When your enemies are getting cooked, the best you can do
is grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.
Specifically, and most recently, many of the rank-and-file
MAGA followers of Donald Trump have played
themselves. Some of them may - or may not -
use the opportunity and get themselves a
lesson in meritocracy, immigration, class
warfare and the oligarchy.
Elon Musk - the richest person in the world and owner of
the Republican Party and Donald Trump - and
Vivek Ramaswamy - an Indian American
billionaire who wishes he was White - revealed
that they do not care about their poor and
uneducated White base.
Both men, who are toxic, tech-bro fraudster billionaires
who are heading up Trump’s Department of
Government Efficiency (DOGE), have called for the entry of more highly-skilled
immigrants into America under the H-1B
visa program. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering
talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor
in Silicon Valley,” said Musk on his X social
media app. Meanwhile, Ramaswamy said on X that
American culture “has venerated mediocrity
over excellence,” resulting in a nation that
does “not produce the best engineers.” Even
Trump said “we have to have the
most competent people in our country” and argued “we need a lot more
people coming in.”
From the standpoint of MAGA America, there are a few
problems with these statements. For one, Trump
has built his political fortunes over white
grievance, racism, xenophobia and the
scapegoating of immigrants. Branding nations
of the Global South as “sh*thole countries,”
Mexican people as rapists and murderers and
Haitian immigrants as people who eat dogs and
cats, Trump and his folks have crafted a
narrative placing the White man first. With
this rhetoric follows promises to deport 11
million undocumented immigrants and possibly
place them in concentration camps, along with
calls to eliminate DEI, affirmative action and
other efforts designed to address racial
inequities.
MAGA is merely the decades-old GOP Southern Strategy on
steroids. That strategy - which the Republican
Party employed to woo disaffected racist White
Southern Democrats - capitalized on white
resentment over the civil rights gains Black
people made in the 1960s. The Republican
narrative equated government with wasteful
spending and taxation and welfare programs
meant to benefit the Blacks. It mattered
little that White people would also benefit
from these programs. After all, that Black
people would stand to gain was enough to
justify canceling the policies.
While the Southern Strategy relied on racial dog whistles
and nuanced race card politics to uphold the
status quo and the economic interests of the
White oligarchy, Trump has used a bullhorn.
But Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump said the quiet
part out loud and revealed to their MAGA base
that they, as billionaire oligarchs, never
cared about poor white folks. However, they do
care about getting the bag. Exploiting
immigrant visa workers with lower wages,
precarity and no labor protections is the name
of the game.
Moreover, the wealthy white people never cared about the
low-income, poor and working poor masses they
own and control. Although white folks with no
power have been conditioned to punch down and
believe marginalized and racialized groups are
the source of their woes, the oligarchy
considers these white people to be lazy,
mediocre, untalented and ignorant. Fascism
seeks powerless enemies to assign blame, and
capitalists want the finger pointed at someone
other than themselves. As the South African
apartheid oligarch, Elon Musk uses the culture
wars to take control of the government, he and
others of his ilk capitalize on White
America’s belief in the inherent superiority
and meritocracy of whiteness. It was fine to
blame everything on a Black or Brown face or
someone from a foreign country taking all the
jobs, college spots and government money.
White people were content to serve up other
people for dinner when in fact, they didn’t
realize they were the items on the menu.
White conservatives always lacked a class analysis of
politics, and this has undermined their
credibility. Perhaps the MAGA faithful will
finally learn their lesson and change their
way of thinking, but this is doubtful.
