Regular people. Normal people. Ordinary people. Average people. Everyday people. (No, not the song whose chorus is likely stuck in your head right now.)
The masses. Salt of the earth. The working class.
“Regular people.”
“The working class.”
We hear a lot about them in leftist discourses (of the North American variety). Who are they? We don’t know. We only know them as rhetorical devices for online persuasion, as instruments to berate competitors in the marketplace of ideas.
While their true identity remains murky, we know a few things about them. On the whole, they’re a delicate bunch. They’re baffled by debates about identity. They don’t understand why all those people (other regular people, but from out of town) keep taking to the streets. They think tearing down statues is silly. They like cops. They hate pronouns.
We also know that they’re white, because their personhood is modified by regularity, and because of their timeless association with building the world. Their whiteness is sensitive, too. Emphasize things like Black liberation or U.S. imperialism and they’re liable to run into the welcoming arms of the KKK.
They are key to the success of any revolution, but lack revolutionary ambition. They wish only to nourish the earth with the sweat of their brows and earn a fair wage for their labor. They are simple folks with a humble appetite for a world demarcated by two clear genders. They are suspicious of erudition. They talk in a secret language accessible only to the most authentic pundits. They are creatures of the soil who found life through Bernie Sanders.
Regular people despise media elites. They have no time to read Marx. And they don’t give a shit about what happens on Twitter. Persuading them to vote Democrat is the intellectual’s noblest pursuit.
In the end, all they really want to do is join a union. (Preferably the AFL-CIO.)
So say media elites, anyway. With graduate degrees. In urban enclaves. On Twitter. Or to paying subscribers, because talking is the purest form of work.
You may be wondering if regular people ever raise their own voices. They do. Frequently. That’s usually the point at which their champions accuse them of destroying free expression.
Yes! You had me at this paragraph: “While their true identity remains murky, we know a few things about them. On the whole, they’re a delicate bunch. They’re baffled by debates about identity. They don’t understand why all those people (other regular people, but from out of town) keep taking to the streets. They think tearing down statues is silly. They like cops. They hate pronouns.” Thank you for continuing to lift your voice!
I have so much respect for you — but this has made me so sad and hurt to see that you are part of the fashionable woke crowd that despises the poor and working class of this country and lumps them all into a tribe of racist evil subhuman caricatures. I read your wonderful piece on your life as a bus driver and was struck by your humanity toward your fellow drivers – people who are part of the “ordinary” population you apparently despise:
“The demographics of my cohort informed its restraint. We inquired about children, language, town of residence, and country of origin, but never about politics, religion, or ideology. Immigrants understand that social media algorithms and advertising categories are unstable. Plenty of Muslims support Trump; plenty of dreamers want strong borders. People come to the United States for hundreds of reasons. Any of us could have been an academic, dissident, grifter, politician, spy, prisoner, jailer, soldier, activist, peasant, or war criminal. The possibilities didn’t matter. The moment we converged upon the training center, class became our shared priority. ”
Yet you then write this depiction of ordinary — yes, ordinary — people not tuned into the posturings and academic jargon of social media wokery like they’re a collective cartoon of bigots. (How dare ordinary people not understand a confusing academic discourse about pronouns).
The notion that it’s only poor and working class white people who are baffled by an opaque confusing discourse about pronouns, only poor and working class white people like cops, only poor and working class white people who are baffled by much of the identity discourse, only poor and working class white people who join the AFL-CIO is provably untrue.
The great irony in your post is that hatred & ridicule of poor and working class white people (depicted as a collective hive mind of garbage human beings) is now the overriding consensus in left/liberal academia. That’s manifested in the transformation of the Democratic party into the party of rich white suburban highly educated liberals.
Thanks for your kind words. I believe you may be misreading the sarcasm of this essay. I’m condemning the professional class for instrumentalizing so-called working people as a rhetorical device–Steve
That is what I thought you were doing. I have never bravo zulu’d you on a post and I humbly do so now.
Your piece is too nuanced and sarcastic (ironic?) for me. Still not sure what your point is.
I guess if you have to telegraph it to me, I’m not who you’re writing for anyway.
Sorry.
Dumb Cali Bunny