The Smallholder "Revolt"

I'd intended an essay on becoming an earnest leftist by becoming a disillusioned teenage Randian, who then found Jesus, lost him, got himself a red card and finally ended up a cynical and aging anarchist.

But fwoan wrote something concise and eminently more interesting:

"But how else are the Democrats, a party built on sustaining and profiting from the status quo, to convince the cowering masses that their reformative hands are tied by the evil Republicans? In truth neither the Republicans or the Democrats have any interest in helping you. Any change provided by either party in the past has been by organized and fierce demand by the people...

...It’s with this knowledge that we begin to understand why the Democrats are counting on losing this election. Once the Republicans seize control of the House any attempt to further campaign Hope and Change will be neutered. Immigration reform? Blame the racist Republicans. Ending our global war mission? War-mongering Republicans’ fault. True Healthcare Reform? Corporatist Republicans wont have it! The excuse is too good to be true. The inverse is true of Republican voters’ demands."

Having astroturfed into mediated existence a "movement" of  angry crackers and Christian reconstructionists, the GOP is on the verge of giving Barack Obama the opportunity to complete his marching orders under the cover of the bogeyman of "government shut down." You will notice, I hope, that the "small government" Republicans never manage to make useful noises about shutting down the DoD or dismantling the Joint Chiefs proconsular occupation armies, leaving that argument to notably racist friendly gold standard guy, Ron Paul, and his "libertarian" get, the latest Assklown of Kentucky.

I don't want to suggest that there's anything particularly new about this season of febrile White rage. There isn't. Any time the shit gets comparatively shittier for the credit-slurping lawn order Muricans, with their personal Jesus and his legion of corporate prayer warriors, they vote up whatever gaggle of electoral Pinkertons promise to make life even harder for brown people, since the oft-unstated standard for poverty in this country is whatever Jerome Typical Negro has to endure. I say "typical negro," because anyone who has ever lived in a majority black community knows that there's nothing particularly typical about it, except that most of the White folk have moved on. The type is entirely a media invention, hauled out every two years and in nearly every movie produced in a Hollywood Brando understood perfectly well...

So, this is what we have. We have a bunch of smallholders - petit bourgeoisie - pissed off that the gig is coming to an end. They know it, I think. Thirty years of repeated promises of prosperity, and the debt keeps piling up, and the television keeps showing shit getting worse. They also have friends and neighbors who are starting to lose their livelihoods, and their homes.

I imagine the guy with a metal shop and 36% labor costs honestly thinks it's wages which keep him from holding down his fief. He probably really likes most of his guys, and would love to pay them more, but he's got it in his head (in my experience, and recently) that he owns his three bedroom house, fair and square, that his shop was made entirely from the sweat and blood of his effort, and that the schools he pays for (either in property taxes, or in tuition) are really interested in churning out competent adults. He watches the telly and he sees his "country going to hell" on the watch of the first black imperialist corporate running dog President, and he sees how all those places where black and brown people live are full of grifters, welfare queens, and drug addicts. His world is orderly. Or, so he believes. It's not the bank, it's not the very concept of private property, it's not the idea that some should rule and the rest should obey, which comes to his mind. What he sees is his own smallholding, and how soon and how easily he could lose it.

This is his reality. It's his faith - he believes, very sincerely, that all this wealth is made right where it's enjoyed - that he himself has done it. It's a matter of deepest faith that his work and effort and labor always equal some sort of reward, some legacy he'll leave to the world and his children. If he isn't getting the reward he expected (and frankly been raised to expect) and he's put in all the effort, and done what the bank asked, and gone to Church, and hoisted up his flag, then it must be someone else's fault that he feels so insecure.

That reward - let's be clear - is security and the expectation of consumption satisfied. If he cannot feel secure in his possessions, and continue to enjoy them, he rightly believes that something is wrong with the world.

The problem, of course, is that he's wrong about the cause.

Which is the entire political* purpose, at this stage of late order capitalism in the US of A, of the GOP. Their job is to spend millions of dollars (money which represents labor stolen from workers, by corporations, and given to politicians and marketers) blaming the poor and the brown for the all the problems faced by smallholders, middle class professionals and the dependents of the bourgeoisie.

It's an easy sell - because the divide between the smallholder/middle class and the the poor and brown has always been extreme, on the North American continent. It's always been clearly marked by race, geography and culture.

The GOP's purpose, again, is legerdemain. Point to the poor, the brown, the laboring - and blame them for the conditions which first allow the smallholder to exist, and then undo his security, his wealth, and his property. In other words: blame the poor and the non-white for capitalism's discontents.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have only one job themselves - keep the state afloat in any way possible, so long as the capitalists who most benefit from its operation do not have to absorb the costs. And this is why, tomorrow, the GOP's successful rebranding effort will allow them to give Barack Obama what he needs and wants: a Republican cover for the enactment of those measures which will preserve the viability of the State as an enforcer of property, obedience and resource control.

This is what the Tea Party - a smallholder "revolt" against an imaginary State in the service of an actual one, if ever there was - was supposed to do; and this is what it has actually done.

The problem lies not in its failure, or its success - but in the expectations of its rank and file. Because, and I think this is the rub, they aren't going to become leftists if they feel disappointed. They aren't leftists because they aren't proles; they're smallholders. They have no class interest with labor.

And since their expectations for restoration and cultural rebirth cannot be satisfied - this segment of the population (in my estimation) presents the likeliest and most immediate breeding pool for the development of actual, political, militant fascism.

Whether their fake revolt becomes an open one, as capitalism fails them too, and then they fail to understand this, remains to be seen...

UPDATE: * - they serve other functions, of course...