The Guardian recently published the piece, "Mocked and Forgotten: who will speak for the American white working class?" I dislike specifying "white" in the title, but the article is, at least superficially, a response to another article about Donald Trump supporters, so the specification is not inaccurate — Trump supporters are predominantly seen as white working class people. Despite the title, I like the piece as a whole. So much so that I feel compelled to supplement it.
The Guardian piece is primarily a response to an article from The National Review that can best be described as repugnantly honest lies. To see what I mean, a paragraph quoted in The Guardian is worth reprinting here.
“Nothing happened to them[white working class people]. There wasn’t some awful disaster, There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation... The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”
What's repulsive about Kevin Williamson's words is also what I appreciate about them. In most arguments about socialism/communism/anarchism - whatever you want to call the humanitarian belief in people's basic right to life - the free market/capitalist is rarely going to admit to the implications of their belief, namely that the poor, "deserve to die." Much like I want deniers of white privilege to admit they're white supremacists, I want anti-socialists to admit that they think some people deserve to die. Of course they don't admit this and it's absolutely horrific for someone to say that publicly, but I prefer it to the common alternative of supporting policies and beliefs that imply poor people deserve to die, yet deny that implication.
It's worth wondering whether Williamson actually believes these people are responsible for poverty or if he's just comfortable telling them they deserve to die when he knows poverty is a societal problem. So here's the question: is Williamson ignorant and repugnant or is he a well-informed psychopath? If it's the former, I advise Williamson to read "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs." A book that all but proves that addiction is not, entirely, a matter of personal failings, but a sign of a broken society that isolates and deprives people of their humanity. Or if Williamson doesn't care enough to read a whole book, there's a 15 minute TED talk by the author that explains why the kind of picture Williamson has of the poor and addicted is not only false, it's exacerbating the problem. He could see that Portugal legalized all drugs and drug addiction went down and he might realize that he's wrong. Poor people don’t deserve to die.
Until that time I hope for more people like him to say that poor people deserve die. It's time the world stopped pretending that market principles don't have sacrifices.
