Weaving the Basket of Deplorables: On the Effort to reduce the White Working Class to an Untouchable Caste in America

One of the most striking things I have ever heard uttered in American politics in my life was Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous recent characterization of the White working-class partisans of Donald Trump- a figure, for the time being, firmly established in the public consciousness as the voice through which the White working class speaks- as a “basket of deplorables” who are “irredeemable”, and moreover “are not America”. It is symptomatic that the leader of one of the two historic governing parties of that country, who as a Presidential candidate aspires to embody the unity of the body politic, should in the very course of attempting to convince others of her fitness for that role try to rhetorically DISMEMBER the corporate body of society, to proclaim that one of that body’s own organs- once by standard rhetorical convention exalted in political speech as the very “backbone of society”- is so much irredeemable social refuse deserving not only to be cast out of the social body, but regarded as as an anti-national element (“they are not America”).

https://dissentingsociologist.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/weaving-the-basket-of-deplorables-on-the-effort-to-reduce-the-white-working-class-to-an-untouchable-caste-in-america/