On killing your own voters

American politicians hate their working class

Why are the Republicans so eager to kill off their own voters? We saw this first with covid, where the lies about the virus must have contributed a lot to the final death toll. Now the same thing has happened before our eyes with hurricanes. Lying about the cause is bad enough: “Of course they can control the weather” writes an elected Republican congresswoman — but now they are actively lying about the consequences as well: we now expect the continuous stream of lies about what the government is doing from Trump. Just before the hurricane hit I came across a post actively discouraging people from evacuating the areas that will be devastated, because “FEMA is hiring private security firms to stop people returning to their homes.”

This makes no sense at all if the party is trying to improve things for its own voters. Obviously, there is no suggestion of the sort of patriotism which would lead a Republican president to care about the lives of Democratic voters — we saw that in George W. Bush’s reaction to hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans. But both in the Appalachians and in Florida, it is mostly Republican voters who will die.

It might make sense if you regarded the Republican party as a force of entirely motiveless malevolence — an emanation of evil, if you like. But I don’t think you need to add Satan to the mix, whether or not his hand may be seen to rest in an apparently comradely fashion on the shoulder of Donald J Trump. All that’s needed to explain this behaviour is to realise that the point of the Republican party is not to advance the interest of the Republican voter, but gain power for the people who run it.

In that perspective, voters are fungible. When the only votes which will decide the election are a few hundred thousand in the swing states it makes perfect sense to sacrifice the voters in safe states — to sacrifice them literally as well as metaphorically — if that will increase the zeal of the survivors; and this is doubly true when some of the people you are trying to fire up are those who will be counting the votes of the less committed.

If you’re a Republican strategist you can reason that if people must anyway drown in Florida as a result of the incompetence and malevolence of Republican politicians they will not have died in vain if the catastrophe helps to convince voters of the incompetence and malevolence of the Democratic party. In fact, they will be more use to the party dead than ever they were alive. This is shocking only if you think parties are interest groups working for the good of their voters. It is not shocking at all — it is inevitable — if you think of the culture war in literal terms. The decision that some troops must be sacrificed for victory is one the generals must make every day.

It’s tempting to think that this is a result of the corruption of democracy but I think it’s an inevitable part of the workings of power under any system. It is the way the Stalin thought all the time.

But are the Democrats really any different? They would never be as vulgar nor as explicitly dishonest; but they, too, regard voters as fungible. When you look back at Clinton’s embrace of NAFTA, and the whole neoliberal/free trade trend, the destruction of manufacturing industry was carried out in the US and in Britain (not to nearly the same extent in Sweden) with an enormous disregard for the people left behind. I found in Freddie De Boer the other day a chilling quote from a very senior Democratic politician just before the 2016 election:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

But as de Boer also says,

“The amount of human devastation in the deindustrialized spaces in the United States has been unthinkable. Entire communities where the most common source of personal income is disability payments, fentanyl addiction rates in the double digits, 60+% unemployment rates among workers aged 18-25, collapsing municipal services, a doom loop of people fleeing all of that destruction which in turn devastates the tax base even more. At an extreme, you have a place like Gary, Indiana, where the population is lower than it was in 1927, where the violent crime rate is 318% higher than the national average, where residents live scandalously short lives, where fully a third of all residents live below the poverty line….”

This damage, spread out over decades, is not easily compared with the sudden and immediate devastation of a hurricane. “Learn to code” is not quite as cynical as telling people that vaccinations kill, or that hurricanes are the product of government manipulation, but it is more insulting, less likely to be forgiven, and the underlying calculation is the same. The interests and the lives of the apathetic and ignorant working class weigh much less than those of the people like us, who might actually vote.

This isn’t to argue that both sides are equally awful. Right now, today, the Republicans are a much greater threat to everything worth preserving in America — and of course, a much greater threat to the security of client states like Britain. A Trump victory will be a disaster for what’s left of post war civilisation. But even if it’s staved off this time, the threat of fascism can only increase if the alternative is the kind of class warfare waged by progressive with their noses in the air so that they need not look beneath them.