‘White trash’ and left-wing snobbery

For those who still remember the worker’s cult that characterised classical Marxist-Leninism, the metamorphosis of the Left into a club for billionaires and oligarchs seems breathtakingly bizarre. After the socialist disasters of the twentieth century, the Left has taken a cue from the advertising industry: be a condescending show-off and a snob.

From Hillary Clinton’s $12 000 Armani jacket to George Soros’s spending on liberal causes — at the last tally he has spent $18 million on liberal causes this year alone — the Left has flaunted its new-found identity as the movement of the rich, the powerful, the gay and the decadent. Left-wing parties in Europe and the US Democrats no longer seek votes among the poor and downtrodden, but among immigrants and special-interest groups. Ethnic or “gender” anger and conspicuous consumption are what drive it.

It is no wonder that workers and the lower middle class in Western countries, suffering from the effects of globalisation and deindustrialisation, have become increasingly right-wing. Seeing itself deserted by the very people its own “caring” and humanitarian rhetoric would seem to favour, the Left has morphed into one of those drug-crazed, alcoholic celebrities who prefers to insult everyone in sight.

Exit the cap-wearing worker’s politician and enter the snobbish career politician screaming “white trash!” at anyone who dares not to vote for his nation-destroying policies. The world over, the term “white trash” has now become a staple of the left-liberal mainstream media and leftist politicians alike.

“I am a proud leftist snob,” seems to be their new motto. Reactionary aristrocrats and dandyist authors like Oscar Wilde or Marcel Proust used to be snobs. The socialist-leaning English writer and dramatist George Bernard Shaw described Oscar Wilde as “a snob to the marrow of his being, having been brought up in Merrion Square, Dublin”. Yet Wilde had great admiration for the down-to-earth American poet, Walt Whitman. In his famous American epic, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman described himself in these terms, appealing as did Trump, to the “white trash” of America:

“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . . no more modest than immodest.”

In contradistinction, the leftist nomenklatura see themselves as belonging to an elite class whose decadent anti-European values should be imposed from above on society. While they revel in sexual and financial perversity, they have very strict beliefs when it comes to issues of identity and a whole string of taboos surrounding it. Hence their view of the recalcitrant class of Europeans with a national identity, including European-Americans, as “white trash”.

Their politics is not one of debate, discussion and persuasion, but of accusation, slander, vilification and stigmatisation. Not sharing their beliefs is a sign of “bad taste”, betraying one’s inferior social position. The rich and famous — Hollywood actors, singers, best-selling authors and other celebrities — support multiculturalism and globalism. Think of George Clooney and J.K. Rowling whose disdain for Donald Trump was expressed in tweets to their millions of followers, eagerly relayed by the MSM. Or BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) in France, who lives a glamorous life in France as a “vedette”, an author-philosopher with an apparent power to persuade the French Socialist government to go to war in the Middle East. The left-wing snobs live in golden cages, in gated communities and accompanied by bodyguards when they venture onto our crime-ridden streets.

Reviewing a book by Nancy Isenberg, the New York Times writes:

“Crackers and squatters, rednecks and hillbillies, sandhillers and mudsills, clay eaters and hoe wielders: America has developed a rich vocabulary to describe one part of its permanent underclass. The epithet that subsumes them all, to borrow the title of Nancy Isenberg’s formidable and truth-dealing new book, is white trash.”

Broadly speaking, the author who is an academic historian at Louisiana State University, argues that the vast majority of Europeans who emigrated to America were “white trash” and have remained so for hundreds of years.

According to Wikipedia, “white trash” is “a derogatory American English racial slur referring to poor white people, especially in the rural southern United States”. The same source notes further down the page: “Many black people use the term as an attack against whites. Use of ‘white trash’ epithets has been extensively reported in African-American culture.”

However, the term has spread throughout the English-speaking world and is increasingly used to designate all Europeans who are not members of the global elite. In South Africa recently, an intense controversy erupted when Albertus van Wyk, the managing director of a mainstream Afrikaans magazine for farmers, Landbouweekblad, tweeted that the 200 000 followers of Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr on Twitter were “white trash”.

After threats from the public and readers of the magazine to boycott it, Mr. Van Wyk profusely apologised and retracted his statement, saying he was “misunderstood”. I tried to arrange a podcast interview with him on the issue, but he politely declined, saying in a Twitter direct message:

“Dan — thanks for the request. My employer and I have however agreed that I would not discuss the issue in public or in the media.”

It almost goes without saying that Albertus van Wyk regards himself as a liberal.

One of the high priests of cultural Marxism, Herbert Marcuse, once praised the subversion of Western culture by American blacks, writing in An Essay on Liberation that the “lily-white” concept of the soul in Western culture which may be traced back to Plato, has now been appropriated by blacks:

“… the soul is black, violent, orgiastic; it is no longer in Beethoven, Schubert, but in the blues, in jazz, in rock ‘n roll, in ‘soul food’. Similarly, the militant slogan ‘black is beautiful’ redefines another central concept of the traditional culture by reversing its symbolic value and associating it with the anti-color of blackness, tabooed magic, the uncanny.”

Since Marcuse’s first thoughts about how white culture could be designated as surpassed, old-fashioned and retrograde, a whole industry has sprung up at the universities around “whiteness studies” where the object is precisely to stigmatise European identity as something abnormal and inherently racist. This is but the academic counterpart of the political and social campaign to deride ordinary white men and women as “trash”.

One senses that the billionaire oligarchs who influence public opinion and voting patterns by funding both politicians and NGOs with vast armies of paid “activists” fear the current resurgence of “populism” in both the USA and Europe. What is “populism” other than the forgotten “white trash” reasserting their democratic rights and the will to have a say in decisions regarding their future?

If we had to refer to blacks, Muslims and migrants as “trash”, in most countries except perhaps the United States we would be immediately hauled before the courts or the ubiquitous “Human Rights Commissions” for so-called hate speech. Yet the term “white trash” is freely bandied about as one of those magic words or insults that is supposed to break down opposition to the current system.

Given the double standards pertaining to free speech in the West today, how are we to respond to the epithet of “white trash” and the accompanying assault on our values and identity?

There are two aspects to this assault: our stigmatisation as inferior, “in-bred”, unintelligent, and so on, as well as the snobbery attached to benevolent and “enlightened” multiculturalism. The object of the snobbery is, of course, to insult and vilify us even more as “untouchables” or literally “trash”, but also to instil in us and especially our children an aspiration to become more like them, the superior ones, the rich and famous, the snobs.

I therefore think our response to the attack on us should also take two forms: on the one hand, embracing the victims of the current system, those poor whites in the USA, South Africa and Europe who have succumbed to joblessness and a sometimes anomic existence on the periphery of society. Most of the mainstream Western churches have, like their political counterparts, abandoned their charitable vocation and would rather donate money to Africa or Asia than feed and clothe the poor on their own doorstep.

No toxic label such as “white trash” should break the inchoate global pan-European solidarity that transcends borders, continents, classes and languages. Let us all realise that “we are in this together”.

However, at the same time, we should take a leaf out of the book of the old Roman satirists who, like us, lived through a time of decadence and loss of values, as well as identity. The snobbery of the Left that we are experiencing today is a plebeian snobbery; it is not founded on any real sophistication, good manners or refinement. In fact, the new snobbery betrays the vulgarity and nouveau riche unease at its heart. The ostentation of the Eurocrats spending their tax-free euros in special duty-free shops is matched by the conspicuous consumption of South Africa’s black elite that are splurging on expensive cars, European luxury brands when it comes to clothes, watches, handbags, shoes, etc.

Among the many gifts of Europe to the world, is our refinement, our taste, our ethnic and regional food that all combine to create that high culture and joie de vivre which used to be associated with the old European aristocracy. In Europe, the culture of the lowest people is as clay to the sculptor; out of that high art is created. Folk tunes become great symphonies; a lowly peasant dish is transformed by a chef into gastronomical delicacy.

That is why we must fight fire with fire. In the face of plebeian vulgarity masquerading as snobbery, we must reassert our refinement, rooted in our glorious past as landed farmers and aristocrats. European people are inherently beautiful, which is one reason why we are so often resented. No European woman needs to artificially straighten her hair or have her face operated on to look attractive. We must turn the tables on the left-wing snobs by reasserting our beauty on all levels, and subject them to a gaze that is even more critical than the jaundiced eye which they are casting on us.

Already satire — a literary genre invented by the Roman patricians reacting to the vulgarity surrounding them during the Empire — is freely employed by today’s alt-right movement. We need much more of that, but also a type of classical satire that pokes fun at the pretensions of the multicultural snobs and their lackeys in the mainstream media.

Above all, we must reject the notion that there is even such a thing as “white trash”. Europeans who are exhibiting anomic tendencies are precisely victims of a planned cultural, economic, moral and political subversion.

We need to rediscover our real, earthy, sophisticated selves, exemplified by our great artists, thinkers and statesmen of the past.