Demonize the Rich
Fascists offer a fake enemy. We have to offer a real one.
Until the world is perfect, people will have rage. Who should they be mad at? Fascists will tell you to be mad at immigrants and brown people and gay people and poor people. It is not enough to just say, “don’t do that.” You have to tell people who they should be mad at instead: rich people.
Making America’s political atmosphere healthier depends on the task of getting people to stop despising scapegoats and to start despising rich people. Is “rich people” a precise enough term to describe the genuine villains at the heart of our nation’s problems? Perhaps not. But it’s close enough.
No political movement or party can hope to seize the public’s imagination and channel the public’s energy without being able to clearly tell the public who is to blame for their problems. Right wing zealots have never have a hard time understanding this. Who is to blame for the fact that the America that you live in does not match the America of your imagination? Immigrants are to blame! Black people are to blame! Dirty Muslims are to blame! Weird trans people are to blame! Mexicans speaking an inscrutable language are to blame! Criminals, inclusive of all the preceding groups, are to blame! Purge your beautiful nation of these rogues and the perfect America of your imagination will finally bloom—with you in the driver’s seat!
This message is a poisonous stew of lies. But that is not a political liability. It is a message that offers plain answers to hard questions. It is easy to understand. It soothes inflamed souls by pinning the crimes of modern capitalism on the perfect culprit: People different than you. Since you already didn’t care for those people too much, assuming that they are the root of all your woes is seductively plausible.
Clarity of lies should be countered by clarity of truth. Who is to blame for the fact that the America that you live in does not match the America promised to us all—the great land of hope and opportunity and equality and justice for all? Rich people are to blame. Why are rich people to blame? Because rich people, as a group, represent the beneficiaries and biggest defenders of the system of American capitalism that is ultimately responsible for producing the state of affairs that has robbed you of the ability to live a free and happy life. America is a wealthy nation. So why aren’t you wealthy? Because rich people take all the wealth for themselves. America has the resources to create a system that takes care of all of us. So why don’t we have such a system? Because rich people prefer a system that exploits most of us, in return for making rich people richer.
That’s a fact. You can spend a lifetime studying the intricacies of the economics and history and psychological motivations and sociology of this state of affairs, but if you boil it down to the idea “Rich people are the villains of America,” you are going to be on the right track. If a political message is meant to usher the public through a door that leads to deeper exploration of all of these wonderful details, then “Fuck rich people” is a healthy message, and one that—if delivered with sufficient energy—is robust to any attempts to debunk it. Nitpicking exceptionalism is nothing in the face of deep truths. We need not fear the well-funded public relations backlash to this message, any more than the fascists do to their own. When Donald Trump made his famous remark that Mexicans are “rapists,” he made sure to add, “And some, I assume, are good people.”
I’m sure many rich people are very nice folks. Unfortunately, they are responsible for all of this nation’s problems.
Not to fear. Whereas the solutions to the fascist set of villains demand horrifying mass deportations and military-style oppression and the imprisonment of an ever-expanding set of undesirables, the solution to “Rich people are the villains” is much more humane. We simply make rich people less rich. As a bonus, all of you will get richer, in the process. Terrific! Instead of concentrating our nation’s ample resources in a few hands, let’s spread those resources around to everyone who needs them. (The rich people will still be left with plenty!) Does this sound so bad? No. It actually sounds quite nice. This is socialism. The path to achieving it begins with the simple explanation that rich people are at the root of our problems.
The class war is a reality. It is an ongoing process in the real world that constantly affects our lives. American capitalism is a system in which the forces of capital forever try to strengthen their own economic and political position, and the result of their success if that everyone else finds themselves in a diminished economic and political position. Politicians can either acknowledge this and take a position on it or they can try to deny it, but either way, the class war continues on. Some politicians say, “Hey, we should probably draw a line that limits how powerful and wealthy rich people and corporations can get, since we don’t want to live in a dystopia,” and some politicians say “All wealth is created by our beloved rich people and businesses and we must not stand in their way.” Some politicians avoid the entire issue by saying “Look at all those immigrants!” and some politicians avoid the entire issue by saying “What we need is civility and hope,” and in both of those cases the rich win the class war by default. It takes energetic political action to place limits on capitalism. In the absence of that energetic political action, there is only capitalism’s logic, which is the ruthless and ceaseless accumulation of wealth in fewer hands. Those hands are the hands of the rich. You can see why it might behoove us to pay attention to them.
MAGA-style fascism benefits the rich but it is also crucial to point out that neoliberalism, the status quo prior to Trump’s rise, also benefited the rich. The status quo in general benefits the rich. Having more comity between Democrats and Republicans, having Congressional baseball games where members come together across the aisle, having John McCain as the moral soul of the Republican Party—none of this matters much in terms of the class war. In fact the reason why it was so easy for a monster like Trump to slide into the king’s throne is that the political landscape had been so polluted with insincerity for so long that the “norms” that Trump shattered were already hollow and brittle. Most people expect that they will get bullshit from political leaders, and they are not disappointed. This is not an atmosphere conducive to generating high-minded outrage about the decline of Our Venerable Democracy.
The Democrats are trembling over the apparent migration of working class voters into the Republican Party. The labor unions that they have allowed to decline for decades no longer seem sufficient to corral voters into their corner. Is there any doubt that the cravenness, the meekness, the empty sloganeering of the Democrats themselves for the past 15 years is to blame? The Republicans do not offer working people a genuine ally, but they do offer them an enemy. The Democrats offer them a mush of mixed messages, a bunch of technocratic pablum, an offer to join hands with Hollywood millionaires and Silicon Valley billionaires to come together in a united front against… something. “Let’s not be crude” seems to be the Democrats’ overriding pitch against Donald Trump. Not as catch, I’m afraid, as “Fuck the rich.”
Do not tell voters that Trump is rude and boorish and impolite. Tell them that Donald Trump is the motherfucking problem. This silver spoon billionaire motherfucker wants to take away your health care! This skyscraper-living motherfucker wants to take away your retirement! This spray-tanned greedy motherfucker wants to raise your taxes to give his greaseball rich buddies a tax cut! This soft-handed hand sanitizer grasping motherfucker wants to talk shit about people who actually work for a living! This scumbag con man overpriced steak-selling motherfucker wants to keep you overworked and underpaid and sick while he rides around on his ugly ass private jet with some of America’s biggest assholes kissing his ass the whole time! He wants you to have less so he can have more—more money, more power, more fucking meatloaf to shove in his fat fucking pink lips while he rides around on his little golf cart.
Piece of shit rich motherfucker.
Economically speaking, the rich and their interests are the underlying cause of our drastic crisis of inequality. Politically speaking, the rich and their interests have captured our government and our laws and twisted them to serve those who have the most. Plainly speaking, the rich are the problem. Want a villain? Don’t look at Mexico. Don’t look at people who came to this country for a better life, just like your ancestors did. Don’t look at poor people who never had a fair chance, or at people different from you in some superficial way. Look right up at the rich people who have too much and keep taking more and fix the whole world so that nothing can ever change that.
Rich people are the enemy. Say it! Live it! If you consider that message to be too harsh, I invite you very politely to wake the fuck up. The message coming from the other side is more evil, more damaging, and less true. It’s time to be honest. And if we end up making rich people feel demonized, well, that is a step in the right direction.
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Related reading: Who Is Your Enemy, My Brother?; Your Money Is On The Table; We Have a Distribution Problem.
If you are interested in class war and how it might be won rather than lost, you might enjoy my book about the labor movement. It’s called “The Hammer” and it is available for order wherever books are sold. If you’re in NYC, you can hear me speak about it at the NY Society for Ethical Culture on Sunday, November 3 at 11 a.m.
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Lol this rhetoric is a great way to change the culture. So many folks have a hard time villianizing rich folks because they want to be a rich folk. I get a lot of "don't judge" type comments when I start saying stuff like that but excuse me, I WILL JUDGE. Nepotism: judge. Trust fund: judge. You should judge too. You're one layoff away from selling your house. Be mad at the banks, at the real estate ventures keeping property values inflated. You know the rich people. 🤣
It's called "Divide and Conquer", and it's as old as colonialism. I think LBJ expressed it best:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Two things I like to point out:
1) Somebody calculated that the top 1% has taken $50 trillion from the rest of us since 1980. We could use the government to simply appropriate that back and disburse it among the population. It comes out to about $150k per citizen. $600k for a family of four. This might make a good plank on a platform to run for office, but you'd probably need bulletproof skin to pull it off.
2) Why isn't there a maximum wage tethered to the minimum wage? Cap earnings and tax earned and unearned income the same. Eliminate inheritance. That leaves everyone to balance between two life choices. Either work hard when young and acquire assets, then slow down and live off unearned income when you're old or work hard and play hard all your life.
Humans have known how to create a sustainable and socially just society for over a hundred years. We're just too easily manipulated by our emotions to ever bother doing so.
You can't give a pack animal a mind :)