White Working Class Used to be Little Darlings

Here's conservative icon Ben Stein getting an earful from a racist.

“This is a George Wallace moment,” my interlocutor continued. “White working class people, white small businessmen, mothers, are just sick at being pushed around by the courts, by the government, by the media, by the intellectuals...."

And so on to blacks on welfare and affirmative action.

But I have to say to the apologist for the white working class: What did you expect?

Back in the day the white working class was the little darling of the liberal ruling class.  Liberals couldn't do enough to extol the sturdy virtues of the working stiff.  At least that's how it went back in the 1930s.

But you could tell things were changing in the 1950s when Jackie Gleason portrayed a less than stalwart municipal bus driver.  And the worm had clearly turned in the early 1970s when Atchie Bunker was made into a figure of derision.

Listen fellahs!  Sooner or later the ruling class gets bored with the little darlings they've created.  They decide that blacks, or women, or gays are far more engaging than bitter-clinger working class whites.

And then the old little darlings are left, deserted, with their bitter tale of betrayal.

Listen up!  When you sign up with the politicians as their little darling du jour you are signing up to be their mistress.  They'll be around to chuck you under the chin and give an expensive present at election time, but the rest of the time you are expected to smile sweetly and never complain.

Here's the future for the white working class.  The affair to remember is over.  The government goodies are over.  The movies, songs, paeans to honest toil are over.  Now there is nothing left but to suck it in, get an education, get a job, and join the People of the Responsible Self in the middle class.  You will find them in the Republican Party.

When you are a little darling of the politicians you can sit on your butt and complain about the unfairness of life.  And because you are a pretty little darling and you have still got what it takes the liberal ruling class will respond to your whining with government programs.

But what happens when the bloom of youth is over?  Then the victim card doesn't work any more.  Then you have a choice.  You can slowly decay like Blanche DuBois as you continue to depend on the kindness of strangers, or you can suck it in and get a life.

The time has come for the white working class to suck it in and get a life.  The time has come for the white working class to embrace the life-giving ideology of individualism, which means that you take responsibility for your own life before God and stop blaming other people.

I call the people that do this the People of the Responsible Self.  The political home of the People of the Responsible Self in the United States is the Republican Party.

Glenn Reynolds is complaining today that while Washington isn't working, the world outside achieves wonders like private spaceflight.  Well, yeah.  Politics isn't supposed to "do" anything.  It is civil war by other means.  Don't expect anything other than a war out of the political process.

Even liberal pup Ezra Klein knows something is wrong.  For him, of course, it's all about the intransigent Republicans preventing things from getting done, from the end of earmarks to the failings of Speaker Boehner to the lack of big-business influence on Republicans. (Imagine: The Chamber of Commerce supports a "clean" continuing resolution for the budget mess just like the Democrats!)  Oh, and Ted Cruz.

But really what's happening is that every time liberals try to spoon that big government medicine between the lips of the little darlings, the little darlings upchuck.

Probably what we are seeing is the entry, finally, of the white working class into the Republican Party.

Because, at long last, the little darlings of the white working class have hit bottom and they have nowhere else to go.