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Tuesday
Yesterday I mentioned the GOP’s use of cultural issues to distract their working-class supporters from their real agenda, which is to funnel as much money to wealthy people as they can. In contending this, however, it’s possible that I don’t understand these supporters. Perhaps they don’t need to be distracted but are just fine with the wealthy feathering their own nests. As they see it, Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, along with Trump’s shameless grift—recently he peddled “Trump Water” at the East Palestine toxic disaster site—are just marks in his favor.
Two passages from literary works I’ve read recently alerted me to this possibility. While Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! don’t have much in common, both provide interesting insights into lower class characters on this issue.
In Proust, the family maid is affronted by all charity her wealthy mistress directs to poor people. If the aristocratic Aunt Léonie is going to give money away, Françoise figures, she should only bestow it on other rich people.
“I don’t think she [Eulalie, an impoverished recipient of the aunt’s generosity] has very much to complain of, all the same,” Françoise would sigh grimly, for she had a tendency to regard as petty cash all that my aunt might give her for herself or her children, and as treasure riotously squandered on a pampered and ungrateful darling the little coins slipped, Sunday by Sunday, into Eulalie’s hand, but so discreetly passed that Françoise never managed to see them. It was not that she wanted to have for herself the money my aunt bestowed on Eulalie. She already enjoyed a sufficiency of all that my aunt possessed, in the knowledge that the wealth of the mistress automatically ennobled and glorified the maid in the eyes of the world….[H]ad she had control over my aunt’s fortune (which would have more than satisfied her highest ambition) she would have guarded it from the assaults of strangers with a maternal ferocity. She would, however, have seen no great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, had she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps she felt that such persons, not being actually in need of my aunt’s presents, could not be suspected of simulating affection for her on that account.
As Françoise sees it, giving gifts to “persons of the ‘same class’ as my aunt” seemed to her
to be included among the ornamental customs of that strange and brilliant life led by rich people, who hunted and shot, gave balls and paid visits, a life which she would contemplate with an admiring smile. But it was by no means the same thing if, for this princely exchange of courtesies, my aunt substituted mere charity, if her beneficiaries were of the class which Françoise would label “people like myself,” or “people no better than myself”…
Note that Françoise exempts from the aunt’s charitable giving the money she herself receives, regarding it as so much “petty cash.” Here she is like those White working-class Americans that consider Black working-class Americans unworthy of receiving governmental assistance that they themselves receive. If she were a member of our own society, Françoise would be amongst those convinced that the poor spend their money on sirloin steaks. With no proof, Proust’s maid is sure that the Eulalies of the world (a.k.a. “undeserving objects”) receive far more than she does from her employer:
And when she saw that, despite all her warnings, my aunt continued to do exactly as she pleased, and to fling money away with both hands (or so, at least, Françoise believed) on undeserving objects, she began to find that the presents she herself received from my aunt were very tiny compared to the imaginary riches squandered upon Eulalie. There was not, in the neighborhood of Combray, a farm of such prosperity and importance that Françoise doubted Eulalie’s ability to buy it, without thinking twice, out of the capital which her visits to my aunt had ‘brought in’…
In her anger, Françoise starts sounding like certain of our rightwing evangelicals, convinced that Eulalie will ultimately experience the full force of God’s wrath:
“Flatterers know how to make themselves welcome, and to gather up the crumbs; but have patience, have patience; our God is a jealous God, and one fine day He will be avenged upon them!” she would declaim, with the sidelong, insinuating glance of Joash, thinking of Athaliah alone when he says that the
…prosperity
Of wicked men runs like a torrent past,
And soon is spent.
I now shift gears to Thomas Sutpen, the central figure in Absalom, Absalom! Although he is regarded as “white trash” by privileged Whites, as a young boy he doesn’t begrudge them their wealth:
He had learned the difference not only between white men and blade ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men….He still thought that that was just a matter of where you were spawned and how; whether you were lucky or not lucky; and that the lucky ones would be even slower and loather than the unlucky to take any advantage of it or credit for it, or to feel that it gave them anything more than the luck; and he still thought that they would feel if anything more tender toward the unlucky than the unlucky would ever need to feel toward them.
And:
He no more envied the [rich] man than he would have envied a mountainman who happened to own a fine rifle. He would have coveted the rifle, but he would himself have supported and confirmed the owner’s pride and pleasure in its ownership because he could not have conceived of the owner taking crass advantage of the luck which gave the rifle to him…
Faulkner attributes the views to Sutpen’s youthful innocence, but I wonder if Trump’s working-class voters have a comparable innocence, not believing that this man, who speaks their language, would play them for suckers. After all, won’t he appreciate how loyal they are?
And so the wealthy find support amongst people whose financial interests are in direct opposition to their own. As long as they can keep playing that game, they will play it.