Don't poopoo all the political brouhaha over J.D. Vance and "childless cat ladies"
There's real class war lurking within the "culture wars" and it's over Kamala's soon-to-be-announced "care economy"
The “culture war” is, and has always been, a class war in the venerablc Marxist sense.
Let me explain.
The evidence for such a thesis became quite quite compelling this past week when President Joe Biden announced he would no longer be running in the November election, and the Democrats “coronated” Kamala Harris as their new standard bearer.
As all the more honest pundits have made clear, Biden did not withdraw from the race in a wholly unselfish gesture toward the good of the country.
As Perry Bacon, Jr. opining in The Washington Post put it bluntly:
The president made the formal announcement that he is no longer running for reelection. But this was not really his decision. Key figures in the Democratic Party did not want Biden as their candidate — and created so much opposition that it would have been hard for the president to move forward.
Meanwhile, the same pundits who were chanting full-throated and in unison “time to go, Joe” are now celebrating the instant anointing of the once maligned Vice President as the glorious future of the Democratic Party if not the totality of generations x, y, and z all wadded together.'
Although most of the instant polling since Biden’s announcement on Sunday show Harris recovering most of the statistical ground the latter had lost over the past twelve months, there is less to this scenario than meets the eye.
If one examines the data scrupulously, it becomes obvious that very few swing voters have in nary a week suddenly changed their minds.
The replenished “deficit” for Harris in this instance is tantamount in all likelihood to committed Democratic voters who each for their own reasons had been sandbagging Biden in their minds and in response to the pollsters. The fact that it is not Trump’s numbers that have changed, but only those of his opponent, strongly hints at what has truly been transpiring in the polls.
Which brings us back to the matter of not so covert class war that is now driving this election.
We need not enumerate the recent spate of academic and anecdotal analyses that show Trump’s level of support beyond his indulgent MAGA acolytes is largely due to a growing nationwide fear and loathing about the American economy.
A comparison of the economic records of Trump and Biden show a general statistical advantage for the latter, especially if the metric is raw economic output and the performance of the stock market.
However, the inflation rate under Biden has been four times that what it was under Trump, according to the financial and non-political website Bankrate. And, as Forbes magazine notes, inflation continues to redound to the general benefit of the wealthy and the detriment of the working classes.
As Kamala Harris commandeers the helm and starts to turn around the downward trajectory of the Democratic Presidential campaign, it is becoming clear that the electoral battle this autumn will be fought on largely economic policy.
A ranking of top campaign issues in early July by the international data aggregation platform Statista shows that inflation is by far the top priority of a sizable segment of voters. Health care, immigration, and jobs follow in that specific order.
Overall economic issues, according to Statista, make up more than 60 percent of voter concerns. “Cultural” issues, including abortion, guns, civil rights, education and criminal justice reform add up to about only 15 percent.
Right out of the gate Democrats, nevertheless, have been doubling down almost exclusively on cultural controversies.
Harris’ first speech as the assumed Democratic Presidential nominee was to the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, where she gushed in signature platitudes about the dangers of school vouchers and “not going back” but “moving forward”.
The rest of the week the party itself trained their heavy fire on Republican Vice Presidential hopeful J.D. Vance for an off-the-cuff remark he made in 2021, when he had not yet even entered politics, about Democratic politicos as “a bunch of childless cat ladies”.
This past week Vance clarified his own recyled remark by saying he was not denigrating anyone’s decision not to have children. “The point”, he insisted, is that the Democratic party “has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child”.
Vance, of course, is the author of the best-selling book and popular Netflix series Hillbilly Elegy.
Hillbilly Elegy own autobiographical account of growing up in Appalachia and the urban desolation of the Rust Belt.
His work documents in brutal but artistically forceful detail the frustration, bitterness, and opioid-addled despair of family life among the once prosperous, predominantly white, working class. But it also celebrates their pride, commitment to kin, and gritty resourcefulness in contending what at times seem like overpowering odds.
Vance’s “hillbillies” are commensurate in no uncertain terms with Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterization of today’s Republican Party as a “basket of deplorables” whom Biden himself, even though he has touted for himself the not always convincing sobriquet of “Scranton Joe”, has repeatedly warned are a “threat to democracy”. as well
Vance’s Mamaw with her arsenal of firearms drive this point home.
The ruling knowledge class, which has been ascendant in America since the financial meltdown of 2008, sees in Vance a more polished and persuasive version of the populist demon that the progressive elites have been frantically trying to exorcise since 2016.
The fact that populism is on the ascendant world wide, as I have emphasized, makes all the chanting and waving of incense even more urgent.
If he cannot be vilified for his lack of education – he graduated from Yale – or the kind of crude palaver and bad manners that typify his real estate mogul running mate, Vance must be excoriated for…well, once upon a time demeaning elderly women with an overstock of puddy tats.
And, of course, he must be without doubt be cast as a “phony”, because real hillbillies don’t become venture capitalists. They prefer remaining unemployed and pining for their papaw’s erstwhile, well-paying union jobs in the dying coal towns of Appalachia
Get ready for the most important election in American history, folks. It’s J.D’s snark toward feline-fixated spinsters versus Kamala’s acclaimed cackle.
Yes, my friends, Biden’s exit from the Presidential campaign has indeed shaken up the race in less than a week, as the herd media is proclaiming.
Thanks to the mainstream media’s penetrating analysis of a thoughtful, but volatile electorate, we now know, according to Vanity Fair, Trump may be having second thoughts about a VP with whom he wrongly thought he had chemistry.
Trump, it appears, is said to harbor serious “reservations” about men with facial hair.
In case you’re concerned that the Democrats won’t be prioritizing bread-and-butter as opposed to cultural issues, the Financial Times assures us that they will. In fact, the Times today predicts a sooner-then-later shiny brass rollout of something called “Kalmalanomics”.
According to the Times Kamala this past week in a stump vowed that she would refurbish that much admired brand of “Bidenomics”, which includes infrastructure and green energy investments, yet adds a real zinger that will certainly excite all the soccer moms and Silicon Valley coders who were on the verge of stampeding to Trump.
It’s the “care economy”, stupid!
What is the “care economy”, or CE for short? According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),
…the care economy includes paid (employed in the formal and informal sectors) and unpaid work through which care is provided for others. Care responsibilities can be broadly categorized into two groups: those carried out within the home and those performed outside of it. For example, childcare providers and health workers, pre-school and school teachers provide care in the formal market based on remuneration, outside their families and homes, but often this type of work is underestimated as the remuneration is low and unfair.
It certainly would be nice if kindergarten and daycare workers, let along high school teachers and college professors, were paid more for their valuable and crucial services.
But if the preferred option for the very same cognitive elites is having little or no children while making sure those smarmy, hyper-natalist hillbillies with their God, guns, and foul mouthes who threaten democracy do not get elected to national office, how in practice can we develop a genuine “care economy”.
It may seem like a stupid question, but doesn’t such an economy rely heavily on the production of people?
Well, maybe not.
If the wave of the future is truly “childless cat ladies”, then how about an economy based on the production of cats?
Just asking.
I’m looking forward to an answer from the candidates in the fall debates.
Then we will know what this election is really, really all about.