Why is Bernie, or any other left-leaning person still using X or Twitter? This makes little sense to me. I guess this is just another example of people not realizing how their daily actions impact their politics. We need actual dialectical analytical folks out there with the political commentary, not just professional politicians with a brand, like Bernie.
Anyway, he X-ed something today in response to the Democratic party loss in the election:
I’m not sure why it won’t embed the way other things do on this site but it’s probably “user error” – which is what a friend of mine calls it every time I complain about my new iPhone. I hope to figure out how to embed tweets better in the future (or X’s).
Bernie misses the point here. He won’t want to talk to working class people, because working class people all share a very similar view – it is the foreigners that are taking away jobs, harming the economy, and increasing taxes. Most working-class people believe there’s a zero-sum game here with public money, and that the more we let in foreigners, legal or not, the less they will be able to take home in their check and the less good jobs will be available.
Politicians like Bernie would rather use the rhetoric of “change” – which isn’t a good word at all, it’s a “change” to move from a democracy, to a republic, to a plutocracy, to a dictatorship (the path we seem to be on now just like the Romans were). Change is so vague that anyone from any political position could use it. This is how we know Bernie isn’t serious; he’s a professional politician with a brand.
Addressing the zero-sum game means that Democrats or any politician who wants to engage working-class people will need to speak about racism and essentialism – two things that most politicians will not touch or discuss. They will vaguely gesture toward it, and then not respond when the racist and essentialist side says, “I support black people better than their own leaders do!” Which, of course, is another essentialist/racist view. What is required is a deep, deep, deep dive into the idea that we somehow have no public money and why that might be, the preconception that there’s a table with limited seats for those who want to work and be a part of a community, and that immigrants do not come here to commit crimes but find themselves in desperate situations due to the slow and poor policies we have for those people.
Bernie’s call to address the American working-class seems really beautiful and easy – it’s almost like a Trump campaign argument! But doing this is something so difficult, messy, and time-consuming no professional politician will do it.
If this interests you, it has to be done by you with the people you interact with in your daily life. This requires strategy, consideration, planning, and having difficult conversations with people who are your friends and who you care about. This is the province of rhetoric.
Unfortunately our universities are filled with RINOS – Rhetoricians in Name Only – who hate public speaking and teach it like they are teaching someone how to assemble a utility shelf for their garage. Most university rhetoricians who teach public speaking resent students, resent the course, feel like it’s beneath them, and just prostrate their entire curriculum to weird and vague assumptions about business norms (without having worked or studied business communication at all).
High School teachers are better positioned because students feel more open there to express ideas and teachers feel the pressure of the school board and community. They are performing more rhetorical dance moves in their class political discussions about class and race than the RINOs are.
A good solution is, unlike some rhetoricians and RINOs on Facebook are saying – only study fascism from now on or your work isn’t relevant (A wild claim from a discipline that encourages dilettantism, just attend an NCA convention to see it for yourself) to refigure the curriculum of the basic course and public speaking to reflect an investigation to how American government is 100% dependent on rhetoric. I’m going to be working on this and I will share my thoughts here on the blog.
But Sanders, or any professional politician, won’t do it. They understand the difficulty and danger of rhetorical engagement. They’d rather call for change for a vague “working-class.” These terms need not only more narrow definition, but serious inquiry behind them. I bet you won’t find many people who describe themselves as working-class – most people in America are middle-class, don’t you know? The problem is with those working-class people who are too stupid to vote correctly, etc. (This is RINO discourse)
I wonder if we really could support a true dialectical thinker in public office. What if they ran on a campaign that yes, government issues are complex and difficult and yes sometimes it feels like politicians ignore you. But I hope to get your support by showing you how deeply interconnected our policies with taxation and public services are with our treatment of people who come into this country, no matter how they get here.
What a rhetorical challenge! It does make me wonder, and oddly, it makes me somewhat hopeful as this difficult dive is quickly becoming our last political option versus a fascist dictatorship.
Leave a Reply