The ‘White Trash Revolution' - an update

Brexit, Trump, Yellow Vests, Gaza, Mexican leftists - we're doing great, don't worry!

 

I’m working on the United States section from Emmanuel Todd’s book “The Defeat of the West” and he discusses a subject which he gets completely wrong: American Protestant evangelical Christians. 

Todd is completely negative on them, to the point where he openly negates their Christianity, and then almost their existence as genuinely religious people within the West. Read my upcoming article to see what I mean.

It reminded me of a book review and an editorial I wrote in 2017 which touched upon a similar theme. 

If you like this series around Todd’s book (and I can’t thank you enough for going along with me, dear reader!), then you will probably like this one. The book it is based around, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016) by Nancy Isenberg, was a huge best-seller, drew reviews from top media despite being a rather academic work, and because it’s a great read about a denigrated and ignored segment of US society: lower-class White Americans. 

The book was especially timely for me because at the time I was often writing about the “WTR”: White Trash Revolution. 

A lot of people immediately chafed at the term “White Trash”, but I was using it positively and seeking to reclaim it. I took inspiration from how upper-class Iranians derisively referred to the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 as the “revolution of the barefooted”, because many revolutionaries were too poor to have shoes. These Iranians were viewed exactly as rich Brits viewed poor Whites in the colonial era, per Isenberg: as “waste people” – i.e., trash. The “barefoot” term has since become a point of pride - an obvious result of socialist-inspired pride in the lower class. 

The simple point of WTR was: Trash - of any nation - are what needs to be the focus of government policy, and democracy demands that they have majority representation.

So the WTR had Brexit, then the election of Trump, then Isenberg’s book - things were going good. They hit a peak (at least for me) with the Yellow Vests. The WTR got stalled with Covid, but the WTR started to rumble back to life in Russia in 2022 and then we definitely got restarted on October 7, 2023, in Gaza. 

There’s a lot of great stuff in this book which I relate in these articles - here’s a smattering of great quotes which should pique your interest: 

“If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about state’s rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.”

“They (Northern soldiers) saw secession as a fraud perpetrated against hapless poor whites.”

“As one angry Southern writer declared, the northern party should not be called ‘Black Republicans’, but ‘Red Republicans’, for their real agenda was not just the abolition of slavery, but inciting class revolution to the South.”

Of course, it’s totally absurd that in 1848 Marxist-inspired revolution is flowering in Europe but in the US there’s allegedly nothing of the sort going on - it has been written out of history by liberalist authors, of course. 

One quote from me, to show how the slogan of 1848 - “Work, bread or lead!” - finally had to be implemented in the US in the 1930s: “To make a long Depression story short: The United States could not remedy the problems of the Great Depression until they finally overcame their hatred of White Trash.” The New Deal was the first government aid for American peasants since Reconstruction. 

It’s interesting to read journalism from the past, indeed. Remember these calls? How did it turn out?

“People are calling for a new TVA program today, and much of Trump’s legacy will rest on if he funds similar employment/public works programs.”

Trump did NOT respond to those calls, indeed!

When Covid hit what did he do? One-time payments, instead of creating permanent government programs which would lift the floor of America’s multi-coloured Trash. That would have expanded the government, which liberalism hates and decries as socialism… same old story. 

The denigration of evangelicals is indeed a fight waged by Western secularists, but that ignores the class component: it’s clearly a way to insult, suppress, ignore, disempower and denigrate poor Whites in America. That’s not socialism, and Trash denigration in every country has to stop - think of all the wasted human potential and we’re reminded the issue is class, not color. 

Like Todd’s book, it’s far from perfect: Isenberg makes just 4 references to socialism, about as many as Todd. My articles are doing the same thing to both: looking at their data and conclusions through a socialist lens - it makes them far more interesting and useful from a political science perspective. 

If this doesn’t get you to click I don’t know what will: Elvis.

“Elvis had achieved what no white trash working-class male had ever dreamt possible: he was at once cool and sexually transgressive and a ‘country boy’. No longer a freakish rural outcast, as in the past, Elvis was a ‘Hillbilly Cat,’ something many teenage boys wished they could be.”

Indeed, our King is White Trash - all hail!

‘White Trash’ – A book review of our family

‘White Trash’ – both a book and Trump revolution?