The elite will show no sympathy for the poor whites
Netflix’s new adaptation of JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Alleghi” is disastrous for left-wing political narrative. How do I know that? Because a lot of leftists are trying to stop him from seeing it.
Critics complain that the movie has a lot of noble country folk – although the 2016 culture of Bamboo or the film version is not exactly focused on such nobles. They also caught that there are no big black characters in the autobiography of a white man from a mountain country. Even if yes.
For a film made from a bestselling book with a well-known liberal filmmaker (Ron Howard) and Glenn Klose, Amy Adams and Gabrielle Besso, the movie seems surprisingly controversial. And why? Because, as I said above, it is destructive to the left political narrative.
Professor Robert P. of Princeton. George noted, responding to a negative review, “Do you think so [those] Who doesn’t want you to see ‘Hillbilly Alleghi’. . . I dunno. . . An agenda? . . . The campaign against this film – the standard issue created by liberal businessman Ron Howard, is purely political. “
To be honest, everything coming from the left is political. But the reaction to this Netflix movie says something about what we feel like on the left.
Writing about the reaction, Rod Dreher comments, “Now it’s okay to hate the displays again, and maybe even mandatory.” He adds, “I think the ‘privilege’ discourses between middle-class, educated, white liberals are mostly about rearranging prejudices to make lower-class whites worthy of upper humiliation.”
The old Southern Democrats maintained the loyalty of poor whites by assuring them that those poor whites felt they could focus on blacks. The Modern Democratic Party maintains the allegiance of upper-middle-class whites by making sure they can focus on lower-class whites. By humanizing those lower-class whites, Netflix’s “Hillbilly Alleghi” calls the whole enterprise into question.
Democratizing the working class at one time belonged to the Democrats. But for a long time.
After World War II and the GI Bill, a new management class emerged in the United States. College college education was not just a way to read, but a necessary passport for the economically and socially upper middle class. In 1960, anyone could become part of the upper class without a college degree; By 2000 that was almost unheard of.
This means that, of course, those who have entered the higher realm have done what the lower echelons of the aristocracy always do: be very careful in distinguishing themselves from the non-elite.
In America, class warfare is disguised as cultural warfare, and cultural warfare is often waged in the name of fighting racism. Thus, the Deplorables had to be branded as racist, although it was not the working class that drew the neighborhood or set college college admissions policies.
And that means they can’t be humanized, or shown to be victims. The sympathy of the upper classes, towards the goals of choice, is cautiously acted upon.
Of course, the results go beyond movie reviews. As Christopher Caldwell recently noted in The New Republic, the Trump economy includes the first “egalitarian boom” in decades. In 2019, before the Covid-19 screamed, we had 3.7 percent unemployment (with record unemployment for blacks and Hispanics.)
Contrast this with the Obama part of the boom, where almost all economic gains went to the top 10 percent revenue bracket.
Under President Trump’s presidency, meanwhile, “the top 10 percent networth increased only marginally, while all other groups fluctuated. In 2019, the share of overall earnings rose to 90 percent for the first time in a decade.”
And what is Biden Crowd’s most outspoken policy initiative? Student-loan waivers, which include the majority of the working class who subsidize college debt to people who are better off.
Most Americans do not have a college degree degree, and college college degree-holders earn more money on average in their lifetime.
On the net, the signature Democratic Party’s policy initiative is a shift from bad-off to bad-to-bad.
It’s easier to take things away from people if you tend to think they don’t deserve better. The response to “Hillbilly Alleghi” suggests that we will hear many such things in the years to come.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the founder of the InstaPandit.com blog.
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