Xenophobia has been inverted with the indigenous working classes treated as ‘the other’: unless parties on the right are to have a clear run a new political movement is required to unpick this doomed neo-liberal stratagem
Wednesday, J December 2018There are differing reasons behind the political chaos engulfing America, Britain, Italy, and France, but cutting the indigenous working class out of the national conversation is common to all of them. So unless the far-right is to be allowed a free run, won’t a new political movement be required to cut the working class back in?
World AIDS Day 2018 was marked on the 1st of December. In the 1980s, at the height of the epidemic in the US, tens of thousands died annually. For the religious right it was seen as a condemnation from on high for the crime of pursuing a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. Drug users were another vulnerable group for whom there was also little sympathy. But the liberal Left rallied to the cause, chiefly by presenting AIDS as of equal threat to everyone, and money duly poured into research for a cure.
Today America is suffering from another even more lethal epidemic caused by opioid addiction. More than 70,000 died from overdoses last year, a death toll which surpasses the worst years of deaths from AIDS, gun deaths or car crashes, as well as total US military casualties from the Iraq and Vietnam wars combined. Additionally, at just over 47,000, the suicide rate last year was the highest in half a century. Life expectancy in the United States is now actually falling in the longest decline in longevity since the First World War. America is the only wealthy country where this is happening. But because the victims are overwhelmingly what only liberals designate as ‘white working class’ and thus a ‘community we do not identify with’, the American Left, so vocal on other issues, is largely silent.
