Bass Boats, Gun Racks, Church Goin', And Donald Trump - The White Middle Class Is Back

Berkeley Roberts had, as Tennessee Williams' Maggie said in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, been born poor, raised poor, and expected to die poor, and for decades his family had seen that prophecy come true. Particularly in the dismal Biden years when everything black was raised to new heights and everything white was dismissed, dishonored, and discarded, Roberts felt consigned to his small dirt farm and forgotten. 

 

Roberts was not black poor, not welfare poor but still scrambling to make ends meet, to make something out of the soybeans and corn he grew, the hogs he raised, and the old tractor he rented out to neighbors and to maybe have enough in reserve to buy a few acres for his sons. 

He shot squirrels and 'coons, had barbecues in the Fall, pulled in his share of bass from the lake, and took down a deer or two during hunting season.  Life was not exactly bad, but dreary, predictable, and without much hope.  He watched as America's borders were opened and millions of illegal aliens poured into the country and treated like royalty, as the black man was lionized, and as gay men paraded down the avenues of the Nation's Capital like they owned it.  Ordinary folks like him were invisible at best and considered bigoted blights at worst. 

Roberts' folks had come west from Virginia and North Carolina in the 1850s, leaving their depleted tobacco lands for the promise of cotton in the Mississippi Delta.  His people were not landowners or plantation grandees, but laborers - the organizers and overseers of the thousands of slaves that cleared the cypress swamps and made the rich bottom land of the river as fertile as that of the Nile. 

His ancestors worked the plantations of the Farnsworths and Marshalls until they decided to strike off on their own, move to the hills, work their own property, live simply but independently, and make a living.  After the Depression years, the family moved and settled just across the line from Meridien where they had lived ever since. 

The Roberts had never accepted a dime from the government, paid their way, educated their children, staved off serious illness and were proud that they had fulfilled at least a part of their American heritage; but at every critical, dismissive, and accusatory remark from Democrats in Washington - they were nothing but Bible-thumping cracker ignoramuses, racist mongrels, tarpaper shack toothless sister-fuckers - pride turned to anger, at worst a spiteful, vengeful rage. 

Never Confederate flag-waving neo-secessionists like many of their neighbors, the Roberts still felt the sting of century old insults of Reconstruction, and the consignment of the white farmer to the backcountry and political oblivion. 

Then came Donald Trump who from his very first day in office promised to change all that, restore racial balance, give credit if not honor to the descendants of the white, Christian, European civilizations responsible for empire and the spreading of wealth and culture.  His promise was not one to reward the country's elites- they had done well since the founding of Jamestown and the implantation of the patrician English Cavalier tradition in the New World - but yeomen like the Roberts. 

 

The American Left had hectored and hammered for decades about the marginalized, the poor, and the disadvantaged black man, but the white American was left aside, supernumerary and insignificant in progressives' pursuit of some febrile idea of racial justice.  The white middle class never complained and took the insults and dismissiveness in stride, secure they thought on small family farms, with little legacy and inheritance, but with the same raw, eager, patriotism of the first settlers who had moved west. 

Yet during the Biden years when dismissiveness became a nasty, bullying hatred, this marginally middle class became angry.  They had never fed from the public trough and wanted no government largesse, only a modicum of understanding if not respect.  Progressives were championing the black man who was responsible for a gross disproportion of rapes, murders, assaults, and robberies; absent fathers leaving illegitimate children scattered throughout the ghetto; violent, recidivist social misfits who after seventy years of civil rights, were still settled in poverty and dysfunction. 

The white middle class took offense.  Their dutiful, respectful, patriotic, Christian ways meant nothing to the cliques and cabals ruling Washington under Biden.  The progressive vision for America was a 'diverse' one, but that new caste system, like the Aryan one, was based on race - but a reverse  system where blacks were at the top of the pyramid and whites were at the bottom.  

Progressives claiming systemic racism and white privilege felt that this demission was necessary and required.  The Roberts family, just be being white, were considered the inheritors of the slave-owning past.  There was nothing to do to disclaim this assertion.  It was settled history.  Racism was in their blood. 

When Trump was elected for a second term and exhibited all the resolve, power, and authority vested in him to reverse the divisive, destructive progressive programs of 'social reform', Berkeley Roberts and thousands like him cheered.  They would get nothing from the new conservative government, and never expected or wanted it.  All they hoped for was a recalibration of the American meme - race, racism, diversity, and identity were no longer to be the measurements for access or the valuation of morality.  

Originalist policies recalling Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and Adams were to replace the corrosive notions of Lafollette, Debs, Brandeis, and Gompers, the aggressive governmentalism of FDR and LBJ, and the hideous, deforming Biden years. 

 

Adlai Stevenson, Democratic candidate for president running against the popular General Dwight D Eisenhower had it right in one - 'the little man', the heart and soul of America should not be forgotten. Of course Stevenson's solution was to redistribute the wealth of those industrialists who had built and enriched America in a socialist economic transfer.

Much more appropriate to the lot of the little man were the verses of Walt Whitman who in his poem I Hear America Singing praised the labor, the brawn, the muscle, of the worker:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands...

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

'Each singing what belongs to him', the heart of conservative values, distorted, deliberately confused and misinterpreted by successive governments which wanted only an arrogation of power - what belongs to them. 

Walt Whitman spoke to Berkeley Roberts and the American 'little man', the heart and soul of the Republic as he had always been.  When thanks to Donald Trump the decks have been cleared, the trash taken out, and America's house cleaned, Whitman's vision will be restored.