How Aristocracies Benefit Both From Racism And From Anti-Racism
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,
A good example of the way in which aristocracies benefit both from racism and from anti-racism, is Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the US Presidency, which is heavily backed by America’s aristocracy, and which is fueled not only by their money but also by the widespread racism in American culture, and especially by the equally widespread repudiation by many Americans against racism.
Her opponent in the Democratic Party primaries, Bernie Sanders, was loathed by America’s aristocracy, because he was accusing them of destroying the country and was proposing policies to restore democracy to America, by means of various governmental interventions to reverse the existing undemocratic government’s wealth-transfers “from the masses to the classes?. Sanders was publicly acknowledging that any government is a societal-prioritizing instrument, and that it therefore transfers wealth from some to others, via taxes and other essential policies, and so the wealth-distribution needs to be an independent focus of governmental policies – not simply ignored by government and subsumed within the “economic growth? concern.
Here is how Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination in the primaries: She won 84% of the Black vote in the crucial South Carolina primary, where 61% of the voters, in that Democratic primary, were Blacks. Sanders won 58% of Whites voting there. Clinton won, of the total SC primary vote, 73% to Sanders’s 26%, a crushing 47% margin of victory. And then in the later southern primaries, her margins of victory among the overwhelmingly high proportion of Blacks in the Democratic Parties those states, were similar, which fact (her numerous primaries crushing him, especially on Super Tuesday) cemented Sanders’s loss, and her win, of the Democratic nomination.
Whereas both of the primaries that preceded South Carolina (the caucus in Iowa, and the election in New Hampshire) were in overwhelmingly White northern states, which had been little shaped by the legacy of slavery, the racial situation was much more tense in SC, and also in the other southern states, where the culture of slavery still persists, more than a century after the Civil War that was fought over slavery.
Sanders’s message, that economic inequality is the linchpin of America’s increasing inequality of economic opportunity, was a colossal flop among southern Blacks, for whom the pervasive anti-Black racism amongst their local non-Blacks, seemed to be far more the cause of Blacks’ suppressed economic opportunities than did the existing economic inequality itself. To them, Sanders’s argument (that economic inequality is self-perpetuating, and thus needs specific governmental policies to address) seemed false (because the racism there is so intense). They couldn’t understand rich-versus-poor, because what they saw around them every day was Black-versus-White. As Hillary and Bill Clinton’s, and Barack Obama’s, friend and chief economic advisor, Lawrence Summers, taught to his students at Harvard, “I think we can accept, I think we should accept inequality of results, recognizing that those who earn more are in a better position to contribute more to support society?.
It’s standard …read more
Source: How Aristocracies Benefit Both From Racism And From Anti-Racism
