishment Sherburn vs.Tea Party Boggs?
Michelle Goldberg of The Nation has an interesting article about class divisions opening up in the GOP, with wealthy conservatives openly expressing contempt for lower class whites who have been a reliable GOP voting bloc. Goldberg’s post brings to mind conversations my 19th century literature survey course has been having about class and race tensions in Huckleberry Finn. Hold on while I explain.
Goldberg has in mind When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question, written by Charlotte Hays, director of cultural programs at the anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum. As a sampling, Goldberg offers up the following:
A chapter on the foreclosure crisis and crushing student debt, for example, is called “White Trash Money Management.” “There are, I thus adduce, two keys to not being White Trash: having a job and paying your bills on time,” Hays sniffs. “The first is getting more difficult in this economy, but it is still White Trash to go on disability if you aren’t positively unable to lift a finger.”
Goldberg notes that, if “conservatives once tried to keep their contempt for hoi polloi behind closed doors, Mitt Romney–style, now they’re displaying it proudly.” As further evidence, she points to “the growing prominence” of Fox’s Stuart Varney, who “sneer[s] at the poor in an impossibly posh English accent. (“Many of them have things,” he once said. “What they lack is the richness of spirit.”)” and to Charles Murray, who once wrote about the genetic inferiority of Blacks but now laments (in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010) about the decay of industriousness in working class white men. (Note how rich conservatives who generally prefer to blame individual character flaws rather than social and economic factors for failure.)
I don’t know how general this new contempt is and whether it is related to the tensions within the GOP between the monied establishment and the Tea Party base. But it’s reminiscent of the class splits that appear in Huckleberry Finn.
I find the intersection of race and class in the novel to be more interesting than just the treatment of race. The novel has several instances of the split amongst whites, whether it be between Miss Watson and Huck, Judge Thatcher and Pap, or Colonel Sherburn and the poor whites in the lynch mob. Here’s what a 19th century Charlotte Hays or Stuart Varney sounds like:
The idea of YOU lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a MAN! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a MAN? Why, a MAN’S safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind — as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him.
Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people — whereas you’re just AS brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark — and it’s just what they WOULD do.
Today, someone in the mob in front of Sherburn’s house would capture the speech on smart phone and it would go viral. Incidentally, when we talk about class I tell my students that I consider “white trash” to be almost as objectionable as the n-word, an instance of classism that (as all such slurs do) deprives a class of people of their humanity.
Although Huckleberry Finn indicates that the lower class Jim is a natural ally of the lower class Huck, race in the end wins out. Huck may resolve to buck society’s race prejudice and free Jim, but he takes a step back when Tom shows up and Jim once again becomes a punching bag. Lacking faith in himself, Huck turns the book’s plot over to someone from the class above.
Democrats need to take note. They may be excited by class rifts that they see growing within the GOP and dream that Obamacare, as it spreads to struggling families, will bring poor blacks and poor white together in support of progressive causes. That’s the dream of a leftwing populist like Thomas Franks in What’s the Matter with Kansas.
This will not happen if Huck Finn proves predictive, however. We are more likely to see race prejudice, along with deference to those with money, once again carry the day. Sure, the Tea Party will have their fling, elevating figures like Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz and occasionally shutting down the government. But in the end, it is far more likely that the Toms and Sherburns will prevail (Jeb Bush or Chris Christie in 2016 ?) and that lower class whites, having no new territories to light out for, will be reduced to waving Confederate flags in front of the White House and calling their black president a Kenyan Muslim socialist.
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