All the racists who didn’t vote for America’s first black president have a chance to redeem themselves this year by voting for his wife, Hillary Clinton.
History Professor and Salon contributor, Nancy Isenberg, has added another thrilling volume to the long tradition of groundless, Marxist histories. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America explains how racism against impoverished white people, like Former President Slick Willy, is basically on par with historical racism against blacks.
As Isenberg unfolds the narrative, she nails everything that’s wrong with America: the government’s too small, the “1%” controls everything, conservatives are white plantation owners in disguise, and there aren’t enough abortions.
Isenberg rehashes the old liberal defense of Bill Clinton’s “trumped-up presidential adultery scandal” and other notorious behavior. Being from the oppressed “white trash” “class,” Clinton was essentially “the first black president.” Conservatives didn’t like him because their elite snobbery couldn’t tolerate “black culture.” This (incredibly racist) form of apologetics saturates every discussion of Clinton in the book.
It also provides the basis for Isenberg’s criticism of conservatives as plantation-owning eugenicists in disguise.
According to Isenberg, conservatives are employing the same old tactics as their (Democratic Party) ancestors, the slave owners of the 19th century. “The deceivers [conservatives] offer essentially the same fear-laden message that the majority of southern whites heard when secession was being weighed.”
What are these age-old tactics? Telling poor white folk that the liberals in Hollywood and East Coast professors “make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle.”
It’s not clear from what Isenberg says whether her complaint is that Hollywood isn’t full of radical liberals or that Hollywood being full of radical liberals isn’t a bad thing.
Although conservatives say liberals hate poor whites, conservatives have really taken “the lead in white trash bashing.” Listening to Obama – who has struggled to win the Midwest and Deep South – one might have mistakenly thought leftists had taken the lead on that front.
The end goal for conservatives, according to Isenberg, is to keep the poor out of the economy by lowering taxes for the “1%.” For Isenberg, “banks, tax policy, and corporate giants” are some of key sources of poverty in America.
In place of these evil forces, we need more of a “visible hand.” We need more policies, like “Obama-era health care reform,” which help the poor. But conservative “social Darwinists” can’t stand the idea of helping out the “undeserving” poor.
(Naturally, Isenberg can’t point to any instances of conservatives espousing this social Darwinism. That’s okay. It’s there, whether “implied or stated.” Trust her.)
We also, according to Isenberg, need more abortions for poor people. “Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists,” she explains, “think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor women lost state-funded abortions during the Carter years.”
Isenberg sounds suspiciously like the eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
