Dawning class awareness on the right

The new eruption of class consciousness and anti-oligarch fervor that followed the UHC CEO assassination last month cannot be subsumed into the tired old left-vs-right paradigm of politics that has so toxically polarized our country for years.  It transcends that paradigm, and hopefully will eventually supersede it altogether.

If your reading is confined to left-wing sources, it would be easy to miss this.  Certainly the right-wing media, like those of the left, took part in the disgusting scolding of the masses for their natural feelings -- the MSM as a whole are billionaire-owned and reflect the parasite class's interests.  But they do not reflect the rank-and-file right wing.  As I pointed out in my original post on the topic, when Ben Shapiro posted a video doing his share of the scolding and framing it as a left-vs-right issue, the comments from his own right-wing audience were -- well, see for yourself.  "Your wealth is showing.  It's not a right or left issue."  "I feel no sympathy for the death of this evil man."  "This isn't a left vs right issue.  It's the working class vs the wealthy."  They get it.

Since I regularly read right-wing blogs, I've been particularly interested in the reactions there.  However, the real catalytic event on the right, even more than the assassination, was the recent eruption of naked billionaire arrogance and insults from Elon Musk against rank-and-file Trump voters' anti-immigration views.  This evidently awakened many to an awareness that the oligarchs have no respect for them or common interest with them -- even though many on the right have been inclined to view Musk as some sort of celebrity guru.  This pithy and articulate blogger retort sums up the response well.  Notice that Trump too gets some flack for siding with Musk.

Here's another post which is well worth reading.  Showing a deeper awareness of the class reality, it takes the Musk episode as a jumping-off point to analyze the parasitic oligarchy and how it corrodes national cohesion and marginalizes American workers.  It's not remotely a left-wing view, but that's the point.  These right-wingers are not becoming left-wingers.  They're expressing the fundamental class consciousness that they have in common with the more aware part of the left, even if they don't yet recognize that commonality.  (The dumber elements on both sides remain obsessed with race, each in their own way.)

A few more prominent figures have also spoken out, such as Steve Bannon, accusing oligarchs like Musk and Ramaswamy of "gutting the middle class in this country" and calling for reparations for American workers displaced by immigration.  That post is at the Daily Kos, and its tone reflects the desire to shoehorn this conflict back into the old left-vs-right paradigm, but you can still see what Bannon said.  The same is true of this video -- the commentariat in general has an elitist, pro-immigration, sneer-at-the-workers attitude -- but it gives some good examples of how some rank-and-file right-wingers are turning on Trump himself over the issue.

The right-wing media (as opposed to bloggers) have mostly avoided the issue, but Breitbart posted this fairly straightforward recounting of the conflict, and the comments are worth a look.  I didn't read them all -- there are thousands -- but most of those I did read voice fury at wealthy capitalists using any means available to drive down American wages, and a lot of hostility toward Musk and Trump.  Very few commenters defended the oligarchs' stance and behavior.

In the long run this was likely inevitable.  The obscene concentration of ever-growing mountains of wealth in the hands of a very few, while most Americans struggle to get by, is now so obvious and so obviously destructive to society and democracy that it's almost impossible to avoid noticing, no matter what your political orientation is.  And most Americans have indeed noticed it.  It took extraordinary events like the assassination and Musk's outburst to get people talking openly about it, but the cat is out of the bag now -- and among both right and left, the talking and the anger will keep spreading.  There's no going back.

If one party or the other could fully embrace and embody the new class consciousness, it would probably reap huge rewards at the ballot box, but I don't think that's possible -- they are now both wholly captured by the oligarchy.  The Republicans are still planning even more tax cuts for the wealthy.  When Biden proposed timid steps toward restoring reasonable tax rates on billionaires, the oligarch-owned MSM and bought-and-paid-for Democratic politicians hounded him out of the election race.  The far more drastic and fundamental measures needed to smash the parasite class and redistribute those huge mountains of wealth back to the workers who created them are entirely beyond the imagination of current party politics.

The oligarchs are striving to make peaceful change impossible.  They should listen to JFK.