Unfortunately, the Right is Right
The problem with the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, capitalist, fascist faction of rightwing US politics is that they’re technically right. This is their country. At least it was founded to be their country. For most of the time since its founding, it was their country. And it has only been in recent history that anyone has said and acted otherwise.
The notion that the United States was created as a free society, as one meant to protect the liberties and rights of all people, or that it was intended to be a true democracy is false. The founders of this country were wealthy, white, genocidal, enslaving capitalists, and in drafting the country’s constitution and its laws, their intentions were self-interested, meant to serve themselves and those of their class.
The Constitution is cited and celebrated as if it were perfect and as if it was meant to protect the rights and serve the common interests of every person in the country. Rich and powerful people have rarely ever done anything for the good of all people and the founders were no different. They were not saintly altruists, but literate barbarians, and the rights and principles they codified as the law of the land were meant more to protect themselves and govern relations between one another than they had anything to do with the wellbeing of common folk.
The majority of the good that has been done in this country, in the way it is governed, the expansion of representation and the rights afforded to the people, all came much later in the country’s history, most of it in the twentieth century. Most of it was only accomplished by the hard work, sacrifice, and suffering of the working people of the lower classes, women, and people of color. Acting on principles of justice and fairness, this country’s true fighters and pioneers for justice willfully misinterpreted the intentions of the founders, or made reinterpretations based on the wording of the Constitution and the country’s laws, to subvert the will of the megalomaniacal crackers who founded the country and drafted its initial documents, to force it be something still greatly flawed but closer to a democracy than was intended. The fact that it’s an expectation that we all have the right to vote, go to public schools, not work hundred hour weeks, not start working in mines and factories at the age of nine, make a living wage, and not die of overwork and dysentery in a ditch before we reach age thirty is thanks to Black abolitionists and civil rights activists, suffragists, labor organizers, and other groups representing the poor, disenfranchised, and abused of this country. If not for them, the government would do little other than kill or imprison people. Which of course it still does a ton of.
It’s no wonder that the descendants of the country’s ruling class fight so hard to maintain the status quo and try to revert to the old ways. The political-, economic-, landholding-elites of the United States are not aberrations in fighting to maintain the superior powers of the wealthy, white, male, capitalist class. Theirs is the class that this country’s government was meant to serve. Can’t blame the spoiled little bitches for whining when the other kids want a share of the rights and excess riches.
It’s a pathetic irony that so much of the far right movement’s base in this country, poor whites, would be little benefited by the form of rule they hope to impose, just as their ancestors were. Poor whites did not thrive under the white supremacist oligarchy of the early US. Though their status was better than that of Black slaves and most free Black people, indigenous peoples, and early non-white immigrants, they were still a lowly, abused, suffering class, expendable and exploited by the wealthy white ruling class like everyone else. The lower class crackers who long for a return to this time are ignorant of the fact that their ancestors weren’t shit, and that under reinstatement of the country’s original system of rule they would end up as impoverished and ill-treated as their worthless ancestors. The best a non-rich white could hope for in the early days of the United States was to be given a plot of stolen indigenous land, so that it could be held until wealthier whites, banks, or corporations could seize the land after it had been “settled.” The thing about white supremacist ideology is that even though it champions the delusion of white superiority, it still functions within a hierarchical framework in which not all whites are equal. It may give the lowlier crackers a feeling of superiority over more melanin-blessed people, but they’ll still be the inferiors of wealthy high class whites. Some are more equal than others, as it were.
Pretending that this isn’t and wasn’t always a racist, misogynist, xenophobic, fascistic nation ruled by an elite minority class is untrue and promoting that notion is a lie. Whenever one speaks of the greatness of this country, its noble history, the honorable nature of its founders and subsequent leaders, they’re talking out of their ass. When one says that this isn’t what our country is or what it stands for, that it’s un-American, every time something horrible is done by this country or to the citizens of this country, it’s simply untrue. Rather than deny reality and the validity of the Right’s arguments for white oligarchic rule as being Constitutional and in line with the intentions of the country’s founders, we should acknowledge those sins and crimes and corruption, and fight for something better. We can’t win the argument with false claims about what this country is, was, or was meant to be. We win by understanding that the United States isn’t and never was what it should have been and what it needs to be. Progress will mean remembering all the evils of the past as they are uprooted and extinguished, and then building a better, more just country atop its remains.